There’s a lot of anger about — and it’s not pleasant. But at least it means people are engaged as well as enraged. What’s more worrying and increasingly irritating is the negativity, the drip-drip of despondency that’s been allowed to seep into so much of daily life.
Everything is broken! All is lost! The end is nigh! Which is fine if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or believe that the eschatological prophecies of the Bible have pretty much all come to pass.
Every day we are told repeatedly that ‘catastrophe’ awaits. It will be ‘-catastrophic’ if we leave the EU without a deal, ‘catastrophic’ if America withdraws from the Paris Agreement on climate change, ‘catastrophic’ if we push ahead with fracking, ‘catastrophic’ if Jeremy Corbyn becomes prime minister and so on.
The whingeing middle classes have convinced themselves that the game’s up to such an extent that it seems almost rude not to join them in their grumbling. It used to be only fogeyish Tories who thought the world was ‘going to the dogs’. Now everybody does.
Whether it’s the end of democracy, the destruction of the environment, the rise of populism, impending famine in Africa, fears over nuclear warfare, the pollution of our oceans, the threat of terrorism, worries about how the young will become homeowners, the increase in the cost of private education, the lack of decent avocados in Waitrose, the endless roadworks on the M4 — whatever your gripe, the bourgeois apocalypse is upon us. All that seems to unite Britain now is the idea that we are hopelessly divided. According to a poll, more than two-thirds of us feel pessimistic about the state of the economy.
My wife and I don’t get invited to dinner parties often, but a friend who does says he comes away from them not so much with a headache of disappointment as a migraine of despair.
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