You don’t Need No Education

Terminally bitter and chronically cynical as I am – or maybe just because This Is England – I’m picturing this heartbroken kid; dreams snuffed out by an ex-fireplace salesman promoted to a position of incompetence. A glittering academic career in ruins. His future shoved up against the wall and downgraded by a volley from the Eton Rifles.

And then, somehow, by enormous chunks of good fortune and several truckloads of help from a cast of thousands, making a success of his life.

Later, just a scant few years later, by which time our crumbling state schools have been reduced to a cross between Lebanese refugee camps & Salvation Army soup kitchens; when strafing migrants in the Channel is an actual Saturday night reality TV show hosted by Nigel Farage and Isabel Oakeshott; when the Tories’ newly minted Volunteer Gammon Army arrest citizens for calling racists racists and wearing poppies smaller than the regulation six foot-squared; when Keir Starmer holds down the care home residents so Matt Hancock’s cuff links don’t get splattered by old people’s drool as he smothers them; when, during our annual three days of summer, the sun shines its now red, white and blue rays and your dad nips down the Dog and Swastika for a pint after his shift at the statue defending factory, our ripped-off kid is now a man.

Complete with fuck-you-peasants mock Tudor pile and smirking Audi on the drive, he endlessly lectures his own kids to stop whining and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Striding smugly to the polling station, past the dead homeless people swept into the gutters, to rot until the state collects them for Potters Field, all pious and self-righteous and desperate to sock it to the scroungers, wasters and lefties; to pass on the family tradition of destroying the futures of your own kids and grand-kids by voting Tory.