Humbug Doesn't Come Close, Mr. Scrooge...

Increasingly, I'm minded that Dickens would find just as fertile ground for his tales of woe and injustice in the Britain of the twenty-first century as he did reflecting on that of the eighteenth and nineteenth. One could easily argue that nought has changed but fashion and technology; that the pipe-dreams and fantasies of universal liberation from slavery and penury via the - to borrow a much later phrase - '...white heat of technology...' are in fact just that: dreams.

We have made little progress, two hundred years on, from the era of debtors' prison and the the workhouse. It might be argued that the disparity between the richest and the poorest in this land is now at its most extreme in our history. Technology has seldom served to equalise society or relieve the burden of toil from the masses: it simply increases the profit margins of those in control of it: far from being an agency of general good, technology is almost always the willing creature of the capitalist.

We are approaching Christmas Day yet again, and yet the message of goodwill to all rings more hollow than ever: today's Guardian headline piece highlights that malnutrition is now a major cause of hospital admissions in Britain. We see increasing numbers of homeless - lifestyle choice, anyone? - on the streets, being pissed on by passers-by who seem to deem it fit to put the boot in to people already without anything material left to them, let alone their dignity, because we operate a venal and selfish society, now almost completely without the safety net of an adequate health & social care system, and due entirely to the callous, deliberate and systematically neglectful deconstruction of a once proud welfare state by successive Tory administrations. Christmas, for so many, is just plain humbug, and frankly as a result, insulting to all of us.