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What a fantastic result for Andy Murray. Now, wouldn’t it be great if his victory, which is going to inspire children all over the country, is the catalyst that makes tennis a sport for all?

Watching Wimbledon is like watching the pages of Hello magazine come to life. Cheering Tiiiim The Second on Centre Court yesterday were David Cameron, Alex Salmond, Ronnie Wood, two Hollywood actors I’ve never heard of, Mr and Mrs Wayne Bloody Rooney and surly little Victoria Beckham.

Oh, and the schoolchildren, of course. On special ticket deals to foster excitement. And the people in the seats reserved at cheap prices for grass-roots club members. Except there weren’t any of them, were there? There’s a lottery, which is fair; then the tickets go for thousands on the black market. There’s a lottery, which is fair; Victoria and David Cameron must just have been very, very lucky, I suppose.

Now, my oldest is tennis-mad already and this will boost the enthusiasm levels. But to harness that enthusiasm and channel it so my boy is a future Wimbledon champion and can have his father thrown out of Centre Court for being one of those comical socialist type things and complaining loudly about the price of strawberries? A term’s coaching at an indoor tennis court? £84. An hour’s hire of a tennis court? £8. We could afford it. Millions can’t.

Every time we have something like Andy Murray, or the Olympics, or the Rugby World Cup, or an Ashes victory, or the Ryder Cup, or a British Lions success, everybody seems to cheer up. People are happier, try more sport, get fitter and healthier. The country’s a better place to live in.

How much longer will it take for the penny to drop? Investment in sport – such as the Olympics – brings immense value, does enormous good. We should do more of it. Sport is good for us. We shouldn’t squander the legacy of the millions we spent on the Olympics by closing athletics stadia and letting wretched soccer clubs have grounds. We shouldn’t build on school playing fields. We should subsidise access to sport for all. How much longer will it take for the penny to drop? Millions now save billions later in health bills.

The private sector? Of course. Let’s let the private sector and the free market decide, shall we? After all, it’s the private sector that’s comprehensively in charge of soccer and look at the shape soccer’s in, on and off the field…..

Oh.

What politicians need – particularly the ideas-free Ed Balls and his fellow cowards of the Labour party – are new balls. (Having said that, in the embarrassing case of the cowards of the Labour party, any balls at all would help).

But hey. What’s the point? Why keep fighting for an inclusive society? People don’t want to have to go to the effort of thinking, far, far less the effort of actually taking part. Only last week, in July of the year of your Lord 2013, people were busy telling me that those who need food banks to feed their families are, in fact, useless scroungers.

I find it really remarkable and profoundly depressing that people, after all these decades, choose to believe the myth of the “undeserving poor” invented by the Victorians. It was the Victorians who also perpetuated and developed the idea of making help conditional, basic, difficult and humiliating. The policy caused virtually no suffering, pain and misery at all – to those who invented it. “The undeserving poor” helped the well-off, the safe and the lucky sleep easy in their beds at night, their consciences untroubled by the children starving in the gutters.

It’s the same myth peddled today by people-shaped beings like David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith to protect their and their friends’ wealth and status: poor people are feckless, idle, undeserving wastrels who got themselves into this mess and could haul themselves out of it, if only they could be bothered.  The mess we’re in is the fault of the poor, the old, the jobless, the cold, the hungry – not the fault of bankers or politicians or lawyers or accountants or directors or shareholders or chief executives.

I suppose the people who choose to believe the lies of the politicians and the press are too comfortable and too lazy to question the clichés they are spoon-fed. They are the “haves”. They seem eager to accept the lies they’re told by the wealthy in the cause of protecting what they have, because accepting untruth means no thinking or effort or risk is necessary. They are in a proud tradition: people who believed black people were a lesser species and therefore slavery was right; people who believed the mill owners had the best interests of their child workers at heart; people who believed Mr Hitler made the trains run on time; people who believed other religions were evil and so their adherents had to die.

No need to question. Comfort, ease and plenty can be enjoyed, safe in the knowledge, imparted by the Daily Mail and the politicians who, on every other subject, the “haves” choose to distrust completely, that they’ve jolly well worked hard for it and must now protect it from all those people who’d waste it on food and light and heat. The “have-nots” probably, actually, smoke and have tellies, which makes it even easier. And there are really obnoxious poor people, which makes it easier still.

More fool me, then, for spending time and effort trying to persuade a mum, a union member, that she had to swallow her pride and use the vouchers she’d been given for the local food bank for the sake of her kids. In an agony of worry and humiliation, she didn’t want to. I’m sure if I’d been able to point out more clearly to her what a feckless, idle scrounger she was, she and her hungry children would have been helped much more than my naïve attempts to suggest food might be a good thing.

I had no answers, only a profound wish that somebody else would solve the problem. Only they won’t. The “haves”, unlike me, have the answer to everything, although for some inexplicable reason, nothing has ever been done about them.

I don’t have answers but I do know that trying to share wealth and provide food, heat, communication, water, education and health are good things to do. I believe everybody has a right to these basic needs, and nobody has a right to make a profit out of them. Believing that everybody should have equal opportunity – not, for the eight trillionth time, equality; equal opportunity – means you can’t just stop, much as you’d like to.

When I’m low, I think often of all that my parents and grandparents endured to create a country where everybody got a fair chance, where the poor could live good lives too.

Today, the country they completed in 1945 is inhabited by people who are prepared to accept lies and cliche so they don’t have to worry about, or question, need, pain, suffering, hunger, cold. In fact, they don’t even have to believe they exist. Instead, they join in with things like Iain Duncan Smith in bullying the jobless and mocking the hungry.

They must be very proud of what they have done with the legacy for which people fought and died: the boom years, the salaries, the working conditions, the employment protection, the education, the good health, the pensions, every single solitary last one of them won for them by the left and by the blood, sweat and tears shed for them, by people who didn’t believe lies and fought for what was good and fair and right. All that bounty, and see what we have done.