A new video is doing the rounds on Facebook showing President Donald Trump signing an executive order that will result in the reopening of coal mines. The main headline for this video was all about how the US is no longer helping to combat climate change. However, there was one short part of that video which seems to have gone unnoticed. There, President Trump was surrounded by other politicians and, of course, miners. He turned to the miners and said: “You know what this means? This means you are going back to work.” They smiled and cheered and got one of the pens Trump used.

Those mines were closed simply because no one needs or wants coal anymore. Sure there are some exceptions, but all coal needs have been met with what is available today.

Why on earth does anyone want to re-open a mine when no one is going to buy the coal? We’ve moved away from coal power stations.

Trump seems to have missed the lesson at business school where they spoke of the laws of supply and demand.

A similar thing can be said for some seaside towns in the UK. In the past, not everyone could afford a holiday in Barcelona and so many British families would spend their holidays at seaside resorts along the coast of England. These were beautiful towns, quintessentially British and affordable for the average family. However, low-cost airlines changed all of that and people opted for more adventurous holidays. The result was that many of these towns, which put all their eggs in one basket, are now a shadow of their former selves. Unemployment is high and the average wage is, well, average. This is the result of bad economics on their part.

This is how you end up with too many people sitting around in a pub, or on Facebook, kvetching about politics, trolling other people and voting to leave the EU or electing Trump. Have you ever listened in on those conversations? I have and I always thought they were talking a load of nonsense. Like so many people, I heard their rants and anger against anything that was part of the changes that brought about their current situation and just wrote it off as narrow-mindedness.

The politician should be the medicine for the malaise, not the climax

But the truth is they aren’t being narrow-minded, they are only promoting aspects of a world that propped them up and gave their life meaning. These are people who do jobs and offer services we don’t need anymore and are desperate to bring it all back by attacking the enemy: progress. It is not ‘immigration’ that is the problem, nor ‘liberalism’. It is the fact that both are part of a much larger phenomenon they no longer understand and are not at all part of. They aren’t against the environment, they are just angry that people have suddenly realised that their job is bad for it. Priorities have changed and they couldn’t change with them.

When you find yourself in such a situation, it can be very difficult to come to terms with what is happening around you and to you. In effect, it feels like you are being bullied and you have no control over your destiny and you are desperate for someone else to voice your feelings too, simply so that you no longer feel like you are going crazy. Might this not be how a millionaire gets voted into power by working class people whom he has shown such blatant disregard for in the past?

Unfortunately, these people never got the politicians they needed, they got the politicians they wanted. Instead of a politician identifying the problems and offering the solution, politicians now just run research, look at what is already popular and then go out and reflect that. This is the wrong way round. The politician should be the medicine for the malaise, not the climax. What we see today is politics working backwards. It is manipulative and downright sinister.

Politics should be about solutions and smart ideas, but we don’t get that anymore. We should vote for politicians because they are clever. Instead, we see politicians more obsessed with how they perform on social media rather than how they perform in office.

We have campaign managers aiming for numbers, pouring over data to reflect the voters, not help the voters.

Yes, we need politicians to understand our concerns but real workable solutions should then follow. We should be voting for solutions, not slogans. Racism, sexism, homophobia, a disregard for the environment and overspending are objectively bad ideas but inherently seductive ones too. Their terrible repercussions can be measured and studied. They are not the solution and will not bring back an age when your life was better financially.

Politicians are in duty bound to know this because the disaster that follows will be their fault alone.

So the coal mines will open and the miners will go back to work. They will work long hours in a toxic environment to produce something that no one will buy. Their mines will go bust, like many of Trump’s business ventures.

Seaside resorts will remain empty, too. And the unhappy people at the pub will have no one else to blame.

Edward Caruana Galizia studied psychosocial studies at Birkbeck University of London.

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