Britain's self-inflicted wounds

Over the last few days I have fallen victim to a deep melancholy.

Witnessing recent events, I cannot help but say to myself “and to think this is all self-inflicted!” One of history’s greatest nations laid low by a few decades’ dreadful politicians.

The murders, the riots, the clamp-down, the predictable cycle of hysteria peddled by the media. Every aspect has cast a pall over the few microns of positivity I had left within me.

Me at this very moment.

The state is a gargantuan, deceitful and increasingly authoritarian entity. We have witnessed sporadic tumult and violence on our streets for years. Everyone can see the double-standards applied to policing in this country, yet we are forever asked to deny the reality in front of us.

Policing by consent has gone the way of Morris dancers and milk delivered in glass bottles. A modern, more draconian method is at hand – at least for some.

There has to be a difference here - I can’t quite put my finger on it though.

When ‘Black Lives Matter’ riots take place, the police retreat and take the knee. When hordes of Roma set fire to police cars and buses in Leeds the authorities respond limply. When Muslim thugs batter police officers in Manchester airport, they remain at large, cultivating their victimhood.

When frustrated white, working class people take to the streets, all of a sudden the furious machine of government kicks into action: a-hah! so there it is! the police can use force – and lots of it – when they want to!

Were last week’s thugs simply mindless or rather the warning signs of future widespread unrest? Could they be both?

Decades of discontent have been left to fester, putrefying the body politick. A nation whose culture has been changed irreversibly without the electorate’s permission, ‘multi-culturalism’ implemented through hectoring and bullying.

At each turn voters were deceived. Now many of our urban areas our unrecognisable. We now have police forces so in thrall to ‘minority groups’ that they begin addresses in Arabic – ‘salum alaikum’ – while being stood over by ‘community leaders’. Elsewhere, police liaison officers plead with crowds of armed Muslim men to return their weapons to the mosque.

Blink three times if you need rescuing, officer!

Not that all ‘communities’ have ‘community leaders’, though. The white working class certainly don’t have one. If they did, he’d be getting smacked over the head with a policeman’s truncheon and thrown into the back of a police car, not negotiating directly with coppers over an area’s law and order.

Is it a crime to say this now? The lines of legality are blurred. Fuzzy legal definitions of ‘hate’ make unclear the boundaries of what is permissible speech. People are too frit to speak, lest they come a cropper amid the stupid, braying, yet almighty mob of so-called ‘social justice’. Does this article constitute ‘hate’? How thin is the ice we are now on? I genuinely don’t know. We have a willing authoritarian as our new PM, a self-styled ‘tough man’ (even tougher than Ed Miliband!), promising convictions and jail time for ‘thugs’ – something that the judiciary, not the executive, used to be responsible for. Due process be gone!

My new toaster has more personality and power of empathy than this man, Sir Two-Tier.

Despite being told that immigration was the fillip our economy needed, per capita incomes have remained stagnant since 2008. In real terms, we are becoming poorer. One of the world’s most advanced economies has gone into reverse, hoovering up cheap labour from across the world, simultaneously overburdening the nation’s ill-equipped infrastructure.

Instead of a country whose wellbeing is fostered by a government, we are a populace serving a government which brooks no criticism.

Nor is it clear how anything is supposed to change. Politics offers no choice: manifestos are collections of meaningless soundbites thrown together to stupefy voters and to be instantly reneged upon. There has been no meaningful difference offered at the ballot box for over 25 years. Even when seismic votes do happen – Brexit! – an obstructive system strains every sinew to dishonour the people’s wishes.

Our electoral system has resulted in a government with 20% of the possible vote having ultimate control. The influence that was not conferred at the ballot box was already installed via decades of cultural, Gramsciite infiltration into the country’s institutions. July’s elections were merely the dark red cherry on top.

We are a nation addicted to wasting money we do not earn on idiot schemes. Getting anything productive done is simply too much work: environmental assessments for infrastructure projects run into the tens of thousands of pages.

Or, take Heathrow’s third runway – an expansion of our busiest airport that has been underway, without resolution, for approaching 20 years. Over roughly the same timeframe, the Chinese have built nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed railway. Of our own high-speed rail endeavours, the less said – the better.   

Twenty stagnant years of GDP per capita. Thanks Lib/Lab/Con - great job! From: www.macrotrends.net

At present it is hard to see any green shoots of optimism. All week the media has obsessed about the prospect of ‘riots’ across the length and breadth of the country. Peculiarly, they failed to materialise: instead, we were treated to the usual hackney-phrased crowds baaing out ‘Nazi scum off our streets!’. That there were no Nazis nearby scarcely mattered – they were making themselves feel virtuous.

So emboldened are the ascendant elements in our kinder, fairer, warmer (et cetera) politics that Labour councillors feel no compunction with advocating cutting the throats of the protestors. Charming! So much for that much forgotten phrase ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’

What else would you expect? Change the people, change the culture, change the country. It’s all change, change, change. And change is always good, apparently.

I’m not so sure. I’m not that old and I’ve seen changes in my country that render it unrecognisable. Are they for the better? Even if they aren’t, am I allowed to say?