Meghan, Harry, Oprah, the Royals, Piers Morgan: a Punch and Judy show of the rich and famous

Amid the pages of Bertolt Brecht’s classic collection, The Svendborg Poems, you encounter the following verse:

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.”

Brecht, who came of age during the First World War and who lived through two abortive German revolutions on the back of which was born the beast of fascism, carried in his head a creative brain of inordinate force. It was married to a heart in which the travails and struggles of the common man remained the cause of his life, informing his work and worldview to the end.

With this in mind, it’s interesting to ponder what Brecht would make of the plight of the common man in these dark times, informed by a global pandemic that has changed the way we live and has wrought searing economic dislocation with all the attendant stress and despair.

In the UK NHS workers, over a hundred of whom have perished in the fight against Covid, have just been offered a one percent pay rise in gratitude for their Herculean efforts in dealing with the failures and criminal negligence of a Tory government and establishment from the beginning of this public…