Spunt's helpful guide to Britain for fat Americans - Learn about Anglos so you can hate them better

[The Grognard]

The Rover 75 failed because British car industry at that point grew up with the expectation people would buy something outside Britain for being British. If anything, that was a negative for a car in the 1990's.

 

[Spunt]

I did actually drive a Rover 75 once. Between the vague steering and the ultra-soft suspension it felt less like driving and more like floating down the road on a pool toy.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

I did actually drive a Rover 75 once. Between the vague steering and the ultra-soft suspension it felt less like driving and more like floating down the road on a pool toy.

Art imitates life?

 

[Spunt]

Mrs. Spunt suggested this was a good photo to share. It certainly is very informative about Britain IMO:



EDIT: One last post is in the works, though it might be a while.

 

[soy_king]

Mrs. Spunt suggested this was a good photo to share. It certainly is very informative about Britain IMO:

View attachment 4119960

EDIT: One last post is in the works, though it might be a while.

Please do another post about your unis or schools. Your education system is a complete mystery to burgers

 

[Return of the Freaker]

Please do another post about your unis or schools. Your education system is a complete mystery to burgers

Only in Britain is a "public school" actually private

 

[Alex Krycek]

@Spunt not to contradict you but Edward VIII was overly political and lost his title instead of his head.

Though they used his marriage as an excuse and quietly ignored he was a Nazi Sympathizer.

 

[Spunt]

Chapter the Last: Why is Britain Collapsing?

​

My nation is one that is deep trouble. Britain has been in a state of slow decline since 1945, losing its empire and being overshadowed and overtaken economically, militarily and culturally by the USA. But in the last five years, Britain's decline has become a collapse. Instead of a superpower, we now join the likes of Belgium and Greece as European countries that are bordering on being failed states. In this post I'll talk about how and why that has happened. This thread has been all about my opinions so far, but here I will go further and arrogantly propose my own ideas as to the whats and whys of my country's failure. If you don't agree, that's fine. I'm just some sped with three buttcheeks. But I've lived in this shithole for decades, and I have also lived in the USA to have a point of comparison, so I can at least give some reasonably educated guesses as to what the fuck is happening.

Having started this work, there is so much to say that I will have to split this up over several posts. It really is that bad and there is so much disaster and incompetence to cover it could fill a book, and probably will do once people start to acknowlege the problem. But they don't, not yet.

I heard an interview with film-maker Adam Curtis a few weeks ago. Now you have to be careful with Curtis, because he can be disingenuous in a Michael Moore sort of way*, but one thing he does know is his history. He likened the current state of Britain today to that of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, just before it collapsed - not so much in the nuts and bolts of what was happening but in the psychology of the ruling elite and the people alike. I'm paraphrasing here, but the gist was "Everyone knows the system fundamentally doesn't function. Nobody will publicly admit it because it's seen as unhelpful and unpatriotic, but nobody, at the top or at the bottom, has any idea what to do. Everyone wants the present system to remain in place as long as possible, even though it is completely broken, because when it eventually collapses the resulting upheaval will ruin their lives."

We're starving and freezing but LOOK AT THE FLAGS, WORSHIP THE FLAGS​

*His series "The Trap: What Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom" spent its entire runtime trashing the concept of "Positive Liberty" - the idea that "Freedom" constitutes "Freedom To" that is widely used on the political Left (as opposed to "Negative Liberty" - "Freedom From", used on the Right) and how it led to tyranny, but in the last three minutes of the last episode he reversed course because he realised he had been arguing against his own ideology the whole time and said that we should use Postive Liberty anyway without explaining why. Have a watch of it if you can find it, he accidentally trashes his own left-liberalism and it's remarkable how the script realises it's painted itself into a corner and hurriedly changes course in a blind panic, resulting in the bizarre spectacle of an hours-long political polemic that doesn't agree with its own conclusion.

Now maybe there are some elder Slavs here who can tell me whether or not that's an accurate reflection of the last days of the USSR. But it does sum up British psychology quite well. What I would add is that there is a very concerted effort, on the part of everyone - the government, the media, the people, to refuse to see the wood for the trees. Everyone will acknowledge each problem in isolation "oh yes, it's so expensive to heat your house that libraries are being advertised as "warm banks" where people can go to not freeze to death in their own houses", or "oh yes, people are waiting 48 hours on trolleys in hospitals because there are no beds", or "oh yes, inflation is at 10% and interest rates are so high nobody can pay their mortgages" and "there seem to be a lot of sex pests and racists in the Police" but nobody, by quite deliberate effort, will accept that these are anything more than a very large number of isolated problems rather than the very clear evidence that the entire British system is coming apart at the seams and it very likely can't be fixed.

Why? Well the political class don't want to admit that their entire careers have been failures. Too many people's livelihoods are invested in being useless e-mail class middle-managers for sclerotic government agencies. The media are just as invested in the system they've been defending and benefiting from since 1945 and the plebs don't want to get depressed. Everyone is still talking and acting as if we were only to fix these problems one at a time, we'd go back to the way things were.

There are few clearer examples of this than the recent massive rise in violence at football matches. Here's the BBC wringing its hands about it. But note that in the section titled "What are the reasons?" the answers given are superficial and vague. "People are taking drugs." "The Police aren't arresting them enough." "They're letting their hair down." But none of these answer deeper questions as to WHY? WHY are people taking drugs at football matches when they didn't previously? WHY are there more people that need arresting? WHY do people need to "let their hair down" more than before? The reasons these questions aren't asked is that they don't have answers that can be put in a Tweet or a pithy quote for a smug news article, or a call for a change in the law by some campaigner or the Police. People in this country are angry and desperate. That's why they take drugs and smash things. That's not something that can be easily fixed by deploying more plod or arresting drug dealers.

The media, led, of course, by the BBC, are filled with the same media-class laptop-slingers who are in large part responsible for these problems and stand to lose the most when it all falls down. They have no skills that are of use in any other context than propping up Britain's creaking civic systems. Neither do the hordes of otherwise-useless non-job holders in government and big business. Being a Data Protection Co-Ordinator for a Regional Clinical Commissioning Group, or an Influencer Outreach and Social Media manager for a Digital Rights Management company is something that only makes sense in the current context. A farmer is a farmer and is needed in any context, but the e-mail class to which most degree-educated Britons belong lose all value once the system falls. Just like the various Commissars and apparatchiks who propped up the old Soviet system stood to lose everything when it fell, Britain's useless layers of over-educated, under-employed stuffed suits know that they will probably starve when the hammer falls. So they do everything they can to ensure "stability", that the broken system they rely on to feed their families stumbles on at least until their lifetimes are over, and that includes denial about how bad things really are.

And things are really fucking bad:

- The NHS no longer functions. At all. My local GP, not unusually, has wait times of over a month to see* a GP. In that time, whatever problem you had has either cleared up on its own or has sent you to hospital. As I said in my post on the NHS, the mismanagement of the healthcare system over the last 50 years has resulted in everything being funnelled into emergency medicine because it's the only thing that is still funded - except emergency medicine has now failed too. The very British phenomenon of "Bed Blocking", whereby elderly people who are well enough to leave hospital but who can't because there are no care homes to send them to (due to our equally dysfunctional Social Care system) has created backlogs of hospital beds full of healthy people resulting in ambulances queuing for hours just to get their patients booked into hospital (this poor fuck has been in hospital for an entire year despite being fit to leave https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-64029162). And then there aren't enough ambulance crews to attend emergencies, and that was *before* they went on strike. There are critical shortages of basic antibiotics and children are dying of ear infections. But it's fine. Things will get better soon. It's just an isolated problem. One Scottish Doctor said what everyone is thinking, that the NHS is "broken" and will not recover. The Scottish government's response was to say that "the founding principles of the NHS are not up for debate". They have no idea what to do except more of the same until it collapses. Reforming the NHS would simply cost more money than the government has, and the changeover would worsen care for so many people that any government trying it would be booted out of office in favour of a party promising a return to the status quo.

​

*Not "see", as such. Speak to one on the phone. And yes, that's not a very good way to diagnose people, and people are regularly dying as a result. This started during the pandemic and everyone seems to think we'll return to face-to-face meetings "when things are better". It's just an isolated problem.

- The total mismanagement of our country's energy strategy means we are facing blackouts this winter. We refused to build new nuclear power stations in 2010 because "they wouldn't be ready until 2021", relying on gas-fired ones instead, while closing our coal-fired stations for environmental reasons. All it took was an increase in the price of gas (and bear in mind we make our own) for the whole house of cards to tumble. One of our biggest nuclear plants, Hinkley Point B, shut down earlier this year because it reached the end of its life. Its replacement, Hinkley Point C, one of the biggest nuclear power plants ever built and expected to produce 7% of the entire country's power, won't be ready until 2026 because it started construction 4 years late, thanks to the interminable NIMBY's charter that is our non-functional planning system. There are rumours it could be delayed another decade due to finance and engineering problems. The National Grid announced that it was planning to cut people's power this winter "to save gas for heating" - except most modern gas boilers need electricity (sometimes even a wi-fi connection) to function, meaning that the people getting their power cut off to save gas for heating won't be able to heat their homes either. People will probably die, in large numbers. But it's ok, it's just an isolated problem caused by that big meanie Vladimir Putin. Zelensky's lads will be in Moscow by Christmas then things will go back to how they were. Any day now.

​

- Everything and everyone is on strike. The aforementioned useless e-mail class have sucked wage budgets away from people who do actual work for decades now, and the likes of doctors, nurses, postal workers, paramedics, teachers, rail workers and even public criminal defence lawyers have been under-paid for a very long time - and now inflation has breached 10% they are having to use food banks despite being employed full-time. So now all those groups, and others, are on strike for more money - a LOT more money. It's a general strike in all but name. And of course, with the gigantic government wage bill forming a large chunk of the economy*, the government can't afford to give 10%+ wage increases to all these people without causing an inflationary surge that would be met with higher wage demands until we end up recreating Weimar Germany. Plus government bungling has drained the coffers to the extent the money isn't there anyway. The government can't borrow the money either, because it has maxed out all its credit lines and any more borrowing would shake the markets' confidence in the government's ability to pay its debts - this is what caused the Trussocalypse, when Liz Truss' unfunded tax cuts threatened to reduce the government's credit rating. Given that the entire country's pension schemes depend on government bonds, a run on them would destroy the entire country's pension funds, causing something along the lines of the Great Depression and possible rioting, rebellion or even revolution. So the government literally can't pay any of these people enough for them to be able to feed themselves. It's a problem with literally no solution, but it's fine, I'm sure it's an isolated problem and we'll find some way to muddle through. The money will appear "when things are better".

​

* Bear in mind these figures exclude people who are indirectly on the government's payroll, particularly transport and outsourced NHS workers, who are employed and paid by subcontractors with public money. More on this book-cooking later.

- On a related note, Britain's economy is the only one in the G8 that hasn't recovered to pre-pandemic levels. In fact we're now in one of the most severe recessions ever recorded and it could continue for years (exactly why I'll get onto later). So Britain's problems aren't just those of the general malaise that's affecting the entire Western world at the moment (caused, of course, by that mean Mr Putin who FORCED us to not build nuclear power plants a decade ago and FORCED us to under-pay our front-line workers at the expense of Diversity Co-Ordinators, what a big nasty doodoohead he is) they are quite a lot worse than even other big Western economies. But don't be too smug, Burgerlanders and EuroPoors. What's hitting us first will hit you next. Don't pretend your country is doing OK. We're just the canary in the coalmine.

So, onto the meat of this thing - why is this happening? Why is Britain falling apart so much faster than other Western countries? Britain isn't the only Anglosphere country with issues. Canada's slow descent into dictatorship, the USA's crippling culture war and massive political divide, whatever the fuck is going on in New Zealand. Many countries, in the Anglosphere and the West in general, share some of the problems I'm going to outline here. But I don't think any other country has all of them, or has them to the extent Britain has. So here are my theories as to why this place is such a shithole. This was going to be one post, but it's so massive I may need up to six, fuck, maybe more if I think of more. But let's get started:

1. Incompetent Government
​

This is the immediate and most obvious one, and the one that the rest of the world will be the most aware of, especially given this year's events. But the rot in Britain's government is deeper and has been happening much longer than most people are aware of.

Britain is an astonishingly badly-governed country, and has been probably since the 1960s. And it's not just at national level - every level and type of governmental structure is run by idiots. The public sector in the UK pays very poorly compared to the private one, so they are forced to hire whoever they can. This includes both elected politicians and Britain's vast bureaucracy, neither of which attracts the best and the brightest - instead, the low salaries and comparatively good job security attract the lazy, the incompetent, the corrupt and the power-hungry.

The British Prime Minister is paid just under £200,000 ($260,000) a year. That may be well above average for the country, but what would the Chief Executive of a private company with an annual turnover of $1.5 trillion (the UK government's overall budget) earn by comparison? British politicians are paid peanuts, and most supplement their income with all kinds of other activities - consultancy, company directorships, after-dinner speaking, media work and more. This both reduces the time they have to work on their political jobs and of course encourages conflicts of interest and rampant corruption. The country's leaders are not in government to serve the country, they are in it to use their power and influence for personal gain, and the country can burn for all they care.

The lower in the governmental pyramid you go, the worse this problem gets. Local Councillors are paid almost nothing, and take the role either as a step on the rung to get further up or to wield petty influence over their neighbours. Many local councillors, especially the long-serving ones, are too insane or unpleasant to get any further up the political ladder, but they get elected over and over because nobody in the UK gives a fuck about their local politicians. For the Brits reading this, do you know the name of the three councillors in your local ward? Do you know what kind of people they are? Do you even know the name of the ward? If you can answer yes to even one of these questions you are in a tiny minority (one that doesn't include me, I've no clue, I don't even know what party they belong to). A friend of mine worked at a local council where one of the local councillors had a stroke and went completely mad. He would send long, all-caps emails to senior managers demanding ridiculous changes and that various members of staff be fired for imaginary slights against him, all of which had to be taken seriously because he was elected and that trumped how insane he was. At council meetings he would rant and rave incoherently and actively obstruct anything getting done. Yet come election time, he was re-elected with a massive majority, because the few people who bothered to vote had no idea about any of this; they didn't see any further than the name of the party next to his name.

Many people in the UK think the Civil Service and bureaucracy are intransigent and obstructive, and prevent reform. However that's not the case at all, not any more. It was Margaret Thatcher who declared war on the Civil Service for opposing her economic policies, but it was her spiritual successor, Tony Blair, who finally managed to destroy it, filling it with his personal cronies and hacking away at its power. The last remaining source of pushback against insane government policies and on-a-whim decision-making was gone, and that was a big problem. Every politician got their ideas implemented, immediately. And when a new government took over, everything started from scratch, the previous government's projects were cancelled, and everything changed direction. This push-pull effect on the country destroyed its ability to plan for the future and harmed its very stability, and enabled every thicko politican's two-bit personal projects and hare-brained schemes to be put into action without any analysis or opposition.

In places like France and Germany, the entrenched bureaucracies enable long-term planning that the British system is now completely incapable of. As an example, look at the railways. In France and Germany, the networks have benefitted from long-term, consistent planning, delegated from the politicians even though they are state-owned. They have been planned and managed that way since 1945, and as a result France has the first and best high-speed rail network in Europe and the German system is the most efficient freight distributor in the world while still running a world-class passenger network. By contrast, the British railway system was nationalised in 1948, "modernised" in 1955, hacked back under Beeching in 1963, starved of funding under Thatcher, re-privatised in 1997, partly re-nationalised in 2003, and in 2010 the government decided it wanted a high-speed network and planned a horribly overambitious project called High Speed 2, that was supposed to cover most of the country, but at present only consists of a partly-built white elephant between London and Birmingham* that is now estimated to cost three times its original budget and probably won't ever recoup its colossal costs (with other planned extensions to other cities either cancelled or indefinitely postponed by successive governments). Everyone secretly knows the whole thing should be abandoned before it bankrupts the government, but thanks to egos, the need to save face, and of course the good ol' sunk cost fallacy, it will be built, whatever the cost and whether or not it's really needed. Every government since 1948 has changed course, changed what it thinks the railways should be, and changed the people in charge of them over and over. The result has been ruinously expensive chaos and the worst railway network in the Western world, with even countries like Spain and Italy outclassing our networks on a fraction of our budget, simply by not having each successive set of politicians cancel the last set's ideas and change direction again.

*The route is barely more than 100 miles long, and as a result the trains won't be able to spend very long at their top speed. This will reduce the current 79-minute journey time to 52 minutes. The cost of this less than 30 minute saving was originally budgeted at £31 billion (roughly $40bn) but is now expected to top £87bn ($110bn). Just as a point of comparison, the estimates cost of Liz Truss' unfunded tax cuts, the ones that nearly destroyed the economy and brought down the Prime Minister, were £30bn, by comparison.

As I mentioned in my last post, our current electrical grid problems are a direct result of clueless, over-powerful politicans who can't think beyond the next election and their own careers. The government came under pressure in 2010 to build new nuclear power stations, with Britain's existing ones due to shut down in the next 10-15 years and pressure to reduce carbon emissions. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg refused, on the grounds that "They wouldn't be ready until 2020 or 2021", which to a British politican may as well be the time the sun burns out - after all, he'd be in a cushy corporate job by then, who gives a fuck? Now it's 2022, and we are facing blackouts because of a lack of nuclear power. Nick Clegg (who also managed to tank his own party's vote due to his betrayal of his own voters while in office) now has his cushy corporate non-job of "President for Global Affairs at Meta Platforms", whatever the fuck that is, and is drowning in Zuck Bucks. Like all in Britain's public life, he was handsomely rewarded for his failure.

As Nick Clegg's example demonstrates, there is a culture of mediocrity and rewarding failure in the public sector. Notorious London police chief Cressida Dick first became known for an incident where she led a group of counter-terrorist cops who chased an innocent Brazilian electrician halfway across London and shot him five times in the face at point-blank range, and then lied to the commission of enquiry. She first got a counter-terrorism job at the defence ministry, was knighted, then became head of the Metropolitan Police, which she proceeded to run into the ground. More on her in a later post. I did government work for a while myself. The head of HR where I worked had previously worked as the HR head of a branch of the Probation Service, where he was fired after several hundred probation officers ended up on duty without any criminal records checks. No matter, he was immediately re-hired elsewhere because he had "experience". To tell stories of his many subsequent cock-ups would be powerlevelling, but let's just say he had not become more competent in the meantime. He was still in post when I left four years later.

Every public project comes in massively over-budget, late, and under-delivering, particulary infrastructure. Each set of bureaucrats who might learn from each failure get fired, and the responsible politicians retire to work for NGOs or mega-corporations, immune to the effects of the mess they made and facing no consequences for it. The Public Sector is particularly bad at contract management, with superior private sector lawyers running rings around government procurement people and bilking the people of the UK out of billions. This was a particular problem under Tony Blair, with his Chancellor (and successor as Prime Minister) Gordon Brown, a deeply arrogant yet breathtakingly incompetent man, setting up "Public-Private Partnerships" (PPPs) to use private sector finance to build schools, hospitals and power stations, also known as the "Private Finance Initiative". This kept the cost of these projects off the government's balance sheets (and the staffing costs off the public sector wage bill), but they essentially did a sale-and-lease-back on all those buildings. Costs spiralled out of control and many of the buildings were delivered late and are starting to fall apart because of corners cut in their construction and there's no money to fix them.

This school just fell down one day.​

This disastrous subcontracting can be lethal. The London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, like many others, had so many interconnected layers of management and subcontracting for the refurbishment of its crumbling tower blocks that highly-combustible aluminium panels were used to "clad" the outside of the building without any clear line of authority. When one such block caught fire in 2017 and killed 72 people, the subsequent inquiry produced this astonishing "diagram of blame" showing how all the various public and private bodies involved blamed each other for the disaster.

Is this the kind of diagram a functioning country would produce?​

Things would go from tragedy to farce. Surveys were conducted (at catastrophic cost, of course) of pretty much every tower block in the country, and hundreds were found to be covered in dangerous cladding. In the Grenfell fire, the fire spread so quickly that the residents were unable to evacuate. Because of a lack of funding and qualified people to remove the cladding from many of these blocks, "walking watches" were legally required, whereby fire wardens would patrol the communal areas 24/7 looking for fire. This involved the hiring of thousands of people to walk around tower blocks all day looking for fires, of which of course they hardly found any. This is STILL going on, five years later, because of wrangling and cost issues about removing the cladding. Some people have had scaffolding and plastic sheeting covering their windows for five years and counting, and they are being charged to pay for the people walking up and down all day just in case something catches fire. And because all the money has been spent on these non-jobs, there's no money to fix the actual problem. Leaseholders in these blocks are being charged thousands of pounds a year to remove the cladding they didn't agree to in the first place and to pay for people to hang around in the corridors with fraud and overcharging rampant. Everything about this disaster has pissed money everywhere and continues to do so in this storm of ineptitude, inefficiency and idiotic priorities. It's an extreme example, but it demonstrates why everything in this country costs much more than it should.

"Lol your house is a deathtrap, so here's a rasta with a phone you have to pay for. Fuck you."​

Some more examples of just how badly-governed this country is:

- In Northern Ireland, the then-energy minister Arlene Foster was in charge of a scheme whereby the government would subsidise renewable energy use by businesses. Thanks to her gross incompetence, the scheme actually paid businesses more than the energy actually cost them, and so they started renting empty warehouses just to heat them up as much as possible to get free money.

- The government's attempts to censor the internet have (fortunately) failed due to the sheer ineptitude of the people trying to organise it. First up was the "Porn Ban", whereby the government decreed that all porn sites would require a complex and invasive age verification process that very obviously was never going to work and would make anyone buying the porn loicenses the government proposed vulnerable to blackmail if the database was compromised. The government sent an email to journalists to reassure them of the security of the proposed system, but put all their email addresses in the cc box instead of bcc, managing to create a data breach before the system was even set up which didn't exactly inspire confidence. Not to mention that the whole thing could easily be circumvented with a proxy or VPN. So that was abandoned. More recently, the government proposed to ban content that was "harmful but not illegal". Run that idea around your noggin for a bit until the paradox makes your eyes bulge from your head like a Looney Tunes character seeing a sexy lady. This too was expensively abandoned because it didn't even make any fucking sense. This is what happens when policy relating to the Internet is made by the kinds of people who have their network password written on a Post-it note on their monitor and who ask their secretaries to print out all their email.

- In 2004 one day the Housing Minister Yvette Cooper decided that the process for buying a house being streamlined. This being the government, the "solution" was an absurd piece of bureaucracy called a "Home Information Pack" (HIP). This would be a gigantic document that sellers would pay government-trained inspectors to poke around their houses and compile all the information that buyers got anyway through the normal house-buying process. The cost would be £600 ($750), and for every day a house was on the market without one you would be fined £200. The government trained a small army of inspectors, despite opposition from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (who sued the government for not consulting anyone about this idiocy), Estate Agents, and everyone except the hurriedly-created "Association of Home Information Pack Providers". The manifest impracticality and unpopularity of the scheme resulted in a strings of changes and postponements, with the government refusing to back down in the face of all logic. The legislation was defeated in the House of Lords, resulting in a further delay until after the 2010 election, when the new government immediately abandoned the scheme. The Association of Home Information Pack providers (representing the thousands of people who paid for training in the scheme) then sued the government for abandoning the scheme and got a big payout. I can't find a figure for the total cost of this failure but it has to be well into eight figures.

---

This rot is so deep and so ingrained into the culture of the British public sector at all levels that there is no possibility of reforming it before it collapses. Nobody knows what to do and nobody will acknowledge the problem. The culpability for this is shared by all political parties, whose MPs have profited greatly from it, so none of them will ever address it even if they had the first clue how to fix it. The only way forward is to burn it all down and start again. Fortunately, we won't need to do the burning ourselves because the entire system is likely to spontaneously combust on its own. When, nobody knows, and nobody wants to think about.

Next: Part 2 - The ruling class is now the enemy of the people

 

[Desu Mountain]

I don't even live there and I'm getting blackpilled.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

Chapter the Last: Why is Britain Collapsing?

Ask Enoch Powell

 

[Stasi]

This rot is so deep and so ingrained into the culture of the British public sector at all levels that there is no possibility of reforming it before it collapses.

It is honestly difficult to describe just how rotten and corrupt everything is, I don't know if your post fully captures the dire state of things but its as good an attempt as anyone is going to make.

I was actually thinking about this thread recently because I had the misfortune of needing to use the public transport in London and its such a fucking mess. Ticket prices have been steadily increasing but the quality of service has degraded noticeably in the last 15 or so years (and it was never good to begin with). Seems there is more and more money sloshing around in the system but it just disappears somewhere and nothing ever gets fixed or improved. A friend of a friend works at TfL in a management position and they were at one point 24 hours away from bankruptcy and total collapse needing an emergency government bailout. Imagine that, the transport system in one of the biggest cities in the world being run into the ground to the point of needing a taxpayer funded bailout. Of course they blamed muh covid and not incompetence and corruption.

 

[teriyakiburns]

I had the misfortune of needing to use the public transport in London and its such a fucking mess. T

The last time I had to use public transport in london, I got yelled at by a ticket inspector because, while my ticket was valid for the journey I had taken, I had gone down the wrong corridor at the end of the journey and somehow ended up at a barrier that wouldn't let me through.

 

[Kier Starmer]

What is worse is the UK has in place probably a worse PM than Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak. Sunak hailed himself as the first pajeet poo in the loo PM and is so proud. He is an absolute charlatan who is richer than the entire royal family.

At the moment as @Spunt masterfully puts there are so many dominos in place the entire thing will collapse in unison. At the moment the worst of all the issues is the public services. There are practically none that are operating normally. There is no reliable public transport, no NHS, it's a corpse at this point and beyond repair and the cost of living is looming at an appalling 17% by April according to the treasury last year in November. Remember everything in the UK except a few things is taxed at 20%. To Americans sounds fucking crazy because it is INCLUDING FOOD!!! There is a temporary measure the Conservatives can do and that is take VAT (Value added Tax) off food they did it during the Wu flu to 5% but they are greedy fucks so won't. It would alleviate a lot of problems but fuck existing I guess.

Personally, for me, I went vegetarian because the price of meat and eggs is astronomical. It can easily be about 60% of your food bill.

So enter Rishi and please watch the following video for a case in point. He is utterly spineless and has the talent to not answer questions like ever. It is something so present in the Tories that since Theressa May we have had this. He is the worst PM because he has no policies and will just curtail any of the MPs who give him support. What the Tories to are doing atm is this fantastic thing called "denying democracy". When discount Trump went it should have triggered this wonderful process called "an election" but instead he put policies in place just a few months before to prevent that. Because the fucking cunts know they would lose power if an election was cast the Conservatives would only win about 35 - 40 seats and these are fairly accurate too.

I do have a shred of optimism though I do think with global raises of the crowd the UK's younger demographic will riot. Historically in the UK with multiple strikes happening there has been great unrest alongside it and the police force is barely a thing currently.

edit bonus
Here is the cunt serving at a soup kitchen and well you'll see

 

[Otterly]

We had family from rural scandiwegia visiting over the Christmas holidays and their kids were asking why the verges on the motorways and everywhere was full of trash and cans. The kids are four so the reply was ‘because some people are naughty and do t care’ but we talked about it once they’d all gone to bed becasue it’s a small but very visible microcosm of the whole problem. I agree with everything @Spunt says about the systemic collapse looming but the root cause of this is destruction of functional communities.
We used to have communities. People were poor at a level modern kids would t even believe - and sorry for ‘when I were a lass’ ing here but it’s part of the point. I went to school with kids who had outside bathrooms in their farm and cardboard to fix the holes in their shoes and that was the eighties. My parents grew up one with no heating, electric or gas. They had to pull water for a tin bath. BUT amd it’s a huge but, people helped each other. Communities were safe for kids to roam. People had big families, everyone knew each other and everyone’s behaviour was beholden to and policed by their community. Bottles used to have a collection payment on them so kids would collect and return them.
All that is gone. Gypsies and immigrants collect trash for a few then fly tip it by the road. Our hedgerows are full of trash. It’s hideous. Where once that’s get you a Clip round the ear nowadays nobody dares becasue they’d just stab you.
ALL this social rot is because there re no more communities. There are no shame based brakes on behaviour.
As to what caused that loss of community, we that’s imposed externally and it’s the usual suspects - vast immigration, of peoples who are tribal and don’t give a shit about the hedgerows. ID pol, and all that fracturing people as well. But the rot started with the miners strikes here and was accelerated by Tony Fucking Blair, may he rot in hell, and his opening the doors from 97.
With no community, no one cares. The few who do care feel so isolated and afraid they won’t stand up and say actually that’s a man, or no I dont want a hotel full of Albanians next door. The ones who do t care act with impunity becasue they’re never held accountable by those around them. Community, I do t care how cheesy it sounds - until we get that back it won’t get better. How we get that back? Well no idea, but I’m sure a return to seriously hard times will do it. Back to the workhouse, is where the common man here is headed.
I am furious at how these people have ruined our country. The England of the70s, 80s and 90s was fantastic.

 

[Bankman]

I can confirm what Spunt has written about Britain is painfully funny and true. Should Null or someone else ever decided to gather together some "best of" threads, I hope Spunt's posts make it in.

I'll add a few very broad points. Britain was the first place to become a modern country. And as such, many modern things such as factories and mass urbanisation began in Bongland. There was, however, some social upheavel. The gradual move from country to city (among other things) eventually eroded the sway of the national church. From the carcase of Christianity political faiths rose from it's decaying flesh. In Britain, the national faith was Whig Liberalism, often dressed comfortably in Anglican robes. The main idea is simple because I'm going to oversimplify it: we're best because we're the freest and whatever we do is right. We worship ourselves. Also, your land is ours now. Fortunately, no other country would ever again take up the gauntlet of smug superiority.

The unspeakable fuckup of the WW1 shattered the national faith in Whig Liberalism. Britain had entered the war unprepared and paid an enormous price for her folly. Britain and France, with the help of some sly American diplomacy, squandered the peace. And, more embarassingly, the war's aftermath left Britain as a debter nation to the Americans.

@Spunt has already said he'd cover the ruling class, so I'll end it by saying the last time Britain was ruled by such vile cretins they had the good graces to evacuate to the continent.

 

[Mettermeck]

Art imitates life?
View attachment 4093971

 

[Spunt]

2. The Ruling Class is the Enemy of the People

This is Dame Cressida Dick:
​

As I mentioned in my last post, she became famous for leading a botched counter-terrorism operation that led to her men shooting an innocent Brazilian electrician five times in the face in a crowded tube carriage after tailing him halfway across London under the impression that he was a Pakistani terrorist. Dick lied to the commission of enquiry into the shooting, insisting that her men had shouted warnings to the man they killed despite dozens of traumatised witnesses (whose morning commute was interrupted by a man being shot in the head with .45 pistols until he had no face left) insisting that they did not. She also said the victim was carrying a bag, which he was not, and wearing a long coat, which he was not.

Nobody was ever punished, or even disciplined, for this catastrophe. Instead, Dick was promoted, first to a classified job at the Foreign Office (we are not entitled to know what she did or what she was paid), then as head of the Metropolitan Police, London's police force and the biggest in the country.

Under her watch, the Met descended into failure and corruption and was rocked by a string of scandals. Met officers were found to be participating in all kinds of illegal activity, and were found hosting WhatsApp groups where they made edgy memes out of crime scene photos. In one particularly ugly incident, an off-duty officer "arrested" Sarah Everard, an innocent woman, for supposedly violating the Covid-19 lockdown, handcuffed her, raped her and slit her throat. When a woman's rights group tried to stage a vigil, Dick sent in her jackbooted thugs to break it up, and unarmed women were filmed being assaulted and restrained by officers, again for apparently violating lockdown rules. (When the Prime Minister violated the same lockdown rules, Dick's force refused to investigate until an opposition MP threatened legal action). The Met investigated itself and found itself Not Guilty, but a whistleblower leaked documents proving the investigation was a setup led by the very people it was investigating and made a criminal complaint against the Met, who were later found to have breached the human rights of the arrested protesters.

​

Dick's force were responsible for the absurd Operation Midland, whereby a known liar made wild accusations of paedophilia against a range of retired MPs and military officers, which a Met spokesman imfamously described as "credible and true". They were neither, and a number of these men (who were all in their eighties or older) were arrested, placed under investigation and had their lives and reputations ruined because the Met decided to publicise their investigation despite having no evidence whatsover and many of the accused men having cast-iron alibis. Several died before their names were cleared, the rest sued the Met and won large payouts. The cynical (i.e. me) may have interpreted the zeal with which the Met pursued this as a symbolic attack and flexing of power by the new neoliberal establishment against the old conservative one.

Dick was the driving force behind efforts to introduce facial recognition cameras in London and complained long and hard about opposition to this and other draconian police powers, calling privacy concerns "ill-informed". Dick was also found to have obstructed an investigation into the murder of a journalist who was investigating police corruption by destroying evidence and illegally refusing access to internal records. She was castigated by another inquiry that found that sexism and racism were pervasive across the force - and not just the usual hysterical whining about microaggressions, we're talking coppers being members of banned Neo-Nazi groups and frequent sexual assaults on female officers, civilian staff, prisoners and even rape victims. Her successor found that thousands of officers were still on the force despite being found guilty of misconduct, up to and including sexual assaults on rape victims. Some had been on full pay for years, rewarded with time off for appalling behaviour.

When Dick was criticised in the report into sexism and racism at the Met as well as the Everard case, she refused to resign, calling her detractors "armchair critics" and absurdly suggesting that if people were approached by a Police Officer who they did not trust they should "flag down a bus" to escape.

The government's response to these scandals, which all came within a year of each other, was to extend her contract by two years. Dick was backed to the hilt not only by the Government, but also by the Association of Chief Police Officers and the Metropolitan Police Federation, who said that it was "easy to comment and criticise from the sidelines".

The message was clear: the British Establishment look after their own, and the plebs shouldn't question their betters. It was noticeable that after her departure, many came out to defend her as a "great leader" despite the Met getting worse by almost every metric under her administration. All those people were current and former Police officers. Cressida Dick, like so many powerful public figures in the UK, ran her organisation solely for the benefit of its own members, not the people it was supposed to serve. Of course the coppers liked her - under her reign they could get away with practically anything.

The response to all this really demonstrates what I was talking about in the last post about people wilfully refusing to see the wood for the trees. Everyone has wrung their hands and clutched their pearls and vowed to get rid of the "bad apples" in the Police, insisting that the problem is a vetting issue and that if we only fire all the racist and sexist police officers everything will be fine. What they won't address is that things like racism and misogyny (not to mention rampant corruption and assorted other criminal behaviour) are the direct result of the real problem - the unchecked power and conceited culture of the Police, exemplified by Dick herself. The Police, like many other British institutions, sees itself as the only expert in its are of operations and any opinion that does not originate from within them as irrelevant and uninformed. When the Police are no longer about serving the public and being the valued members of communities like they used to be, and instead are politically motivated and unaccountable thugs drunk on their own power, that's where problems like racism and sexism arise. The Police shaped these officers, not the other way around. But politicians don't want to reduce the Police's power, given that the Police are nowadays the paramilitary wing of of neoliberalism, so they don't address it. The BBC, of course, loves the unchecked power of the police to terrorize people for wrongthink, and share their contempt for the people, so it's much easier to blame individual officers rather than the toxic culture that the entire establishment shares.

In the end, it was the Mayor of London, Labour Party politician Sadiq Khan, who forced her out of office. But don't think for a second that Khan gave a single fuck about the people of London or the Police force who had been terrorizing them for decades. He did it to embarrass the government. Just last month he extended the London "Low Emissions Zone", a blanket toll on non-electric cars, to cover many of London's suburbs rather than just the congested center, despite 80% of affected residents voting against it, saying "It’s not a referendum – that’s what weak leaders do."

Democracy is now for "weak leaders", and the ruling class have no intention of being weak. Canterbury City Council announced this week that they were going to split the city into four zones and ban drivers from driving from one to any of the others, using numberplate-recognition cameras. They consulted nobody about this.

Meanwhile, residents of the Yorkshire town of Whitby are going to be forced to switch from natural gas to hydrogen appliances, despite them being less economical and safe than conventional gas or electricity. The affected people get no say, and a spokesman for the company doing this proudly announced that "a vote wouldn't be the real world" - full marks for honesty and accuracy, because there is currently legislation going through Parliament that will give the government and gas companies the right to force entry into your house, destroy the appliances that you paid for, install hydrogen ones, and charge you for it.

Britain: Fuck You.​

Now some of this is undoubtedly the same WEF techno-feudalism that much of the West is being subjected to. But the British establishment's disconnection from, and complete contempt for, the people of this miserable little rock, is something different, and something very distinctly British. Two people above all are responsible for this more than anyone else, and the first may be surprising:

Margaret Thatcher
​

At first, my calling out Thatcher for being partly responsible for the way the British government makes war on its own people may seem counter-intuitive. An instinctive small-government conservative, she was the ultimate anti-establishment politician. Unlike previous prime ministers, she was not groomed for power by her family. She was not an aristocrat, an Old Etonian, an Oxbridge Graduate, or a man. She did not come from money, new or old. She was the daughter of a shopkeeper in the sleepy Nottinghamshire town of Grantham. In fact her outsider status made her the victim of a campaign of slander and hatred by a massive establishment-backed propaganda campaign that continues to this day and very much resembles the anti-Trump movement in America. Iron Lady Bad.

But to get her agenda passed, she made changes in the very way the country and its government functioned. As I have already mentioned, she was the first British Prime Minister to work against the Civil Service (Britain's vast bureaucracy) rather than with it, and she altered Britain's civic systems to give politicians much more power than they had previously, something which her successors (and one in particular who we will get to shortly) used to centralise power and see themselves as the masters, not the servants, of the people.

And secondly, she politicised the Police and began turning them from the friendly neighbourhood community members of yesteryear into the jackbooted thugs they are today. Thatcher used the Police to violently disrupt the miner's strike of 1984, her great showdown with the over-mighty Trade Unions who brought Britain to its knees in the 1970s. And I mean violently. Using a literal army of Police as violent strike-breakers was very effective, and some would say necessary, given the nature of the enemy they fought pitched battles with across the country for an entire year. But like her centralisation of power, using the Police as enforcement tools for political ideology was an idea which caught on, and now you have the Police doing this:

​

(This wasn't true, by the way. In fact all the arrests of people criticising troons have been thrown out by the courts and attacked by politicians, but the Police are now so powerful that they ignore them both - and Thatcher gave them that power).

Whilst Thatcher was the first of her kind, she was also in many ways the last. She was the last Prime Minister who was undoubtedly motivated by a desire to improve the lot of ordinary British people - because she was one of them. She was "one of us", a phrase of which she herself was very fond. Her successors are now members of the global elite, not grocer's daughters from quiet dormintory towns near Peterbrough. Much was made about how Rishi Sunak was the first brown-skinned Prime Minister and how it was a sign that Britain's noble PoCs overcoming racism blah blah blah. Bollocks. Sunak's background is one of almost unimaginable wealth and power. He has more in common with Warren Buffet than he has with any street-shitter. His education includes the prestigious Winchester College, Oxford and Stanford, and his work history includes spells at Goldman Sachs and Theleme Partners. His wife is the daughter of the founder of the gigantic Indian IT company Infosys, with an estimated net worth of over $800 million. He's as elevated above the British as most British people are above the lowest-caste Indians. Men like Sunak don't get into politics for the money or to help people - they do it for power.

But the man more responsible for any other for the utter contempt Britain's leaders have for the peasantry is not a Conservative politician, nor one from a particularly wealthy background:

Tony Blair
​

What are the modern stereotypes Americans hold about Britain?

- We spy on our own people obsessively
- We have the highest ratio of CCTV cameras to people anywhere in the world
- We blindly follow whatever American Presidents ask us to do without any clear benefit
- You need a Loicence to take a shit
- The Police and security services are effectively above the law
- Being mean to people is a criminal offence
- Our disastrous multicultural immigration policy has led to overcrowding, social tension and skyrocketing crime
- Objecting to any of this has you labelled as a terrorist.

ALL of these, and more besides, are a direct result of Tony Blair's policies. Tony Blair took it as his personal mission, driven by his reading of authors like Anthony Giddens and Francis Fukuyama, to turn the Labour party away from its Socialist roots to globalist neo-liberalism to follow in the footsteps of his idol, Bill Clinton. Blair managed to get the imfamous "Clause 4", a commitment to the nationalisation of industry, removed from Labour's constitution, before spreading his vandalism to the country at large. He was ahead of his time in many ways, displaying an obsession with either banning everything or making it compulsory long before the likes of George Soros and Klaus Schwab brought it to the mainstream of Western politics. Blair's policies combined the paternalist authoritarianism of socialism with the robber-baron elitism of the neolibs, and unlike Thatcher he made sure that his ideology became embedded in the very structure of Britain's civic functions. By politicising the machinery of government he essentially turned Britain into a one-party-state. Sure, you can vote for a different rosette, but they all have essentially the same policy programme, just promising to implement the same policies more effectively. As an example, here are the three major Prime Ministerial candidates for the 2015 general election, who seemed to have all come of the same dark-haired-white-man-in-a-suit production line:



Left to right (lol as if they were left or right of each other) you have:

David Cameron, Conservative party. Cameron now holds the following positions:

-Consultant for Illumina Inc.
-Vice-chair, UK China Fund
-Director, ONE
-Consultant for First Data Corp.
-Member of Council on Foreign Relations
-Chairman, LSE-Oxford Commission on Growth in Fragile States
-Registered member of Washington Speakers Bureau
-Chairman of advisory board, Afiniti

Nick Clegg, Liberal Democrat party. Now "President of Global Affairs" at Meta.

Ed Miliband, Labour Party. Now Labour's lead on "Climate Change and Net Zero". His brother David now earns about $1m a year as the head of the NGO "International Rescue Committee"

Quiz: Which of these fine gentlemen would you vote for if you supported the following policies?

-Brexit
-Reintroduction of the death penalty
-Nationalisation of industry
-Privatisation of the BBC/ending the licence fee
-Points-based immigration system
-A united Ireland
-Spending money on flood defences rather than reducing carbon emmissions
-The right to recall underperforming police chiefs
-Reduced defence spending
-Increased defence spending
-Opening more grammar schools (state schools that select by ability)
-Withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, Cyprus or Sierra Leone
-A Bill of Rights
-Increased nuclear power generation instead of wind power

Spoiler: Answers

None of them. Your betters have decided these things for you. Fuck You.

As for Blair himself, his roles post-PM have included:

-Senior adviser, JPMorgan Chase
-Climate Change Adviser, Zurich Financial Services
-Lecturer in "faith and globalisation", Yale
-Unknown role, UI Energy Corporation (A Korean "consultancy" company that builds oil drilling facilities in Iraq)
-His own consultancy company "Tony Blair Associates" (Notable for giving PR advice to the Khazakh government after they murdered 14 unarmed protesters in 2011)

Another of Blair's calling cards was the "Quango" (Quasi-NGO) - a bureaucratic body to which the government devolves power but has essentially no accountability. By 2009 there were 766 of these bodies (at times there have been well over 800) employing 111,000 stuffed suits and governing budgets totally £46.5 billion (about $60bn). These secretive organisations essentially run Britain, governing everything from what drugs NHS doctors are allowed to prescribe to setting train timetables. It is the existence, remit and staffing of these organisations that have turned Britain's governmental machinery from a politically neutral civil service to neoliberal establishment. Governments come and go, but most of these boards, authorities and committees remain, doing the same thing with the same people and shaping the country with no accountability.

At the very least, this means that there are 111,000 people whose ability to put food on the table depends on a lack of reform, and those people have votes, power and influence. They see the British people as a mindless herd to be pushed into whatever shape they wish. Maybe this would't be so bad if they were a) competent and b) on the side of the people but they are neither. Post Thatcher and Blair, it's not only true to say the establishment is the enemy of the people, it's also true to say they see themselves the same way. Only in a country with total contempt for its own citizens would someone like Cressida Dick become one of the most powerful people. The title of this post says that Britain's ruling class are the enemy of the people. But that isn't just my opinion - that's the opinion of the ruling class themselves, and that's the problem.

The bureaucracy's kleptocratic political figureheads hang around for a few years before leaving to be paid huge sums by the same firms they enriched when they were in power. Everyone with power in Britain is in it for themselves. They don't want to fix the country's problems, they just want to stuff their pockets as much loot as they can before they flee the burning building.

To summarise, here's something that caught my eye about the turn of the millenium. It's the logo and motto of the Home Office, the government department that oversees the justice system, the Police and immigration. It may just look like a dumb government slogan (my God did Blair like his slogans), but actually read it and take a look at what it implies about the beliefs of the people who wrote it.

​

Ignore the "safe, just and tolerant" buzzwords. It states the intent of the Police, courts and Immigration service to "Build (...) a society." The Police, people with handcuffs and guns, the prisons, the judges and the people who decide who gets to come into the country, aren't going to serve society, they intend to BUILD it. The Police 100% see themselves as social engineers. It's not about the will of the people and it hasn't been since Thatcher's time, it's about pushing and shoving the people into how they want them to be. You don't get a choice, you don't get a say, your vote means nothing.

Welcome to Britain. Fuck you.

Next: Part 3: Brexit

 

[Cloacan]

This is simultaneously one of the most informative and well-written threads on the site and one of the most depressing.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

Kinda surprised Dunblaine and all the weird shit surrounding it didn't come up re: Blair. At the very least, why does the UN need a copy of your investigation of your domestic criminal incident?

 

[teriyakiburns]

I'll add a few very broad points. Britain was the first place to become a modern country. And as such, many modern things such as factories and mass urbanisation began in Bongland.

We were the first for a lot of things, which means we made all the mistakes and suffered all the early adopter problems, but on a national scale. All of that legacy also meant that we eventually fell behind, as other countries cherry-picked what actually worked, dumped all of the legacy and idiocy, and ran off into the distance. America particularly. The manufacturing machinery displayed at the 1862 International Exhibition showed how quickly America was moving ahead, while British industry, though still innovating and advancing, as it would for years to come, was already starting to lose steam by comparison.