Safe haven when the news is too scary!

Double Vision with Charlie Adley

Sometimes you watch the news or read something in the paper and your heart sinks. The world seems beyond redemption. Your mind spins as you struggle to make sense of it all. Are you really a member of this species who so readily seek out hatred; who appear to savour the horrors of war?

As a news junkie I’ve adopted ways of protecting myself from what I call ‘nadir moments’, so before you drop down a canyon of personal despair, check out my guide to dealing with hate.

The last story that affected me badly was concerned with a fairly unsensational man. UK Lib/Dem politician Vince Cable is remarkable only in that he’s become his party’s leader at 74.

I have no reason to disbelieve his recent revelations that as Business Secretary during the Tory-Lib/Dem coalition government, he saw up to nine studies that showed: “… that immigration had very little impact on wages or employment, but this was suppressed by the Home Office under Theresa May, because the results were inconvenient.”

Even now I feel a stab of fury: an inconvenient truth, suppressed by a Tory who is now Prime Minister, because she knew better than to care about mere facts. May knew well that immigration was boosting the UK economy, because along with cohorts of business leaders, the Institute for Fiscal Studies had advised her that the UK’s migrant workforce was actually creating jobs for UK workers.

Yet instead she sat on all those reports, because people don’t want to hear that immigration helps. They want someone to blame. They need to hear talk of controlling borders, and so the hate continues.

My heart sinks through the floor as I wonder about who the hell we are. Do facts now play no part in the machinery of democracy? There’s nothing new in politicians saying what they know people want to hear, but don’t we want to hear the truth? Can we no longer handle the truth?

To read Charlie’s column in full, please see this week’s Galway City Tribune.