IT seems we really are living in the Twenties.

Not the 2020s, of course, the 1920s. Our ancestors a century ago probably thought the world would be a much fairer place after they were long dead. But it’s not. The rich still wallow in decadence – with wealth that would shame Caesars; the middle classes struggle by, drowned in debt, working themselves to death, filled with fear. And the poor – the poor, as ever, are crushed under foot, treated with contempt, their lives meaningless to our rulers.

The more things change, the more they stay the same – that expression has never been quite so cruel as it is today: an era where the Government can say with a straight face that it wants to "level up" society, while tying an anchor around the necks of those in need and throwing them overboard.

Just look at this very particular moment of history – I don’t mean this year, or this decade, I mean these last few days. They stand as tablets of stone, declaring for anyone who has eyes to see that only those with power and money matter. The rest of us – regardless of whether we think of ourselves as middle class or working class, or just humans struggling to get by – we’re of no consequence to those in charge: the very few at the top who got there by gift of birth, or metaphorically slitting the throats of those around them and scrambling over their bodies for a taste of power.

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What are the Pandora Papers but a trumpet blast that you and I and everyone we know are suckers – played by a system that’s been rigged against us all since the moment we were born? Some might say the 12 million leaked financial documents show the world’s richest with their snouts firmly in the trough. I say it looks more like they’re vampires with their teeth in our necks.

The Pandora Papers reveal a catalogue of tax avoidance, money laundering and secret mountains of wealth. We’ve got the Tory donor – who’s given nearly £525,000 to Conservatives – involved in a massive European corruption scandal (he denies wrongdoing); the King of Jordan on a £70 million property spending spree in the UK and US through secretly-owned companies; the Czech Prime Minister failing to declare an offshore investment company used to buy French villas for £12m; and the secret network of offshore companies owned by Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta’s family.

Tony and Cherie Blair saved hundreds of thousands of pounds in property taxes when they bought a London office building worth £6.5m from an offshore company partially owned by a Bahraini minister.

There’s also Azerbaijan’s ruling family and their hidden involvement in property deals in Britain worth more than £400m. The Queen’s Crown Estate bought a £67m London property from the Aliyevs, accused of corruption and looting Azerbaijan.

The Queen is also privately funding Prince Andrew’s legal fight against allegations of sexual assault. It’s thought she’ll pump millions into a defence fund against Virginia Roberts Giuffre – a woman raised poor and predated on by billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein precisely because she was poor. Name another mother who could spend millions on her son’s legal fights. Ask yourself if this doesn’t mock justice.

These are our rulers. Their lives are about as far removed from ours as the Earth is from the Sun.

 

Tony and Cherie Blair saved hundreds of thousands of pounds in property taxes when they bought a London office building worth £6.5m from an offshore company

Tony and Cherie Blair saved hundreds of thousands of pounds in property taxes when they bought a London office building worth £6.5m from an offshore company

 

Now let’s move to the other side of the accounting ledger. There’s warnings today that six million Britons currently face a "heat or eat" dilemma this winter as a miserable £20 a week in Universal Credit is slashed from payments to the nation’s poorest. I’m old enough to remember when such payments were called "social security"; that they’re now humiliatingly branded "welfare" by our Government is all you need to know about how the powerful view the poor. An estimated 210,000 children live in poverty in Scotland. Food banks are warning that they’ll be handing out smaller parcels this Christmas to the poor – partly down to an expected demand in charity support as that Universal Credit cut hits families.

Add in energy price hikes and 3.5m of our poorest households will face "fuel poverty" this winter. Fuel poverty simply means folk will freeze in their own homes.

The very companies which now shape our world – Big Tech – engineer society so it’s preferential to the rich and hurts the rest of us. The Facebook Files – leaked documents from within Mark Zuckerberg’s malevolent monopoly – show how the rich and powerful (celebrities and politicians) operated under different rules when it came to the content they could post. Meanwhile, the company has stirred up hate around the planet and mainlined mental health problems to the world’s youth. Former UK deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg takes his dollars for defending this foul corporation.

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Our media bends the knee to a Conservative Government presiding over this social destruction. The BBC is almost too scared to say the word "Brexit" and fawns over Cabinet ministers. The press amplifies the Tory obsession with "wokeness" and "political correctness" – which is nothing but deflection, cynically fomenting a meaningless culture war in order to direct the gaze of the nation away from the grotesque inequalities that we must endure.

We’re either fools or slaves. We accept this. If these events were contained in the pages of a novel, readers would expect the next chapter to feature such leaders dragged into the public square in carts to be prosecuted for crimes against their own citizens. But not here, not in Britain, not in the west. We bow and scrape. Perhaps we’re all too beaten and broken by our own financial dread to rise up in anger. But there’s only so long this humiliation can go on.

As the 1920s festered and wore on, the world exploded in a multiplicity of variously-hued rage as different societies in different parts of the world decided enough was enough and life had to change. Some of that was for good, some of that led to monstrous evil. Where the 21st century leads, God alone knows – but the status quo cannot continue, at least if ordinary people have any pride left in themselves at all.

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