Neema Parvini
Britain is a country falling apart. An illustrative example is that the water utility supplying 16 million people in Greater London is on the brink of bankruptcy, leaving it unable to service its nearly £20 billion (US$27 billion) of debt. There are rumors that this critical piece of infrastructure could be sold off to the Chinese.
Here’s the kicker: like so much of Britain’s key infrastructure since the rule of prime ministers Thatcher and Blair, it is already foreign-owned. Nearly anything you can think of, including iconic British brands, is owned by foreign firms: nuclear power? The French. Jaguar Land Rover? The Indians. The Mini? Rolls Royce? The Germans. British Steel? The Chinese. Arm Holdings (semiconductors)? The Japanese. Cadbury’s chocolate? The Americans. Britain now is not so much a nation as a public limited company.
But this is the least of our concerns. The combination of the insane belligerence of successive British governments toward Russia, a key energy supplier to Europe, and the nation’s equally insane net-zero climate change policy has resulted in an energy crisis, drastically increasing the cost of electricity and gas. The national debt of £2.7 trillion is 96 percent of GDP and the government runs a £61 billion annual deficit. In Britain, everything is expensive and nothing works.
Looming large over these issues and every aspect of life is the immigration crisis. Sixty-five percent of the UK’s population increase in 2023 and 2024 came from immigration, and the total number of new births to foreign-born mothers is now greater than 33 percent; this is completely without historical precedent. To put it in context, net legal immigration in the U.S. under Joe Biden was around 1 million people with an overall population of around 340 million; in recent years, Britain’s net immigration has approached 1 million with a population of just under 70 million. But, as Thomas Carlyle once said, statistics can never substitute for what you can see with your own eyes. The government has been cramming new arrivals into every nook and cranny of the country, including rural towns and villages. The visible impact on daily life has been so disruptive that no one but the most ostrich-like of liberals can ignore it.
In the face of all of this, the political class is dangerously incompetent. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has become borderline schizophrenic. One week, he’s denouncing mass immigration as a radical libertarian experiment by the Conservatives, the next—succumbing to pressure from his left—he’s expressing “deep regret” for saying so. As I write, he is back to denouncing mass immigration and talking a tough game on deportations. Starmer has been a disaster, chiefly due to his inability to navigate a coherent course and stick to it. He is constantly caught between following the advice of those to his right (the Blairites) and capitulating to the lunatic leftist core of the Labour Party. It’s the worst of all worlds, and his approval rating has dropped to an historic low of 16 percent.
As I outlined some months ago, the Tories are nowhere, and still rightly blamed for the abject state of the nation after 14 sorry years in power. Their leader, Kemi Badenoch, is not only anonymous but almost comically inept. There are frequent stories of her being late to meetings. During a recent rout at local council elections, which saw the Tories lose 674 seats, she reportedly spent the night doomscrolling on her phone. She recently, apropos of nothing, told an interviewer how she got a fellow pupil at school expelled for cheating on an exam. In the same week, she revealed that she no longer believes in God. It is almost as if Badenoch is aiming to destroy the Tories forever.
Thus, all the focus in the British media is on Nigel Farage and his so-called right-wing populist party, Reform UK. Farage is now widely tipped to win any general election almost by default. His chief selling point? Not Tory, not Labour. People have had enough of the establishment parties or, if you prefer, the “uniparty.” Farage thus faces a wide-open goal, and yet, somehow, he conspires at every turn to be as lukewarm and as status quo as possible. For reasons almost nobody can understand, Farage has positioned himself to the left of even the Tories on many social issues, including transgender “rights,” and he has been nearly hopeless on the one issue that matters: immigration. Instead, he has focused on nonsensical trivial issues, such as attacking “left-wing milk” (anything that is not full-fat cow’s milk) and trying to exempt bacon-flavored potato chips from EU regulation. While these mild cultural crusades can be moderately entertaining, the severity of the crisis in Britain means they are a luxury we cannot afford.
Those of us who pay close attention already know that Reform UK is comprised of fakes, agents of containment, and regime men; they are the Tories redux. The system is not scared of Farage, but rather preparing the ground and priming the audience for him. Things are so bad that I’ve joked about voting for the shambolic far-left, pro-Palestine party of Jeremy Corbyn. If nothing else, the system, which is rotten to the core, does not want him.
Of course, Corbyn is not the answer either. To draw on Carlyle once more, there comes a time when an elite is so thoroughly corrupted that there needs to come a cleansing fire. It has been 367 years since Oliver Cromwell last performed that service; we are long overdue for a reprise.
Source: https://chroniclesmagazine.org/columns/the-hopeless-malaise-of-british-politics/
