The country is in a disaster, says Brian Reade, but so many people are missing the target and looking for the cause and directing their anger.
Boris Johnson and David Cameron, too entitled and too ambitious(Image: Getty Images)
It is surprising that a country that loves fair play has repression as its favorite pastime. Want a reason for low pay and a failing NHS? Bloody immigrants are flooding the borders in increasing numbers, leaving our little island bursting at the seams. Even though net migration was 171,000 last year, compared to 944,000 in 2023.
Why do taxes continue to rise? The 24 million poor people sitting on their bleeding asses on benefits. Even though more than 13 million of them are state pensioners who have paid into the system, and almost 40% of Universal Credit claimants keep our economy going through low-paid jobs.
Low productivity? Lazy young guys living in their mother’s storage room while faking ADHD. Even though unemployment among 16-24 year olds has reached 16.2% because our economy does not offer them jobs and we have built very few houses, the average age of a first time buyer is 34 years old.
OK, let’s blame the militant unions, the civil servants working from home, the BBC, the striking doctors, the net zero fanatics, the libtards sympathetic to terrorism, the trans lobbyists, the overpaid footballers or whoever chose the bloody Eurovision entry. If it’s not their fault that this country is rotten, then whose country is it?
Well, how about we look at three of the worst acts of self-harm committed in Britain over the last decade that still shame us today: HS2, Brexit and Grenfell. In 2011, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron launched HS2 to try to win over northerners, saying the project, estimated to cost £32.7 billion, would be a “catalyst for economic prosperity”. In 2020, Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson also gave the go-ahead, despite being warned the costs exceeded £100 billion. Today we learn that a much-scaled-down HS2 will cost more than NASA’s Artemis Moon mission and won’t be ready until 2039.
In 2013, Prime Minister Cameron called a Brexit referendum solely to ward off right-wing Eurosceptics, and in 2016 Johnson saw an opportunity to take leadership by championing a Brexit he had previously opposed. This reckless act has shrunk the UK’s economy by 7%, with some analysts saying it costs £100 billion a year.
In 2011, Cameron waged a war on red tape by creating a “one in, one out” rule whereby a new regulation could only come into force if another was scrapped. Last year the Grenfell inquiry, set up to examine how 72 people died in a tower block in 2017, found the policy was so “dominant”, believing “even issues affecting the safety of human lives were being ignored, delayed or ignored”.
And Cameron’s government was found to be “resolutely resistant” to tightening regulations and amending the Fire Safety Ordinance to clarify that it applied to the exterior walls of apartments and blocks of flats. After the disaster, footage surfaced of Johnson from 2013, who, as the then mayor of London, told a politician who challenged the wisdom of his cuts to the fire service to “get stuffed”.
Neither Johnson nor Cameron are solely responsible for these national calamities, but their fingerprints are left on the scene. So what connects them? Both are over-entitled, over-ambitious Old Etonian and Oxford elitists who saw the leadership of the country as their birthright. And once that goal was achieved, with promises that could never be kept and problems thrown into the long grass, they fled. Leaving the rest of us to foot the bill while they waltz off to make a private fortune from the mess they left behind. Perhaps, when we blame Britain’s problems, we should try to strike upwards rather than downwards. There are a lot of people up there to hit.
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