I was standing in an endless queue at the local Post Office a mile’s walk from our house (you can forget parking), and reflecting on the fact that thirteen years ago there used to a sub-post office two hundred yards from where we live, plus two others within half a mile, and that, even allowing for inflation, I’d have paid a lot less for the privilege of posting a small parcel first class, and there might have been a vague chance of it reaching its destination the following day.
That got me wondering whether anything run by the government – anything whatsoever – has actually got better for your average citizen, i.e. a wage-earning, law-abiding taxpayer who doesn’t rely on other people to subsidize their lives (which narrows it down to about ten percent of the population).
I can immediately think of many groups whose lot has improved dramatically under Labour: criminals, many of whom would only wind up in jail if they broke in and refused to leave, and who can seemingly prey on the rest of us without fear of the police infringing their basic human right to carry out their chosen trade unmolested; illegal immigrants have done well too - once here, the chances of them being tracked down and thrown out appear to be infinitely remote.
There are benefits recipients, of course (or “clients” or “customers” – or whichever ludicrous term is preferred these days): their tax-funded income has risen steadily, and there seems to be no particularly pressing reason for them ever to re-enter the World of Work - in fact, many of them would be worse off if they did.
Teenage mums have never had it so good.
Dentists and doctors seem to be making out like bandits, thanks to that monumentally idiotic woman, Patricia Hewitt – a quarter of a mill per annum for handing out aspirins and refusing to treat anyone at home seems a fairly good deal to me (my doc appears to upgrade his top-of-the-range Beamer at least once a year – go on, son, fill yer boots!). Nurses, too, are doing all right, and teachers have seen their salaries rise in real terms.
Finally, there’s the vast, burgeoning army of semi-educated seat-polishers working for the state, who, despite never being asked to work any harder or more efficiently, have seen their salaries rise faster than those poor saps in the private sector whose taxes pay their wages. Local council leaders and NHS Trust managers and public service broadcasting execs and police chiefs are all now vying to get onto the Sunday Times “Rich List”.
Of course, many of us are financially better off than we were 13 years ago – but that’s only because we’re living a colossal lie: we all owe a fortune in terms of the budget deficit. Anyone can live high off the hog for a while if only they can find someone stupid enough to hand them vast sums of money. For instance, you and I are currently subsidizing everybody who works for any bank which is now part or wholly-owned by the government. And the guys at the top keep sucking up those bonuses: just as foreign aid essentially means taking money from poor people in rich countries and handing it over to rich people in poor countries, our tax regime now involves extracting money from poor people in what used to be a rich country and handing it over to the sort of rich people who made this a poor country.
But even before we start paying off the deficit (as if!) we pay a far greater percentage of our income in direct taxes (mugging) and indirect taxes (burglary). And under a Labour government – who would have predicted that? And, of course, the cost of food and petrol and private schools and heating and foreign holidays and insurance have all gone through the roof.
The NHS has disimproved markedly. People are dying in their thousands thanks to killer infections caused mainly by third-world cleaners and lazy nurses, helped by the absence of ward sisters or matrons - i.e. the sort of grown-ups who might be in danger of maintaining standards. If you’re allowed to actually see a doctor, there may prove to be an insuperable language barrier.
Education has got worse. Oh yes, the exam results have improved no end, but many state school “students” sit pretend “everyone’s a winner!” exams weighted in favour of the illiterate and the non-numerate (in contrast, private school pupils sit proper, old-fashioned exams which actually require knowing stuff). Even when a teacher wants to improve their class’s performance by excluding disruptive junior psychopaths, lefty nitwit “governors” insist that the little bastards be allowed back in. Schools minister Ed Balls tells teachers they’ll have his support in getting rid of troublemakers - but, as we all know, he’s a mendacious scoundrel.
Are we safer than we used to be? Of course not. Since the police gave up policing in favour of social engineering, Haringey and Hackney have far worse crime rates than East Harlem and the South Bronx, let alone most wussy little European capitals. And the UK as a whole is more violent that the US or South Africa. God, it makes you proud!
Traffic’s appalling – as we all know. Rail travel? Er… The Tube? Nope.
Still, our Parliament is the envy of the world…. Oops. Try again.
Anyway, we’ve abolished boom and bu... Ah!
Still, being an island has allowed us to keep tight control of our borders...Sorry!
Well, there’s always the special relationship with the United St... Hmm.
So I ask once more – of those things the government controls, what got better? Anything? One little, teensie-weensie, tiny, insignificant thing? Anyone?
Looking back on that mad, joyous day in 1997 when Tony Blair was elected to revive the nation following seventeen years of Tory misrule, could any of us, no matter how rabidly anti-Socialist, have predicted just how effectively, how comprehensively Labour would manage to bring us to our knees? Well, yes, of course we could, and many of us did, because we’d lived through the whole sorry, sleazy, embarrassing nightmare in the 1970s – the last time these morons were in charge.
And the Tories can’t even get above 40% in the polls?
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