My last post was about the Tesco employees working for less than the living wage who trolled me for suggesting they deserved better. The Tesco employees who were happy to work all the hours they could just to survive. The ones who were happy to claim working tax credit at the same time as slagging off ‘benefit scroungers’.
How will they to be voting in the general election?
Will they understand that if they give Theresa May and the Tories a green light they’ll be signing away their rights to tax credits and to any hope of an increase in their wages? They’ll also be signing up to a lifetime of zero hours contracts followed by a worthless pension, a council run care home with no funding to be anything more than a holding centre for the nearly dead.
Last week, a mark of how I felt about the future was made clear to me when I received a text from my brother saying he was really ill.
16 years ago my brother was in a coma and we were told he would probably die within 48 hours. At the time, the news hit me so hard that I fell to my knees at Euston station where I was trying to get a train north to comfort my mum. I fell to my knees and howled an animal howl that I didn’t know a human was capable of making.
On the train, a stranger held my hands and prayed over me, my grief was so enormous. The thought of my brother dying was unimaginable.
My brother received a liver transplant in a Spanish hospital and survived.
Sixteen years later when I received that text saying he had a virus and was going to the liver unit in Leeds for a check up, do you know how I reacted?
I said to my husband, “John’s liver transplant might be failing.” And while he moved to comfort me, I thought “The lucky bastard.”
I thought, “The lucky bastard” because the thought of growing old in a society where the majority are willing to sacrifice their humanity and their dignity because they believe they were put on this earth to be nothing more than worker bees for the rich and the privileged fills me with dread.
And yes, I know that being envious of someone dying is inviting a slow and painful disease-ridden death but this is how I felt, however awful that may be.
Yesterday, Theresa May called for a general election because she felt she was certain to win. She had been advised to go for it to stop the dissenters so she could continue to run rough shod over the poor and the poorly of this country.
But yesterday, I felt a tiny glimmer of hope. Just maybe, the Tesco trolls and all the other little people like them would wake from their torpor and realise that they deserved better.
Then maybe I could look towards a future where my children will grow up and earn enough to feed themselves; a future where they may own their own home or at the very least be able to rent something more than the slums I see people living in here every day.
Last week I didn’t want to see a future. Yesterday, I dared to hope.
We have to do whatever it takes to show the Tories that we’ve had enough. If you can, get out there and help the Labour Party by signing up to campaign. Show the Tory billionaire campaign donors that we can win just by spreading the truth. We don’t need their blood money.
Remember that there have never been more members of the Labour Party than there are now and that’s because of Jeremy Corbyn. People joined to vote for Corbyn, against all the odds and all the media bias.
Read the Labour policies instead of the Daily Fail and let’s put someone who gives a shit in Downing Street.