What is this better future Starmer is planning after all the pain? Who is going to save us from this drivel, asks Roger Gewolb

He blamed it all on the Tories of course, taking a page out of the David Cameron/George Osborne playbook, claiming that the Tories have left Labour with a surprise £22 billion “black hole”.

He added that Labour has quickly filled £5 billion of it by cutting the winter fuel allowance, to reduce our energy bills when it counts, by moving to means testing, so that only the poorest pensioners will now get the allowance.

However, that actually means that some 10 million other pensioners, many of whom are just above poverty level, and everybody else who has more will no longer receive it. What a victory.

And of course, having discovered this dastardly black hole, he’s obviously also going to have to fill the other £17 billion, plus the cost of all the huge pay rises he’s just given to all the union-backed public service workers, by rolling back on his election campaign promise of 5 minutes ago not to raise taxes, and he’s also going to have to cut public services. What a surprise!

I must say, I am so sick and tired of this utterly banal and phony behaviour from politicians; it just never ends.

Does government actually believe that we are so stupid-the answer is a resounding yes-that we will believe their story that they only just discovered the black hole?

How in the world could they not have known about the state of government finances all the time?

They were supposed to be in office as the Loyal Opposition with a Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer responsible for everything monetary, economic, and financial and Economic Advisers and all the rest.

And yet nobody exposes them and all of this nonsense. Nobody even tries to put a stop to it. Think tanks produce paper after paper explaining why there is no real black hole and presenting government policy and the national debt, taxation, and spending in an entirely different light, and yet nobody reads them except perhaps academics and policy wonks, or so it seems.

The mainstream media is not interested. Their economics editors and other so-called experts get on our television screens every evening and in our newspapers every morning and simply recite the government policy line.

And we all just sit here and take it, day after day. It is never-ending.

My theory is that it is lethargy and apathy-driven, this robotic acceptance of utter nonsense foisted on us daily, if not hourly, by our political leaders.

People are bored with politics and politicians and don’t trust them one bit and basically just ignore them and don’t care. Sure they talk about politics down the pub, but they’re really not interested, and can’t be bothered to do anything about it, even though at the end of the day these same politicians are running our lives, through legislation and even how much money we have to spend.

Ordinary folk regard the political arena as so boring that they would rather talk about football or anything else and the political machine just carries on grinding out useless waffle, while our political leaders move things in the directions that favour their own interests and that of their backers. That is unfortunately the reality of our political system today, and not just in this country.

What is the solution? Alternate news channels, especially digital and some television, try to combat the bias of the mainstream media and its unwillingness to defend the interests of the ordinary citizen, but they have not yet made sufficient inroads.

A number of numerous smaller digital platforms broadcasting video and audio news both live and recorded seem to have veered too far into right wing, conspiracy theory territory to be universally credible.

In any event, I believe that the news cycle moves so quickly that it would not be effective for news channels or newspapers print or digital to try to properly expose the gaslighting foisted upon us all day long.

What is needed is a consumer minister, someone with no vested interests who can call out the unworthy policies of the government, and the opposition, dissecting and criticising them and suggesting alternatives.

This minister’s reporting should be backed up by think tank research where appropriate, and all of it must then be published and disseminated by our news channels and outlets as a legal requirement so that, whatever propaganda the channels are pushing that day, a special Consumer Minister’s Report must also be published alongside, and the truth nevertheless gets out.

And, in time, I would not be surprised if that actually doesn’t get the mainstream players to pull up their socks.