The academic and historian Glen O’Hara posts something very interesting on Bluesky. It’s about Britain and what a pleasant place it is to live in. I’ll cut and paste what he’s said and take it from there:
The triumph of Britain:
- Social liberalism everywhere
- Good race relations
- Low crime
- Low unemployment
- Economic growth returns
- Got the Covid vax first
- Real wages rising
- Debt lower than most
- Massive personal savings
- Good air quality
- Amazing, thrilling sport
- Women’s sport expanding
Okay, it’s a bit random but there’s a lot of truth in that list. And that’s important because the far right in British politics, aided and abetted by an irresponsible populist right-wing media, is trying to point us in a very different direction.
The likes of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who calls himself Tommy Robinson, and the Fagash Fuhrer Nigel Farage project our country as broken, lawless; a veritable tinderbox ready to explode. With armed criminals and mad axemen, all dodgy foreigners of course, on every street corner, the only way is rioting on the streets. Yet despite their best efforts, Yaxley-Lennon and Farage have failed. And the reason they have failed is simple: Britain is still a great place to live, this year with an actual summer.
We are socially liberal, or at least more socially liberal than we used to be. No one cares if people live and have babies out of wedlock, we are generally more tolerant and understanding of the LGBTQ community, most people are not racist. A few thousand angry men and women chanting ‘Oh, Tommy Tommy’ and ‘Keir Starmer is a cunt’ outside hotels where asylum seekers were put by the last Conservative government does not change that simple reality.
Not all the examples given by O’Hara apply to everyone. We know that. There is way too much poverty, there are far too many people using food banks, many folk have no savings and there are still too many people who for one reason or another are not in work. That will have to change, as the NHS is changing and improving under the new Labour government and, despite the whining of the right-wing press to the contrary, things are definitely getting better.
14 long years of Conservative misrule has sapped our energy, convinced us that politics doesn’t matter, that politicians are all the same. But that’s not true. Until the worldwide financial crash of 2008, the Labour government had changed so much. Britain got much better. Now, we’re in the second year of a Labour government that is having to first fix the mess they inherited and then to make the country better. You won’t read about it in the Mail, Sun, Express, Times, Telegraph or even the increasingly unhinged left of centre Guardian but facts are facts.
Although Brexit has been a disaster for Britain, as we always knew it would be, even in international affairs we are back in the game, as we have seen regarding Ukraine where we have led the coalition of the willing.
This is not a failing country. It’s a recovering country, for sure, and there will be obstacles along the way but the shambles of the Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss (stop laughing at the back) and Sunak years is now a thing of the past. The grown-ups, despite the occasional cock-ups and missteps, are back in the room.
Things are better than you might think. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Yaxley-Lennon and Farage want you to riot. Why not believe in better and be kind? It’s not a hard choice, is it?
