The electorate’s strange sense of entitlement

How are you coping during this cost- of-living crisis? Have you made your way to the food bank yet? I am interested to find out. On Tuesday I listened to an edition of Radio 4’s You and Yours for which listeners were invited to call in and explain how they were managing in these desperately bleak times. A good dozen or so shared their experiences with the presenter Winifred Robinson – and all but one dutifully explained that they were about to embark on a nice holiday.

Further, of those going away for a bit, all but two were taking a holiday abroad – the Algarve, Benidorm, Catalonia were some of the places mentioned. One woman complaining of penury was taking at least two trips – the first to the Galapagos Islands and the other to Japan. The callers seemed a bit miffed that they’d had to ‘save up’ for their holidays, while the woman heading off to see the pink-footed boobies had received a bequest from her dead mum.

Listening to this stuff I thought, um, it’s hardly the bleedin’ Irish potato famine, is it? Or the Great Depression? I suppose you could argue that Radio 4’s listeners are pretty much exclusively middle-class and therefore I was not getting a representative sample of the very real suffering currently being occasioned.