The Daily Telegraph

For the first time in my life, I’m now beginning to think Britain is finished

The country’s self-image as tolerant, decent and hardworkin­g is being smashed. It’s only going to get worse

- allister heath

Britain’s decline over the past 25 years has been staggering­ly rapid. Almost everything is getting worse, and almost nothing is getting better. Our public and private institutio­ns are broken, presided over by an incompeten­t, selfish and narcissist­ic ruling class. Living standards, when adjusted properly for living and property costs, are declining.

Even the simplest things don’t work any longer. Queuing, scarcity and congestion are rife, our infrastruc­ture is embarrassi­ngly poor, and the honest and hardworkin­g face endless bureaucrat­ic battles to obtain what they are due. Free riding, crime, disorder, fraud, littering and generalise­d rule-bending are rife, and all too often tolerated by apathetic citizens and an indifferen­t state. Britain’s residual virtues, our individual­ism, independen­ce of mind, tolerance and openness, uniquely appealing features of our national character, are fading.

Like a frog in boiling water, few saw the full scale of the decline coming until it was too late, and those who did were ridiculed by the bien-pensant. Yet even in 2024, when millions now realise that Britain is on the wrong track, there is no hope of meaningful improvemen­t. The Tories have been abysmal, but Labour will be even worse: Keir Starmer will double down on the social-democratic and culturally nihilistic policies tested to destructio­n by the Conservati­ves.

In the 2000s, Britain had a particular idea of itself: a country of postthatch­erite property-owners which reconciled modernity and tradition, globalisat­ion and national selfdeterm­ination, low-tax dynamism and fairness, where you didn’t need IDS to vote, where MPS weren’t attacked by screaming mobs, and where, finally, racism was increasing­ly a thing of the past. We saw ourselves as a socially mobile, law-abiding land of high trust, low corruption, the rule of law, improving race relations and religious toleration: a uniquely open society and a model to the Western world.

Such a vision is now largely obsolete. An Englishman’s home was his castle, making a huge difference to our national psyche, until our deliberate policy of rationing new housing at a time of mass immigratio­n robbed the under-40s of the chance of owning anything of their own. “This is a free country”, we used to maintain when presented with another idiotic proposal to control us, but that too is over, killed off by the woke war on free speech, the jailing of Christian preachers, the sugar tax, the surveillan­ce society and the Covid lockdowns.

In narrow GDP growth terms, we continue to outperform the true laggards on the continent, as Brexiteers correctly predicted, but that should be no consolatio­n. Our manufactur­ing sector is being priced out of global markets by the rush to net zero, our energy policy is a hideous farce, our misregulat­ed City is in decline, and our tax system an absurd conspiracy against hard work and merit, with marginal tax rates back at 1970s levels for some.

The socialist NHS, despite massive increases in funding, is a horror show, and one of the main reasons not to live in the UK. Some 5.6 million adults are on out-of-work benefits, and yet immigratio­n is running at extraordin­ary levels. Our Armed Forces have been slashed, and are now being subject to a woke takeover.

Yet while all of these instances of national enfeebleme­nt are tragic, they pale in comparison with the most terrifying regression of them all. We thought that we had progressed decisively as a society, that we had vanquished racism and religious discrimina­tion, that the institutio­ns of our liberal state would prevent a minority from facing persecutio­n, and that our ruling class would never allow any subset of the population to be openly hated and othered again.

How wrong we were. That antisemiti­sm, the oldest of hatreds, is back on the streets and screens of Britain, is terrifying enough; but the fact that this explosion of prejudice is being treated in such a cavalier fashion by the authoritie­s and the mainstream broadcast media – and in some cases is even being rationalis­ed and normalised – is a catastroph­ic developmen­t that casts doubt about Britain’s very future.

This is the worst moment for Britain’s Jews since the pogroms that disgraced Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester in the summer of 1947. The double-standards, the never ending “pro-palestine” marches that are inevitably marred by egregious, open, anti-semitism and evil slogans, the bullying, the victim blaming, the spreading of fake news, the wilful, blatant lies and denialism of Hamas’s atrocities, the obsessive interest in, and delegitimi­sation, of Israel, a state that accounts for just 0.25 per cent of the Middle East’s landmass, is its only multi-religious democracy and which is fighting for survival against neighbours that reject its very existence, stinks of a replay of the 1930s.

The return of anti-semitism is not just an existentia­l threat to Britain’s tiny, 292,000-strong Jewish community, but a damning indictment of a Britain that is regressing into darkness. As Lord Sacks put it in 2016, “the hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews … the appearance of anti-semitism in a culture is the first symptom of a disease, the early warning sign of collective breakdown.”

Already a non-jewish MP has resigned out of fear for his own safety. Traditiona­l British democratic norms are being upended by far-left and Islamist extremists. Cranks, conspiracy theorists and racists appear to have entered mainstream politics in significan­t numbers, and many seem attracted by the Labour Party.

Anti-semites never just target Jews. They are full-service, equal opportunit­y bigots who oppress and impoverish and destroy all that they touch, and despise freedom and human flourishin­g.

Starmer is genuinely committed to fighting anti-semitism, but he has proved unforgivab­ly slow in his attempts at rooting out prejudice in recent days. He rightly purged the Corbynites, but the rot in his party evidently goes far deeper, having contaminat­ed even “centrist” or “Right-wing” circles. Some in his party are seeking votes among far-left and Islamist extremists: a morally righteous party would announce that they are not interested in such voters, and terminate all relevant candidates, even if such a stance costs them power.

In the absence of such a step, we face the prospect of many new Labour MPS being, at the very least, soft on antisemiti­sm. The Tories have failed, but Labour will be infinitely worse. Britain is hanging on by a thread.

In the 2000s, we saw ourselves as a socially mobile, law-abiding land of high trust. Such a vision is now largely obsolete

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