A heavy heart, but surely things can only get better

OPINION: It was with a heavy heart that I woke up Wednesday to news that Boris Johnson had become the next prime minister in Britain, my former homeland.

After a day's reflection, perhaps a suitable ending to a catastrophic decade in British politics. For the past 1[ads1]0 years, the country's governments have increasingly come closer to the right, one PM at a time. It began in 2010 with Labour's glow Gordon Brown in 10 Downing St, but after he failed to exploit his early popularity and summon a snap of choice in 2007, and was then blamed for his part in the global financial crisis of 2008, his days was numbered.

In the wake of the parliamentary spending scandal, which saw some unscrupulous parliamentarians claiming huge sums of public money to pay off their mortgage or the maintenance of their country houses (do you remember the duckhouse?), It was an opinion that politicians really were "just in it for themselves". Such apathy led to no party winning a clear majority in the parliamentary elections in 2010, and a coalition was formed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

During the election campaign, Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg promised to scrap college tuition fees, but within months of becoming vice president, they tripled from 3,000 to 9,000 pounds a year. The Lib Dems were labeled liars and their political benevolence was gone, but still supported David Cameron's Tory Party and the demanding austerity program.

In 2013, & # 39; Bedroom Tax & # 39; introduced, so that people have reduced their benefits if they had an extra bedroom in their council or homestead home. Most of the hardest hit were disabled.

The same year, disability for disability, which supported people with poor health or disability, was replaced by the personal independence payment. The goal was to tighten the criteria and save £ 1.3 billion; The reality was that people had to undergo "degrading and degrading" assessments to prove their longstanding disabilities.

Many people lost their money, while the private companies Atos and Capita, who performed the reviews, earned millions.

"We're all in this," said former Chancellor George Osborne once he justified cuts to key public services and as the years went by, hospitals and libraries were shut down.

The food banks opened in record numbers, while homelessness reached the crisis level. In November 2016, the British charity Shelter warned that the combination of high rents and cuts in benefits would see over 250,000 people homeless that Christmas. A day after the announcement, a man froze on the streets of Birmingham.

To pledge the British Independence Party and the Murdoch-owned media, David Cameron promised an in / out referendum on Britain's EU membership. It would turn out to be his downfall. June 23, 2016, 51 percent of the UK voted to leave the EU and Cameron resigned the following day.

His replacement, Theresa May spent the next two years traveling back and forth to Brussels to try to mediate a deal and then unsuccessfully sell it to the House of Commons. She called a snap choice and lost the slim majority she had. She still refused to retire.

And when she visited the site of the Glenfell Tower disaster, she refused to meet the victims or their families. Maybot looked as effortless as she was inept.

As the months went by, Brexit suffocated everything, and while MPs didn't see, things just got worse. Finally, a hopeless and exhausted Theresa May finally threw the towel, and as we enter the last months of the 2010s, Boris Johnson has entered number 10. There are now populist, nationalist leaders on both sides of the Atlantic and Britain. set to plunge out of Europe without agreement.

So continue on Boris, do the worst – as someone said, things can only get better.

Lee Kenny is a Stuff Reporter based in Christchurch. He has campaigns for the British Labor Party, but now resides in NZ where he is not a member of any political party.