The answer is pretty buggered I reckon. We have, for a start, a massively depleted industrial sector that has not been properly supported by either the state or the finance sector for decades. We have a preponderance of service industries, a massively inflated welfare state, high taxes, sclerotic public services as anyone who uses the NHS or local authority services will know, low productivity and an energy sector that has been shot to pieces by idiots following the ideology of Net Zero. We have lost the capacity, due to Net Zero to make virgin steel and we are also losing our chemical industry and petrochemical industries for similar Net Zero related reasons. We are not just a country that is in trouble, we are a country that has been driven at full speed into an unyielding wall by decades of mismanagement by Britain’s political and administrative classes.

There’s an excellent article by Dr Richard North about the return to life of the Parliamentary soap opera after the summer recess. What caught my eye though was a comment below the line which summed up just how far down a super-deep borehole of crap Britain’s economy is. It’s a layman’s view of just how buggered Britain’s economy is. Basically the comment said we are half way between ‘proper fucked’ and ‘it’s time to stockpile tinned food’ to which could be added the words ‘or worse’ if you know what I might mean.

Here’s the comment.

This is Britain’s worst performance with Gilt percentages since the Great Financial Crash of 2008. However back then the British economy and society was a bit less shaky than it is now. Back in 08 whilst some people and businesses suffered most people, as I recall from my contemporaries, could still reasonably easily afford to heat their homes or fill the tanks in their essential vehicles. Now Net Zero has put an end to affordable or reasonably affordable energy so we can add that to the list of social and economic woes that Britain is suffering from. Britain is also suffering from social problems, such as excessive migration and the crime it brings, government services incorporating absurd ideologies such as Trans, Identity politics and Green Guff and ever spiralling prices for essentials such as food and fuel.

I have to agree with the commentator on the Turbulent Times piece, we are in a very bad place. The British economy is like a rice pudding with a solid looking skin on the top but a boiling hot maelstrom of quicksand-like rice underneath. You wouldn’t think that a giant rice pudding would be a safe thing to walk across and neither is the British economy something that you could rely on to be solid and reliable.

Andy Burnham the relatively newly installed Prime Minister, or ‘Andy Crapp’ as he’s starting to be referred to as, is in no position to make things better. He cannot reform welfare because of fears of a back bench revolt, similarly he faces a similar revolt should he wish governments to do what the British people have said they’ve wanted for decades and halt unwanted immigration and deport those who are ‘not conducive to the public good’.

Burnham’s government is sooner or later going to run into the brick wall of reality which is that Britain’s economy is dysfunctional, the state is costly, incompetent and wasteful and we’ve imported millions of people from cultures that hate us. Britain is in addition just one Southport-like migrant caused atrocity from serious violence and what I must euphemistically call kinetic extra-Parliamentary politics. This is not what I or any sensible person should want but it’s a situation that our political classes have delivered to us.

I think the situation can be turned around but it will be difficult and I don’t see anyone in the current government or the Tories, who created and exacerbated some of these problems themselves (the Lib Dems would just ban us from driving from our homes if they had power – see City of Bath). The Challenger Parties also do not seem to be aware of just how deeply the rot goes in Britain and have not formulated the sort of policies that might be needed to sort these problems out. Britain I’m afraid is in deep deep trouble economically and socially and it angers me because there were multiple opportunities for politicians in the past to not get us all so deeply in the financial, geopolitical and societal shit.

Link to the Turbulent Times piece

Politics: the soap opera resumes