When the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom is advising people to stock up on tinned food and bottled water, we are no longer living in a serious country. We are living in one that has quietly accepted decline as normal.

Foxtrot Oscar.

Here is Andy Burnham discussing his meeting with Zelensky. @russell_kane absolutely nails it once again.

Britain is visibly decaying. Everything costs a fortune. Everything is decaying. Everyone is saying it. Living in Britain should be like hitting the jackpot. But successive governments have pissed our assets away. Often deliberately. Britain faces huge difficulties and we don’t have the calibre of politicians to deal with the issues being faced. We have the most useless, insincere and out of touch politicians ever seen in British history. It’s a dreadful situation. We are being led by a bunch of shysters with their nests being feathered by their corporate cronies. We are an island full of natural resources & with a temperate climate. We should have energy security, vibrant agriculture and fishing industries, blue collar industries to be proud of, manufacturing centres of excellence, but instead, it's all being destroyed, sold off or closed down. The industrial and community fabric of so many communities has been wilfully destroyed or neglected for decades. We have infrastructures and public services that are rotting despite having the highest tax burden in history. We have an ongoing cost of living crisis where supermarkets & utility & energy companies fleece consumers on a daily basis while showing record profits. And for all of this, I blame governments for being more concerned in political game playing, consolidation of power, suppressing freedom of speech, indulging in petty punishment rules and surveillance culture, facilitating corporate greed rather than addressing the many concerns and challenges faced by individuals and communities right across the country. Britain has turned into a total mess. Nothing works. Everything is bogged down in governmental petty bureaucracy or punishment politics. Pensioners, small businesses, students, farmers, fishing communities and the disabled are wilfully hammered by the Labour government. Over £100bn of taxpayers’ money is now spent per year on interest payments for the national debt, £30bn is being spaffed away on carbon capture machines, The cost of living for basic essentials like water, energy and food is through the roof. We are taxed to the hilt and yet public services and core infrastructures are rotting. We have water, energy and food security concerns despite having the national resources to be secure in all of these. We have successive governments literally asset stripping the country to give everything away to multinational corporations. We have massive amounts of poverty and homelessness. We have thousands of migrants arriving across the channel while £millions are spent every day on housing them in 5 star hotels. We have an NHS that is in a total mess with millions of people living in excruciating pain because they can’t get treated for months on end. We have governments who are more concerned with sucking up to the likes of BlackRock rather than fixing the mess that they created. And we even have a government who ram through plastering solar panels on thousands of acres of prime farmland while spending £50bn on sun dimming experiments. It’s an utter disgrace what has happened to Britain and for all of this, I blame successive governments. Also, community spirit has declined. Membership and attendance of the institutions that once bound communities - pubs, clubs, youth centres - has been in long decline. This is not nostalgia for a mythical past. It is the measurable result of decades of under-investment in maintenance. Deferred government maintenance is a false economy: costs compound, service reliability falls and the daily experience of the British public becomes a scenery of quiet degradation and a country that increasingly looks and feels as though it has stopped trying to maintain standards. It’s horrendous.

They knew it was 😷 bollocks. Pure theatre.

Britain is not the same. The Covid era broke something in Britain. The national spirit has been broken. It feels muted. So many people are saying this.

When was the last time you felt it was genuinely great to live in Britain?

Same decay with Edinburgh Waverley and the rubbish strewn streets and traffic chaos in the centre of Edinburgh. Taxes go up. Civic standards are going down.

Use cash locally. Every card swipe sends a cut to a bank and a data trail to a corporation. Cash doesn’t. It stays in the shop, pays the staff and circulates on your high street instead of vanishing into fees and algorithms. No tracking. No outages. No middleman. Spend it where you live. Keep the money where it matters - in your own community.

Adverts were way better back in the 1980s & 1990s. Case study: Gregor Fisher. Photo booth. Comb-over. Hamlet cigar. Good advertising was a cigar called Hamlet.