It stinks.

There are two basic reasons why poor people in Britain don't vote. First whoever 'gets in', life remains shit. Put more actively there is no difference between 'any of them.' Wealth and power stays, resolutely, with the wealthy and the powerful - as though these human-made facts were, like day and night - natural events. 

But there is a second reason which is easy for middle class pundits (not me baby) to miss. The whole system of power in Britain has become corrupt. Maybe it always was. But it used to be a widely held view that Britain had avoided the 'continental malaise' of the tips required every time you bump up against any sort of officialdom. The working assumption, that the bigger the fish the more handsome the payola, was seen as part of the difficulties that people who had the misfortune to be born in foreign parts had to face. All sorts of official, sanctioned corruption in Britain somehow seemed to mean that the unofficial sort was less practiced. (Everybody knows that if you are diagnosed with something serious you can jump the queue by paying to see the consultant. Everybody knows the Birmingham had to disband the Serious Crime Squad - as they were the ones committing the serious crimes.) 

Well. It turns out, just like the opinion that there is mostly common ground shared by all the major political parties, the view of the least well off in our society, that the people who manage the whole system that manages our lives are out for whatever they can get is, broadly speaking, true. Occasionally someone brave enough to pull back the curtain exposes the truth. It is no surprise, despite the self-congratulatory hooha that surrounds the Levinson enquiry, that the media pay the cops. But Doreen Lawrence has got as far as the Home Secretary in her campaign to show that the South London cops who so badly botched the investigation into her son's murder were not just racists, they were corrupt-to-the-core racists. 

Chancellor Osborne, an offspring of wealth and privilege,  attacks 'aggressive' tax avoiders. Nobody believes his spurious concern. His mum and dad will have to sack the family accountant. Home secretary Teresa May is sweating over whether to open the can of worms that is the South London police force. MPs want their expenses back. Philanthropists squirm now the spotlight has has shone on their 'charitable giving.' (Did you know Britain's public schools are all 'charities?')    And on. And on. 

It is hard to believe anything other than the reality that the whole majestic edifice of Britain's social and political system is populated by a species of self-serving rats. It turns out that the the opinions of the people at the bottom of our society, that it doesn't matter who you vote for, that 'they are all in it for themselves' are, largely, right. Unfortunately that is only the beginning of all wisdom.