I’ve been reading the newspapers every day for the past 60 years, ever since I started delivering them aged 11.
Sometimes I’d get so engrossed in the Daily Mail, Express, Mirror or the old Daily Sketch that I’d be late for school.
All human life was there, as the now defunct News of the World used to boast.
It’s a habit I’ve never shaken. But today I wince when the papers come through the door. What new horrors will they bring?
Frankly, I’ve never been more depressed than reading today’s headlines. And I lived and worked in the grim 1970s, from typing by candlelight because of the power cuts caused by miners’ strikes, through petrol shortages, the sterling crisis, IMF bailout and inflation at 25 per cent, to the Winter of Discontent, which left the dead unburied and rubbish piled high in the streets. (Bit like Brum today.)
However bad things were – and maybe it was the optimism of youth – there was a sense that things could only get better.
Today, though, nothing seems to work, no one in authority seems to care, and to my mind at least there doesn’t seem to be any light at the end of the tunnel.
In fact, with almost four more years of this hopeless Labour government, things can only get worse – especially if that opportunist chancer Andy Burnham replaces Surkeir.
We have an epidemic of shoplifting in Britain as police have withdrawn from the streets
On the eve of the Labour conference, Burnham has given a series of interviews setting out his far-Left manifesto. More borrowing, more spending and tax, tax, tax the ‘rich’ until – to use a popular phrase from the Seventies – the pips squeak.
He proposes a ‘mansion tax’ to clobber London and the South East and a revival of Gordon Brown’s cynical 50p top rate of income tax – which actually cut revenues and would lead to even more wealthy individuals joining the exodus of millionaires and non-doms who have already left, taking their money with them.
The minority of high earners already pay the lion’s share of income tax in order to subsidise the more than 50 per cent of the population who take out more in benefits than they put in.
And the welfare bills, heading for £100 billion a year, will keep on soaring. We’ve just learned that since the pandemic around 700,000 people have been signed off suffering from ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’ and 250 more are joining them every single day.
Give me strength. This is economic insanity. Even when unemployment was high in the 1970s, no one was getting paid not to work because they were a bit fed up. Mental Elf is one of the great scams of our day.
It’s also reported that around a million benefit claimants will be £2,500 a year better off than those on the minimum wage who bother to get out of bed and go to work in the morning.
Two more headlines: One in 20 of our remaining pubs will close next year, with the loss of 12,000 jobs because of extortionate alcohol duty, sky-high business rates and Labour’s lunatic National Insurance raid. More than 1,100 pubs and restaurants have shut and 89,000 jobs in hospitality have been lost since Rachel From Complaints’ disastrous Budget. So much for looking after ‘working people’.
Meanwhile, the housing market has collapsed because of widespread rumours that Reeves will raise property taxes again on even modest homes. Last month alone, 20 per cent of sales fell through as buyers got cold feet.
Migrant families as they wade into the water to get a ‘taxi boat’ to take them to the UK in Gravelines, France
Nor is it just the economic outlook where the picture is bleak. Back in the 1970s, we had police stations on every High Street and coppers pounding the beat.
Today, the police have withdrawn from the streets and we’ve got an epidemic of stabbings, phone thefts and, especially, robberies from shops.
You don’t have to look far for the evidence. I’ve just watched a video on the internet featuring two thieves helping themselves to goodies from a supermarket in South London. The shortest oik has a Deliveroo box on his back, which his oppo is filling with booze, food, etc, from the shelves while the store guard looks on impotently. They then stroll off into the night, unconcerned about being apprehended.
Another vid this week shows a gang of ‘Eastern European’ women in Glasgow cleaning out a bridal shop. There are incidents like this everywhere, every day. I wrote recently about a machete fight outside my local chip shop in broad daylight. To the best of anyone’s knowledge, no one has been nicked even though the whole thing was caught on CCTV.
Meanwhile, the Old Bill busy themselves investigating people who post hurty words on social media. And don’t get me started on our two-tier justice system, which this week released a Muslim man who attacked with a knife and threatened to kill someone outside a mosque for setting fire to the Koran. We now effectively have a de facto blasphemy law which protects one religion and one religion alone. The cultural cringe to militant Islam is nauseating and will only encourage extremism.
As the Mail reports, Donald Trump may make some wild allegations, but when it comes to sharia, he’s not that far off the mark. Sharia courts are now prevalent in many areas of Britain, endorsed by Labour politicians.
Another problem we didn’t have in the Seventies was mass immigration. Yet today, it’s top of most voters’ concerns. Every day there’s a new outrage, whether councils laying on £600 taxis to chauffeur migrants to doctor’s appointments or illegals who came here on small boats being put up in four-star hotels – including the Egyptian rapist/terrorist I wrote about earlier this week.
The papers are full of this stuff daily, but nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer as he announced the recognition of Palestine by the UK Government
Trapped like a rabbit in the headlights on the domestic front, Starmer poses unconvincingly as a world statesman. How’s that working out, then?
OK, so he sealed a preferential trade deal with The Donald – better than some countries, admittedly, but the devil will be in the detail and exporters including the steel and Scotch whisky industry haven’t escaped Trump’s tariffs.
Obsessed with cosying up to the EU, he sold out our fishing industry to the French in exchange for British travellers being allowed to use electronic e-gates at European airports. Only we can’t, not yet. Now we learn there are to be further delays of at least another six months. Believe it when it happens.
This week we learned that we won’t even be able to catch the fish the French haven’t Hoovered up. The international fishing council has announced there should be ‘zero’ fishing for cod over the next year in what are nominally British waters. So we’ve had our chips there, too.
He’s also blundered into rewarding Hamas terrorism by recognising a Palestinian state without insisting on the release of a single hostage. (Why? Purely domestic politics. See sharia/militant Islam, above.)
On Ukraine, Surkeir is deluding himself, promising to contribute millions towards buying American weapons for Kyiv, and putting boots on the ground and planes in the air as part of a European-led peacekeeping force.
Who’s he trying to kid? The country is virtually insolvent, we can’t afford proper kit for our own military, our aircraft carriers and Royal Navy ships are constantly in port undergoing repairs and the Armed Forces are at their lowest strength since the Napoleonic Wars.
Now we learn that the UK employs more parking wardens than soldiers – 82,000 traffic wardens plays 73,500 in the regular Army. You couldn’t make it up.
That about sums up Surkeir’s Basket Case Britain. We can’t do much about Israel’s war of self-defence in Gaza, or Russia’s war on Ukraine.
But back home there’s no ceasefire in the war on motorists, now facing a new 9p-a-mile levy, on top of road tax, assorted congestion and ULEZ charges and hefty fines for parking and doing 24mph in ridiculous 20mph zones, which raised a record £2.3 billion last year.
Still, I haven’t gone the full Tom Robinson Band and given up reading the papers altogether.
I’d file this car-crash government under We’re All Going To Hell In A Handcart. But it’s being so cheerful as keeps me going.
