Yes, Britain today is governed by idiots, but that is not the sole reason it is in trouble

Four score years, roughly four generations: Is that the natural life span of any democratic welfare state? Certainly, the ailing condition of the United Kingdom, now just two years away from marking the 80th birthday of its National Health Service,  suggests as much. In addition to being the over-lauded moral heart of the UK, the NHS is the UK’s largest employer. The usual response to demands for an end to unlimited immigration to Britain runs: But without immigrants, how will the NHS survive? The future of the NHS, rather than that of the people it was invented to serve, is now the defining issue of British politics. 

However, the actual issue has been the NHS’s multigenerational removal of the interlinked values of social cohesion and of personal responsibility. For example: In Scotland in 2023, 2,555 youngsters, aged 16-18, were paid £643,381 for minding family members who themselves were entitled to benefits. What was once a familial duty is now a transaction between the state and groups of relatives, with the government funding everybody, including the various medics supervising the treatment, the civil servants authorising it, and other civil servants compiling the statistics. That’s weird enough, but not as weird as the extrapolated outcome. Some 24 million people in the UK, or 34 per cent  of the population, live on benefits, nearly ten million of whom are of working age. These numbers do not include the uncountable numbers of NHS employees and  civil servants who administer or assess and report on the various schemes. 

So, why work? Good question, when as “of right” such services  are “free” as an expression of “equality”.  These meaningless terms – equality,  free and natural right – have become a deadly curse on British society, especially when joined by those other ghouls at the UK’s deathbed, namely transgenderism, multiculturalism, diversityism, equityism, inclusivism, environmentalism, and God help us, even BLMism, each with its own version of the blood-sucking leeches of medieval quackery.  

BLM, sigh, is back in the picture courtesy of the millionaire and deeply unfunny comedian Sir Lenny Henry, who is leading a campaign for the British to pay £18 trillion (€20.7 trillion) in compensation to the descendants of African slaves. These are, like Henry, though brown, usually called black, which is rather like saying that maroon is in fact navy blue. Henry’s preposterous claim ignores the fact that the  African slave-trade was the invention of Africans, who captured and enslaved millions of other Africans, whom they sold to Arab states and into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was the Royal Navy that ended the latter, not Africans.  Around the same time, the 1840s, a million Irish people died in the Great Famine, and another million were displaced. One of these was my great-great-grandfather, who joined the Royal Navy and served on antislavery duties in the Atlantic. Far from the Irish getting compensation for the Famine today, the descendants of their survivors (such as myself) are now apparently meant to compensate the millionaire knightly spiv, that sleezy grifter Henry. 

What made his insensate greed possible is the mass immigration that has transformed Britain. Contrary to the multicultural paradise that was imagined by Britain’s political elites and its ever-burgeoning race-relations industry, the result has not been a happy emulsion of different peoples and cultures. How could it be? Immigrants often had trouble finding any British people to assimilate with, as the incomers rapidly colonised entire areas where few natives remained. Many British cities soon resembled post-war East European  camps for displaced peoples, where there were almost no natives, just competing strangers, embodied by that hellish dystopia named Slough, a multi-ethnic wasteland composed of abandoned garages, broken windows, cars on bricks, strange headgear, derelict shops, dogshit and litter. 

The dogmas of multiculturalism mean that other cultures must be as respected as those of the natives, which is why the British welfare state freely subsidises all the polygamous unions of those Muslim males who were prudent enough to harvest a few wives on their journey to Britain. In many cities and towns – Birmingham, Leicester, Blackburn, Bradford – white people are in the minority. There are now 24 clinics in England that specialise in coping with the aftermath of female genital mutilation, which is illegal in Britain, but in effect tolerated through – no surprises here – passive police neglect. So too was the mass rape of white working class girls by Pakistani men, with possibly 100,000 victims. Though that particular epidemic has been somewhat curtailed in recent years, it was hardly at the initiative of the present Prime Minister Starmer, who himself exhibited perfectly splendid passive neglect on the subject when he was Director of Public Prosecutions  (for which job he was, quite naturally, awarded a knighthood). 

His deplorable record as Prime Minister since his election two years ago appears to have cleared the way for a handpicked successor, Andy Burnham. to be recruited from the mayoralty of Manchester to succeed him at Number 10. But Starmer, Burnham and the latter’s rival Streeting, all bear the mark of Cain: They want to re-unite the UK with the EU, if Burnham only equivocally so, which is the equivalent of scrambling off the keeling deck of the Titanic and managing to book the last seat on the Hindenburg. 

Yes, Britain today is governed by idiots, but that is not the sole reason why it is in trouble. Throughout this century, its political agenda has been obdurately centrist, with seven prime ministers refusing to tackle the monstrosity that is the NHS, failing to deal with illegal immigration which itself is caused by a profligate welfare state, while remaining dedicated to achieving Net Zero Carbon emissions by 2050. This latter project is not merely a delusion concocted by the deranged Marxist fantastist, Ed Miliband, but a certain failure. For what will the outcome be if Net Zero is reached (it won’t be) and global warming continues? Why wouldn’t it? Russia, China and India are pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like industrial-scale fire-extinguishers dealing with a raging wildfire in the cumulonimbus. What possible difference can wet little Britian make, whatever it does?

Moreover, in every single metric, Britain is failing. There has been institutional decay in both government programmes and in the private sector. The drip-drip-drips of incompetence and corruption have fed into personal behaviour. Shoplifting, fare-dodging, traffic-light violations, pub-brawls and dangerous speeding, are now not just normal, but actually normative. Yes, recently there has been slight economic growth, but not enough to match the increase in population as more unskilled alien monoglots pour in, and aided by helpful, government-supplied interpreters, avail of the wantonly generous welfare state. Eighty years on, some euthanasia – a touch of cold steel, perhaps? – is now surely called for. 

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.