Sometimes I can't sleep

I have always been able to see old London quite clearly. Admittedly the centuries seem to lie in a muddled heap, like acetates on top of one another, but if I focus, I can see times past and times present. I really hope I don't see times to come. It all seems to be circling back to some strange form of Victoriana without the bustles. The poor are despised, some go hungry, some die, and many are exploited. The middle class chases the upper class with a kind of well meaning desperation, knowing what lies below them both, and the upper class just acts as though nothing will change. In Victoria's reign, there were riots, barely mentioned now but very brutally suppressed at the time. She was not always universally loved. The way to be loved was to help the poor, and to be sure there were great philanthropists doing the work that governments avoided. As well as a time of desperate hypocrisy and poverty, the Victorian era was one of expansion and optimism.

That optimism seems to have been replaced with a kind of flaccid cynicism, a recognition of theft as the universal building brick underlying all things.

Some daft bint from the House of Lords claimed that people were using food banks because they didn't know how to cook. Her MP husband Bernard Jenkin claimed 50,000 pounds in expenses in order to pay rent on his sister in law's farmhouse as a second home. The utter corruption and cruelty of the government is endless. Their answer to dealing with the deficit is to let poor people die. What kind of system is this?

What would it take to bring about a revolution here?

We are not the people to do that. We are comfortable enough, and the uncomfortable are too weak to fight. After all, I can hardly complain about my own life, there is so much to be joyful for. But I do find myself increasingly thinking that it would have been better for Scotland to be free of those insolent thieves in Westminster, so confident in their mendacity, so incompetent in running the country. Their credibility would have been utterly broken. Of course, so might Scotland and the UKr, but the tories would never have got over it. And they need to be stopped, before Britain becomes something truly terrible and heartless.They want permanent austerity outside their front door. They want a world in which most Brits expect much less and work much harder for it; but not them, never them.

London has a lot of beauty in it; but I think I am past seeing it as home. We are not quite back at the 1880s, but we are not far from the 1980s, where people huddled in doorways at night to sleep, gutters of frozen urine under Waterloo Bridge, beggars in cardboard boxes. The difference is that now, those people are moved on. That's what we've learned in 200 years; cosmetic surgery.