That was the decade, that was. It’s over, let it go, as Millicent Martin used to sing. And what a grim 10 years it has been.
A bankers’ recession, four Tory election victories, divorce from Europe and a false dawn for Labour.
It began in 2010 with an Old Etonian toff in Number 10, and ends with another, only slightly older and less honest.
Unlike “The Noughties” that went before, no one can think of a catchy description for the period.
It will probably become known prosaically as the Twenty-Tens, like the 1910s.
Whatever you call it, the second decade of the 21st century was one of the most unpleasant, divisive and depressing in living memory. And mine goes back a long way.
Under Tory rule – including the phoney coalition – the NHS deteriorated, public services declined and social care fell off a cliff. Old folks’ homes, Sure Start and Walk-In health centres, youth clubs, and day care facilities closed.
(Image: PA)
Bus services stopped running, the railways went to pot and your local library shut its doors. Tens of thousands of teachers, police officers and classroom assistants
were sacked.
The 2010s brought austerity, redundancy and the remorseless rise of the gig economy of casual, insecure work at the whim of employers.
What will the 2020s bring? Certainly not 20-20 hindsight that would make Tory politicians see the cruelty, folly and misery of the decade now ending.
Austerity is not over. It’s simply rebadged as “sound financial policy”. Massive cuts in spending will continue. Towns and cities face a big hit: £23million for next year in Leeds alone, for example.
For those who don’t remember her, Millicent Martin did the wrap-up number in the early 1960s BBC TV satire, That Was The Week That Was, presented by David Frost.
The show slaughtered a Tory government in terminal decline, and led – guess what? – by yet another Old Etonian, Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
Millicent is still alive, aged 85, living with husband number three in America.
Come home, darling, and slay Boris in song.
