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For the first time in my life, I'm now beginning to think Britain is finished

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Leroy N. Soetoro

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Feb 18, 2024, 8:04:57 PMFeb 18
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/14/for-the-first-time-im-
beginning-to-think-britain-is-finishe/

Britain’s decline over the past 25 years has been staggeringly rapid.
Almost everything is getting worse, and almost nothing is getting better.
Our public and private institutions are broken, presided over by an
incompetent, selfish and narcissistic ruling class. Living standards, when
adjusted properly for living and property costs, are declining.

Even the simplest things don’t work any longer. Queuing, scarcity and
congestion are rife, our infrastructure is embarrassingly poor, and the
honest and hardworking face endless bureaucratic battles to obtain what
they are due. Free riding, crime, disorder, fraud, littering and
generalised rule-bending are rife, and all too often tolerated by
apathetic citizens and an indifferent state. Britain’s residual virtues,
our individualism, independence of mind, tolerance and openness, uniquely
appealing features of our national character, are fading.

Like a frog in boiling water, few saw the full scale of the decline coming
until it was too late, and those who did were ridiculed by the bien-
pensant. Yet even in 2024, when millions now realise that Britain is on
the wrong track, there is no hope of meaningful improvement. The Tories
have been abysmal, but Labour will be even worse: Keir Starmer will double
down on the social-democratic and culturally nihilistic policies tested to
destruction by the Conservatives.

In the 2000s, Britain had a particular idea of itself: a country of post-
Thatcherite property-owners which reconciled modernity and tradition,
globalisation and national self-determination, low-tax dynamism and
fairness, where you didn’t need IDs to vote, where MPs weren’t attacked by
screaming mobs, and where, finally, racism was increasingly a thing of the
past. We saw ourselves as a socially mobile, law-abiding land of high
trust, low corruption, the rule of law, improving race relations and
religious toleration: a uniquely open society and a model to the Western
world.

Such a vision is now largely obsolete. An Englishman’s home was his
castle, making a huge difference to our national psyche, until our
deliberate policy of rationing new housing at a time of mass immigration
robbed the under-40s of the chance of owning anything of their own. “This
is a free country”, we used to maintain when presented with another
idiotic proposal to control us, but that too is over, killed off by the
woke war on free speech, the jailing of Christian preachers, the sugar
tax, the surveillance society and the Covid lockdowns.

In narrow GDP growth terms, we continue to outperform the true laggards on
the continent, as Brexiteers correctly predicted, but that should be no
consolation. Our manufacturing sector is being priced out of global
markets by the rush to net zero, our energy policy is a hideous farce, our
misregulated City is in decline, and our tax system an absurd conspiracy
against hard work and merit, with marginal tax rates back at 1970s levels
for some.

The socialist NHS, despite massive increases in funding, is a horror show,
and one of the main reasons not to live in the UK. Some 5.6 million adults
are on out-of-work benefits, and yet immigration is running at
extraordinary levels. Our Armed Forces have been slashed, and are now
being subject to a woke takeover.

Yet while all of these instances of national enfeeblement are tragic, they
pale in comparison with the most terrifying regression of them all. We
thought that we had progressed decisively as a society, that we had
vanquished racism and religious discrimination, that the institutions of
our liberal state would prevent a minority from facing persecution, and
that our ruling class would never allow any subset of the population to be
openly hated and othered again.

How wrong we were. That anti-Semitism, the oldest of hatreds, is back on
the streets and screens of Britain, is terrifying enough; but the fact
that this explosion of prejudice is being treated in such a cavalier
fashion by the authorities and the mainstream broadcast media – and in
some cases is even being rationalised and normalised – is a catastrophic
development that casts doubt about Britain’s very future.

This is the worst moment for Britain’s Jews since the pogroms that
disgraced Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester in the summer of 1947. The
double-standards, the never ending “pro-Palestine” marches that are
inevitably marred by egregious, open, anti-Semitism and evil slogans, the
bullying, the victim blaming, the spreading of fake news, the wilful,
blatant lies and denialism of Hamas’s atrocities, the obsessive interest
in, and delegitimisation, of Israel, a state that accounts for just 0.25
per cent of the Middle East’s landmass, is its only multi-religious
democracy and which is fighting for survival against neighbours that
reject its very existence, stink of a replay of the 1930s.

The return of anti-Semitism is not just an existential threat to Britain’s
tiny, 292,000-strong Jewish community, but a damning indictment of a
Britain that is regressing into darkness. As Lord Sacks put it in 2016,
“the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews … the appearance of
anti-Semitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early
warning sign of collective breakdown.”

Already a non-Jewish MP has resigned out of fear for his own safety.
Traditional British democratic norms are being upended by far-Left and
Islamist extremists. Cranks, conspiracy theorists and racists appear to
have entered mainstream politics in significant numbers, and many seem
attracted by the Labour Party.

Anti-Semites never just target Jews. They are full-service, equal
opportunity bigots who oppress and impoverish and destroy all that they
touch, and despise freedom and human flourishing.

Starmer is genuinely committed to fighting anti-Semitism, but he has
proved unforgivably slow in his attempts at rooting out prejudice in
recent days. He rightly purged the Corbynites, but the rot in his party
evidently goes far deeper, having contaminated even “centrist” or “Right-
wing” circles. Some in his party are seeking votes among far-Left and
Islamist extremists: a morally righteous party would announce that they
are not interested in such voters, and terminate all relevant candidates,
even if such a stance costs them power.

In the absence of such a step, we face the prospect of many new Labour MPs
being, at the very least, soft on anti-Semitism. The Tories have failed,
but Labour will be infinitely worse. Britain is hanging on by a thread.


--
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.

Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019.
Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed
dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.
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