Since 2016, with the vote to leave the EU, the British state has revealed itself to be massively corrupt, authoritarian and a danger to its citizens, at least 100,000 have died unnecessarily with COVID.
Boris Johnson’s Conservative party are blatantly corrupt, giving contracts to their pals. The Test and Trace programme cost £38 Billion, and needs a test and trace programme of its own to find it. Dimwitted Dido Harding the idiot-in-charge has gone missing. Perhaps we should get the UK’s Anti-Corruption Champion John Penrose MP to investigate? Oh dear, he’s Harding’s husband.
It is not just the Tories: the Labour Party has been revealed to be plotting to lose both the 2017 and 2019 elections because many of their MPs and the professional staff hated Jeremy Corbyn and his popular manifesto for reviving a semblance of decency and social justice so much that they tried everything they could to wreck his chances of winning. Now the leader is Sir Keir Starmer, probably the emptiest suit they could find, who is way behind the slimy Johnson in every poll.
The SNP is not immune from this virus of political corruption. Around £600,000 of donations to be ring-fenced for another referendum campaign have disappeared. Peter Murrell, Nicola Sturgeon’s husband, who is autarch of the party refuses to say where they went; the finance committee resigned because they couldn’t do their duty. Long time independence blogger and former ambassador Craig Murray has been sentenced to jail in a trial that would make Idi Amin blush: by writing up honestly the fabricated show trial of Alex Salmond – without revealing the identity of his perjurers – he came into the sights of the coven that runs Scotland.
The long-running persecution of Julian Assange is another blot on the idea that the UK is a law-abiding state: innocent of any crime, and the US extradition denied on health grounds, he is still being held in solitary confinement in high security Belmarsh jail while being denied blankets and being strip-searched 11 times a day. Many of his supporters believe the British state is trying to kill him “pour encourager les autres” as Voltaire said – so other potential whistleblowers will take note and keep schtum.
“Taxes are for little people,” opined the late, unlamented bling-bling harridan Leona Hemsley. Britain should change “Britannia Rules the Waves” – which it clearly doesn’t – for that motto. The City of London is basically a vast scam and money-laundering setup. Bizarrely it is exempt from the laws that govern the rest of the country, and has its own sinister official The Remembrancer in Parliament to keep it that way.
The economy has been in a poor shape for quite a while. Like the US, what remained of the manufacturing base has been offshored to cheaper locales in the Far East. Ironically, rather than being a drain on the UK, the EU seems to have been propping up the “Sick man of Europe” so when the pandemic recedes the true magnitude of the Brexit disaster will reveal itself. Perpetrators like John Redwood or Jacob Rees-Mogg are wealthy and won’t be affected by this. It’s those lower down the scale, both Remainers, Brexiteers and those who couldn’t be bothered to vote that will lose their jobs and businesses. At least 450,000 Brexiteers have died, and many younger people, overwhelmingly pro-EU, have reached voting age, so it is likely that a revote would be in favour of returning. They are likely to be furious that their cosmopolitan options were shafted by addled, bigoted Daily Mail reading codgers.
One of the worst issues of the 20th Century in Ireland, the “Troubles”, or the violence between Protestants and Catholics, has reared its ugly head with Loyalist riots. The Good Friday Agreement had meant a generation growing up without sectarian violence, using a fudge that kept both sides reasonably happy. Neither the Brexiteers nor Johnson cared a fig about this situation, stitching up the crackpot Unionist DUP in the process. A tipping process has been set in motion which will inevitably result in reunification. Strangely many border farmers and business owners, who would normally be solidly Unionist, now realise that they would be better off economically as EU citizens and will vote accordingly.
About the only British institution that has come out of the past couple of years with any honour is the NHS, despite being cut to ribbons and the Tories having sold off all the PPE which had been carefully stockpiled in expectation of a pandemic. Doctors, Nurses and ancillary staff worked their hearts out to help sick and dying people; some 600 succumbed to COVID. Their reward? Applause on Thursdays, pay stagnation and pitiful support from the useless Starmer.
In 1997 Tony Blair came to power promising “It Can Only Get Better.” Britain’s new slogan should be “It Can Only Get Worse.” And it will. The Siren will be chronicling this Sceptred Isle’s descent into a falling state.