COLUMN: Let's make sure our anger is used wisely

In 1961 Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse launched a West End musical entitled Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.
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They got the title from a piece of graffiti on an East London wall.

The musical’s long forgotten, but the graffiti’s back, and after the events of the past few months, it’s hardly surprising that some people still feel moved to write on a wall. However, for many of the victims of Kensington’s Grenfell Tower inferno the wall is one of the main channels for anger.

The world has turned upside down. It has been a year since the UK voted to leave the EU. And we’re still in it until 2019.

In my view America’s political system left the rails and crashed down a historical mineshaft with the election of Donald Trump.

Maintaining a ‘special relationship’ with Trump is like poking a rabid rottweiler with a sharp stick.

And the UK had an unnecessary election which has probably done us all a favour. The dam of public disapproval for the economic suffering inflicted upon us has finally burst.

We’ve had enough. Yes, Theresa May’s battered, the laughingstock of a ‘government’ which is hanging on by its fingernails, but this election had only one winner – the people.

The ‘strong and stable’ government campaigning by, in my view, an over-confident May, thoroughly expecting her ‘deserved’ landslide, was stilted, repetitive and lacking any empathy with the public. Now Britain’s Tories intend on sharing power with the DUP.

The barrage of media hatred against Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn during the campaign was breath-taking. Painted as everything from a lunatic to a terrorist, he still battled on.

His rallies, compared to May’s, were natural events attracting thousands. The rally at Huddersfield looked like the Sermon on the Mount.

And now, in the richest borough in the UK, the seemingly avoidable tragedy of Kensington’s Grenfell Tower fire.

In November 2016, on their blog, (Grenfell Action Group) the residents angrily predicted this fire.

The inequality and unfairness in our society have been brought into sharp focus in Kensington, as well as revealing the true nature of some of our public figures.

Mrs May said she couldn’t visit the Grenfell survivors because of ‘security’ reasons, yet the following day our 91-year old Queen was there talking to distraught residents, as Jeremy Corbyn had done two days earlier.

And in the midst of all this, someone has to start the Brexit talks.

It seems at last that we – the peasants – are revolting.

And as that ex-punk and unlikely Brexit supporter Johnny Rotten said, ‘Anger is an energy’.

Let’s make sure it is used wisely.