Now is the summer of Britain's discontent

(Photo: Courtesy)

The BBC news at 7:00 this past Tuesday morning had eight stories - each redolent of the despair that grips British public life. An opener was the global threat posed by the successful test of a North Korean ballistic missile and the US response that "war cannot be ruled out".

Having mooted a global nuclear Armageddon, the bulletin plunged into British national miseries: the results of an investigation, which, said the BBC reporter, "could scarcely be much worse," into police failure to assist victims of harassment; another indictment of police by the survivors of the Grenfell Tower fire for not arresting any of those deemed responsible for the inferno; an expected collapse of the government's determination to restrict public sector pay rises to 1 percent; yet another alleged police failure, this time to protect Bijan Ebrahimi, an Iranian refugee in the UK murdered after years of racist abuse; the charge that a government report on Saudi sponsorship of terrorism in the UK had been suppressed; news that most students leave university with debts of around 50,000 pounds(about $64,000), which most can never repay. Sports usually come last in BBC bulletins, and since the UK is quite a sporty country, it's often cheering. Not on this grim bulletin. Mark Cavendish crashed out of the Tour de France.