Buck Up, Plebs

Having spent only four decades breaking up communities, casualising the workplace and demonising the different, Her Majesty's Government has appointed someone called Mims to nag a few people into mucking in a bit more. The minister for loneliness, a private landlord whose past record of human sympathy includes voting against a bill that would have compelled private landlords to keep their properties fit for human habitation, has been thrown a bit of loose change with which to fund furniture restoration projects and organised rambles. Such laudable concern for the lonely is of course natural for an administration predominantly staffed by sagging middle-aged adolescents, self-pitying tax dodgers and stupid old women; it is doubtless due to pure if benign coincidence that a recent study associates loneliness with a cash cost to private-sector employers.