The depressingly bleak Christmas awaiting too many children in Britain is a damning indictment of how our unequal country is operating.
We salute everybody working hard and donating so kids in other families do not go completely without this year.
But the richest Prime Minister in the nation’s history should hang his head in shame and make way for a leader who’d govern for us all by spreading wealth, power and opportunity.
The resurgence in child poverty under the Conservatives is a policy choice rather than inevitable, a direct result of chronically low pay and a criminally callous benefits system.
In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol Tiny Tim’s Christmas is saved by Scrooge seeing the light and turning into Santa.
Sunak, alas, is getting worse not better.
Striking back
Ambulance crews like nurses, railway workers, border staff, posties, university lecturers and any group anybody may wish to identify don’t want to strike.
Striking means losing a day’s pay. But back them into a corner, reducing the value of pay packets, undermining the very work they do, and something will snap.
Industrial action is a last resort and the ambulance dispute, like so many, about more than money. It is fundamentally about decency, about how crews and the public are treated.
We know the agonisingly long delays are the fault of Ministers, not ambulance crews.
When the Tories won’t negotiate, they are to blame for strikes.
Coming home
Lady Luck didn’t smile on England’s men’s football team at the World Cup.
Gareth Sountgate and his vibrant, diverse Three Lions, particularly captain Harry Kane who never shirks responsibly, fly home with their heads held high and fans dreaming of Euro 24 when hopefully fortune will smile on British teams.
