COLUMN: SABRINA SWEENEY

It’s often said that good journalists should have a healthy dose of scepticism, that they should all be doubters who don’t just believe the first thing they are told but ask pressing questions and work hard to get to the truth. What we are not supposed to be are cynics who immediately disbelieve, who sneer at politicians or corporations and regard them as untrustworthy, blaming them for society’s ills, before we even begin to tell a story.

Interestingly, a cynic is defined in the Oxford English dictionary as a person who views people as being motivated purely by self interest rather than acting for honourable or unselfish reasons. Personally, I believe that description is ironic in the times that we’re in.

As a journalist in the current political and social climate, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to fall heavily into the cynic camp. Every week, as the time comes to write this column, I envisage sitting down to pen something positive. But try as I might, as I stay across hot topics of news and current affairs, whether that’s listening to the radio, TV, reading newspapers or following social media, I struggle to find anything that’s both newsworthy and optimistic. In fact, I did wonder if I was tumbling into a spiral of negativity; Perhaps motherhood and the accompanying lack of daily adult conversation was affecting my ability to view things clearly. But as it turns out, I’m not in some kind of small child induced decline. In fact, it’s a conundrum facing many colleagues and friends, not just in the media but in other sectors, too, such as health, education and charity.

After almost a decade of austerity, budget cuts and privatisation under the Conservative government, overlapped with the Brexit shambles, it seems many of us have become cynical. We expect the worst of our politicians; we expect their decisions to be based on self-interest. And who could blame us? You may remember a gleeful Theresa May telling her Tory party conference in October that austerity had ended.

She insisted there were “better days ahead” for all of us. I don’t know about you, but I certainly haven’t witnessed any sign of such improvements.

As my esteemed colleague Denzil McDaniel noted in his column in this newspaper last week, the UK is one of the wealthiest countries in the world but it is waging war on the poor.

Among them are pensioners who are taking out loans to get cut price operations in Lithuania because of long hospital waiting lists.

And let’s not ignore one of the most deeply saddening and heart wrenching sights, so visible on our streets today; the number of homeless people in the UK, which has now reached 320,000 – an increase of 13,000 from last year. Half of them are in London and according to the housing charity, Shelter, the figures show that roughly one in 200 people are now homeless or living in temporary accommodation.

It’s a shocking disparity in a country that boasts such wealth that people in paid employment are depending on food banks to feed their families.

I wasn’t too surprised to hear that a United Nations investigation into poverty in Britain found that a combination of Tory cuts, Universal Credit and Brexit have inflicted “unnecessary misery”.

If you venture out onto any high street, you can see the effects of austerity and unfair social policy. Nor was I shocked to hear Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur who led the investigation, say that rather than actually making savings, government cuts had actually exacerbated serious social problems across society. In fact, none of the disgraceful actions of this government really surprises me anymore. Either that’s just a sad indictment of politics at the moment or I really have become a cynic.