What do you, a real person in the real world, want? Best be quiet and let the politicians tell you | Marina Hyde

What do “people in the real world” care about? It is a question as old as failing government itself. Yet, crucially, it is something that you – a person, in the real world – are not cleared to answer yourself. Instead, it needs a politician to inform you what you care about – and, much more frequently and much more dismissively, what you don’t care about. Once these permissible areas of giving-a-toss have been delineated, the politicians who told you what they were can get on with the long process of not fixing them, at the end of which they will tell you that those problems…