Signs that UK society is breaking up in broken Britain

This article is indirectly about domestic cat caregiving because if I am correct in saying that British society is gradually crumbling then clearly it affects cat ownership and how cat owners discharge their duty to look after their cats.

I was compelled to write the article by a Sky News article about the supermarket chain Tesco, which reports the CEO of Tesco saying that, “We cannot go on like this!”

He was referring to the unacceptable spike in verbal and physical attacks on supermarket staff which has resulted in a decision to issue all Tesco staff on the front line with body cameras. I find that a remarkable development. For me, it is a very strong indication of a deterioration in British society. Why should people be attacking and verbally abusing supermarket staff? These are innocent people going about their business.

And it includes physical assaults which have increased by 33% compared to the same time last year. Tesco Chief Executive Officer, Ken Murphy, said that those responsible are a small number of people.

Tesco has joined Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and the Co-op who have all issued or offered to issue body cameras to staff over fears for their safety. The assaults include racial and sexual abuse, physical assaults and threats with weapons increasing to over 850 incidents a day which is around double the pre-Covid levels of 450 a day.

To add to that we have an enormous increase in thefts from supermarkets with thieves boldly scooping up large quantities of supermarket products in their hands and walking out the door as if entirely immune to capture and prosecution. They are!

Both these developments are due, in my opinion, primarily to the lack of a police presence. The police have simply washed their hands of thefts from shops and indeed all minor crime. The police have for years been sitting on their hands doing nothing about minor crime which is, taken together, a major crime as it undermines society and fosters criminal behaviour in general.

Shopkeepers are beginning to feel that they are alone and they are organising themselves to create “private armies” to protect themselves (Chiswick High Street).

To add to the above, there is a general malaise in the country and the youngsters of today appear to have lost hope and/or they are stressed. They are stressed at the lack opportunity that they feel they have for the future.

Jeremy Clarkson was on holiday in France and he got chatting with some youngsters. He asked them what was good about Britain. There was a silence and then one person chipped in and said “Nothing”. They see nothing good about Britain and I can understand that sentiment. The country has deteriorated massively since I was a young person. The country’s culture has changed. It is no longer the Britain I knew. One is issue is mass immigration which has altered the culture. Some clerics believe that the country is no longer Christian.

The kids don’t see anything good about the country or about the history of the country. There’s nothing about Britain which makes them feel proud according to Clarkson. He adds that, “I look at Britain today and I simply don’t know what’s holding it together or how it’s still functioning as a nation state.”

I understand that sentiment as well. Here are some examples of broken Britain:

The NHS is totally malfunctioning on many occasions. There are managers in hospitals protecting criminal behaviour as illustrated by the Lucy Letby scandal. There is a similar scandal developing in Birmingham which is yet to hit the news media of unexplained baby deaths. Damn it; nurses are killing babies in the UK it seems to me.

And the nation’s air traffic control system recently collapsed because, according to Clarkson, “a lone pilot mistakenly said he was heading for Birmingham when he meant Bristol”. It seems that the computer system running Britain’s air traffic control is fragile to put it politely and probably needs upgrading but there’s no money left in the kitty to do it.

Britain is bankrupt because of all the debt that we accrued over Covid when we dished out far too much money to people while they were in lockdown doing damn all. Now our national debt is the same as the country’s GDP and we are one of the worst countries in the world in that respect. This means that were paying enormous amounts of interest on these loans at about £100 billion annually as I understand it which takes money away from all other social services.

I’ve mentioned Britain’s police force but Clarkson says that, “We learnt only last week that policemen and policewomen can’t be sacked even if they spend their evenings doing a spot of light burglary!” Yes, it is very hard to sack miscreant police officers because their tenure on their jobs is assessed by an independent panel chaired by ‘soft lawyers’ who don’t want to sack them. It is for senior police officers to sack junior police officers in the usual way as takes place in any other business.

And in Britain, the motor vehicle is being utterly ostracised by local and national government. There’s no point owning a vehicle any more in Britain because you can’t do more than 20 miles an hour in urban areas and in Wales the whole country is restricted to 20 miles an hour in urban areas. You’re basically tearing up the need for a vehicle as most people use their car to drive around urban areas to do shopping et cetera. But the manufacturers still built bloody enormous SUVs with massive batteries.

The recent Notting Hill Carnival turned from a fun event into a “blood-soaked orgy of robbery and violence”. And the pictures you see of the carnival are horrendous with young men in hoodies brandishing machetes running down rubbish-strewn streets looking to stab somebody, anybody. It was captured on camera and it tells the tale of lawless Britain.

Now we have schools falling to bits because the roofs were built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) which has a 30-year lifespan. That lifespan ended 20 years ago. Now we have bits of ceiling falling down potentially onto children. The government ordered the closure of 156 schools but there may be many more. And there are many more hospitals and other public buildings partly constructed with this form of concrete. It’s going to cost billions to rectify the problem. And this government put off rectifying the problem for a decade or more and now the problem has come home to roost with the real fear that people in the buildings will be harmed.

They’re going to have to put the kids in shipping containers to continue to teach them. It is complete chaos. It’s even worse than that because there is a lot of asbestos within the schools and public buildings as well as it was used in the construction of the buildings with this form of concrete. This makes repairing these buildings incredibly complicated and expensive as asbestos is very dangerous. It has to be removed by specialists. Rectifying this problem is going to take many years.

And this is after Covid-19 which heavily disrupted school kids’ education. That by the way led to highly inflated grading. You can no longer fail in a British school. The word “fail” is not to be used by teachers. That attitude means the kids are not prepared for the real world.

And what about HS2, the high-speed rail link from London to the North? It’s an utter disaster. All the plans about HS2 rejuvenating the North and splitting up to travel East and West have been torn up. Now we’ll be lucky if this new railway line actually gets built at all. There are questions about tearing up the project but so many billions of pounds have been spent on it already that they can’t stop it. Just another disaster by the British government and an indication of failure and a broken society.

And another indication of sloppiness and breakdown is the recent scandal of the thefts from the British Museum. That’s been going on for donkeys years and nobody stopped it or bothered to do something about it. There’s hardly any security in the basement at the British Museum where there are millions of precious items not on display. All you need is an ID card to get down there which you can probably fake. And about 10% of the stolen items are recovered.

Finally, there is the boat people coming over from France in their droves. We simply do not know how to deal with them. Migrant crossings approached 900 in a day yesterday. They don’t know where to put these immigrants. This is complete chaos. A provisional total of almost 21,000 migrants have reached British shores in small boats this year.

Jamie Clarkson thinks that people need hope. I agree with him. In order for there to be hope their needs to be a perception that there is a future which is hard to see when Britain is so clearly broken.