Part Two: Chapter Three Quality of Life

Britons’ quality of life has been eaten away, often in slow, incremental steps we don’t see happening unless we are prompted to look back to see how much we’ve lost. Bit by barely noticeable bit, (like the sneaky invisble way fiscal drag works) our cost obsessed, ‘efficiency is everything’ government has reduced what it does for us, outsourcing and offshoring services to cheaper providers (who have fewer resources, skills, experience to draw on) and dumping the responsibility onto individuals and families while still charging us the same amount, if not more in income tax, council tax, VAT and stealth taxes. Those decisions affect all Britons for the worse, individually, socially and nationally BUT governments have hidden what they’ve done behind the cloak of personal choice and layers of deniability. It is already hard to measure and research the things I’m describing. That means the bean-counters operating the purse strings have a built in excuse for ignoring them. And just suppose, through the mechanism of ideological hegemony, by which a culture can secretly ban and censor things without having to record it anywhere, (in the way a new law or policy would provide a record) research proposals for these questions get cold shouldered and rejection slipped, how then could we ever learn about it?

I’m afraid you’ll just have to follow my clunky attempt to join the dots and try and demonstrate a thread, a story (I’m not using Brown’s corrupted word ‘narrative’) or a plan our leaders (or more likely those who direct them) have made and enacted.

I’ve divided this chapter into five headings demonstrating five drivers of how and why life has become harder, less free and more time consuming for us all.

1) Government ditching their responsibilities and dumping them downwards. 

2) Government offering us up to be milked.

By favouring multi-national companies over consumers and citizens, employers over employees, capital over labour, special interest groups over all citizens, business over our environment, offering us up to be milked by supermarkets, utility companies, banks, financial services and insurance companies, local councils, solicitors, privatised parking firms, litter wardens and many more.

3) Over-regulation.

An increase in onerous regulation both professional and individual, dumped onto us by Government or their arms-length agencies.

4) The cost of professional over-regulation.

That’s you patients, pupils, motorists and so on, oh, that’s all of us, isn’t it, who get less time, concentration and service from doctors, nurses, teachers, coppers because muppets make us fill up half our shifts with their bullshit forms, audits, ‘governance’ and diversity policies. Bullshit which gets them their next promotion or conference.

5) Leaving British citizens unprotected from fraud and rip-offs from three sides.

UK citizens are left wide open to theft and fraud by our government discarding their responsibilities to operate a working law and order system. Instead, they sit back and do nothing as we are robbed and scammed by British and international cyber criminals, legally ripped off by banks and finance companies, insurance companies and utilities and legally fleeced by local councils or government agencies like HMRC & DVLA. 

As I go through these headings, please consider the future consequences to ordinary people and UK PLC of continuing down this direction of travel. Where and how will this end?

Next, I take a closer look at the yet to come, unforeseen and unplanned for consequences, which you’ll have spotted by now is a major theme of this book. Under ‘What else have we lost?’ I explore growing depression and hopelessness, declining social cohesion, then national dumbing down in all its manifestations and how that costs our country in ways most people cannot see or foresee e.g. younger people whose limited life experience means they don’t have a rear view mirror to check.