I look at the state of Britain, my nation and home and I despair. I observe the hollowed out Royal Navy, the crumbling infrastructure, the filth on the streets that takes for ever (if ever) to get cleared up, the lengthening wait for parents with mentally ill children to get help, the health services that are a quality lottery, the under-resourced police forces, the ambulances that fail to arrive in a timely manner, the schools that look as badly maintained as they were when I was a teenager many decades ago and much else and it makes me wonder. It makes me wonder just where the massive amounts that Britons pay in taxation has gone?

Britons are extremely heavily taxed. We are taxed on our income then taxed again via Value Added Tax when we purchase most goods. We pay council tax to councils that can’t do what councils thirty or forty years ago were able to do which is collect rubbish bins weekly. We pay tax when we buy a home, tax when we buy fuel, tax when we buy alcohol, tax on hot food, tax on tobacco, tax to use and insure our vehicles and those sectors of our economy that actually work, the SME’s and the self employed are taxed when they make a profit.

Britain pours an awful lot of resources into the tax maw but the average Briton can often see very little in return. When we try to make use of the nationalised healthcare system we might be lucky and get excellent treatment or we might be among the millions of unlucky ones who get treated like absolute shit. When we ask for help from the state for our families we either get told ‘there’s no resources for you’ or what support we do get is to say the least, lacklustre. When we sign up and patiently wait for social housing we get told that there’s not enough properties to go round and when our people who have put their lives on the line in our Armed Services leave the military, there’s little in the way of help to help them navigate the very different world of Civvy Street.

We pay so much and get back so little that we should ask ‘where’s the money gone?’

It can’t all have been spent on welfare and the NHS. It can’t all have been spent on ‘essential services’. It can’t all have been spent on housing invaders who came by small boat or large plane. So where is all the massive amount of money that the State garners from the taxation of the individual and businesses gone?

Has it all been wasted on fripperies and nothingburgers or are we and our institutions more corrupt than we give them credit for? We used to laugh at nations who built roads to nowhere and bridges that crossed nothing because the decisions to build such wasteful were made by corrupt politicians and administrators who signed off on these projects in order to receive a cut of the funds but now it appears that we could have similar problems here. For example, who benefited from the disaster that is the UK’s High Speed Rail system that cannot even manage to get the rails to end up at its planned final destination and which is now ending up with too many trains that are now too long for the platforms at the stations on this truncated rail line? I tell you what, it’s certainly not the taxpayer or the potential users of such rail services.

Where’s the money gone because it is clearly not reaching those who need the services that this money should be funding?

I’m not naive, I’m not a minarchist, I’m not in favour of the state doing nothing (where would we be without food safety standards monitoring and enforcement for instance) and I know that many services are expensive, but there must be oodles of waste that occurs that is not even being remotely tackled. But the money that the Treasury gets off of individuals and businesses doesn’t seem to be spent on the things that the nation needs in order to defend itself, keep the nation healthy and ensure that poverty and despair is not on every British person’s menu.

So I ask again: Where’s all the money gone? We’ve given it over to the State under threat of imprisonment but we rarely see the sort of services that this money could give. We still have crumbling housing estates that are increasingly filled with despairing and left behind people but very little money seems to be being spent on changing that situation.

We are beset by robbers who are robbing the British people blind but these robbers do not jump out on us from dark alleyways but instead wear suits and live far beyond the concerns of the bulk of the country in London SW1.

This is not a situation that we should ignore or tolerate much longer. There is only so far that a State can squeeze its citizens before the State is not seen as a partner in society but a parasite that lives off of it.