The Zimbabwefication of Britain - welcome to the Third World

Our part of London didn’t have any mains water this morning. Same thing happened a few weeks ago. A burst something or other. This doesn’t exactly put us on a par with Pakistani flood victims, but it’s annoying. Last night we failed to get to a Prom because some troglodyte communist thug decided to bring our tube network to a virtual halt. And we’re all wondering whether the Inland Revenue is going to ask us to pay back money we don’t have because they’ve wrongly assessed the tax liabilities of millions of Britons. 


I remember being very upset with a friend back in the early 1980s who suggested Britain was turning into a Third World country. I can’t remember which particular event prompted her assertion – the Brixton Riots, probably – but I remember arguing that she was out by several years. After all, in the 1970s, Britain really had approached the status of a banana republic: our cars were rubbish, clothes and interior decorating styles were appalling, industry had been brought to its knees by vicious communists, council workers were refusing to bury the dead, and our chancellor had to go crawling to the IMF for a hand-out because he’d spent all our money subsidising pointless heavy industry jobs in Labour constituencies. For a while there, this country really did look ungovernable.

Then along came Thatch. As I pointed out to my friend at the time, it was Mrs. T’s attempts to halt the Zimbabwefication of Britain (or, more likely, “Ugandification” at that time) that were causing civil unrest: our rivers of blood were a sign that, as a nation, we were laboriously and painfully climbing out of the basket to which the rest of Europe had, with justification, consigned us. 

Besides, I hate all that triumphant left-wing “Look, we’re just as evil/greedy/incompetent/repressive/poor as everyone else!” nonsense which always signals that some smelly little tyranny is about to be championed by someone who has enjoyed the plush benefits of life in a Western democracy. I have a book by Norman Parkinson, “Left Luggage”, written in the early 1960s in which, as part of a general attack on the Left, he spends several pages dealing (seriously) with the argument that the Soviet economy will soon overtake America’s. (Of course, if Barry Obama had been in charge at the time, it might very well have succeeded). The fact that anyone ever entertained such a deranged proposition is testament to the capacity of socialists for believing anything that discredits Western civilisation.

But – and I’m almost ashamed to admit this – I’ve recently found myself wondering whether Blair and Brown haven’t been even more effective than Wilson and Callaghan in bringing the UK into line with the likes of Albania on a whole number of fronts.

During that argument almost thirty years ago I no doubt adduced a number of points in rebutting the Third World claim, including our education system, our health service, the robustness of our democratic system, the probity of our police, our religious tolerance, our low-crime society, the fact that our transport system – while a bit creaky – still basically worked, and our TV was still the best in the world.  And, as we’d just returned from Portugal – perennially on the cusp of Third Worldom, according to its own people – I pointed out that Heathrow was a model of calm efficiency compared to just about every other airport we’d ever passed through.

Well, the education system is, as we all know, a joke. Relentless social engineering has led to hundreds of thousands of young people passing devalued exams which enable them to attain pseudo-qualifications in pseudo-subjects at pseudo-universities, while remaining largely illiterate and non-numerate.

Our democratic system (and how I’ve attacked people in the past for making this very point) has been eroded to the point where the UK is basically a left-of-centre one-party state, where you choose between candidates largely on the basis of their manners and the quality of their tailoring, given that their fundamental views are barely distinguishable (Europe? Climate Change? Education? The NHS?). And, of course, we long ago handed over control of our country to the grotesquely undemocratic Politburo that rules from Brussells. (Thanks to the ridiculous Van Rumnpy-Pumpy and his egregious ilk, we are apparently powerless to halt European immigration - we have, in effect, handed control of our borders to foreigners). 

If you don’t have a life-threatening illness when you’re admitted to a British hospital, chances are you’ll have one when you leave. We now live in a rampantly high-crime society, and our police are, of course, useless. Our transport system is a disgrace. America now produces classier TV comedy and drama than we do. As for Heathrow…

But none of the above guarantees automatic qualification for Third World status. The main sign that we’ve turned into Englandistan is the fact that a very expensive bureaucracy backed by cosmically expensive technological systems is no more successful at calculating our tax liabilities than would be some hirsute alcoholic in a string vest with a fag dangling from the corner of his mouth, sweating copiously in a non-air-conditioned office in a temperature north of 40 degrees Celsius working it out with a pencil stub on the back of a packet of goat-dung cigarettes.