The Gradual Demise of Great Britain

I write this reluctantly and with a heavy heart. As far as I am concerned it is a disaster.

When I first arrived in Britain in September 1960, the Conservatives were in power and  Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister. The slogan that kept him in power was, “You have never had it so good”. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, everything went wrong. When the world found out that the then Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, was sleeping with Christine Keeler, who was also sleeping with the Russian Naval attaché – an obvious security risk. There is much more to this nonsense, which I won’t bore you with, but eventually Macmillan was forced to resign and Sir Alec Douglas Home ran the Government from the Lords, almost as a caretaker Prime Minister.

Harold Wilson won the British General Election in 1964 with a small majority of 4 seats. He then called a snap election two years later and emerged with a much larger majority. Economically, Britain was in the doldrums from 1966 onwards. Wilson nationalised the steel industry and interfered with the management of ailing British Leyland, which was partially nationalised in 1975. This was virtually the end of the British owned car industry. The car industry in Britain is dominated by the Japanese Nissan and the Indian owned Tata (Jaguar, Land Rover).

Successive Governments led by Wilson, Heath (Conservative) and Callahan (Labour) did nothing to halt Britain’s decline, although Heath did eventually succeed in joining the EEC (the precursor to the European Union) in 1972.

Margaret Thatcher won the General Election in May 1979. Her Government transformed Britain. Many of her reforms were and remain unpopular, such as closing old, heavily subsidised coal mines in Northern England. If she had not fought and won the Falklands War she may not have survived as Prime Minister. London was transformed into one of the worlds most important financial centres. She was Prime minister from 1979 to 1990 but her legacy lasted until well after her death in 2013. We lived in Britain from 2005 to 2009 – it was delightful.

The recent transformation of a Britain seduced by the personal ambition of people like Boris Johnson has been a disaster. He supported Brexit because he thought it represented his best chance of becoming Prime Minister. The best interests of Britain did not feature in his calculations.

Brexit was and remains an economic disaster. Overnight it reduced the British GDP by about 5% and Britain has not recovered its place in the world since then.

It is worth noting that when Tony Blair’s Labour Party was elected in 1997 Britain’s GDP at the time was equal to that of China and India combined. Today Britain’s GDP is about 20% of that of China. Could self-indulgent Britain really afford to play around with nonsenses like Brexit that has taken the country back to the Wilson, Heath, Callahan years? The answer is obviously NO.

Trains are often late or cancelled, the NHS has waiting lists of up to eight years, the streets are dirty. I could go on.

The activities of the so-called Reform Party will make the situation much worse if it ever comes to power. Focussing solely on populist issues such as migration, the Reform vision of Britain seems to be an aging, preferably white, unproductive and unimaginative country gradually becoming less and less relevant.