How are you coping during this cost- of-living crisis? Have you made your way to the food bank yet? I am interested to find out. On Tuesday I listened to an edition of Radio 4’s You and Yours for which listeners were invited to call in and explain how they were managing in these desperately bleak times. A good dozen or so shared their experiences with the presenter Winifred Robinson – and all but one dutifully explained that they were about to embark on a nice holiday.

Further, of those going away for a bit, all but two were taking a holiday abroad – the Algarve, Benidorm, Catalonia were some of the places mentioned. One woman complaining of penury was taking at least two trips – the first to the Galapagos Islands and the other to Japan. The callers seemed a bit miffed that they’d had to ‘save up’ for their holidays, while the woman heading off to see the pink-footed boobies had received a bequest from her dead mum.

Listening to this stuff I thought, um, it’s hardly the bleedin’ Irish potato famine, is it? Or the Great Depression? I suppose you could argue that Radio 4’s listeners are pretty much exclusively middle-class and therefore I was not getting a representative sample of the very real suffering currently being occasioned. And yet the statistics show that more people are booking holidays abroad this year than was the case in 2019, before the pandemic. I do wonder a little if the constant yelling on the airwaves that we are irrevocably doomed economically, and that the poor are dying in their droves, might be slightly overstating the case.

My suspicion is that small businesses have been hit badly but that most people are getting by OK, even if the rise in mortgage interest rates might hurt a few. And yet everyone seems to buy into the catastrophism thesis and this, in turn, means support for striking workers is higher than one might expect.

Of course, if you advance this argument the left will accuse you of being callous and blind to the shocking privations experienced by the ‘poor’ . So it is a tricky argument for any politician to advance at all, even if it seems to me basically true. The real problem is managing the population’s unrealistic expectations. The electorate doesn’t like it when politicians remind them of their own responsibilities to manage their cash more wisely, or to put a jumper on when it turns cold. We have become a hugely entitled country and this is true at the bottom of the ladder just as it is at the top.

I suspect that Louise Dean, aka Miss Piggy, is not a regular Radio 4 listener. Louise, aged 43, is thus nicknamed because she does indeed bear a striking resemblance to a pig, the consequence of having half of her nose bitten off and spat out by another lady in a row over a credit card. She was jailed this week for threatening to stab an Uber driver with a dirty syringe unless he gave her all his takings. Louise works as a prostitute – in presumably a very niche market – and, to state the blindingly obvious for a moment, comes from Greater Manchester. I thought about Louise when I heard another government minister talking about ‘levelling up’ the north of England and wondered about phoning in to suggest that the quickest way to do so would be to remove from it all northerners. Or at least northerners like Louise – of whom there are very, very many.

The better news is that northerners are being eaten by their own dogs at a rapidly escalating pace and that this might obviate the need to ship them somewhere else to make the area more palatable. There have been 18 deadly dog attacks in the past two years and 2022 had the highest number of deaths on record – mainly in the north-west of England. Further, the number of people attending A&E departments having been savaged by a local pitbull called Tyson has roughly doubled in ten years – unsurprising really, as the number of dogs has almost doubled over about the same period, from seven million to more than 13 million. Naturally, there was a spike in the number of dogs bought during the pandemic, but this does not entirely explain the rise.

You may by now be wondering where the hell I am going with this piece, having touched upon Winifred Robinson and her holidaying listeners, the salubrious Miss Piggy, northerners in general and now dogs. But there is a common thread, and it is located somewhere in those words I mentioned earlier – entitlement and responsibilities.

Dogs that are well-trained, cared for and exercised regularly will not spend their leisure periods devouring northerners. They will instead be obedient and charming companions. But to get to that stage requires hard work, sacrifice, diligence and discipline on the part of the owner – four qualities which today are seen as rather de trop.

You do not have a beholden ‘right’ to own a dog and I would argue you should not do so if you don’t have access to open space. Nor should you do so if you can’t be arsed to train it, or can’t afford to look after it properly. Owning a dog carries with it grave responsibilities – much as does owning a child. But that is another area where a sense of entitlement easily outweighs any notion of responsibility, as we can see from the growing profusion of children who by school age can’t read, use cutlery or even take themselves to the lavatory (as a survey of primary school teachers recently made clear).

There are some things for which a government is not responsible. If you are very broke and worried about paying bills, don’t book a foreign holiday. If you can’t afford the time and money to properly care for a dog or a child, don’t have one.