This time next week we’ll know our fate and the shadowy blueprint of our future. The choice is grim between the two – for there are only two in reality – who would be the next PM of the UK. And whatever the future, it is bleak, for that is what we’ve brought upon ourselves.

My worst fear is a Tory majority which will almost certainly herald a No Deal Brexit if Johnson sticks to his no extension pledge when even he is unable to magic the withdrawal agreement into a trade deal within his timescale.

My best hope, a hung Parliament, there to nip his ankles and stymie in part the madness that is bound to unfold.

Like many of you Brexit has become a background to daily life, as has/did the run up to the election. Little else penetrated for those of us consumed by its ramifications.

Those of us living in one of the many other countries in the European Union who have even more, if that were possible, to fear, in every restriction on Freedom of Movement and right to services.

Public debate and opinion have been coarsened and vulgarised these past three years, and thrashing around for scapegoats, the thugs and the bigots given licence to spew hot, ugly words.

When parliamentarians lie, cheat and choose not their words wisely, then why should some of the public?

Suddenly, festering resentment has been allowed free and open expression and it is ugly; shameful; unworthy of a people who like to think themselves above all others.

As merely a watcher – although consumed by anger with much I see – even I feel burned out.

It took a television programme to remind me that to millions, yes millions, such self-indulgent anorakism has no place in their daily thoughts.

Channel 4’s Dispatches: Growing Up Poor: Britain’s Breadline Kids punched through all mental meanderings and abstract anger with facts revealed without comment or rising faux hysteria.

Four point one million children grow up in poverty. One in three of British children. Repeat that….1 in 3.

They mainly rely on food banks as their parents, usually a lone mother, have been failed by a rigged system presided over by the DWP, whose officers work without compassion or understanding but to a set of rules cheered in by the Tory Party.

Universal Credit is a system evolved out of austerity measures introduced by David Cameron’s government. In material terms the austerity programme has been responsible for rising food prices and financial insecurity.

Food banks and their usage have soared and under the current government a further one million children are expected to slip into poverty over the next four years.

There are now an estimated 2,000 food banks distributed across the UK. They have become an acceptable skein in the fabric of life – replacing the workhouse of old; just keeping heads above water.

One of the first rules in tabloid journalism is to personalise a story. If readers can see a face, hear an individual’s words while searching a face, it becomes real. Mere facts, however shocking, are never enough.

Out of the three families featured in the documentary, one stood out for me. Courtney, aged eight, lived with her mother and five-year-old brother after domestic abuse forced them out of the house.

The mother is often not well – mental health issues – and because of a hold up in DWP payments they were living on the children’s benefits of £5 a day.

That meant food or heat or a five-mile walking round-trip to the food bank. Courtney, a pretty imp of a child with an already sage intelligence, sang and skipped as the heavy bags dragged on her arms as the three made the trip home.

With her ever vigilant concern and watchful eyes on her mother and brother, Courtney is classed as part of another ‘new’ movement. She is one of around 800,000 young careers who should be carefree not caring.

God knows in my first few years working in Glasgow in the mid-1970s I saw poverty that shocked me to the core. Ghettoised poverty confined to certain areas in cities.

But this poverty is somehow different. It’s a widespread almost fact of life.

Children do manage to eat, one way or another, there is a roof over their heads but, and this for me is the killer, hope has been denied.

This ‘poverty’ is deemed acceptable; just a part of life; a shrugged ‘that’s how it is.’

Meanwhile billions, billions are ‘spaffed’ as Johnson would say, on a futile, fruitless show of imperial power by men and women who have never known raw, gut-wrenching hunger or faced a choice between sleeping three to a bed in overcoats or using enough fuel credit to fill a hot water bottle.

This is what our minds and our rage should be addressing every day. Not this side-show of ultimate impotence whichever way the result goes.

That children in 2019 in still one of the world’s richest countries should be living like this is a disgrace. The poor do not always have to be ‘with us’….neither do heartless politicians.