Toryville

I have driven past these woods a couple of times a week all year. Lush Sycamores and Horse Chestnuts casting cool shade across the street to the edges of New Suburbia, those winding lanes of new-builds, with plasterboard for walls and 'Home Is Where The Heart Is' transfers casting barely-noticed glances over cluttered kitchen tables.

Today something catches my eye.

The leaf fall has revealed something hitherto hidden from sight.

A tent.

And when I look a little closer there are more.

Many more.

I wonder how long it will be before the arsehole vigilantes pour off the estate to drive these adhoc villagers from their sight. Until now they will have been invisible. They won't last the Autumn never mind the Winter.

I'm reminded of my We Shall Overcome gig in Skegness, where the locals told me a similar village of tents exists among the sand dunes, people with no job, no home, no money, and in receipt of no help from cash and care-starved local authorities.

During the Great Depression, such shanty towns became known as Hoovervilles.

Today they are the inevitable consequence of Austerity. They are what happens when a government turns its back on its citizens and pulls up the drawbridge of Hope.

These are Toryvilles.

#FoodBankBritain is an ideological CHOICE. It is cruelty made policy and sold as common sense.

And for every tent in a Toryville there are 100,000 families at the limit of their overdraft, credit carded to the max, and one lost job away from the same fate.

Enough is enough.

Things HAVE to change