In the late 2000s, particularly following the worldwide financial crisis of 2008, the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, declared that we were ‘Broken Britain’. Everything was broken and nothing worked. It was a smart attack line from the Conservative party and it was complete bollocks. 10 years of a Labour government had made things much better. Ironically, it was David Cameron himself who broke Britain.
When David Cameron formed the Tory government of 2010 in which some Liberal Democrats took jobs, he and his chancellor George Osborne set about a cynical policy of austerity which began to dismantle the public services on which we depend. Austerity was piled onto not the very rich, of course, but the poorest. By the end of the Tory decade, even life expectancy, which had been rising for decades, started to fall. The underfunded NHS started to crumble, with waiting lists almost non-existent in the Labour years now at record levels. In addition, Cameron called the referendum on EU membership, purely to end the debate in his own party once and for all. His gamble failed as a small majority, but a majority nonetheless, ripped us away from the centre of Europe.
As a cup half empty man, I suppose I often look at the negative side of life and expect things to get worse, not better. It’s still disappointing when things do get worse, as I feared they would, and now I wonder if my fear that everything is broken and nothing works has come true.
Take today. Little things, maybe, but lots of them. On our road, the recycling boxes are overflowing and have been for days. There’s been industrial action and subsequent backlogs but we’ve been told to not worry because the bin lorry will be along soon enough. But it hasn’t been. I took some items to the tip today but that was closed too. A visit to the pharmacy revealed that my partner had been prescribed a treatment that has not been available anywhere for months. Our new washing machine died a few days after we got it but John Lewis – John Lewis, that most respected, ethical and reliable company of them – all promised to call us on Saturday, failed to do so and can now offer a visit from an expert but not until Friday (it’s Monday). Our roads are being dug up yet again for the installation of better internet speed and we now have temporary lights down the road, both of which are stuck on red. Our postal service is the worst it has ever been, with items often days, sometimes weeks late, if they ever turn up at all. If I drive around our area, there appear to be small stretches of road in the middle of millions of pot holes. Honestly, if I wanted to find genuine fault with almost anything, I could easily do it. For how much longer will we put up with this?
We have a prime minister, elected by no one, who tells people struggling or even failing to pay their mortgages to “hold your nerve”. I mean, really? How do you hold your nerve when you can’t afford to pay your mortgage and you face possibly losing your home as a result? Only a man with more money than God – Rishi Sunak and his wife are worth around £750 million – could come up with something as stupid and lacking in empathy than that. If David Cameron was the man who started to break Britain, Slippery Sunak is going to be the man to finish the job.
Whether it’s trying to get a GP appointment – “You’re having a heart attack? Well, we can fit you a fortnight next Friday at 8.00 am: is that okay?” – or trying to get enrolled at a dentist, you might as well forget it. Getting a tradesman to turn up on the right day, always assuming they turn up at all, is as much as a gamble as putting money on a horse, except that you are probably more likely to get a winner than you are to get someone to turn up.
And let’s not even talk about the hassle of trying to get around in Bristol where thanks to our useless mayor Not Very Marvellous Marvin Rees it’s becoming impossible to drive anywhere and then find anywhere to park. As for buses – great if you live near the metrobus like us, appalling if you don’t.
I’ve never known times like these. Normally, most things work for most of the time. Sometimes it feels like lots of things aren’t working. Today it feels to me like everything is broken and nothing works. It feels like the country is rudderless and drifting, mainly because it is. We have a weak leader, Sunak, with no obvious vision for the country, an out of touch nobody who has no idea how the rest of us lead our lives, man who thinks that everything will work out fine and dandy if only we hold our nerve. The sheer brass neck of it all.
I’d like a few years of decent or even boring competence, leaders with compassion and vision who will start to fix things. Given the mess Sunak and co are going to leave the country in come the next election, it can’t come soon enough for me. If things carry on as now, people are going to get mad.
Header from the Times. Brilliant, isn’t it?
