I can’t pretend that the result of the general election was a surprise, though the scale of Boris Johnson’s victory was larger than even my natural pessimism had led me to expect. I am deeply disappointed that it would appear that in no small measure those with the most to fear and the most to lose by a Tory government are the very voters who have facilitated it’s formation. I had truly allowed myself to hope that when faced with the choice people would decide that an immediate Brexit was not a price worth paying for a government with the potential for and probable hidden intention of doing the most vulnerable in society great harm. However, I was wrong and for reasons which I suspect we all understand, uncomfortable to both sides of the political debate perhaps but particularly the left, the votes were cast as they were, and I have no intention of any further analysis of this matter at the moment.
I do though, have a deeply personal reason for being both fearful and, if honest, a little resentful at the scale of this Conservative victory.
The Tory party, along with the Liberal Democrats, has imposed an ideologically driven austerity programme for nine years in which public services have been demolished, the poorest demonised for their own poverty and the most vulnerable left without the basic support which they so desperately need. I do not believe that ,hand on heart, each and every one of us did not know that when casting our votes. I had dared to hope that we might just be fortunate enough to end this once and for all with a government truly committed to  providing good public services and, in particular for me, adult social care.
In no more than nineteen months, possibly as few as seven, my youngest son James, a young man with very special needs who requires twenty four hour supervision and care, will leave school. Since the death of my much missed late wife Fiona, I have been his sole carer and rely on those hours when James is at school to try and carry on with what’s left of my working life. If, as I now fear, adequate day care provision is not in place when he leaves school it is going to prove near impossible for me to carry on working properly at all. This is deeply personal and a source of real worry, but is not what hurts. What is most upsetting is that those in need of help the most in our society are just not important enough to be a voting priority. It re-enforces the suspician that, though not directly hostile ( though one encounters no small degree of passive agressive disaproval daily from certain quarters) people would rather the disabled were simply not there. An over-reaction? Possibly; but when one feels that peoples real needs are clearly a lesser priority than the abstract political concept of Brexit is it such as baseless hypothesis?