I echo the words of a national columnist who today looks with shame at the callousness of Windrush and says “My country disgusts me”. 

The abuse of our colonial cousins goes back centuries. Anyone in Britain with any spare cash invested it in the Slave Trade without a thought.

There are monuments to the profits they made, subsequently inherited without a second thought. Emancipated slaves then had to work for nothing for five years to pay back their previous owners’ financial losses.

Now we discover that since 2010 our hypocritical government, full of false piety, has been ‘stabbing in the back’ the very people to whom we promised citizenship in the 1950s.

We have moved from small socially-integrated tribes to large scale agriculture, fiefdoms, territorial and politically motivated wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, oligarchs and the dubious nature of Facebook. Greed, deliberately-designed inequalities of income and opportunity and a personal sense of entitlement to power and wealth now transcend sharing, altruism and equality. Our politicians are more interested in their careers than making unpopular decisions. Their ideologies consist of mantras rather than common sense. We are sleep-walking to a worldly demise.

Paradoxically, there has never been a better time in the world’s history to unite together and create a future different to the one we have conspired to invent. We now share an unpleasant and largely self-fulfilling destiny; one we will regret when we later survey the ruins of what was once a green wonderland. The last remnants of social integration are being systematically unpicked by power and egoism. Revamping the autocracy of Westminster to the democracy of PR would help.

We live in a playground for the rich where lies, fake news and deceit, determine the poverty of billions in favour of a few. We desperately need something to believe in which empowers all of us to reshape the world together and be reshaped by it. Hope won’t be enough to protect this struggling planet for those who succeed us.

There’s no room now for false hope; the ‘chips are down’. Perhaps, if we could learn to respect nature and take urgent steps to protect it, it would respect and reward us all if it’s not already too late. It has no false promises or threats to make. Just the universal message that we have all forgotten. “What goes around, comes around”!

Mike Joslin
Dorchester