A few weeks ago, I was standing on the touchline watching an under 14’s football match. The parental chat mainly aimed at who was playing well and the coach’s team selections. I tend not to chat about serious stuff and steer well clear of politics. Sure, there are one or two parents as left-wing as I am, but I find it’s best not to go on about the dictatorship of the proletariat at 9am on a Sunday morning. Sometimes, however, politics can’t be avoided. How do you respond to a parent who says, regardless of Labour’s recent and egregious policy targeting those with disabilities, that disabled people should be picking up litter in their spare time and that no one should get “something for nothing”. My first response was to catch my swinging arm on the end of which was a fist heading towards his nose. My second response drew me into a long meditation on punching in general and punching down in particular and why this seems to have become a default for many people, many political parties and many governments. To my mind, down-punching idiots are loved by the kind of political parties and governments whose main aim is to protect the rich. The rich, who after fourteen years of Tory austerity got richer while everyone else got poorer. In that time these oligarchs, kleptocrats and pillars of various establishments around the world figured out that persuading people to punch down was so much better than leaving people to figure out that punching up was more beneficial. So why not serve up immigrants/refugees, people on benefits, disabled people and all those who can easily be tagged and demonised by the media (conveniently owned by the oligarchs, kleptocrats and the establishment) as punch bags? Much better than serving up lessons in revolutionary socialism and a who’s next for the guillotine competition. Why would so many of us accept food banks if not for the reason that we don’t care about food poverty or the people that desperately need them? Even The Labour Party have abandoned the poor. You can tell because the financial markets were suddenly very quiet about the Labour Party’s last mini budget, because it was obvious whose side Labour were on. Labour’s mini budget message may as well have been: Fuck the Poor. And the list of leaders who may as well have this as their mantra or on their political gravestone is long and extensive, from Trump in America and Xi in China, to Netanyahu in Israel and Putin in Russia. It’s the way the world is currently going, the weak and needy, those who can’t make a buck and have no economic muscle, are caught between their dire circumstances and governments and people who rather than offering a helping hand offer a fist - and if you really don’t think we are all in this together, better watch out for that fist punching you at some point in the future.