The famous Saatchi & Saatchi “Labour isn’t Working” slogan of the late 1970s which, undoubtedly, helped propel Margaret Thatcher to power is coming back to haunt us in a new form: Britain isn’t working. Originally, it referred to high levels of unemployment in Britain, largely because of years of mismanagement by the Labour government. However, Britain is not working now for multiple different reasons. These include the stranglehold that ‘woke’ ideology has on so many of our public institutions, on the one hand, and a series of strikes, on the other.
The ‘woke’ grip
Many organisations no longer function, or no longer function in the way originally intended, because they are stuck in a ‘woke’ iron grip. Take our police forces (or ‘services’ as they prefer to be styled) which no longer seem capable of solving many crimes. They, nevertheless, pay undue attention to ‘non-crimes,’ especially so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’ which, incidentally, they have been ordered to cease investigating. Crimes go unsolved largely because they go uninvestigated and the number of crimes which some police forces fail to investigate increases with alarming regularity. Thus, burglary does not necessarily merit a visit by a police officer, even in some cases where violence is threatened. Street muggings whereby people are relieved of their mobile phones (I speak from experience) are only recorded by the victim online; you will not speak to a police officer about it. Contrarian and sceptical journalist Toby Young of The Spectator jokes that if your house is broken into and the police seem reluctant to visit, tell them that the robbers have sprayed a transgender epithet on your walls, and they will be round immediately.
Our Border Force, also seemingly infected by ‘woke’ ideology, does not work. While they have not yet adopted the description of a ‘service,’ they seem to act a great deal more like one than anything associated with ‘force.’ As such, they frisk elderly ladies at Heathrow Airport while scooping up thousands of illegal immigrants arriving on our shores, welcome them with a smile, a blanket and hot tea and then, for all intents and purposes, release many of them into the English countryside. The rest go to respectable hotels, sometimes in city centres (again, I speak from experience) where no effort is made either to contain them or to deport them.
The purported ‘jewel in the crown’ of our welfare state, the National Health Service (which remains to be replicated in any other country) is a crumbling edifice of what it used to be. Waiting lists continue to grow, operations are being cancelled, waiting times for ambulances are scandalous and compounded by waits, often of days, in emergency departments, complaints are copious while the bottomless pit into which the government throws our money gets deeper. While frontline services seem to be strapped for cash and personnel, there is a concomitant increase in spending on non-clinical staff including equality and diversity officers.
Our public health system, the part of the National Health Service that tries to keep people out of hospital, is not fit for purpose. In common with health systems worldwide, the mismanagement of the response to COVID-19: the insistence on wearing face masks, known to be ineffective prior to the pandemic and now reconfirmed as such; and the prolonged and repeated lockdowns with the simultaneous paralysis of the National Health Service to accommodate the wildly overestimated figures of COVID hospitalisations. This ironically led to one the biggest public health disasters this country has known in terms of mental health, obesity, alcohol-related deaths, and missed cancer and cardiac screening. This was all compounded by the adverse effect on the economy and education. The only possible mitigation is that they did not see it coming; but that is hard to believe as they were warned by leading experts like the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration.
It transpires that the British Army was, indeed, working well during COVID. It appears that they were busy spying on the British population, monitoring the social media activity of individuals critical of lockdowns and the pandemic response generally and reporting them to the government. The so-called 77th Brigade was responsible for this, even though it is meant to monitor foreign social media accounts for potential security threats. Thus, leading critics of the lockdown—such as above mentioned Toby Young, Mail on Sunday journalist Peter Hitchens, and a leading TalkTV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer—had their activities reported to the government and social media entries, such as YouTube videos, blocked.
The fact that any branch of our armed forces was involved in monitoring British citizens is bad enough, but it also enters the realm of the absurd when one considers that none of the individuals named above made any secret of their activities and commentary related to the pandemic. Toby Young established a blog called Lockdown Sceptics, since morphed into The Daily Sceptic, Peter Hitchens wrote about COVID weekly in his Mail on Sunday column, and Julia Hartley-Brewer was a constant critic of the lockdown policy. The point behind their activities, and that of many others, was precisely to inform the government of the potential harms of lockdown (since vindicated) and to put the ‘pandemic’ into perspective.
Britain on strike
There is another way that Britain has stopped working. To some extent, this has similarities to the events that led to Mrs. Thatcher’s rise to power. These events are referred to as the ‘Winter of Discontent’ when across Britain refuse went uncollected, snow-blocked roads went uncleared, and bodies remained unburied as widespread and coordinated industrial strikes took place. The Labour government, under the leadership of James Callaghan, both downplayed the seriousness of the situation (“Crisis, what crisis?”) and failed to negotiate a solution. Today Britain is on strike again or, at least, some specific sectors are.
Although there are similarities, comparing current industrial action with the Winter of Discontent is facile. Thanks to Mrs. Thatcher, the size and power of the trade unions was severely attenuated and the phenomenon of secondary strikes and secondary picketing, whereby unions in unrelated industries took industrial action, was outlawed. Nevertheless, the nature of the current strikes involving train drivers, nurses, teachers, and university lecturers is different.
Leaving university lecturers aside—few, including the universities, even notice—the strikes by school teachers are a disgrace. Nobody doubts that they may have a case for inflation-matched pay rises (leaving aside the propensity for that to fuel further inflation), but their industrial action is coterminous with the recent COVID-19 lockdowns whereby children were prevented from attending school and, with varying success, taught online. This had a disproportionately adverse effect on children from lower socioeconomic groups. It is also worth noting that teachers were paid in full throughout the lockdown while millions suffered reduced income on furlough and thousands have not been able to return to work due to businesses folding.
Nurses were also fully paid throughout the lockdown. While many worked very hard, many did not, as evidenced by copious TikTok videos emanating from the National Health Service and, especially, from the white elephants referred to as Nightingale wards. These were never used yet remained in place, staffed and empty, for over a year. Even Wuhan had dismantled its emergency COVID-19 hospitals within weeks of the news that it was spreading. The unique aspect of the nurses’ strike is that it is the first time we have had one. There has been industrial action in the past but no withdrawal of labour. All this is at a time when the UK’s general mental and physical health has barely been worse in the modern era. The National Health Service itself is falling apart and, as mentioned above, waiting lists have never been longer.
Finally, the rail strikes. To be fair, train drivers had their employment and income affected for many months of lockdown. However, they are a relatively highly paid sector of the workforce, and their strike is not solely about pay but about conditions and the running of the railways. One issue is the disappearance of train conductors, once considered essential for safety. But trains appear to run safely without them, and it is eminently possible that many trains, for example those in the London underground, could run equally if not more safely without drivers. While it is understandable that workers will fight to save their jobs, they must recognise the reality that is the shambles of our rail system. That is not entirely their fault, but they are a contributing factor. Something is very wrong if someone, as Peter Hitchens has, can report that rail services are more reliable and pleasant on days which purport to be strike days.
Admittedly, therefore, we are a long way from the Winter of Discontent where Britain was deliberately paralysed by strike action. Strikes are certainly adding to our present circumstances but there is an underlying malaise that is leading to a partial paralysis of public services and public bodies. In part, the malaise is a symptom of the woke disease that diverts organisation such as the police and our border force from doing their jobs. In part, the state overreached itself by a significant margin during the COVID lockdown and, having become accustomed to its new found power, seems reluctant to rein it in.
Britain Isn’t Working
Better Pay For NHS Workers Rally in Sheffield in 2020 (Photo by Tim Dennell, CC BY-NC 2.0, via Flickr).
The famous Saatchi & Saatchi “Labour isn’t Working” slogan of the late 1970s which, undoubtedly, helped propel Margaret Thatcher to power is coming back to haunt us in a new form: Britain isn’t working. Originally, it referred to high levels of unemployment in Britain, largely because of years of mismanagement by the Labour government. However, Britain is not working now for multiple different reasons. These include the stranglehold that ‘woke’ ideology has on so many of our public institutions, on the one hand, and a series of strikes, on the other.
The ‘woke’ grip
Many organisations no longer function, or no longer function in the way originally intended, because they are stuck in a ‘woke’ iron grip. Take our police forces (or ‘services’ as they prefer to be styled) which no longer seem capable of solving many crimes. They, nevertheless, pay undue attention to ‘non-crimes,’ especially so-called ‘non-crime hate incidents’ which, incidentally, they have been ordered to cease investigating. Crimes go unsolved largely because they go uninvestigated and the number of crimes which some police forces fail to investigate increases with alarming regularity. Thus, burglary does not necessarily merit a visit by a police officer, even in some cases where violence is threatened. Street muggings whereby people are relieved of their mobile phones (I speak from experience) are only recorded by the victim online; you will not speak to a police officer about it. Contrarian and sceptical journalist Toby Young of The Spectator jokes that if your house is broken into and the police seem reluctant to visit, tell them that the robbers have sprayed a transgender epithet on your walls, and they will be round immediately.
Our Border Force, also seemingly infected by ‘woke’ ideology, does not work. While they have not yet adopted the description of a ‘service,’ they seem to act a great deal more like one than anything associated with ‘force.’ As such, they frisk elderly ladies at Heathrow Airport while scooping up thousands of illegal immigrants arriving on our shores, welcome them with a smile, a blanket and hot tea and then, for all intents and purposes, release many of them into the English countryside. The rest go to respectable hotels, sometimes in city centres (again, I speak from experience) where no effort is made either to contain them or to deport them.
The purported ‘jewel in the crown’ of our welfare state, the National Health Service (which remains to be replicated in any other country) is a crumbling edifice of what it used to be. Waiting lists continue to grow, operations are being cancelled, waiting times for ambulances are scandalous and compounded by waits, often of days, in emergency departments, complaints are copious while the bottomless pit into which the government throws our money gets deeper. While frontline services seem to be strapped for cash and personnel, there is a concomitant increase in spending on non-clinical staff including equality and diversity officers.
Our public health system, the part of the National Health Service that tries to keep people out of hospital, is not fit for purpose. In common with health systems worldwide, the mismanagement of the response to COVID-19: the insistence on wearing face masks, known to be ineffective prior to the pandemic and now reconfirmed as such; and the prolonged and repeated lockdowns with the simultaneous paralysis of the National Health Service to accommodate the wildly overestimated figures of COVID hospitalisations. This ironically led to one the biggest public health disasters this country has known in terms of mental health, obesity, alcohol-related deaths, and missed cancer and cardiac screening. This was all compounded by the adverse effect on the economy and education. The only possible mitigation is that they did not see it coming; but that is hard to believe as they were warned by leading experts like the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration.
It transpires that the British Army was, indeed, working well during COVID. It appears that they were busy spying on the British population, monitoring the social media activity of individuals critical of lockdowns and the pandemic response generally and reporting them to the government. The so-called 77th Brigade was responsible for this, even though it is meant to monitor foreign social media accounts for potential security threats. Thus, leading critics of the lockdown—such as above mentioned Toby Young, Mail on Sunday journalist Peter Hitchens, and a leading TalkTV presenter Julia Hartley-Brewer—had their activities reported to the government and social media entries, such as YouTube videos, blocked.
The fact that any branch of our armed forces was involved in monitoring British citizens is bad enough, but it also enters the realm of the absurd when one considers that none of the individuals named above made any secret of their activities and commentary related to the pandemic. Toby Young established a blog called Lockdown Sceptics, since morphed into The Daily Sceptic, Peter Hitchens wrote about COVID weekly in his Mail on Sunday column, and Julia Hartley-Brewer was a constant critic of the lockdown policy. The point behind their activities, and that of many others, was precisely to inform the government of the potential harms of lockdown (since vindicated) and to put the ‘pandemic’ into perspective.
Britain on strike
There is another way that Britain has stopped working. To some extent, this has similarities to the events that led to Mrs. Thatcher’s rise to power. These events are referred to as the ‘Winter of Discontent’ when across Britain refuse went uncollected, snow-blocked roads went uncleared, and bodies remained unburied as widespread and coordinated industrial strikes took place. The Labour government, under the leadership of James Callaghan, both downplayed the seriousness of the situation (“Crisis, what crisis?”) and failed to negotiate a solution. Today Britain is on strike again or, at least, some specific sectors are.
Although there are similarities, comparing current industrial action with the Winter of Discontent is facile. Thanks to Mrs. Thatcher, the size and power of the trade unions was severely attenuated and the phenomenon of secondary strikes and secondary picketing, whereby unions in unrelated industries took industrial action, was outlawed. Nevertheless, the nature of the current strikes involving train drivers, nurses, teachers, and university lecturers is different.
Leaving university lecturers aside—few, including the universities, even notice—the strikes by school teachers are a disgrace. Nobody doubts that they may have a case for inflation-matched pay rises (leaving aside the propensity for that to fuel further inflation), but their industrial action is coterminous with the recent COVID-19 lockdowns whereby children were prevented from attending school and, with varying success, taught online. This had a disproportionately adverse effect on children from lower socioeconomic groups. It is also worth noting that teachers were paid in full throughout the lockdown while millions suffered reduced income on furlough and thousands have not been able to return to work due to businesses folding.
Nurses were also fully paid throughout the lockdown. While many worked very hard, many did not, as evidenced by copious TikTok videos emanating from the National Health Service and, especially, from the white elephants referred to as Nightingale wards. These were never used yet remained in place, staffed and empty, for over a year. Even Wuhan had dismantled its emergency COVID-19 hospitals within weeks of the news that it was spreading. The unique aspect of the nurses’ strike is that it is the first time we have had one. There has been industrial action in the past but no withdrawal of labour. All this is at a time when the UK’s general mental and physical health has barely been worse in the modern era. The National Health Service itself is falling apart and, as mentioned above, waiting lists have never been longer.
Finally, the rail strikes. To be fair, train drivers had their employment and income affected for many months of lockdown. However, they are a relatively highly paid sector of the workforce, and their strike is not solely about pay but about conditions and the running of the railways. One issue is the disappearance of train conductors, once considered essential for safety. But trains appear to run safely without them, and it is eminently possible that many trains, for example those in the London underground, could run equally if not more safely without drivers. While it is understandable that workers will fight to save their jobs, they must recognise the reality that is the shambles of our rail system. That is not entirely their fault, but they are a contributing factor. Something is very wrong if someone, as Peter Hitchens has, can report that rail services are more reliable and pleasant on days which purport to be strike days.
Admittedly, therefore, we are a long way from the Winter of Discontent where Britain was deliberately paralysed by strike action. Strikes are certainly adding to our present circumstances but there is an underlying malaise that is leading to a partial paralysis of public services and public bodies. In part, the malaise is a symptom of the woke disease that diverts organisation such as the police and our border force from doing their jobs. In part, the state overreached itself by a significant margin during the COVID lockdown and, having become accustomed to its new found power, seems reluctant to rein it in.
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