Here’s a sampling of recent headlines from the country that loves to lecture others on freedom of speech and rule of law.
Racist Tube rant woman Jacqueline Woodhouse jailed: A London Underground passenger has been jailed for 21 weeks after she admitted hurling racist abuse at fellow passengers. – BBC
Girl gang who kicked woman in the head while yelling ‘kill the white slag’ freed after judge hears ‘they weren’t used to drinking because they’re Muslims’. – Daily Mail
Police misused powers during royal wedding, protesters claim. (AK: on preemptive arrests of republicans) – The Independent
The hijab has liberated me from society’s expectations of women: Wearing the hijab doesn’t have to be about religious dedication. For me, it is political, feminist and empowering. (AK: What’s worse than a feminist, and a radical Islamist? A feminist Islamist) – The Guardian
No 10 guide to changing nappies and baby talk: New parents will be given government advice on changing nappies, breastfeeding and “baby talk” under a multi-million pound initiative to support family life. – The Telegraph
UK economy’s fall into recession deeper than expected: Contraction of 0.3%, coupled with more bad news from the eurozone, increases pressure on government to intervene to boost economic growth. – The Guardian
Is there any reason, any reason whatsoever, for other countries to listen to Britain on absolutely anything? Flee as quickly as you can possibly can! 😯
Touché!
I’m a “little Englander”, so I wouldn’t dream of telling others how to organise their society.
Is there anything positive I can think of to say? Hmm…
I guess Britain/England often experiences profound social change earlier than other countries. We had our republican revolution almost a century and a half before France, did the whole industrialisation thing first etc. So maybe we’re just showing you the future. Beware – don’t let this happen to you!
North Sea oil fucked Britain up. Without it would have been forced to have a sane industrial policy but because of the oil money it could continue thatcherism to long
UK could have done what Norway did with its North Sea oil revenues and established a Sovereign Wealth Fund which among other things would support aged pensioners and other social welfare schemes. But of course that is a “socialist” idea!
Incidentally the conservative Howard government (1996 – 2007) established a similar fund for Australia but the following ALP government under Kevin Rudd used the monies to prop up the economy during the 2008 GFC.
It is having to much money. A SWF doesn’t help with that
An SWF could have been used to siphon off excess revenues to avoid overheating the economy and causing inflation. Excess funds might then be invested in infrastructure projects, sprucing up schools and hospitals, building public housing, funding new start-up ventures or encouraging scientific research. In the British case, once the coal mines were closed, the SWF could release funding to new industries and to adult education schemes to retrain unemployed miners.
This would not have conflicted greatly with the Thatcher govt’s commitment to deregulating the economy according to monetarist principles. The SWF would assist in regulating the money supply and controlling inflation. Some of what I mention above isn’t exactly what Milton Friedman would approve but they’re in line with the govt’s role of mop-up and stimulating the economy to support free markets.
It wasn’t overheating etc. that was the problem. It is having to much money so you do what is ideological right instead of real world right. This explains why the Scandinavian countries are so successful or the US in the 50s/60s. Their taxes were so high that the only way to increase tax revenue in the mid term was to grow the economy which forced them to do the right thing instead of the ideologically correct thing. If you are instead to much on the left of the Laffer curve the thinking is to much, we could always increase taxes if needed.
Yes. They exploited it fast, and were exporting it at $10/bbl. when production peaked in 1999. The decline rate was so fast, they were a net importer by 2004, for almost $40/bbl.
And since then, production has fallen further, imports have grown, and the price has gone up, up, up.
What boneheads.
North Sea oil is hard to exploit so it isn’t that surprising that they were pumping it up at $10/bbl. It is the semi sane thing to do. But it is true that from a national defense point of view a slower rate of extraction would be smarter.
The British were the first out of peasantry, became industrial workers, merchants and colonizers. They are among the first to be cannibalized by the high finance industry, the first democratic society under ubiquitous surveilance. Perhaps the first to have a modern Caesar… then the plough again!
May we live in interesting times.
Yes, there are lots of headlines coming out of Britain that can perplex and induce rage. Glad we have a very perceptive individual like yourself Anatoli. I could say a million things.
It is ultimately sad seeing the decline of my country (not that I am saying we should pretend we should rule the world, just be economically and socially stable), although I am not really supportive of the establishment/elite (you know what that means) but the general decline of the country as a whole is a disaster. It’s just fucking crazy, to think so many people worked hard to build a well ordered and prosperous society and it is destroyed in barely a generation.
Lets start with the £24 billion cost of olympics (first web source I could find) at a time when the armed forces, the navy in particularly, face massive scaling down.
Also, are you aware of the prescence of Islamic sex grooming gangs, the Rochdale child sex case (google) in particular. Second generation (or first) Pakistani men, brought up in their conservative belief system are taught to see white girls as easy meat, especially when they, shock horror, are out on the streets unsupervised wearing skirts!. There was a massive shitstorm about this (and censorship on the part of newspapers) because the organized ‘anti racist’ lobby feared that people would point out the link, that it’s mostly people from one race/religion are behind a wave of child sex acts(abuse, gang rape, pimping etc). The social services were afraid to bring it up, the police forces were afraid to bring it up, ah yes, ‘cultural sensitivities’. So girls were abused for years and even now it is still quite verboten to adress it.
The UK has been in decline since the 1890’s. Can’t say it is something of the last few years. And spending on defense is a waste of money, especially if their only use is as auxiliaries for the hyper power who is experiencing its one decline Compared to that spending on the Olympics is wise. And that is IMHO foolish for a country like Britain.
Male adolescences who are not properly supervised are bad news period. Doesn’t matter if they are Muslims, Polish or West Indies. Would even argue that Muslims are slightly better news. So start to fear the Polish in a few years.
Grace,
I was once told by a police officer at a seminar years ago that many Lebanese Muslim families in Sydney tend to spoil their male children and allow them to boss their sisters around. The girls were treated like drudges. Often it was the mothers and female relatives who differentiated between the male and female children in this way. Fathers were too busy earning a living in car-making factories (now long since gone) or small businesses.
We now have the phenomenon where Muslim males are underachievers at school, university and in employment (not that there is much around for unskilled workers) and Muslim females are overachievers at the same. It’s apparent even where I work: we have a few Muslim women lawyers and paralegals, recognisable by their names or headscarfs, but no Muslim male equivalents.
Not so long ago in Bankstown (a Sydney suburb), a group of Lebanese men preyed on Anglo-Australian teenage girls and was charged and convicted of rape and other assault charges. There’s been no repeat since. These days if Lebanese Muslim boys or men get picked up by police, it’s for illegal drag-racing and hooning around in customised cars.
Incidentally the Chief Crown Prosecutor who brought the Pakistani sex-grooming gang to trial was himself a Pakistani and while he agreed that Asian men were responsible for much on-streetnsex-grooming of teenage girls, he said that the girls selected were perceived to be unwanted by their families and communities because they were on the streets late at nights and in the early mornings. So they were picked on because they were weak. The CCP also noted that most sex-grooming in the UK is done by white men acting alone.
http://issanghazni.wordpress.com/2012/05/13/stop-racialising-the-rochdale-child-grooming-crimes/
http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/CPS_VAW_report_2011.pdf
As someone who lives in Britain I agree with pretty much everything said here especially some of the things said by Jennifer and Charly.
Britain faced serious problems in the 1960s and 1970s when with the end of Empire it no longer could rely on captive markets for its goods. However the country still had potential strengths that could have been built on. Unfortunately in the 1980s North Sea Oil made it possible for Britain to avoid engaging in the difficult long term work and planning that a sustained turnaround would have needed. Things then got even worse when in the late 1980s financial deregulation let the financial community in the City of London off the leash. By the 1990s the British economy was floating on North Sea Oil and on a succession of uncontrolled credit booms based on a massively over priced housing market funded by the City of London. The latter of course represented a grotesque misallocation of resources and investment and one which simply sucked in imports leaving the country in permanent deficit. However the “boom” years allowed the British elite to pretend to itself that no fundamental reforms were needed and that it had no need to change its own ultimately amateur system of government and that it could lecture everybody from the Chinese to the Russians and from the Germans to the French about what was the “right” way to do things. It was striking to notice by the way that as Britain during the 1980s became more dependent on North Sea Oil the subject simply stopped being talked about and became taboo.
Now North Sea Oil is becoming depleted and the wealth produced by the giant casino in the City of London is being increasingly exposed as the confidence trick it always was. The wheels are coming off but the elite or at least the political class remains in denial. It is difficult to see any happy outcome ahead.
Thank you, Britain.
We will honour your sacrifice by trying to learn from your many mistakes.
***No 10 guide to changing nappies and baby talk: New parents will be given government advice on changing nappies, breastfeeding and “baby talk” under a multi-million pound initiative to support family life. – The Telegraph***
What is wrong with this one? This actually seems quite sensible. Otherwise, the rest of the list does suggest the UK is in decline.