Doubleplusungood

Yesterday, in the wake of the latest Budget announcements, Conservative Party Chairman Grant Shapps posted the following on Twitter:

There are lots of things I could say about that, but I know that you are already thinking the same thing, so I’ll skip over it to get to this next bit - an excerpt from George Orwell’s 1984. Emphasis in the following extract is mine. (And a h/t to Tom Muller for pointing me towards this):

“So long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in the gutters, they went to work at twelve, they passed through a brief blossoming-period of beauty and sexual desire, they married at twenty, they were middle-aged at thirty, they died, for the most part, at sixty. Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”