Our present Government is morally bankrupt and in its death throes. A friend recently said "our whole system is broken. We need some other way of running our country."
And whilst I think he is right, I cannot see a different way. Many of our politicians are sadly arrogant and self serving, unlike the army of volunteers that work tirelessly in our country to keep everything running.
A drastic re-set and re- think is definitely needed but sadly is unlikely to happen whichever party wins this year's general election. They are all as bad as each other is the comment you get from many people who have lost faith in our current politics.
I subscribe to no political party and judge them on their behaviour and ability to do their jobs. I consider this Government the worst I have ever experienced. Their incompetence at times has been mind numbing and in Boris Johnson we had a total buffoon as prime minister and in Liz Truss we had somebody so unsuited to being prime minister that she only lasted a handful of days.
But my fear is that the Labour party, which will almost certainly form the next Government, will be no better and we will head off down a different road that just ends in a different cliff to fall over.
I am no supporter of Keir Starmer and holes are already beginning to appear in the Labour party and that's even before they come to power.
We seem to be in a very serious hole where the future looks anything but bright. Somebody else said we should have MPs with no party affiliations. Somebody else said that MPs should be volunteers. Neither of these ideas would work. Our nearby MP George Freeman has come out publicly to say he cannot pay his mortgage on his MP's salary. Let's just say his comments have been met with derision locally and he is now a laughing stock.
Our MP in South Norfolk Richard Bacon is now even more invisible since he announced he wouldn't be standing at the next election. He was pretty invisible before, so much so that posters showing him as a missing person were posted around South Norfolk a couple of years ago.
Over the next few weeks and months we will continue to have the two main parties slagging each other off in public with the Tories no doubt promising all kinds of things they know they cannot deliver and the Labour party probably promising all kinds of things that they also know they can't deliver. We are in for months of lies, slanderous comments and utter nonsense from one party in its death throes and another which doesn't really seem to know what it is about and where its going and the main sufferers from all this will be Joe and Josephine Public.
I am always trying to dissect what I think are the local issues, discussing them in my emagazine Hethersett Herald. And the two that stand out for me at present are:
1/ The lack of adequate medical facilities and 2/ the lack of general facilities to meet demands from a huge population increase in our village. Both these points are of immense concern.
I spoke yesterday about the frustration of not being able to telephone our village surgery to make an appointment despite being asked to do so in both a text message and an answer machine message and being told that to make an appointment people should visit the surgery and queue up. Ok not a problem for me but a couple of my readers pointed out that when you are feeling ill the last thing you want to do is stand in a queue to get an appointment that may or may not be available and then to go away and have to return later.
Sometimes I just feel like screaming with frustration and I'm sure many of you feel the same. Things don't seem to be improving despite promises to the contrary.
I will return to the matter of insufficient facilities later but that's the end of today's lecture.