I was browsing my way through a UK technology forum the other day when I noticed a couple of posts from some very bright young people who were complaining about their difficulty finding work. I did rather feel for them. Trouble is that it’s a hard time all round at the moment. Moreover, despite what our politicians tell us, I think it’s not likely to get any better any time soon. Therefore, rather than beating themselves up over this, I think we need all to stand back a little and take stock of what has happened to our once-great nation over the last few years:-
Main trouble is that we have squandered vast sums of money on two pointless Middle-Eastern wars – one of which was actually illegal, both of which lasted longer than World War II, and neither of which we stand the remotest chance of winning. Moreover, to hide his mismanagement of the economy, the one-eyed Scottish idiot in charge of this country, Gordon Brown, secretly flogged of huge chunks of the country’s gold reserves at a fraction of their value, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Meantime, he also allowed the banking system to fail to such an extent that he is now spending vast sums of money the Government does not actually have, in order to prop it up again. It is an unprecedented mess of near-biblical proportions. Don’t believe me, my little goslings? Take a gander at this:-
https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat…/2187rank.html
Compare the UK’s position with that of say Germany or Japan – countries that wisely avoided the Iraq fiasco. Even more scary, the nation at the top, China, has actually lent the nation at the bottom, the United States, 40% of what Bush was blowing on Iraq at the rate of $2000 per second! Basically the planet’s supposedly richest nation is now in serious hock to China with no means of ever paying back the debt.
Worse, the USA’s new president, despite his election promises, seems determined to continue with the economic and political suicide that is Afghanistan. Right now, he is busy preparing another 50,000 young Americans to be pointlessly slaughtered, injured or seriously traumatised there – all at the US taxpayers expense, and no-doubt underwritten by financiers in Beijing.
Our long-term problems here in Blighty are even worse than those of the USA. For a start, our economy is linked far too closely to that of the USA – much more than any of our rivals for bottom place on the CIA chart. Then you need to turn the clock back to when Thacher and her cronies destroyed most of our industrial base, back in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Meantime they flogged off all our national utilities to the highest bidder under the great lie of the time, “Privatisation would improve quality of service.”
So today, key parts of our nation’s vital infrastructure is mismanaged by shabby privatised outfits such as British Telecom PLC – just as arrogant and untouchable as the GPO it replaced but with none of the public service ethic. And as a result, we have to put up with an inadequate telecommunications infrastructure that would not look out of place in sub-Saharan Africa. We have falling oil and gas reserves, mismanaged by gaggle of competing, often foreign-owned corporations, semi-regulated by incoherent and incomprehensible energy policies; road and rail systems that are a national disgrace… I could go on, but I won’t…
As a consequence, the bulk of our national wealth generation relies far too heavily on an American-led financial services sector, that is as incompetent as it is dishonest. And too many of its corporations and their senior executives now seem above the law as they go unpunished for fraud, deception and negligence on a mammoth scale. This alone has seriously damaged confidence within the business community. And despite taking billions of pounds of taxpayers money, and continuing to pay massive bonuses to their useless executives, the big banks are still not lending to the businesses that so desperately need it!
Of course, the true masters of dishonesty and incompetence are the self-seeking buffoons that make up our ailing New Labour Government. Its leaders, Blair and Brown have overseen levels of control-freakery, corruption, greed, sleaze, stupidity and total contempt for the electorate, to which the last Tory Government could only aspire!
So I’m afraid you young folks are in for a very hard time indeed – through absolutely no fault of your own. Moreover your children and possibly even their children will continue to pay for the legacy of the Bush-Blair-Brown-Obama era for many, many years to come.
Don’t have nightmares. Honk! Honk!