A personal reflection on wankers

The Grauniad leads on my Facebook newsfeed today with the news that the north is going to have to shoulder the burden of the recession. Which annoys me mostly because I remember the other side of the 80s. Most of you seem to live under the impression that the 80s was all new romantics and flash cars and mobile phones you could kill a child with. I remember it differently. I remember growing up around angry people struggling daily against a system which welcomed each grey morning with a new cut to services, factory closure or privatisation; all of which would end up spewing more angry people out onto the streets. I remember watching those people destroy themselves and each other in their anger with things like the Meadowell riots - I was at the college just round the corner at the time. And to rub it in, we were fed images of Thatcher and co living large down south. Life sucked. I was taught from books ten years past their sell-by date in a school full of teachers who weren't paid enough to care. Careers advice revolved around which shop or factory you wanted to work in, and entertainment revolved around where you could get drunk enough to forget yourself for the evening. Maybe I'm being unnecessarily negative but that's my memory of the 80s. And I watched it all get better in the 90s. I'm not saying that Labour were a godsend, but to be ruled by ANYONE other than the conservatives felt blissful, and it showed. Nationwide employment went down. Having a PM with a modicum of charisma meant that people worldwide started getting interested in this grey little island and threw money at our film and music industries. So how does it feel to have a government voted in who are privatising everything, screwing the north over, shedding ministers to sleaze and almost literally taking the piss? It feels like deja-fucking-vu, that's what it feels like. True, I live down south now, but my parents don't. People I grew up with don't. And neither do thousands of kids who are going to wade through the same shit I did just to get half the education a southerner does. And we're marching helplessly back towards it. Everyone I know is just shrugging their shoulders and not even having an opinion on the fact that half the fucking country is going to be miserable, likely for more than a decade. Have we really come to this? To the point where we can just shrug our shoulders and ignore half our own country?