We Happy Few
Post Brexit Referendum, the U.K. economy has not gone from strength to strength but has, in fact, dropped from fifth to seventh strongest world economy.
Consumer confidence is down, economic growth is predicted to rise far less sharply … if the piddling percentage rate at which it was expected to grow could ever even be claimed to be sharp rather than pathetically flat … food manufacturers and vendors are making their product sizes smaller so that they don’t have to put their prices up ¹ … things aren’t looking too rosy.
But the government has a solution for poor market performance and economic trends.
A number of years ago, government health officials recommended that everyone eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day — the famous “Five A Day” programme of Public Information.
This would, it was said, improve the health of the Nation, thereby improving its economic performance (less days off sick) and reducing its deficit (less requirement for National Health services, less of a tax burden, more spare cash in the Economy).
Recently, however, this need has been downgraded to Three A Day to account for the fact that consumers have less buying power now than last year.
Taking a leaf from the manufacturers’ and vendors’ books, the government is engineering the problem out of existence by ‘right sizing’ the Nation’s health requirements from what it can’t afford to what it can.
Instead of there being a negative/downward trend in the market as demand shrinks, the market has been ‘right sized’ to reflect lack of demand.
Thus, instead of a worrying reduction in the ratio of consumer spending to market size, the market is simply declared smaller than it previously was and the same ratio of spending to size is thereby maintained.
So, whilst the health of the nation may be worse as a result, the health of the market can be seen to be robust.
Now that’s good governance right there: we may be obliged to eat shit in future but at least we’ll have big shit-eating grins on our faces as we do so.
And, you know, it’s true what all the New Age tree-hugging hippies say about owning our feelings and accepting that we are responsible for our own happiness and cannot blame it on others or their actions ⁴: we don’t need to do anything practical …. like reverse Brexit or, oh, I don’t know, say, restructure our society so that it doesn’t benefit rapacious sociopaths to the cost of the rest of us … what we need is a ‘feel good factor’ and everything will be just fine. Here, have some Soma …
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¹ You can see how that one works …
Instead of having to raise prices from £1.50 to £2 for 1Kg they reduce the quantity and charge £1.50 for 750g instead — instead of raising the price to 1p per 5g, they reduce the quantity to 5g per 1p ².
² But that’s okay because the U.K. national performance in Mathematical and Financial skills places it in seventeenth position in the World rankings (behind Romania) — so, no-one here notices and everyone’s happy ³.
³ Although they do have an abiding suspicion that chocolate bars were bigger when they were children.
⁴ So there, Third World … First World, New Age hippy wisdom says to stop your whining and own your feelings of exploitation instead of blaming us for keeping you down.
