I see every day why Britain is doomed

It's easy to work out why we're broken

Photo by Simon Hurry on Unsplash

After being defenestrated from my job for refusing to go along with toxic gender ideology, I’ve naturally been looking for other work. I’ve also had to care for my unwell, elderly parents. Both these things have made me realise why Britain is knackered.

First, the job-hunting stuff. There are jobs out there, but very few for someone like me, with my skill set and at my age (mid fifties). I dishearteningly scour job websites daily. The amount of NHS vacancies! And some of the salaries! A ‘Consultant in Obstetrics’ role commands a salary of ‘£109,725 to £145, 478 a year’. Having always been in the private sector - and journalism at that - these kind of salaries are stunning to me. There also appear to be a lot of low-paid carer jobs.

I apply for jobs here and there, with little hope that I’ll get a response. Sometimes, the bits in job application forms when you have to put your sex are both hilarious and disturbing. One job for a local council had the following options:

Male

Female

Something Else

You will often be asked for your gender as ‘assigned at birth’. The people who write those job ads will have never heard of the appalling child-abuser Dr John Money, who came up with that phraseology.

It feels vaguely disturbing filling in the boxes that ask for your race, religion and sexuality. What damn business is it of theirs? But then we know the reason they ask this, they likely have identity ‘targets’ to hit. As I’m ticking the ‘white British’ and ‘heterosexual’ boxes I get a little sinking feeling, guessing that this may hinder my chances of getting the job. Two-tier, unjust, twisted modern Britain.

I applied for Job Seeker’s Allowance a month ago yet still haven’t even got an initial interview at the job centre, despite the pledge that the claim will be processed ‘in 14 days’. A staff member told me that locally they couldn’t help me because it was all done centrally and ‘they’re very busy at the moment’. I’m sure they are. When I phone the helpline I am left on hold for 40 minutes of muzak before I hang up.

Because I wrote on the original online application form that I do volunteer work, I received a five-page questionnaire through the post asking for exact details of this work. An online version would surely have saved time and money. I filled it in and sent it to Wolverhampton.

If I do start signing on, thus would begin the path to numerous benefits. In three months I could go on to Universal Credit as long as my savings aren’t over £16K. The council tells me that I may become eligible for a 50% discount in my council tax. I could probably also claim for anxiety and depression, but unlike one and a half million of my fellow citizens, I’m not inclined to do that.

In short, what I see is both a moribund jobs market and a profligate welfare state. It’s a recipe for stagnation, personal and economic. An aspect of our economic calamity is that as taxes climb to pay for more welfare spending, more and more wealthy people leave the country, while others work less hard and businesses do less well, ensuring a lower tax take in the future, leading to probable higher taxes still. And repeat.

Our national debt is around £3 trillion. The Government paid £170bn in debt interest alone in 2024-25 (not even paying down the debt, just the debt interest). This financial year it is projected to spend around £150 billion more than it gets, with the gap met by further borrowing. The coming years will be no different. We are on the way to meltdown.

"Britain is a beacon of economic stability" Really?

As for what looking after my octogenarian parents tells me about the state of the nation, it’s seeing the massive expense of keeping them alive. Of course I’m very glad they’re still alive, although I question the quality of their existences (they both often say they wish they were dead). The resources put into keeping them going is astounding. My dad was a fairly high-earner in his day, and my mum didn’t do too badly, thereby giving plenty of cash to the government, but the pills*, the hospital stays, the passenger transport, the health visitors, the treatments, the carers, the many other kinds of drugs and much else besides they’ve received for ‘free’ since they retired over 25 years ago may well be a greater sum of money than they contributed (and that’s not noting all the other non-health things in their life they’ve been given by the State).

Apparently immigrants have to earn a salary of around £62K per annum (presumably at 2025 prices) to become a net contributor to the Exchequer over their lifetime. While I believe this is yet another reason why mass immigration is suicidal lunacy, it also gives you pause when considering native citizens. How many British people would earn that sum at most stages of their career? Not that many. Thus most people take more out of the pot than put in.

My parents get a large amount of text messages and emails reminding them to get jabs, or advising them to attend health screenings. The messages will often include a line about translation services (annual cost to UK: £64 million). They will also get paper letters along the same lines, sometimes exactly duplicated.

When I visit them on one of their sadly frequent hospital stays, I note the rainbow level crossings, the rainbow lanyards many of the staff wear, and the entire walls devoted to ‘celebrating’ their colleagues’ unconventional sexual peccadillos. Annual cost to taxpayers of DEI in the NHS: £40 million.

Anyone who has spent just 15 minutes inside a hospital will be aware of the eye-watering cost of keeping the things going. The equipment, the heating, the food, the staff… so many of them! Wandering around everywhere, all the time. No wonder bugs spread quickly in hospitals. No government has ever been able to streamline staff numbers, because they’d be accused of deliberately murdering people.

My parents often have nurses and carers from abroad, usually very nice people. They are cheaper to the NHS than British applicants, of whom around 20,000 are rejected every year. The priorities of the Uniparty are so strange: it wasted nearly half a trillion pounds ‘fighting’ an airborne disease that spread anyway, and was of moderate harm to the majority of healthy people. The completely useless Track and Trace operation cost nearly £40 billion alone. The State splurged on health protection in 2020 and 2021 but is reluctant to take on more than a certain number of perfectly well-qualified British nurses because of the short-term cost? Odd.

I often get updates on my parents’ health from foreign-born nurses and doctors. Sometimes - not always - it is extremely difficult to understand what they are saying, so strong is their accent. I might get one word in four. Let’s hope I don’t miss a crucial bit of information, let’s hope my parents don’t.

When I was in a ward visiting my dad, who was there with five other sick old men, an African nurse tried to get one of the patients to ‘high five’ her. He just lay there; the guy could barely move his mouth never mind parts of his body. It was strange to see a nurse so completely misreading a patient’s condition.

My parents still have a degree of wealth that means that the State doesn’t do everything for them. I shudder at the cost that others must incur to the public purse, people whose long lives drag on and on, miserably and painfully. I see them as I visit care homes, sprawled in easy chairs, open-mouthed, television blaring, smelling of urine, yellowing photograph of their children on their dressing table. In earlier, harsher, less safe, less healthy times (when everybody smoked) they would have gone to their maker years ago. It’s of course not their fault but they, and millions of others, especially low-skilled migrants, are bankrupting the nation.

The medicine, when it eventually comes, will be bitter.

* I’d estimate that for at least the decade each of them has taken around ten pills a day; I don’t recall their parents taking any regular medication.