The Annihilation Of Britain

This week a country experiencing a catastrophic decline in living standards announced it was going to increase spending on its military to a record 2.5% of its GDP.

That same country, days earlier, announced that it was going to remove cash support for people too disabled to work, calling them workshy, implying their disability was a choice.

A country in which poverty is rising at its fastest rate in decades, in which the gap between the rich and the poor would shame a kleptocracy, in which millions rely on emergency food aid every week. This country decided missiles and fighter jets are the priority.

This country identified disabled people as the enemy within.

This country is Britain.

I’m not going to overstate the depths of Britain’s social, economic and spiritual breakdown with rhetorical flourishes.

I’m just going to give you some facts.

Renting a home in the UK is now the most expensive it has ever been, increasing 9.2% in just one year.

The average monthly rent in the UK is now £1,190 per month (around $1480 in US dollars). In London it is an astonishing £2,500.

Yet at the same time, earnings of the average worker in Britain have fallen 7% in a year.

The average household income is now just £32,300 (around $40,000).

Spending power (what the average worker is able to buy with their money) has collapsed to mid-2000s levels.

Incomes for the poorest 14 million people in Britain fell by 7.5% in 2022 whilst incomes for the richest increased 7.8%.

A quarter of people in the UK say they can’t afford to save £10 a month and can’t afford to switch on the heating when needed.

More than 10% say they skip meals and go hungry because they can’t afford to eat.

The poorest in Britain are now poorer than in some former Eastern Bloc countries.

The British now have the worst access to healthcare among any people in Europe. The UK has fewer doctors and nurses than most OECD countries.

Just a decade ago, a study ranked the NHS as the best healthcare system in the world. When the Tories were elected, close to 90% of people were starting cancer treatment within 62 days of a GP referral. Now just 55% of people start treatment within that time, the worst times on record.

In 2011, seventeen (17) people waited more than 12 hours in an emergency department at a hospital before being seen. Now, after nearly 14 years of Tory rule, more than 140,000 are waiting longer than 12 hours in the emergency department.

This wait for emergency care is killing 500 people a week.

Excess deaths in the UK remain consistently above pre-pandemic levels, the impact of Sarscov2 infections allied with austerity’s deliberate neglect.

Long-term sickness is skyrocketing, population health weakened by rampant covid and brutal austerity.

Shortages of critical life-saving drugs have doubled in three years.

Children are dying of mould exposure in government-owned homes.

Victorian disease including scurvy, rickets and scabies are on the rise. Scurvy and rickets, proxies for malnutrition, are hospitalising 10,000 people a year in England, four times the numbers of 12 years ago.

There are too many stories of vulnerable, disabled people being turned away by state-run benefits offices, and told to look for a job, only to die shortly afterwards of starvation.

Of starvation.

Let’s talk about food. The UK has over two thousand ‘food banks,’ charity locations that give out free food.

Approximately 3 million people relied on emergency food bank aid last year.

It’s important to understand how bad this got and how quickly.

When the Tories were elected in 2010 there were zero foodbanks.

A record 300,000 people are homeless in England, almost half of them children. The number of homeless people last Christmas was 14% higher than the year before.

The UK is also running out of teachers, half of whom now quit within five years, amid huge falls in the number of graduates entering teaching training.

One quarter of all pubs, an institution around which the country’s identity can legitimately be argued to revolve, have closed since 2001, with closures accelerating hugely since Brexit and covid.

With things so grim, it is no surprise the birth-rate in Britain is at a record low.

While Britain has entered a social and economic death spiral, it is also undergoing a spiritual, moral and ethical collapse on the road to neo-fascism.

The British government has passed repressive anti-protest laws denounced by UN human rights experts, laws that have seen non-violent climate activists sentenced to years in prison. The government is feverishly trying to deport climate activists for the crime of being foreign.

Despite this, the right wing press bay for more order and demand further repression.

After Brexit, which signposted this ethical collapse, hundreds of Europeans were deported for minor, technical breaches of new immigration rules that few understood after the rules underwent a total regime change. Thousands of Europeans were refused entry to the country.

This was despite very few Brits being deported from continental Europe for minor transgressions of these same new rules.

These deportation disgraces came after the so-called ‘Windrush Scandal’ which saw descendants of slaves who arrived in Britain before 1973 being deported to countries they barely remembered. Arriving as young children, Britain deported people in their 70s and 80s back to Caribbean homes that no longer existed, saying they didn’t have the right paperwork.

Pure, undiluted racism with undisguised dollops of fascism.

The UK’s sad and pathetic island mentality, both a cause and a consequence of white supremacist empire, is on full show like never before.

If you’ve ever arrived at the UK BORDER you’ll know how fascisty the vibes are. Fascisty but sad, the fluffed up immigration officers almost comically overbearing.

And now most people can’t even escape, Brexit bringing the walls down on the ability to move to 27 other countries. Now, to stay longer than 3 months on the continent, Brits need to pay tens of thousands for a visa.

And the right wing sold this exclusive, 1% arrangement to the people as freedom.

And half of them lapped it up.

The other half knew exactly where all this was heading.

Yet election after election the Brits doubled down, in many cases brainwashed by right wing propaganda, straining, in their preference for ever-cruder nationalism, for an identity that made them feel…something.

Fascism is also advancing on the cultural front through the addition of GB News, the British equivalent of Fox News. Set up in 2021 catering to the covid radicalised, it trades in wokeism, conspiracy and culture war, all funded by a billionaire hedge fund manager.

As for the billionaires and upper classes who voted Brexit and vote Tory, they, materially secure in their privilege, remain motivated by racism, supremacy, cruelty, spite and greed.

As for England’s famed depiction as a ‘green and pleasant land,’ do me a favour.

The UK has failed to reach 17 out of 20 UN biodiversity targets set in 2010 and funding for wildlife protection has dropped 30% in the last decade.

The privatization of green spaces has resulted in 9 million fewer trips to parks and nature, and new housing developments built in the last decade or so have far fewer gardens and green spaces than 20th century projects.

Raw shit is now pumped endlessly into the rivers and sea, somehow the most tragically emblematic policy of a country that appears to have completely given up.

The ruling class, as ever, are doing better than fine. The richest 1% in the UK now hold more wealth than 70% of the population. Secure in their institutions, in their courts, in their penthouse suites, in their CEO offices, in their walled gardens, in their private members clubs, flying to second, third and fourth homes on their private jets. Homes in Europe, where for them, no movement restrictions apply.

The annihilation of Britain is total and no redemption is coming.

The next prime minister is a solid fixture of the establishment, a Sir, a man who was the top cop in Britain for years and oversaw some of the worst excesses of a justice system set up to target the poor and needy, particularly evident after the London riots.

The country stands now only as a warning to others about what happens when a private school clique devoid of empathy and hollowed of morality, directed only by a series of lusts, are able to seize control of a country and its organs of power.

As a warning about empire and colonialism, and about the fractured and tormented identity that results.

The last 14 years of Tory rule have been a political carpet bombing campaign, a country left in tatters, its people hungry, cold, broke, diseased and dying. The launch buttons pushed with glee by an insulated ruling class.

It will not be rebuilt by Sir Keir Starmer, a man who at best promises to stare dispassionately at the rubble and add a lick of paint or two, if you ask nicely.

A man who destroyed the campaigning left within his own party, smearing activists and expelling the only leader who had given young people hope in years.

Britain faces an acute emergency of social conditions and an end-stage crisis of identity.

Good people have tried hard over the last 14 years to hold back the tide, but it has not been enough. In the face of power exercised so cruelly, it has not been nearly enough.

Britain is a country run by a sclerotic, over-fed, calcified upper class, some of the worst people the end of empire has ever bred, themselves descendants of some of the worst people empire itself ever bred.

They have done real and enduring violence to so many people, over so much time, in Britain and outside.

A proper reckoning with this class of people, with their current and past crimes, is a prerequisite for change. Their essential inhumanity needs to be unmasked in full.

It won’t be done by one of them. It won’t be done by Starmer.

After his and the Labour Party’s inevitable victory later this year, I expect they will be begged at, people holding on to the please sir, crumbs-from-the-table approach that it is too late in the day for.

But what else is there, short of revolution?

I don’t know.