Britain`s bust – OPINION | Politicsweb<\/p>\n
OPINION<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Britain’s bust<\/p>\n
\n David Bullard |\n <\/p>\n
\n12 August 2025\n<\/p>\n
\n David Bullard responds to Andrew Donaldson’s account of the state of the UK\n <\/p>\n
OUT TO LUNCH<\/strong><\/p>\n Fifty years from now Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and – as George Orwell said – \u201cold maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist\u201d and if we get our way – Shakespeare still read even in school.<\/p>\n John Major – Former UK Prime Minister in 1993<\/p>\n Last week my esteemed fellow columnist Andrew Donaldson raised a few reader\u2019s eyebrows with his piece on \u201cBroken Britain\u201d writing:<\/p>\n \u201cHowever, for the life of me, I find little sign of it anywhere. I mean, I live more or less in the very middle of the country but my job, delivering sound and staging equipment to music festivals and theatres, takes me to all corners of the UK. Everywhere I go, life seems oddly normal.\u201d<\/p>\n It is possible, of course, that Andrew has yet to deliver sound and staging equipment to Epping, Diss in Norfolk, Canary Wharf in London or any of the other 190 odd locations where the local hotels have been commandeered to house mostly male illegal immigrants.<\/p>\n –><\/p>\n If he had then I doubt whether he would have described the unhappiness on the streets of Epping as \u201coddly normal\u201d. According to news reports I have read in both left and right wing UK publications, the situation in places like Epping is highly volatile and the natives are restless.___STEADY_PAYWALL___<\/p>\n Demonstrators, many of them women, carried placards saying that they weren\u2019t right wing but just wanted to protect their children. Naturally a demo of this sort attracts the extreme right wing nutters who advocate burning down the hotels housing the illegal immigrants but the general impression I got was that there were an awful lot of perfectly decent, law-abiding citizens of Epping who were justifiably worried about walking out at night.<\/p>\n Andrew describes the village where he lives as a \u201cgloriously global mash up\u201d with Iranian, Turkish, Chinese, Somali and Middle Eastern folk all living together in perfect harmony. There\u2019s a mosque nearby and a Nigerian church and Indian or East European wedding ceremonies are held at the local community centre. And, presumably, there are old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist. Clearly Andrew doesn\u2019t live in the Cotswolds where such a cultural gallimaufry is virtually unknown.<\/p>\n Andrew correctly points out the enormous contribution migrants have made to Britain, particularly when it comes to the health service. But these are legal migrants who have settled in places like Andrew\u2019s village and have, as the saying goes, skin in the game. They presumably own homes, cars and businesses and pay rates and taxes like everybody else.<\/p>\n –><\/p>\n Back in 1972 when Idi Amin was kicking Asians out of Uganda my late mother was involved in helping settle them after they arrived at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk. Frightened people arrived with nothing but were quickly and efficiently accepted and given some creature comforts.<\/p>\n Many of these genuine refugees were highly qualified professional people and were grateful to Britain for the opportunity to build a new life for themselves. There doesn\u2019t appear to be much gratitude from the illegals holed up in hotels around the country.<\/p>\n Whether or not you like Nigel Farage or his Reform party is irrelevant but you surely have to admit that he has a point when he claims the streets are out of control. His animus is not directed at legal immigrants but at those who are landing in their thousands on England\u2019s coastline in rubber dinghies arranged by dodgy people smugglers.<\/p>\n The palpable unhappiness on the streets is precisely because these are illegal immigrants and, for some bizarre reason, stand a far better chance of being looked after than anybody actually applying legally to migrate to Britain. Looked after to the extent that they will be housed in a decent hotel, fed and provided with some spending money and health care should they need it.<\/p>\n –><\/p>\n If you are a British citizen and have been waiting patiently for years on the housing list then, bad luck, because an illegal immigrant has just bumped you further down the queue. Last week it was reported that serving soldiers and their families are being moved out of their army barrack\u2019s homes to make way for a new intake of illegals. The soldiers are being \u2018temporarily\u2019 moved to inferior accommodation apparently. Not exactly an incentive to fight and serve for your country is it?<\/p>\n Friends and family who live in and around London tell me that the incidence of shoplifting has skyrocketed and thieves can now quite brazenly walk into their local Tesco or Lidl, help themselves to a few goodies from the shelves, and leave unhindered without paying. The police don\u2019t seem too interested in arresting people for what they regard as petty crime.<\/p>\n Another major problem in London and other big cities is phone theft. If you are standing on a pavement on a busy street and get your phone out to make a call or check messages there is a good chance it will be swiped from your hands by a hooded figure on an e-bike. Since insurance will almost certainly cover the loss if not the inconvenience the police are not really interested.<\/p>\n But the issue of illegal immigration and its inevitable link with rising crime in the big cities is having a much deeper effect on the citizens of the Sceptred Isle. As Janet Daley, writing in the Sunday Telegraph put it: \u201cThe collapse of trust in authority and the bonds of decency that should be taken for granted are in jeopardy and no one in power seems prepared to consider the obvious remedies or even to recall what we already know about dealing with these things\u201d.<\/p>\n –><\/p>\n The problem now is that Britain has reached a point where there is no going back. They can\u2019t (or won\u2019t) suddenly boot all illegal immigrants out of the country and the problem is only going to get worse as more and more come across the English channel knowing that a good life awaits them.<\/p>\n Political asylum has become a joke in the UK because anybody it seems can now claim that they didn\u2019t feel safe where they were living and decided to move to the warm embrace of good old Blighty. Keir Starmer\u2019s best effort thus far is the \u2018one in, one out\u2019 policy which involves swapping an illegal immigrant with France for a potentially legal immigrant.<\/p>\n Quite how that is going to work who knows but it still means Britain has an immigration problem and has to find accommodation for a new arrival, usually to the cost of a British citizen.<\/p>\n Perhaps it\u2019s time to update John Major\u2019s bucolic 1993 vision of Britain with a dose of reality. That Britain of old is long gone and I fear the worst is yet to come. And, as far as dead, white<\/p>\n European males like Shakespeare still being read in schools\u2026 not a chance.<\/p>\n ****<\/p>\n The virtue signallers were out in force in London last weekend when it was time, yet again, to wrap a keffiyeh around your neck, grab a Palestinian flag and head off to central London to show you care.<\/p>\n The core event this time was support for an organisation called \u2018Palestine Action\u2019 which the Brit government (for want of a better word) decided should be a proscribed organisation after it messed up a couple of RAF fighter jets a couple of weeks ago.<\/p>\n The penalty for openly supporting a proscribed organisation carries a jail sentence of between six months and fourteen years but this didn\u2019t deter at least 450 people from carrying placards saying \u2018I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action\u2019 and subsequently getting arrested by the Old Bill.<\/p>\n It remains to be seen how many of those arrested will appear in court but I\u2019m guessing that there probably isn\u2019t enough court time to process that many people and the cases may only be heard in 2029 if today\u2019s court delays are anything to go by.<\/p>\n I\u2019d also be fascinated to learn what the police do with 450 arrested suspects while they wait for the system to process them. One of those arrested, according to a press report, was a blind man in a wheelchair who was \u2018led away\u2019 because he was carrying the offensive placard, even though he couldn\u2019t read<\/p>\n what was printed on it and may well have thought it said \u2018trans rights are human rights\u2019 which is another great excuse to get out in the summer sunshine and yell slogans at the fascist TERFs.<\/p>\n Meanwhile in Gaza all these demos by well fed and comfortably off middle class Europeans don\u2019t seem to be improving the lot of the gaunt, starving homeless folk living in plastic tents amongst the rubble and waving their empty food bowls at the media cameras. But that\u2019s hardly the point is it? It\u2019s all about showing you care.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Britain`s bust – OPINION | Politicsweb OPINION Britain’s bust David Bullard | 12 August 2025 David Bullard responds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,4884,1144,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-339825","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-great-britain","13":"tag-northern-ireland","14":"tag-scotland","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115018704639387470","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}