The Labour MP, Jess Phillips, who fights hard for the constituents from her working class roots, says this of her first impression of going to the House of Commons: “I thought I’d met posh people before I came here, but I’d actually only met people who eat olives.”

Even after all this time of the vast majority of voters living of very modest incomes, they still put the rich and privileged into power to rule.

The sense of entitlement from people like Boris Johnson is staggering, and if you still needed any hint of how this class looks down on the plebs, BoJo’s dad, Stanley showed contempt recently when he said that to spell Pinocchio “required a degree of literacy which I think the Great British public doesn’t necessarily have.”

Basically, they’re thick!

One of the MPs which Jess Phillips may have been referring to was Douglas Carswell, who served as a Conservative, then UKIP, then an independent before leaving the Commons in 2017.

It’s unlikely he’ll struggle for cash to buy olives.

The son of two physicians and educated at private school, Carswell was under the spotlight in 2007 for renting a £335,000 house and claiming it on expenses as his second home, claimed £700 for a love seat and in 2016

defended claiming £174,000 in expenses on top of his salary and private income.

He consistently voted to reduce the amount of public money spent on welfare benefits.

It is, of course, unfair to single Mr. Carswell out. He’s far from the only rich boy to have his nose in the trough.

But this week, he responded to the latest report by the Resolution Foundation that under the Conservatives child poverty could rise to 34 per cent in Britain.

“Child poverty at a 60-year high? I simply do not believe the poverty level today for children is the same as it was in 1959. This is simply bogus news,” suggested Carswell.

The diarist and novelist, Anais Nin once wrote: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

So perhaps Carswell is looking at things through his own prism; indeed, you may well think he sort of has a point if you remember that people in 1959 weren’t that well off. But the fact is, we live in very different times now with greater pressure and child poverty is measured very differently.

And we need to look at things in the circumstances of many people who are struggling.

For example, you have a heart of stone if you weren’t moved by the Channel 4 Dispatches programme this week “Growing Up Poor: Britain’s Breadline Kids” which featured eight-year-old Courtney and her

younger brother who wear their coats in bed because they can’t afford to pay the heating bill.

Their mum escaped abuse with her children seven months ago, but the system won’t help them and they survive on just £5 a day.

Universal Credit is causing real problems, and like many families they rely on foodbanks because their kitchen cupboards are empty.

Britain 2019.

Closer to home, I was in one of our supermarkets recently and spoke to the folk collecting food for our local foodbank. Their workload is ever increasing, in fact the numbers they are helping are up a remarkable 306 per cent since 2017.

They have distributed 2403 food parcels and provided 7,209 emergency meals to 2,403 people. This, of course, will be their most demanding period, and it’s something that always comes to our attention as we think of Christmas.

But it’s a problem the whole year round.

Among those people helping those less fortunate were the staff at the Outpatients Department in South West Acute Hospital, who responded to the suggestion by Nurse Lea Goodwin to help people in their own area in need by donating to the Enniskillen Foodbank.

Fair play to them; they really are the caring profession.

And yet, health service workers find themselves having to go on to the picket lines to get a fair pay that they can live on.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the authorities are engaging in what I consider a PR battle to blame staff for putting patients at risk.

Our health service is being disgracefully managed in my opinion.

A total of 306,180 people are waiting for a hospital appointment, an increase of eight per cent on last year and an all-time high. That’s a remarkable 35 per cent of the population. Figures revealed 108,000 of them were waiting more than a year, and in many cases patients in pain are being told they have to wait over five years for an operation.

No wonder it’s being claimed that the Health Service is “on the point of collapse.”

Suddenly, though, managers and their PR campaign emerges to put the focus on underpaid, overstretched workers.

We need to see things as they are.

Families in the worlds’ fifth richest economy have so little money they live in freezing homes with no food and have to rely on the generosity of others to survive. All the while the multi-millionaires cut benefits.

People are dying on lengthening waiting lists, while the multi-millionaires cosy up to Trump’s attempts to screw the NHS.

As BBC Breakfast was told by Stephen McAloon this week, our vital Stroke Unit is under a cloud.

Schools have less and less money. We have failed to implement a properly-resourced a much-needed mental health strategy.

And so it goes on.

Next week, Britain goes to the polls in what is being billed as the Brexit election. Yet the problems of society run deep and families are struggling.

It would seem at this point that Boris Johnson will remain as Prime Minister; despite his reputation for racism, being untruthful and contemptuous of the poor and vulnerable, crass insensitivity in using the deaths on London Bridge for selfish political purposes and being a coward in selecting which television studio to be held accountable to the public in.

I’ve heard it said, well ….if the British people are stupid enough to vote for him then it’s good enough for them.

Sadly, though, it’s not Johnson and his ilk that will suffer; it’s the people already suffering.