The return of reality

The price of ignoring reality and living purely off leftist theorem is about to hit us square in the face.

Having moved recently to London I am paying quite a generous amount in rent. Generous to the landlord, of course, but less so to me.

“Ah,” comes the response from the Boomer who bought their London flat in 1985, “that is the price one pays for living in such a great city!”

Objections to this abound: that the insanity of government policies in the last 50 years has created an intergenerational conflict; that London is actually at times quite a terrible place to live, with low-level criminality visible on a daily basis; and lastly, that a good many people pay diddly-squat to live there at all.

In my corner of the Big Smoke, it transpires that a good 65% of social housing – you know, the stuff to help our society’s poorest in their hour of need – is occupied by Johnny Foreigner, and that of those, only 40% are working. This is in a post code where the average property sold for just shy of £1.4million last year.

I’d love to live in Japan for a while: what, dear reader, do you think are the chances of me turning up there, begging bowl in hand, and being given a flat in a swanky Tokyo neighbourhood? Approximately zero because, unlike us, they aren’t terminally stupid – yet!

These non-native milkers of British largesse are presumably in receipt of every other government handout available too. Suddenly the thousands in rent every month, the council tax, the energy, the ceaseless snotty letters from TV Licencing seem that much bitterer.

Until recently I had forgotten about a large lump of debt I had: my student loan. Having been gainfully employed for a while after sodding about for a few years, I imagined it would slowly be being paid off. Unfortunately, the interest charged is currently 7.3%, meaning it despite my repayments it grows month-on-month.

Is this a whinge? Maybe, but I hadn’t set out to write one. No doubt I could do more to improve my lot: this morning I bought a coffee for £3.40. Each time I do so I feel a twinge of guilt, followed by a rapid sense of ‘oh who effing cares’.

For you see, buying a flat near me might cost £600,000. If I wanted to save 10% for a deposit I’d have to forgo approximately 17,500 flat whites at £3.40 each. Assuming I live to 80 I have another 16,500 or so days left to live. As such, the mathematics doesn’t quite stack up, and comments under the usual intergenerational warfare articles telling people to ‘not buy so many coffees’ underplays the issue somewhat.

I could, naturally, move out of London, despite the fact I have only just turned up. Perhaps that will happen in due course.

There is no particular group to blame, I feel. For the Boomers who each feel personally insulted when reminded that they lived through a period of unparalleled economic growth, opportunity and cheap real estate: I hold no animus against you, but it is not a personal insult to recognise the boon of one’s birth (this applies to me too – I could be a clubfooted jungle dweller in the depths of Papua New Guinea).

Nor do I blame individuals who come here. D’uh – who wouldn’t? A flat in central London a load of dosh every month?

That’s what I want!

I just won’t have it gifted to me by the government.

After all, they’re the ones to blame – the spineless, brainless nincompoops of government.

Oh, what a shitty web they’ve weaved!

We are now reaching a point where their failings are too manifest for even the normies to ignore. It feels like a wave is beginning to crash.

The industrial scale abuse of mostly white working-class girls by Pakistani men in England’s forgotten towns has done significant damage to long threadbare notions of ‘diversity is our strength’ (a phrase I have actually not heard for a while).

Given that foreign nationals are three times more likely to be arrested for a sexual offence than a local Brit, it is hard to claim that with such self-assuredness as before.

Sure, the range of restaurants is unparalleled, but the gangrape of vulnerable teens has slightly put me off my starter.

Slowly people are realising that the laws of cause and effect still apply.

For example, there is a lot more talk in recent weeks of our relative impoverishment. Europeans are waking up to the fact that the United States is a far richer country, with per capita GDP of even the richest Europeans lagging behind the banjo-duelling Mississippians. Decades of Eurosmugness – where Europeans subsidised by American defence policies, cheap foreign energy and squeezing the last remaining drops of prestige out of their ancestors’ hard work – is suffering a grim reality check.

That the West – formerly the globe’s leading light – has become a two-tier society, in which the natives are gagged from free expression by ‘hate speech’ laws, and where they are gradually immiserated via the woke Hydra of environmentalism, immigration, gender politics et cetera – is now impossible to avoid.

This manifest discontent is why the ‘right’ is on the up. Mr Blackface in Canada has gone, the incompetent government of Herr Scholz in Germany has fallen, Madame Le Pen is on the rise in France, and even the Swedes are getting fed up with their ceaseless bountiful flow of migrants.

Even though we, in the UK, are labouring (pardon the pun) under Sir Keir’s government, it lurches from one disaster to another as it smashes its dumb head against the wall of reality. Our high priests of woke have entered office, and they certainly have time to do far more damage, but the writing is on the wall.

I have my doubts about Reform. They are too in thrall to the Overton Window for my liking, and I have the quiet suspicion that their leaders are little more than slightly sound Thatcherites. To overcome the multiple crises on the horizon, we’ll need a brew far more potent than merely supply-side economic reform.

We’ll need a full reengagement with reality. This is what we are seeing with the incoming Trump administration: the gloves of geopolitical nicety are coming off as he realises there is not much time to spare.

The minds of European elites, in contrast, are yet to catch up with the state of play in 2025. Their minds are stuck in a warm, cosy period of the mid-to-late 20^th century, where the European social model and its concomitant largesse could be sustained.

With much of Europe on the precipice – economically, socially, politically – it seems doubtful that this delusion can be sustained much longer.

The price of ignoring reality and living purely off leftist theorem is about to hit us square in the face.