2025 - how have i lived to this age?

​For someone born in the 1950’s, the year 2025 was a time so long into the future, even during schooling in the 1960’s, to be considered science fiction; a time only Doctor Who and other fictional entities would ever experience.
And yet here we are in 2025, our freedoms hanging by a thread, the word dystopian no longer used by readers of George Orwell but now known by the majority of the population. We live in a mad, bad and sad world and we must make the best of it until a reformist caped crusader comes to our rescue.

Horse racing is a cause for suffering, alongside the farming community. Our government has a scheme whereby farmers can claim a subsidy of £2,500 a year for three-years to plant barley and allow it to rot in the ground rather than harvest the crop to sell for food for people and straw to use for bedding for their cows. They will also be paid for buying bird-seed and spreading it on the ground. No fertiliser to buy, no diesel for their tractors. Natural extinction of the farming way of life. Our food providers thrown to the wolves to uphold the mantra of net-zero. Do your own research and lick your fingers to feel the way the wind is blowing.
Horse racing and those who either earn their living or pleasure from it are also being slow-boiled. The food horses eat is grown by farmers. Hay, too. And straw is required for bedding. The Gambling Commission, too, is inspired by government to make life as difficult as possible for punters and gamblers, the steadfast sector of our world where much of the sport’s funding is to be gained. Can you imagine the furore if affordability checks were imposed on the buying of alcohol, any product bought on what was once termed as hire purchase or on chocolate, perfume or holidays. Yet without an outcry from our M.P.’s the lives and living of thousands of people involved in the horse racing industry is being allowed to be put in jeopardy on the pretext of protecting the few people addicted to gambling on horse racing. Bingo-sites are rarely mentioned, casinos, too, and the National Lottery seems to have been granted an exemption from the hue and cry. It is all about the natural extinction of betting on horse racing or the natural extinction of horse racing itself.
We must enjoy to the limit what we have, though I am tempted to say what we have left. The thoroughbred industry may have a future in Britain and Ireland as a nursery ground for selling foals and yearlings to race abroad, notably Dubai and Bahrain, but as a spectator sport we will, in perhaps as little as 20-years, be reduced to the match races of the eighteenth-century, and then only as an exhibition, as we have today with re-enactments of jousting tournaments. 
If you take into account how few horses are to be found in novice chases in this country, and I include novice handicaps, and compare the large number of runners in novice chases (and I include Beginners’ chases) in Ireland, it makes one wonder where the handicap chasers of the future will come from. The decline in competitiveness in British jumps racing and the tide of owners choosing to have horses trained in either Ireland or France almost, if you were a conspiracy theorist – a term first coined by the F.B.I. in the wake of the assassination of J.F.K. – could be seen as part of a dastardly scheme to salt the earth of horse racing in this country. Not that the industry has helped itself in allowing so many new all-weather racecourses, the major factor in so few horses coming to National Hunt from flat racing, and to allow global bookmaking giants to have so much clout.
We must love our racehorses while we can and do everything as an industry to cater for their welfare both during their lives in racing stables and when they retire to pastures new. It seems the Labour Party are determined to end drag hunting, so there is another nail in the coffin of the thoroughbred. We must demonstrate to the ignorant few and the majority who care neither one way or the other that we take our responsibilities to the horse, our duty of care, seriously. It should be our prime motivation to raise as much funds as possible to ensure our sincerity is matched by the financial resources so no single former racehorses slips through the net.
With donations of £12 from the sale of every horse sold at public auction going to R.o.R. from January onwards, the arrow is finally pointing in the right direction. That said, people must carry out their own research into the direction of travel assigned to our government and governments around the world by the W.E.F., the W.H.O. and the U.N., and perhaps shadowy elites, some of whom have footholds in our own sport, and discover for themselves the future for farming around the world and the countryside in general.