But without the pandemic the rich would have actually been even richer.
Noone is saying they should be grateful. But this may come as a surprise to you but the majority are grateful.
And sorry but personally i think most people should be grateful that they recieved the help they needed to keep a roof over their heads, kept employment and ate. Yes it has came as a huge cost and will have to get paid back. I would be more inclined to be pissed off about why the people that have never worked in their lifes and lived off the governments benefits needed to get paid more. Why the are now getting all this extra help where people in poor paid jobs get sod all. Why when people had to go and work during a heatwave those on benefits did not need to go and sign on as too hot for them
Guess we just have different views on what is important. Might be as you live in IOM and i have stayed my whole life in a run down housing scheme in Glasgow we see things from different perspective,
Without wanting to get into some sort of Monty Python-esque Four Yorkshiremen face off about who had to clean the most lakes and eat cold gravel for breakfast, I will point out that I grew up poor in a small terraced house, in a single parent family, in deindustrialised North Manchester.
There was not much money in our house when I was a child, we never went hungry but the bills often didn't get paid (I remember letters turning up all the time with big red words on the front of them reading FINAL DEMAND and suchlike), and my dad would often be behind on the mortgage payments. I only found out when I was older that he came close to losing the house on several occasions. We sometimes had a car but it was always an old shit-tip of a thing and was generally lacking niceties such as tax and insurance (me and my brother were on police-watching duty whenever we were out and about in it, so that my dad could try to avoid them, although he still got done on several occasions).
I got my first job at the age of 12 (a paper round) to try and get a bit of spends, and I've had a job my entire life ever since (part time when I was still in education).
I moved to the Isle of Man when I was 22 back in 1996, the first two jobs I had here were in pub/restaurant places for shit pay, doing bar work, kitchen work, cleaning work, whatever needed doing at the time. In one of those jobs the landlord deducted tax and NI from my pay but when I went to the tax office here they had no idea who I even was, turned out he'd been making the deductions and just pocketing them - so that was nice.
From there I got a stroke of luck, applying for a job doing one thing (and even that job application was, in honesty, a bit of a punt), but it gave me an opportunity to try my hand at something else whilst I was there - (they were having trouble recruiting into the role, I was interested in what the role was, they gave me a chance to have a go at it) - as I was showing a talent for the computers in the place, and this gave me the opportunity to apply for a trainee IT position with a bigger employer, where I did well, got a full time position after being a trainee, got promoted after a bit, and so on.
Point is I know all too well what it's like to have fuck all, I remember being the kid with the crap clothes and the NHS specs, of not being able to afford to go on the school trips, wondering why some of my friends lived in such nice houses with gardens and a shiny car sat on the drive, whereas we just had a small dingy yard with a knackered fifteen year old Ford Escort leaking oil onto the backings, and I was still sharing a bunk bed with my brother in a two-up two-down terrace.
Given my background, to me the obvious thing to want is to see things like wealth inequality be tackled, to see the pie be shared out more fairly, I don't blame immigrants or the 'benefits scroungers' or anything like that, they are small beer compared to the full-on biblical scale larceny being carried out by the rich and super-rich. It suits the narrative of the rich to have the working class tearing chunks out of each other, to point at 'the other' and blame them, anything that distracts attention from what they're up to and keeps sticking the Tories in power so they can carry on their ransacking of the country unabated.
Yes, I've been fortunate enough to end up in a pretty decent position, I thank my lucky stars for that every single day, but I've never forgotten where I came from.
