Boris the bung: Johnson has been splurging cash on the very rich for the last three years. Now, when the rest of us are suffering in a cost-of-living crisis he created, he has little for us other than excuses.

Remember when only benefit claimants had to choose between “eating and heating” – buying food for their families or energy for their homes?

Those were happy days for the small-minded Little Britons who merrily voted Tory government after Tory government into power to continue ruining the economy and siphoning cash away from people who need it.

Now, more than 60 per cent of the UK’s population are in the same position as those benefit claimants – and suddenly it isn’t quite as amusing to fling the old “scrounger” accusations around any more, is it?

Many of the same people who supported government benefit cuts that drove claimants to suicide or simply starved them to death are now begging the same government to support them through the current cost-of-living crisis.

And some – not necessarily the same ones – are having suicidal thoughts themselves.

This Writer has a certain amount of sympathy for those who didn’t vote Tory and never supported the victimisation of the vulnerable.

Those who did are finding it isn’t so comfortable when the shoe’s on the other foot, I suppose. I wonder whether they will learn from the experience, to be a little less judgmental about other people, now they have suffered just a little of what the sick and disabled (for example) have endured for more than a decade?

Well, the experience won’t do them any good if they give in to their more grim thoughts, so it is right that everybody who is suffering mental ill-health as a result of the government’s failure in its most basic function – providing affordable food and energy to the population – should get treatment for it.

Sadly (again) we have a government that is not up to the task.

The Tories are using the crisis to provide another subsidy for the rich, with people who own multiple houses set to receive £400 for each of them, no matter whether they are occupied all the time or not.

Landlords will be under no obligation to pass the cash on to tenants who actually pay the bills.

And mental health services have long been neglected by successive Conservative governments.

Now they are scrabbling to catch up, providing £2.3 billion extra per year to treat two million more people – that’s just £1,150 each for around 1/20 of those who need help, according to the Sky News poll.

And they have called for evidence from the public about what should be in a 10-year plan for mental health, that will not make any difference to people who are in need now.

Thomas Jefferson (or was it Benjamin Franklin?) once famously said, “We get the government we deserve.”

I just hope people who are going through hardship now realise that their choice of Tory rule has inflicted the same – and worse – on others for many years.

Source: ‘I can’t take the cost of living anymore’: We asked Britons how the crisis is affecting them