Welcome to Dystopia

Last year, as no doubt you remember, the students woke up, got organised and set about destroying London. This seemed the sensible option and would get everyone else to treat them like they were responsible grown-ups. The guy who threw the fire extinguisher from the roof has been jailed, which I support. Alright, it didn’t hit anyone and no damage was done, but it wasn’t exactly the most sensible course of action was it?

That fire extinguisher hitting the ground was the moment at which the public realised it had gone too far. People who want to go to university are supposed to be intelligent, and I don’t have much faith in the intelligence of someone who thinks throwing heavy objects from a tall building into a crowd of people below is a smart idea.

But anyway, I’m not really here to talk about that, or the fact that graduates are increasingly becoming the jobless ones, or indeed that in some parts of the country youth employment is up to 20%, something I’m very aware of as I have just lost my job.

I’m now a statistic.

Still, I’m not here to mope, I’m here to talk about Africa. In Tunisia last week, riots and protests broke out and the government fell to be replaced with another. And this week, Egypt decided that it hadn’t been on the news for a while and did the same thing. More interesting, in an unprecedented move, the country shut down its Internet and SMS services. The country is effectively in lockdown. It might as well not exist in this modern, tech-centred world.

It does mean though that journalists in the field have the advantage now, as no one in Egypt can tweet or blog about what’s going on, they have to speak to journalists directly to get their voices heard out of the country.

As we were watching the riot footage and I casually awaited the collapse of the Pyramids (my knowledge of modern Egypt is very minimal, so I’m staying old school), my father said, “That’ll be us next.”

“Really? Do we get a go?” I said.

“Well, this is all about people being pissed off with the politicians,” he nodded. “And that’s pretty much the state we’re in.”

Do I really think that anarchy is coming to Britain, a country that currently considers it anarchy to refuse a cup of tea? I don’t know, and I don’t want to speculate. Except I do and it will! We’ve seen a taster of what can be done – and that was just the students, a group known for their laziness and drunkenness (if the stereotype holds). What would the rest of us do?

Don’t forget, Britain once owned a quarter of the world – the desire to conquer runs deep within our veins and I don’t imagine it’ll take much more for anarchy to set in.

This country is in a terrible state, you can’t deny that. The high street is on its last legs, the economy remains screwed, education is preposterously expensive and don’t even get me started on the price of petrol. Still, the government has decided that money is better spent importing pandas to Edinburgh, building Olympic stadiums to knock them down again in 2013, and reintroducing the Great Bustard to Britain.

Now don’t get me wrong, the Olympics is an important cultural event but we can’t really afford to host it right now, so why not swallow our pride (a deeply un-English concept) and give it to someone who can. I also support breeding programmes of rare animals, but I don’t support spending billions on getting Edinburgh a tourism boost when it is already a very touristy place. And the Great Bustard is an impressive looking bird, but do we need them back in England right now?

The government need to wake up because right now I’ve given up reading dystopian novels – I’m living in one. And it all seems like it’s going to take a turn for the worse again soon. Cameron, Clegg and the rest have time to try and appease the public. We all knew that economic recovery would be hard, but they’re cutting and taxing in all the wrong places. Ask celebrities to contribute from their fortunes. If the politicians really want to show they care, they could all take a 50% or more pay cut, prove they aren’t doing it for the money. Coming on stage and telling us they understand how we feel isn’t enough, because they don’t.

So come on Cameron, you haven’t got long. Cheer us up or before long the business in Tunisia and Egypt will look like a scuffle on the playground.

I’m not ready to spend the rest of my life in a George Orwell novel.

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Finally, if you haven’t been watching 10 O’clock Live, you should start. Whoever thought putting David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne in a room together deserves a medal. Mitchell has proved himself to be even more intelligent than we thought and an excellent interviewer, unafraid of asking the difficult questions. Brooker spits more venom than a quiver of cobras. Carr is the master of the over-the-line one-liner – for some reason I find them acceptable from him but not from Frankie Boyle. And Laverne does a good job at keeping them all under control and making sarcastic commentary.

Thursday, Channel 4, 10pm. Do it.

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