BRITAIN IS A DUMP!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s over.

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0:00 The Typo That Ruined A Country
11:15 No Building Please, We’re British
24:10 Envy of the World
32:45 Crime is Legal
38:49 Oi, You Got a Loicense For That?
45:52 The Fun Police
49:42 It Can’t Be Done
1:01:03 THEY HAD ONE JOB
1:04:05 The Worst Government Since 1845
1:11:47 No Country For Young Men
1:23:14 Conclusion

Sources & further reading: https://pastebin.com/jV0zEiuz
Music used: https://pastebin.com/khsgFKyE

Have you noticed how…empty everywhere is these days? Britain is quickly becoming a nation of nothing. A recent Cambridge university report finds; “The availability of parks, cinemas, train stations, public transport, GP practices, hospitals, mental health care, police stations, banks, cash machines, post offices, education facilities, theatres, swimming pools, museums, shopping centres, chemists, pubs, and gyms, have declined across almost all English areas” since 2014. Under the Conservatives, funding for local government has been cut by over half since 2010. With such stringy finances, councils have to be frugal with their limited budget, selling off billions worth of public assets just to make ends meet, and raising council tax higher and higher to pay for worse and worse services – and even then, many councils are going into debt just providing basic functions. This is part of a wider economic policy pursued by the Conservatives over the past 14 years. One that was intended to bring down government debt. Cuts to education to the tune of 10 billion pounds, taking 14% of the budget from the most deprived schools. £5000 less per pupil. Youth services down by a third. Environment down 30%. Housing down by a half and infrastructure planning down 55%. Road repairs down 40%. 600 million slashed from yearly cultural spending. That probably doesn’t sound like much but ten years down the line, the last five UK Christmas Number 1s have been a series of novelty songs about sausage rolls. In all this frenzy of balancing budgets, the Tories seemingly forgot that there were people on the other side of those spreadsheets, and soon society began to collapse in on itself, quite literally. St Mary’s Hospital in London has rotting floors, flooding, collapsing ceilings, and sewage spilling out of the drains into the outpatient ward. But St Mary’s Hospital doesn’t qualify for urgent investment to repair these issues, because there are at least five other hospitals in the city in worse condition, and there isn’t enough money to repair them all. One hospital in Cambridge is so dilapidated that it is unsafe to treat overweight patients on the upper floors as the structure could give way at any moment. There are schools that are only avoiding bankruptcy because every time the ceiling collapses they get an apology payment from the company that was contracted to build the school. Some areas were exempt from budget cuts; benefit payments, for example. So the goal became to get as many people off benefits as possible, and some of the ways they tried to do this are downright cruel. For instance, people on housing benefits who have a spare bedroom in their house could be forced to pay a penalty. This would encourage them to move to a smaller house, thus reducing the overall amount of benefits that need to be paid. But some people need a spare room in their house…to store medical equipment. Because two thirds of the penalty payers were disabled. This was a tax on low-income disabled people. And hundreds of thousands fell into poverty as a result. How much did this policy save? After two years; £390 million. Not even one day of health service funding. Estimates for the number of people killed by strict welfare policies run into the tens of thousands. The Conservatives have created one of the most frugal governments in the developed world, and contributed to the longest and deepest period of wage losses since the Napoleonic Wars. The last 14 years of Conservative government have been worse for your finances than the Great Depression. In a modern society, when the government ceases to work, everything ceases to work. The British economy has seen no growth in the past 15 years. The median salary in Britain is £32,000, and this exactly the same as it was in 2005. Had the UK maintained the pace of wage growth it enjoyed before 2008, we would now have on average about £11,000 more in disposable income. The average family in Poland and Slovenia are set to be better-off than the average British family by the end of the decade. People who live in the former East Germany, who spent 44 years under a communist dictatorship, are now richer than the UK average. It wasn’t always like this. Cast your mind back to 2007. I was in Year 3 and spending all my allowance on Club Penguin. Things were far from perfect, but materially we were all better off. Huge strides had been made in reducing child poverty, crime had been on a downward trend since 1995, and the health service was in such good shape that people complained the waiting list to see a doctor was too short. Per capita, Britain was one of the richest countries in the world, beaten only by a few tax havens and oil states. The average British person was richer than the average in the USA, France, Japan, Australia, and Canada. But in 14 short years we threw all of that away. The British economy has even performed worse than Russia, a nation crippled by sanctions, a costly war on its own doorstep, and where 1 in 5 people are alcoholics. I cannot stress how utterly over it is for the UK. 1 in 3 children are in poverty. In places like Newcastle it’s as high as 41%. 1 in 20 children can’t even afford to sleep on a mattress. 800,000 people went to hospital for malnutrition last year, up 300% since 2013. In 2010, the charity Trussell Trust delivered 41,000 food packages to struggling families. Last year it was 3 million. An increase of 7000%. Enemies of Britain, you should be doing victory laps, host a party and invite all your friends. When the Conservatives arrived in office in 2010, the treasury under Labour had been running a deficit of a hundred and fifty billion pounds a year trying to weather the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. If another big crisis were to happen, like a public health emergency or a major conflict, Britain wouldn’t have the money to deal with it. So austerity measures were, as David Cameron called it “fixing the roof while the sun was shining”. It has now been fourteen years since the Conservatives took office. Nine years since they shook off the Liberal Democrats and governed alone without compromise. Yet the roof was never fixed. Things did not get back to normal when the deficit was under control. And when it did rain, it rained hard. Our crippled island stood no chance against the tumultuous 2020s. The Conservatives justified their budget cuts economically with a 6-page research paper called Growth in a Time of Debt, which suggested that too much debt would severely hamper economic growth and recovery from recessions. Needless to say, this paper was fraught with errors, including an Excel typo which threw off all the calculations and drastically overemphasised the results. Even the writers of the paper eventually said that the paper was wrong and a revised version of the study revealed that austerity policies were much less effective than first thought. But that doesn’t matter to the Conservatives any more. They stopped pursuing financial stability long ago, and are now engaging in a nefarious social engineering program that specifically targets the poorest areas of the country. That sounds like some kind of left-wing conspiracy but no, they openly admit to taking from the poor to give to the rich. But is that the end of the story? After all, we’re only XX percent of the way through the runtime of this video. It turns out that many of our nation’s problem are actually decades old, and when the Tories quite literally ripped up the social foundations of the nation, they brought all of them out into the open. A cacophony of catastrophes, aren’t we lucky. If you live in Britain and you’re around my age, you probably scarcely even remember living in a world outside of late trains, littered streets, shuttered shops, and crumbling schools. My viewer base is mostly 18-30 year-olds, who, for the first time in a century are more likely to be living with family than having their own home. You should be out enjoying your 20s, throwing parties, having loads of sex, making a name for yourself. How is that possible when you’re stuck in your childhood bedroom, still with your Mr Men bedsheets, subject to your nagging parents, the only other options giving away like half your income on rent or getting locked into 35-year mortgage on the most boring house you’ve ever seen? That’s not projection, if you thought it was, it’s not. You probably didn’t think it was projection but I’m just letting you know, in case that you did. Don’t blame yourself. You’re not a failure. Look around you, nothing is new. Everything is at least 40 years old. Houses are so damn expensive these days. The average house price has increased 224% since 1990, far outstripping wages over the same period. The problem is we’re being haunted. Haunted by an unholy Frankenstein ghost of Socialist Thatcherism. In the 1930s, it was really, really cheap to build stuff. Interest rates were low, making it easy to borrow money and invest in new construction projects. You didn’t need to ask permission to build – if you owned the land, you could build anything. The only rules were that the structure needed to be safe and well-ventilated. Building was booming – in 1935 alone, 70,000 homes were built in London and nearly 300,000 across the whole UK, giving rise to the classic suburbs still around today. Construction became 17% of the UK economy and accounted for a third of all economic growth in this period. A lot of people didn’t like this. The socialists within the Labour Party didn’t like that private, capitalist developers were dictating the national housing policy. So, when Labour ascended to power after the second world war, they introduced this. The Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. From now on, you must ask for government permission to build anything, so that any and all construction would be in the interest of the public, not profits. Everything must be built with the approval of all the local residents. The government, in theory being the representative of the local residents, could just give themselves planning permission, and for most of the post-war era, it was they who built most of the nation’s infrastructure. Then, when the Thatcher government took power in 1979, they slashed the budgets of national and local construction projects, believing that the private market would simply pick up the slack. What they seemingly forgot to do was repeal the law preventing the private market from building anything. And what does a policy such as that look like several decades later? Under a plan drawn up by the Poplar Housing Association, 330 homes in Tower Hamlets would be demolished and replaced by 1,600 modern homes with 600 being designated as low income housing. There was also added space for retail and transport, right next to Canary Wharf, where all the high paying jobs are. That sounds like the public interest to me! And the public agreed! The council said Yes. The planning board said yes. Even the residents said Yes, in a referendum that was 90% in favour with a 90% turnout. But London city council rejected it. Because ‘some’ people – quantity unknown – said the buildings would be too high – wait what? And so the story goes, year on year, up and down the country. Private developer wants to build, a small minority of local residents get up in arms about it, the local council – not wanting to lose voters – denies the planning permission, and the nation continues to stagnate. Just look at how old our buildings are compared to the rest of Europe – the majority of people live in houses built before 1970! Last year the estate agents Foxtons had nearly 100,000 applicants competing over just 2,000 available properties. The waiting list for a council house in Brent is 14 years with 20,000 people on the list. And as in all cases where supply is limited – those with deeper pockets always win. An underclass of rentoids giving away half their pay-cheque to a landlord, who is often times an actual Lord. And if you ever do manage to escape that tier of the history classroom poster, you get enslaved to a bank for decades paying off a mortgage on a house built before 1925. The streets of Strasbourg, and Frankfurt, even Warsaw and Prague are filled with boutiques and small businesses and cafes. On British streets you will find nothing except Greggs, a WHSmith, or a betting shop. Independent businesses are priced out – entrepreneurialism in Britain today is mainly drop shipping and ticket scalping. This is why we are thousands of pounds poorer than our German counterparts! We are the only country in Western Europe that is like this. Spain has built over 10 high speed rail lines since 1992, most of them much longer than the proposed HS2 line. In fact for 30 euros you can get a first class ticket with a two-course meal included for any journey over 2 hours. Why can’t we have that? It’s not a one-off novelty that gets featured in a Tom Scott video. It’s a normal thing that normal countries have, and we don’t have it. Britain’s cities are more poorly served by public transport than those of any other wealthy western country, including the car-centric suburban hell of the United States. Brescia in Italy, population 200,000 has a fully automated metro line built in 2013 with plans for two more. Leeds, population half a million, is the largest city in Western Europe without a light rail or metro system. It may have something to do with how the bureaucratic inquires required to construct new tram stations can cost more than the Iraq War inquiry. A small group of local residents have the power to block any and all development, even if it’s for the betterment of society, even if they benefit, like vetoing vital flood defences that could stop their homes being destroyed just because the defences would look kind of ugly. House building targets have never been met once since they were introduced 23 years ago. Not under the Tories, not under Labour. So instead, the Tories just abolished the targets! Which is kind of like turning off your smoke detector because you don’t like the noise it makes. The houses that do get built are poor quality, cramped, ugly, and lagging behind our European neighbours. They have to comply with the silliest regulations, such as absurdly small window sizes. This regulation apparently exists because climate change might make people want to open their windows more often so they can get fresh air, and small children could fall out. Instead of opening the windows, why not just install air conditioning? Because air conditioning is more or less banned as it would use too much electricity. Can’t we just make more electricity? Apparently not! Solar construction businesses have been waiting 15 years for permission to build solar farms, because one group in particular have been very vocal in their opposition to green energy. Have you guessed who it is yet? That’s right, it’s the… Green party. 2014. Surrey. Reigate Green party opposes a solar farm that could have provided green energy to over 3500 homes. 2018. Kent. The Green party opposes the installation of a new solar farm in uninhabited marshland. 2020. Hastings. The Green party opposes plans to build a 2 Megawatt solar farm. 2021. Derbyshire. The Green Party opposes any and all solar farm projects in the county, with councillor Frank Adlington saying “solar farms are NOT the future of the Derbyshire’s energy sector”. He goes on to say that, if the Green Party were in government, “There would be greater investment in offshore wind power, hydropower, tidal, geothermal and other renewable technologies” instead. Mr Adlington, Frank, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at a map of the county you represent, but it’s landlocked. Secondly, you might want to check in with the rest of your fellow party members. Because East Suffolk Council, which the Green party controls, have blocked the expansion of more wind farms in the North Sea because they were ‘alarmed’ by the “current developer-led model”. What a weird group of people. Climate change is an existential threat to humanity, but don’t do anything about it if someone would make a profit from the solution. Horror stories from bureaucratic Britain go on and on and on. 13 years to build an off shore wind farm. £1 billion to rebuild a roundabout in Bedfordshire. Victorian-era telephone cables preventing the rollout of high-speed internet. £9 billion and 22 years to build a three mile tunnel under the river Thames. This tunnel has produced 359,000 pages of paperwork and not a single shovel of earth has been moved. Last year India landed a probe on the moon for $75 million. We could have landed Britain on the moon 100 times for the cost of planning to build a 3 mile tunnel. And it’s not just the big projects that get blocked. With the rise of smartphones, these iconic British red telephone boxes have become public urinals and billboards for prostitutes. But when local entrepreneurs wanted to turn this Lambeth phone booth into a coffee kiosk, locals rejected the idea because it was quote “Out of character in a conservation area of historic interest”. Presumably this would ruin the historical value of giant mural of a girl in a bikini. It could very well be that we will never get good infrastructure ever again. A report by the Resolution Foundation suggests that in order to fix our decrepit infrastructure, we would need to double taxes to raise the funds necessary. Keep in mind that when this report was written, the Tories have raised the tax burden to the highest ever since World War II, so we’d have to double that just to get infrastructure up to the standard of our fellow Europeans. It would seem that the government can’t do this alone. We need to retvrn to the planning rules of the 1930s, so that private developers can foot some of the bill. All buildings should be safe and fit for human habitation, but so long as you tick all the safety boxes, you can build it. No permission needed. If you want to build a stadium in the Chilterns or something, that’s when the neighbours should be consulted. You know what kind of place has rules like these? Tokyo. And who’d want to live in a dense, overcrowded third world slum from hell like Tokyo? I’m not actually in Tokyo, this is a green screen. But a strict planning system isn’t the only sucker punch this Act had in store for British prosperity. The 1947 Act also introduced the concept of Greenbelts – all the land surrounding cities would be frozen in place, banned from being built on or altered in any way. Even if that land looks like this. Building on just 1% of greenbelt land could deliver 700,000 new homes. We reduce the size of the greenbelt by 10% and that’s 7 million new houses. Just ten percent! Greenbelt defenders say that it’s there to stop cities sprawling outwards, give the cities’ working class a beautiful place to explore, and protect nature. Although, none of these claims hold much water. We could double the size of every UK city and it would still only cover 12% of the island, leaving 88% free to be left to nature. The average city dweller visits the greenbelt only once per year, and almost all Greenbelt land is privately owned; the only way you can enjoy it is by hoping there is a public footpath. With no other legal uses, this land is subject to intensive farming, which the UK National Ecosystem Assessment found, is a net negative to the local environment. Empty fields are not protecting nature. The Peak district is nature. The Highlands are nature. This is not nature, this is not a beautiful view worth protecting. Basically, I hate Clement Attlee. Ah, but his government introduced the National Health Service, the pride of Britain that, in 2020, was voted by the public as the coolest thing to ever exist, beating out James Bond, space travel, and Obama. So surely it must be good, right? NO. In October 2020, during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, revolutionary New York underground hip hop artist MF DOOM was checked into St James’s Hospital in Leeds. He had recently moved to Leeds from London, because many fans will be surprised to learn that just like Christian Bale and Champagne, DOOM was actually British. Despite living in America almost all his life, a loophole in citizenship laws led to his deportation from the USA in 2012. DOOM is one of the most influential hip hop artist of all time, given the honour of “Your favourite rapper’s favourite rapper”. His storytelling is sublime; Vaudeville Villain, a personal favourite of mine, follows the exploits of a time-travelling drug dealer who gets trapped New York’s upper west side in 1993. Undoubtedly, one of the goats. At the time of his admittance, DOOM was taking medication for high blood pressure, but NHS bureaucracy prevented medical staff from accessing records from the London hospital that had proscribed him the drugs. He had taken a different medication to usual, and was developing a severe reaction. Within just a few days, Daniel Dumile was dead at 49. His wife alleges that overworked nurses couldn’t check on his condition as often as required. This story is not well known, because fans of New York hip-hop and people interested in British healthcare policies are typically separate groups, but MF DOOM was just one of the estimated 300 to 500 people who die per week due to delays in NHS treatment. That’s 20,000 people per year! And this is because, I know it’s kind of sinful to say this but, the NHS isn’t very good at keeping people alive. For 30 years, the UK has consistently had the lowest cancer survival rates of any developed nation The NHS performs worse than average in the treatment of eight out of the 12 most common causes of death, including heart attacks and cancer. We are third-worst in the developed world at treating curable illness. Infant mortality is 27% higher in Britain than the Western European average. Since 2010, 999 wait times for ambulances have doubled. More than a quarter of A&E patients wait more than four hours for help. The number of people waiting for NHS treatment is up 200% since 2010 with 23,000 waiting more than two years for treatment. 66% of the population are overweight and- One of the few things that the UK ranks the highest in is healthcare equality. So at the very least, whether you’re rich or poor, black or white, we’re all equally dead. Of Covid-19. Not only are the outcomes terrible, the pay for those working in the sector is truly appalling. “The starting salaries for junior doctors in places like Australia, Canada, the US and France can be up to double the 29,000 pounds basic they earn here in the UK”. If pay had kept up with inflation, Junior Doctors would be earning £20,000 more per year. Other countries know this: Australia is now offering huge benefits for British medical workers to abandon the NHS and move down under. And it’s working; 1 in 7 doctors trained by the NHS have since moved to work in another country – double as many as any other developed country. We’re literally paying to train other countries’ doctors and nurses! The unions have done their best to fix the situation but let’s not pretend they’re not partially at fault. In 2009 the British Medical Association successfully lobbied the government to put a cap on the number of medical school places available to British students, because they thought fewer doctors would lead to higher pay. And it worked – due to staff shortages, hospitals have resorted to hiring freelance doctors to cover shifts, paying over £2,500 to hire one doctor for one afternoon. What can we do to fix all this? Uh, nothing. It’s pretty hard to improve a system that is already literally praised as a God. So whatever you’re thinking, whatever crazy idea you can come up with to fix the NHS, ain’t happening. Nuh-uh. Because no matter what idea you come up with, the public and the media will accuse you of supporting the total abolition of the NHS, and that we will be only a few years away from being like Americans paying $50,000 for stitches. Which makes any kind of meaningful reform politically impossible. None of these conspiracy theories ever come true, in fact the King’s Fund, a pro-NHS think-tank finds no evidence at all of creeping privatisation of the health service. Decentralising the system. Labour have been talking of “giving away power”, perhaps the answer is making the NHS more local, for local people. Well in 2003, Labour introduced “Foundation Hospitals”, giving NHS hospitals a degree of independence from the government. The British Medical Association, the Royal College of Nursing, and 130 backbench Labour MPs opposed the idea due to fears of privatisation, and The Guardian said it would “effectively privatise NHS hospitals”. It didn’t. Contracting private companies to run medical facilities. This is what they do in Sweden to keep down costs; around 40% of GPs in Sweden are run by private companies contracted by regional health authorities. In 2012, the Coalition introduced the Health and Social Care Act, which among other things, made it easier for private companies to be contracted to do NHS work. The BMA said this was “an affront to the public service ethos that glues the NHS together. The BMA must unmask this reform agenda for what it is – the final step in the privatisation of the service”. It wasn’t. Paying for GP appointments. Among countries with single-payer healthcare, Britain is in the minority of countries without any form of upfront costs. An appointment with your doctor in Norway will set you back about £20. In France, a more modest £6.40. In Ireland, the appointment is free but a blood test is 30 euros. Of course, if you are low income, or elderly, or chronically ill, it’s free. If a similar system were done in the UK, it could raise about a few billion pounds every year. But, last year when a former NHS boss proposed a £7/day payment for hospital stays to ease pressure on NHS finances, the campaign group Keep Our NHS Public, called it a “harebrained idea” and a “zombie policy” – I assume Norway didn’t get the memo. Give it more tax money. This is what everyone says they want. But even this is not enough to placate conspiracy theorists. Since at least 1970 the UK has been below the average on healthcare investment compared to other advanced countries, except for two years under the last Labour government (2007-2009). Yet even when Labour was investing in the health service at the highest rate in its history, they still had to roll out PR managers to make it very clear to the media that they were not secretly privatising the NHS. Because they weren’t. You know the absolute worst part? We already spend more on healthcare out of our own pockets than Americans. The NHS is in such a state that switching to the American system would probably be an improvement! Financial wars are being fought between the world’s elite businessmen, the battlefield is London, and you, the British taxpayer, are paying for them to exploit the legal system for their own gain. At the same time, money is being siphoned off from the police and courts system to fund these exploits, rendering crime effectively legal in the UK. Private Prosecutions are an archaic legal procedure invented some time in the middle ages. Prior to the introduction of the modern courts system in the 19th century, if you wanted to bring someone to justice, the only way to get it was to pay for it yourself. Get permission from the government, hire some lawyers and a judge, rent out a courtroom, recruit some jurors, and run the trial yourself. And legally, this is a legitimate court that can find someone innocent or guilty and put them in prison. In the past, this has allowed the common man to obtain justice if crown courts refuse to hear the case. In 2017 it was used to put a Russian millionaire behind bars for defrauding £1 million from an investor. In principle, it’s a good idea. But here’s the twist: unlike a regular trial where both parties cover their own legal fees, in a private prosecution, whether you win or lose, the government covers all your legal expenses, but not the expenses of your opponent. What a perfectly balanced game with no exploits! When Coalition budget cuts prevented the legal system from functioning properly, many of London’s wealthiest and most corrupt businessmen instead turned to private prosecutions. They started accusing their rivals of stealing millions of pounds or breaking contracts on a technicality. If you win the case, you can send your opponent to jail or give them an unlimited fine. Even if you expect to lose the case, that’s also A-OK, because you can drag out the trial until your opponent goes bankrupt, and the British taxpayer pays for you to do it. It’s a no-risk bet. Anyway, the costs from giving free taxpayer money to millionaires to sue each other to oblivion has almost entirely wiped out the amount saved from budget cuts to the police and courts system since 2010. Oh well. It’s only plebs like us who have to deal with murders and muggings. I’m sure we can just tax disabled people some more to make up for it. If you commit a crime in Britain today, there is at least 95% chance you will get away with it. That’s not me being hyperbolic, look at the rate of reported crimes that end in a criminal charge. Assault, 5% Stalking, 5% Harassment, 4% Burglary, 4% Criminal damage, 4% Vandalism, 3% Vehicle theft, 2% Muggings and pickpocketing, 1% 248 phones are stolen in London every day, and only 2% of them are ever recovered. Most police don’t even investigate stolen phones, even though they are trackers in every phone that tell the police exactly where the stolen phones are located. The crimes with the highest charge rates are shoplifting at 14% – which is frankly amazing considering nearly 3 in 4 reported lootings by criminal gangs don’t even get a police response. – and cannabis possession at 15%. Evidently, police think smoking a joint and watching videos of baby pandas is a bigger threat to public safety than stalking or burglary. If the police won’t protect us, and we can’t own guns for self-defence, you would think the party of ‘personal responsibility’ would at least legalise pepper spray. Sadly, even the mildest pepper spray is considered a weapon and you can be arrested for carrying it. Meanwhile, cops have been told to not bother arresting actual, real, genuine thieves instead just sending them away with a warning. People like you and me, average people who only commit minor crimes like movie piracy and cannabis smoking, get the full weight of the law upon us, while blatant criminals can do whatever the want like it’s the purge. Theft at knifepoint is basically legal but building a tower that doesn’t look exactly like the brochure is prohibited and has to be demolished. Being a lawyer is a tough job, with long hours and low pay. 25% of barristers have quit since 2017 with a further 25% saying they plan to. I would too if I was paid on average £12,000 per year. Wait that’s not a typo? Barristers get paid £12,000 per year? The National Crime Agency loses 10% of its workforce per year, probably because their officers get paid 14% less than a regular cop on the street. Where do these barristers and special agents go? To the private law sector, where they get straight to work making 4 times the salary in private prosecutions defrauding the taxpayer. By paying barristers poverty wages, the Tories have handed over our best lawyers into the hands of gangsters and foreign billionaires, who exploit our legal system for money. So if the cops aren’t preventing crimes, solving crimes, capturing criminals, or bringing people to trial, what are they doing? Beating up people who were holding a memorial service for a woman who was murdered by an off-duty police officer. I was sitting on a jury a few years ago and in the waiting room the woman sitting in front of me was chatting away to the person next to her about how human rights are ‘overrated’, how it’s harder to bring criminals to justice because of “human rights”. This woman isn’t in the minority. I think most people have an internal conscience that makes them act ethically, like Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio, but for a lot of British people that conscience is Joseph Stalin. On almost every civil liberties issue you can name, opinion polls show that just over half of the British public will always pick the anti-freedom option. The death penalty. Mandatory identity cards. Monitoring all public spaces with CCTV 24 hours day. Detaining suspected criminals indefinitely without trail. Warrant-less wiretapping of innocent people’s phones and text messages. Keeping a record of every citizen’s fingerprints, even if they are innocent. At some point it just gets ridiculous. 10 years in jail for travellers avoiding Covid quarantine? They’ve got no problems with police brutality either. It’s this slim majority that allows the government to pass a whole host of authoritarian laws and get away with it. We used to be quite good at this. You know, Magna Carta. The Bill of Rights. The Birthplace of liberalism. Ancient Rights of Englishmen and all that. The problem is that the law works in precedents. Laying one brick doesn’t do much, but it affects every other brick that comes on top of it. And this time it was Labour who started building this wall to imprison us under the guise of safety. In the early 2000s the Blair government passed a number of laws giving authorities the powers to do pretty much anything if they think it will prevent attacks from Terriers. These laws have been used to… detain a man for carrying a laptop and wearing a coat that was a bit too warm for the season. Arrest a woman for walking on a cycle path. Arrest a man taking photographs of a disused road. spy on people that local councils suspected weren’t picking up after their dog. And the Metropolitan police used these powers to manhandle an autistic teenager for calling a police officer… a lesbian. I’m sure they stopped a few actual criminals with it too. Under these powers, hundreds of thousands of people, disproportionately black, are subject to invasive searches by police each year. Searches that by the government’s own analysis, don’t reduce crime. When Stop/Searches were dramatically increased in 10 London boroughs, it had no effect on the overall crime rate in these areas. But this isn’t as clear cut as you’d think, there is some conflicting evidence. An independent analysis, based on the whole UK over a 10 year period, found that increasing the number of stop/searches by 10%, led to a 0.01% reduction in violent crime. The most precious freedom of all is freedom of speech. But there is no freedom of speech in the UK. I mean, sure, the Human Rights Act says “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression” but then it is immediately followed up with “The exercise of these freedoms may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law”. In 2003 Labour used this exception to make it illegal to say offensive things over the internet, a crime of which we are all probably guilty, particularly me when I was 14 years old. This law has been used to prosecute a woman posting rap lyrics, some old men posting boomer memes in a private group chat, and a 20 year old man who insulted a police officer. Look away if you’re easily offended…seriously this is really mean and definitely worthy of a criminal conviction…ready…? OK he posted this. And of course, worth mentioning, that a conviction for posting an edgy video online launched the career of Count Stankula of the Mum’s Basement Independence Party. So up yours, Tony. Now, on their own, these aren’t so bad. I mean, yeah, there are a few false arrests, but all these folks were either never charged or had their convictions overturned on appeal. And I guess a few false arrests are worth it to keep us safe from crime, or to stop bigots ruining everyone’s day, right? What’s the worst that could happen? The Conservatives have built on these precedents to implement the most intrusive and wide-reaching surveillance laws ever passed in a democracy, giving a multitude of police and government organisations the power to silence dissent and investigate people without a warrant. Why did you give the Food Standards Agency the power to hack my phone for whatever reason, and then be able to lie in court about having done so??? Is my cooking really that bad!? Just seems a little strange to me that party that supposedly hates “cancel culture” and supports “free speech”, when given an opportunity to repeal these laws, just makes them worse! By trying to ban “legal but harmful” online speech. By giving police power to shut down demonstrations, to impose location restrictions, noise restrictions, jailing protesters for holding on to things, and detaining anyone in the vicinity of the protest, even if they weren’t participating. By giving police power to arrest protesters for “being a nuisance”. What do you think a protest is? We’re building a country where the government can introduce a whole host of policies meant to curb the freedom of transgender people but a tweet in support of these policies gets you arrested. No word of opposition from the Opposition either, they supported these laws. Labour are just as authoritarian as the Tories, they just want better funding for public transport. I know these days it’s kind of unpopular in left and liberal circles to stand up for free speech, considering how it has been co-opted by boneheads waving flags – wait what the hell is this guy doing – but if you don’t stand up for all freedom of speech, even those of unsympathetic idiots, then the same laws will one day be used against you and the causes you support. See how French police have the power to outright ban all protests in support of Palestine under the guise of anti-racism. That’s coming here if we don’t put a stop to this illiberal nonsense. Before you know it, we’re living in a dystopian future where the government could make it illegal to publish information that makes them look bad. The UK has some of the most restrictive laws on what you can eat, drink, or smoke out of any European country. And it’s because of “Public Health” advocacy groups. It started in 2007 with the smoking ban. Everyone agrees smoking is bad and should be discouraged, but the ban on smoking was far stricter than bans in most other countries. We could have been more like Germany, Austria, or Sweden, where pubs could choose if they wanted a smoking room. Not in Soviet Britain. Smoking in all establishments was banned, completely. It melted our brains and changed the way Brits think about what the government should be allowed to do in regards to our personal lives. Now to be clear, I don’t care about smokers. Your choices are stupid and enjoy your lung cancer. But I know that how the state treats smokers is the canary in the coal mine for how it will treat other unhealthy things that the rest of us can actually enjoy in moderation, in ways that don’t hurt other people. Because from this came banning khat, spice, and nos. Banning buy-one-get-one-free offers. Banning chocolate near checkouts. Banning flavoured vapes. Banning disposable vapes. Banning big wine glasses. Taxes on sugar. Taxes on alcohol. The Welsh government want to ban Meal Deals. A cross-party committee of MPs has recommended banning microwave dinners. Another campaign wants to ban fast food joints within a five-minute radius of schools. Some campaigners propose putting a cap on how much sugar the country can import! You know who else wanted to stop the British importing sugar? The Nazis. None of this nonsense would be seriously considered if the smoking ban was not so harsh. The proponents of the smoking ban assured everyone that this would be the limit of government regulation. That they didn’t want to ban smoking, just restrict it to private residences. They lied. The incessant campaigning of Big Public Health means a total ban on smoking is scheduled for next year – the only country in the world that is doing this. So if these paternalists tell you they don’t want to ban takeaways, or alcohol, or coke, or birthday cakes, or chewing gum. They. Are. Lying. That’s what they’ve been working towards. They don’t think people should be allowed to do make the choice to do something unhealthy. Who doesn’t love a greasy kebab after a night on the town? Who doesn’t see the value in a refreshing pint on a summer afternoon? These guys. If they had their way, all of these things would be banned. And there’s no practical justification. They claim it is to reduce pressure on the health system from obesity and related illnesses – but the biggest strain on the NHS isn’t obesity, it’s old people being old. And we have a drug now that cures obesity. These laws aren’t necessary any more. If you become Morbidly Mr Beast, just take the injection. Or if you’re happy being big guy then nobody should be allowed to stop you. It’s bodily autonomy. Anyone who continues to advocate for restrictions on our lifestyles now that we have this drug literally just hates freedom. I can’t think of any other explanation. You might say this is all overreaction, why am I dying on this hill defending Coca Cola and Tesco Caterpillar cake? Because it’s just one of the many death-by-a-thousand-cuts that is making Britain a more boring place to live. Ditching wifi on trains because it is unaffordable. Your local swimming pool removing the water slides due to budget constraints. Closing museum exhibits. Changing the inside of passports to remove the ships and trains and other British achievements for boring geometric shapes. Once you see this, you can’t un-see it. A nation of nothing. “It Can’t Be Done!” ♪It can’t be done, you haven’t a chance, there isn’t a possible way♪ ♪ The Bridge will bend the girders snap, the thing will blow away♪ ♪ What’s more we can’t afford the price it’s rather high you see♪ ♪ And he replied “It’s Great you fools! And I am IKB”♪ This decade is an era of both crisis and prosperity. We live on the verge of quantum computers, nuclear fusion, DNA editing, life extension, Mars missions, and vaccines for cancer that will hugely improve our quality of life. But we will also enter a world of hyper-realistic AI video, robotic warfare, huge shifts in culture driven by faceless algorithms, and where anyone with $15,000 and a biology degree can print the next bubonic plague. An emerging China rivals the United States. An aggressive Russia threatens Europe. They have big plans for the world, plans that are in opposition to western liberal democracies. The first and foremost point of a government, at its very core, is to protect the citizenry from external threats. This weakened country will fail to do so if we’re not prepared for these new threats. And we’re not prepared. It is entirely possible to build a modern, functional, and prosperous state outside of the EU – take a look at Norway, or Switzerland. But it does require a lot of effort, and a lot of big thinking. It’s a Do-Or-Die project, and our politicians of all colours have chosen…die. British politics is so petty and small-minded that it even has a name – Managed Decline. At best, this is just tweaking small bits at time to gently guide the ship of state into the ocean floor. I mean, can you really, really imagine Vladimir Putin or Emmanuel Macron giving a public address to celebrate banning phones in school. This should be work for a low-level cabinet minister not the leader of a country with nuclear weapons! And at worst, it’s intentionally ruining the few remaining strengths of the UK. Heathrow Airport is the busiest airport in all of Europe, an important centre for European tourism and transit. But building a third runway? Impossible. God damn it, it’s the Town and Country Planning Act behind this again isn’t it? While other hot tourist destinations let visitors shop tax-free to encourage tourism, the UK hits them with a 20% tax on all purchases. The Premier League is the most valuable football league in the world. The Conservatives have sabotaged this by introducing a pointless regulator that does all the same things as the Premier’s own internal regulator, and turns football from a fucking game into a political issue. So now politicians are going to be interviewed about the rulings of football games than actual issues of the day. Britain has been a free-trading, sea-faring, buccaneering nation for centuries. In a world where power and influence are won more with container ships than at the barrel of a gun, if Britannia is to assert herself in this changing world, she must re-learn to Rule to the Waves. That means building ports up and down the country, expanding the navy, and securing more trade agreements, because wouldn’t it be awesome if we could walk into any supermarket and be faced with an overwhelming choice of produce from every country in the world? Unfortunately, the UK’s largest port is in a sleepy coastal town two hours away from London. The proposed expansion of Felixstowe took 19 years to get approval… because of the Town and Country Planning Act. In the same time frame, our great geopolitical rival China, which the Tories loooove to talk about how seriously they’re taking it, have more than doubled the number of ports under their control, either by building their own or buying terminals in over 50 countries. There are currently zero plans to expand British port capabilities. For £18,000 you can give up a year of your life, 24 hours a day in service of His Majesty’s Navy being sent halfway across the planet from all your friends and family to fight pirates. Or you can stack shelves at Tesco for a few days a week. I know which one I would choose. The Royal Navy has been so underfunded and soldiers so underpaid that there is now a shortage of troops, two ships have been retired due to lack of staff, and the government is now resorting to LinkedIn for retired Rear Admirals to command vessels. Within 10 years the UK will become the only advanced country without the facilities to make steel from raw materials. We are shutting down all the blast furnaces. So when there is a war, like right now, and we need submarines and ships to defend ourselves, like right now, where are we going to get the steel from, Rishi? Will I have to pull shopping trolleys out of the river to make aircraft carriers with? Oxford and Cambridge are still an engine of innovation and scientific achievements. Their universities remain two of the best universities in the world, and the UK takes the silver medal when foreign students are asked where they’d most like to study. Right in between them is Milton Keynes, a major high-tech manufacturing hub. Many countries would kill for something like this, yet Britain’s small-minded thinking is squandering that gift. British Neuroscientists and Quantum Computer programmers are paid as little as 50,000 per year. Astronauts with a PhD, fluent in Russian, with dual US citizenship paid a mere 40,000! Engineers in the United States are paid double what they are in Britain. In 2017 a single computer virus took down the entire NHS overnight, how will it survive a AI virus that learns its own weaknesses and patches them up as it proliferates? How would our energy infrastructure cope with a huge cyber attack of the kind inflicted on Ukraine during this war? The answer is that it wouldn’t, because it can’t. Housing Secretary Michael Gove, a man who makes me ashamed to be a Michael, finally did something in his 14-year career of making things worse, and proposed doubling the size of Cambridge by building 150,000 new homes around the city. This would, in theory, double the output of the city and double the amount of scientific achievement. And maybe then we can finally catch up to the USA and Germany and China? And be more than just a collection of Hedge Funds with a Bulgaria stapled to it? The local member of parliament – Tory by the way – objected to this proposal of more scientific advancement and free investment money on the grounds that Cambridge didn’t have the reservoir capacity to supply drinking water to all the new residents that would move there. So let’s talk about the reservoirs. Can we talk about the reservoirs, Mac? I’ve been dying the talk about the reservoirs. From 1970 to 1980, Britain built 10 new reservoirs. That’s one per year! Since 1992, Britain has built zero reservoirs. Yet the population has gone up by 10 million people. To build a new water reservoir, the MP said, would take up to 20 years. Twenty years to dig a hole in the ground and wait for it to rain. On an island where it does nothing except rain. So we can’t have a super futuristic technology hub. We can’t build smartphones. We can’t program robots. Or build supersonic jets. Or even build enough houses so people have places to live. Don’t bother creating a better society guys, because we’re too lazy to build a reservoir. We’re rationing water now, in a supposed ‘first world’ country, but it’s OK! Because Rishi Sunak has unveiled he’s spending £1 million on 100 new chess sets in parks up and down the country. Nowhere has this utter failure – wait sorry, 100 chess sets? That’s your latest great policy? No, actually, £1 million for 100 chess tables. They’re not even going to buy the pieces for us? Because just like the knights, this government can only take Ls. Nowhere has this utter failure to become a modern country been more evident in the fight around HS2, the most rudimentary of 21st century transport that we can’t seem to get right. The actual building of the track is actually proceeding on time and on budget. It’s actually getting to that stage that costs so much. Every mile of track is ferociously debated, discussed, subject to committee meetings, costing analysis, public scrutiny, local hearings, and objections from environmentalist groups, hugely ballooning the cost. After 15 years already under construction, the 140 miles of railway line is set to be completed by…2045! 21 years until I can hop on HS2 and visit the newly opened Cambridge reservoir. Even by the time the project comes to fruition, we will still have less high speed rail than Romania, Greece, and Serbia. The government could write a law tomorrow that fixes all of this. If they really did care about making a success of Brexit, if they really were serious about governing the country, there would be an all-out mobilisation of every aspect of government to make Britain into a country fit for the 21st century. But they won’t. I don’t care if it costs a trillion pounds. I don’t care if it makes a thousand species of rare squirrels extinct. We must build HS2, as a matter of principle. If we abandon it, then it is over for large structural change in this country. If we cannot do what Spain, or France, or China has done ten times since the 90s, then we cannot do anything. Whether you’re on the left or the right, whether you want to build nuclear power plants, nationalise half the economy, re-open the steel factories, or invest billions into science and technology – your idea is dead on arrival, because the state has proven it cannot exercise the full levers of power. We will be stuck debating infantile politics, arguing about bin collections, potholes, and whatever the hell “wokeness” is. Forever. But for a lot of Brexiteers, maybe the most devoted 40% of them, that’s totally fine for them. They proudly don’t mind being poorer, they aren’t bothered about building a powerful economy, or even having influence on the world stage. They would gladly put up with any decline to their living standards, but only so long as the government did one thing: bring down immigration. And the government didn’t do it. I really don’t want to talk about this. Immigrants didn’t elect this corrupt government. Immigrants didn’t brutalise the poor, or take away our freedoms. Immigrants didn’t prevent us from building infrastructure. We did that to ourselves. But lucky for the pro-immigration side, the anti-immigration side is utterly incompetent. In 2010 the Tories promised to get the number of immigrants below 100,000 per year. In 2022 it was over 700,000. Nice one. Migrants are being housed in hotels, country clubs, private lettings, or just dumping them on the streets on London. This is for an immigration system that is half as busy as it was 20 years ago. There’s this conspiracy that the Tories are actually secretly left wing and this is all a master plan to destroy the country with immigrants because of wokeness but the real answer is that the Tories are definitely right-wing and definitely anti-immigration, they’re just STUPID MOTHERF- When France offered to build a migrant-processing facility in Calais for the UK, operated by British workers, the Conservatives said no. Instead, the Tories sent 9 million pounds of taxpayer money to Albania to improve the country and stop people wanting to leave. The money will be spent on a huge new hydro electric dam, industrial parks, environmental schemes and leisure facilities, for Albanians. By the way, 213,000 children in the UK could be living with lead poisoning because of faulty plumbing in over 100 schools. Not enough money to fix that though. How do they get away with it? The pro-immigration side of the debate are so bad at arguing their case. They often avoid very real concerns people might have about immigration with dismissive, twee-sounding memes. “um I think you will find that fish and chips are actually Portuguese, your car is German, and your coffee is Italian. I’ll have you know my wife is French and she is lovely”. Are you stupid? Racists aren’t worried about French women, they’re worried about tens of thousands of young men from some of the poorest countries in the world. “Pretty hypocritical for the British to spent 200 years colonising the world and then complain about foreigners in their country”. We’re trying to make immigrants look good not compare them to the Amritsar massacre. Most people lie somewhere in the middle. They want more high-skilled and educated immigration but want lower levels of other forms of migration. That’s fair. But whether you want a liberal or restrictive immigration system, you can’t have it if there isn’t a system at all. The 2010 to 2024 Tory government will go down in history as the worst British government since the Irish Famine of the 1840s. Unlike, say, the Thatcher government, who at the very least had a vision for the country and an ideological motive, the current Conservative government do not, and have never, had any reason behind what they are doing. They’ve been winging it this whole time. “Many on the left would be shocked by how apolitical most of the Conservative party is. There is currently no theory in conservative politics. One former MP once told me that when he asked his association why they had picked him for a safe seat, he was told ‘It was the lovely way you spoke about your wife at the selection’. Many MPs come to parliament without any real belief other than a view that ‘good things are good, and we should do more of them, and bad things are bad’.” All that they do isn’t because of any deep ideological beliefs, it’s because they’re bored. “Now, I don’t want to be a complete and utter killjoy, but I’ve just run the gauntlet here at Tescos in Haslingden with my kids, past all the discounted toys, only to see that the Easter Bunny is already on the shelf. Easter, 31st of March this year. Let me know in the comments below whether you think Easter is coming to our supermarkets and shops too early.” In 1914, at age 22, Harold MacMillan dropped out of Oxford university to command a troop of working-class men on the front lines of France. He was shot twice and played dead in a shell hole for 12 hours, reading a pocket book of ancient Greek while he waited for help. The upper-class Anthony Eden earned himself a Military Cross at the Somme for carrying a wounded soldier to safety, under heavy German fire. It’s no surprise that when these men later became Conservative Prime Ministers in the 50s, they presided over social democratic Britain, where taxes on the rich were high, social security was generous, and the gap between the rich and poor was at its smallest in our nation’s history. At age 22, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Michael Gove, and the rest of the Tory leadership were finishing up at Oxford university. They’ve never had to interact with the povvos, they’ve never set foot out of timeless country villages into the brutalist post-industrial nothing-scape that most of us live in. They grew up attending fancy private schools, learning about how their ancestors rode gallantly into battle, administered whole provinces of India by themselves, or guided the Empire to victory in a world war. They probably felt like they were missing all the fun. That’s what Brexit was about. It wasn’t about building a strong, sovereign Britain outside the EU, or else they would have done that, or at least tried to – it was about getting their photograph in a history textbook alongside their Great Grandpa, and then…well that’s your legacy secured really. Everything else is just killing time. …or at worst, engaging in corruption. Take for example Rishi Sunak, a millionaire so out of touch that he asks a homeless man if he works ‘in business’. Who’s wife is richer than the King and who owns £700 million worth of shares in her father’s company Infosys, that refuses to stop paying taxes to Russia and is close business partners with oil giants BP and Shell. Infosys worked on Blockchain technology with AlfaBank, a Russian bank formerly run by Tory member Alexander Knaster. Until it was sanctioned in March 2022, the bank worked for the Russian government. The former deputy finance minister of Russia is married to a Tory member who paid almost £300,000 for private meetings with Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. Boris received £27,000 worth of discount luxury food from a company owned by the wife of a Tory Lord – that Tory Lord is the owner of JCB, which David Cameron’s government spent millions of taxpayer money advertising abroad. In 2013 David Cameron received a donation of £177,000 from the Russian PR company New Century Media, a company that had previously worked with the Russian government to promote a ‘positive image’ of Russia in the UK. That same year, David Cameron appointed Dido Harding, his friend he met at university, to the House of Lords. Harding attends the same horse-racing club in the town of former Secretary of Health Matt Hancock, who in 2020 appointed Harding as the head of the UK’s Covid-19 testing system. The horse-racing club was formerly controlled by Rose Paterson, wife of Tory MP Owen Paterson, who was a consultant for the company Randox, which not only sponsors the Jockey Club but was also given half a billion pounds during the pandemic for “testing and diagnostics”. Hancock was eventually kicked out of his office for having an affair with intern Gina Coladangelo, who got the internship job because her brother is the executive director of Partnering Health ltd, which was given a multi-million pound contract for NHS Wales, by who else but Rishi Sunak. It turns out 20% of all contracts issued in the Covid-19 pandemic for protective equipment, £20bn in total, were awarded to companies headed by Conservative party members. And this doesn’t even scratch the tip of the iceberg. How do they get away with all this? Surely there is some kind of anti-corruption department to keep track of all this, right? Well there was actually a guy called the “anti-corruption champion”, but he resigned from the job two years ago and a successor was never appointed. Also, he’s a Tory MP. Also, he’s married to Dido Harding. But would it all be so bad if this privately-educated cabal of toffs were actually good at their jobs? “…the MP accused of watching pore in the House of Commons…” “…he allegedly told a senior civil servant to “slit your throat”” “He is facing very serious allegations that he reportedly offered to lobby ministers on behalf of the gambling industry” “they have now made more than a hundred referrals for fixed-penalty notices as a result of those inquiries” “Does anyone ever say ‘You know what, you’ve done a good job cause everyone else has just done nothing, no?” “I have to say I was somewhat astonished by the speech of the shadow home secretary who can’t even get the name of the country right, talking about the Kigali government, when we’re talking about Rwanda” “During his trial the former health secretary had to crawl through a tunnel while covered in sludge and bugs” “Mr Johnson compared himself to…Moses. He also quoted Lenin.” “Peppa Pig World is very much my kind of place. Uh It- It- it has it uh i-i-it has a uh, very safe streets, uh…” “uh…[heavy breathing] uh…um…forgive me…” OK, you got me, I admit, this video is slightly one-sided. So in the interests of balance, we should at least let the Tories defend themselves. Judging by opinion polls, finding a genuine supporter of the current government is pretty unlikely. But there is a sect of disillusioned conservatives who don’t deny the problems we face, but suggest that the Tories are suffering from some kind of diminished responsibility. The argument goes something like; Well for the first five years it was the Coalition with the LibDems, and we were recovering from a worldwide financial crisis that affected all countries, not just us. Then there was Brexit which took up too much of the government’s calendar to do anything else. Then it was the pandemic, and now another global crisis which has hampered the Tories’ ability to do what they wanted. And the budget cuts didn’t really do much damage anyway, it’s a productivity issue that started way before 2010. I think this is a pretty rotten excuse; even if you agree that governments can’t be held liable for things they didn’t want to do because of unforeseen circumstances…it’s a lie anyway. The Tories did want to do all this. Because one demographic has consistently benefited from the Tories’ rule, which convinces me that these outcomes were a deliberate choice, not an accident. One demographic that have been immune from all the budget cuts and cruel assaults on our livelihoods: Old People. Specifically, wealthy old people. Since 2017, every single age group has taken a hit to their household income EXCEPT people over 65…who have faced no loss of income whatsoever. Quite the opposite. If you were born in Britain before 1973, congratulations. You win. Britain will enter her twilight years just as you enter yours. All the horrible things discussed in this video don’t apply to you. Let’s look at some of the ways Britain is disproportionately catered towards the interests of middle and upper class old people. Pensions are ‘triple locked’ – each year, the state pension grows by at least 2.5%, or to match the inflation rate, or the average national income, whichever is highest. And this is fine, but it’s the only benefit that has this – and it’s universal. The wealthy get free money just as much as the poor people who actually need it. The disabled, the unemployed, young carers, public-sector employees, healthcare workers are all at the mercy of inflation and the generosity of the government to keep their payments above inflation. Most of the time they need to go on strike to get it. What this results in is pensioners having higher incomes than working age citizens for the first time in history. Half of young people support the construction of HS2, with only 10% opposed. In the over 65s, the support is flipped. Because you know who the number 1 demographic that opposes building more housing and infrastructure; it’s old people! It’s always old people! 20% of nightclubs have closed permanently since 2020. Nightlife regulated out of existence. “Why is nobody having children these days” Probably because elderly middle class people don’t want you to get married, and they don’t want you to own your own house, and they don’t want your family to have any fun. It’s not even like a passive dislike of young people, it’s an active assault on their livelihoods. Like trying to ban the under 25s from driving at night or carrying passengers…in one of the safest countries in the world for road traffic. Will this apply to the over 80s, who cause just as many accidents? Didn’t think so, you paternalist, freedom-hating pillock. Even down to the NHS algorithms that decide who deserves liver transplants. A Financial Times investigation found that older patients, who are more likely to suffer from liver failure due to poor diet choices, are almost always placed higher on the transplant list than younger patients who were born with serious incurable genetic diseases. This algorithm, by the way, has no human input, cannot be overruled by physicians, and patients cannot appeal its decision. But what is the most frustrating is how wilfully oblivious old people can be towards the problems young people face. In response to people being unable to afford food, Tory MP Brendan Clarke-Smith said: “buy the Tesco value one”. In response to the epidemic of raw sewage being dumped across the country, Tory MP Damian Green said: “I remember as a child in South Wales swimming in Sewage”. Going back to the 1950s, you can see how Tory campaign posters promised: Less tax, more sugar! They say. A better future is possible. Today, the Tory message to the public is this: Eat gruel and swim in shit. After 14 years in power, this is the best we can give you. And they make no attempt at hiding how they want to boost the power of old people at the detriment of young people. In 2022, ID at polling stations was made mandatory for the first time in British history – another fine example of the erosion of the high-trust society under the Tories – but the forms of ID that are considered valid to vote with are nakedly tilted against young people, poor people, and working families: rent books, 18+ oyster cards, and student ID do not count. But 60+ oyster cards do! Thankfully this tactic didn’t work, because elderly conservatives naturally forgot to bring ID. But they made no attempt at hiding their intentions, and are completely unrepentant about having ruined a perfectly fine system: Older generations are more likely to support a reintroduction of national service – you know, conscription in the army. Conveniently now that they’re all too old to be conscripted themselves. Some military leaders are suggesting troop numbers need to quadruple to be able to fight in the event of a confrontation with Russia. This was around the same time as a poll came out that said 40% of young Brits would dodge conscription if a war did break out. And I don’t blame them. Liberty. Prosperity. Opportunity. These are things worth fighting for, and modern Britain offers none of them. We would be fighting for gruel and 100 Chess Sets. Sorry, chess tables. House of Commons leader Penny Mordaunt recently spoke out in favour of a kind of national service that wouldn’t be military based, but where all 16 year-olds would be automatically signed up to complete a set number of ‘volunteering hours’ per year. She claimed it would “harness young people’s goodwill and community spirit, tap into the energy and imagination of the next generation, and promote good mental health and resilience”. We all know what that would really look like: young people, spending a year of their life, cleaning dog poo, picking up litter, washing cars, for free, because there isn’t enough money to pay actual workers to do the job. The Telegraph recently ran an article about the “growing size of Britain’s welfare state”. And they included a handy calculator to let you know how much of your taxes goes towards these benefit scroungers and wastrels leeching off society. And it turns out most of my taxes go towards subsidising old people, who hate me. Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as saying “To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty”. Well when I was 20, the pandemic hit. I gave up two years of my life to protect old people. So I wouldn’t pass on a disease that was basically harmless for me, but deadly for the elderly. Your early 20s are the most important years when shaping the trajectory your life, and I had to waste them at home. I didn’t get my final two years at university. At least, not the real uni experience. I didn’t get time to develop professional skills, I was in the middle of an internship in March 2020. So what did they reward us young people with for our valiant sacrifice? More taxes. High rent. High student loan interest. No fun. No travel. No help from the state. Shutting down everywhere interesting. While the older generations get a tax cut. While elderly conservatives get to live in a museum that is neither well-preserved nor educational, oblivious to how the 90% really live. We do not live in a country, we live in a retirement home. The Conservatives did this. They have had 14 years of power, 9 years of absolute power. They turned a country that wasn’t perfect, but was doing pretty good for itself, into an international joke. For no reason. No ideological goal in mind. What do the Tories stand for? Sound economics? Limited government? Law and order? Controlled borders? Defending the Constitution? Cultural conservatism? No. Just a herd of brainless, directionless cattle, milling around, reacting slowly, bumping into things, leisurely strolling from crisis to crisis. I…don’t know how to fix all this. If you still think electoral politics will save us, then get out and campaign, good on you. If you want to emigrate, go for it. If you think the whole thing should be burned to the ground, just wait, and parliament will burn down by itself. That’s not a joke, it’s going to happen. But if I had to give you one instruction, if you do one thing to remedy this situation: The bare minimum is that you walk into that polling booth next election, hold your nose, and tick the box for whichever candidate is most likely to beat your local Conservative. I don’t care if it’s a spineless Labour samurai of bureaucracy, a shit-eating Liberal Democrat, or an illiterate national party stooge. Because no matter who gets elected, I promise you they will not be any worse than the fascist gangsters of the Conservative party. A change of government won’t turn this country around, what, you think Labour are going to reverse this? It will only buy us more time. But it is the first, smallest, and most important step towards building a better Britain. Even if that step is taken, there is still a lot of work to be done. Millions of houses. Trillions spent on infrastructure. A country with more and more freedom each year, not less and less. If you’re watching this long in the future, only you will know if we achieved this.