Exulansis

One of the entries in the fake Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is the made up term "exulansis" which is described as "the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it".

When it comes to British politics this feeling is particularly apt, given the glaring disconnect between what the mainstream media focus on, and what millions of us experience in our daily lives.

The IPPR estimate that 130,000 British citizens have been driven into early graves as a result of Tory austerity cuts to health and social care services, and the government's own figures admit that literally thousands of disabled people have dies within weeks of being declared "fit for work" by the Tory disability denial system.

Even if these victims had an average of just two loved ones, that's well over a quarter of a million people who have suffered tragic personal loss at the hands of the state. But if you look at the mainstream media output, they barely mention it (the BBC even deliberately buries austerity death figures) in favour of whatever the talk of Westminster bubble is, which is currently the ridiculously undemocratic Tory leadership contest which utterly dominates every single news broadcast and politics show.

Aside from all the deaths, Tory austerity has caused the slowest economic recovery in Centuries and vast amounts of suffering: Soaring food bank dependency, collapsing public services, millions of children growing up in dire poverty despite living in working households, workers trapped in exploitative Zero Hours Contracts and rip-off gig economy jobs. ever more victims of violent crime after the Tories scrapped 21,000+ police and gutted police funding, graduates trapped by vast completely unpayable student loan debts on extortionate inflation+3% repayment terms, the worst sustained collapse in the value of workers' wages since records began, huge NHS waiting lists, especially for mental health services that have been stripped down to the bare bones, millions of sick and disabled people living in fear of the next disability denial assessment aimed at stripping them of their social security payments and forcing them onto the dole queue ...

But all we hear about on every BBC News and politics show is this ridiculous, and brazenly anti-democratic Tory beauty pageant.

Day, after day, after day of the Tory candidates whitewashing their own demonstrable culpability in all of this suffering, and never held to account over their utterly abysmal track record in government (every single one of these men served in Theresa May's cabinet), nor their relentless smears against Jeremy Corbyn.

And this is where the feeling of "exulansis" comes in.

We want someone to represent our feelings; to hold those responsible for our suffering to account for their crimes against us, but the mainstream media class are almost entirely incapable of doing this.

This class of people are almost entirely insulated from the horrors of austerity Britain.

They're on six and seven figure salaries. They have secure homes and comfortable lives. Nobody is snatching food out of their children's mouths or threatening their residency in the UK. They don't rely on the social safety net that the Tories have been vandalising, nor the public services the Tories have driven into the ground. If there's an outrageous queue for the NHS medical service they need, then they can just go private.

The biggest concern or inconvenience that Tory austerity fanaticism has caused them is probably the fact that their bins collection might have been changed from weekly to fortnightly as a result of unprecedented Tory cuts to the local government budget.

And the majority of the politicians these people are supposed to be holding to account are their well-to-do chums with the same comfortable lifestyles and the same privileged backgrounds (wealthy parents, exclusive private schools, Oxbridge, old school ties opening doors to job opportunities us proles could only ever dream of ...).

So when it comes to the ruinous consequences of austerity, mainstream media hacks often come across as visibly bored by it, like it's just the pointless preaching of lefties distracting attention away from the much more important task of regurgitating the latest gossip and groupthink from the Westminster bubble.

Austerity fanaticism barely affects them, so they don't simply care about it, or accept it as an important issue, or recognise the crucial role this disastrous hard-right fanaticism has played in reducing our nation to this shambolic state.

They just see talk of austerity and its dire consequences as an irritating distraction from their beloved Westminster tittle-tattle and the Tory beauty parade they're all so obsessed with right now.

This indifference tells us that the system doesn't care about us. That the people administering the system don't care about us. That the people tasked with holding the system administrators to account don't care about us.

All they care about is the niche concerns of their own exclusive social class, and it definitely shows.

And that's how millions upon millions of us are left feeling "exulansis" at the state of politics, because virtually nobody covering it is even remotely capable of relating to the horrifying real world consequences of the policies enacted by their own social class against people like us that they consider to be beneath them.

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