• THE week has witnessed a Kafkaesque universe of bureaucratic arbitrariness with thousands compelled to vacate their homes – and this in the UK in 2017!

One hundred years ago Franz Kafka dubbed his workplace “the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institution”, “a sombre nest of bureaucrats”, and he was indignant at the lot of mutilated workers and impoverished widows caught up in the judicial and administrative labyrinths of “the institution” in which “everything is a hierarchy, everything is in chains”, with opaque, remote power structures without moral, rational or human justification.

Have we moved on?

MIKE BOR, W2