Just a thought before bed

Consider the following fundamental measures of the health or otherwise of any modern democratic nation, all of them directly dependent on the state.

In no particular order, they are:

Law and order; transport; health; education; accountability; security; local government.

Can anyone doubt that in Britain each has seen a calamitous decline over the last 10 years?

Let's list them in more detail.

Law and Order: A police force obsessed with pointless targets and incapable of imposing even the simplest expectations of the rule of law and matched by a manifestly inadequate penal system.

Transport: An 'integrated transport' policy that has produced hopelessly congested roads and ludicrously overpriced and unreliable railways.

Health: A 'national' health service that costs billions, emasculates doctors, empowers self-serving bureaucrats and kills its patients.

Education: Schools that consistently fail to match up to over-heated government rhetoric despite immense sums lavished on them and laughably low standards.

Accountability: A ruling class that consistently ignores the wishes of those who have elected it while simultaneously paying itself more.

Security: Armed forces, once the envy of the world, starved of funds yet expected to perform ever more (as well as to endure periodic visits from preening, vote-seeking turds, cf The Bottler).

Local government: Driven by inane targets, incapable of emptying dustbins, bent only only closing libraries to fund equal-opportunities 'initiatives' and lorded over by 'chief-executives' conscious only of the imperative of guaranteeing their pensions.

This is just for starters.

It does no more than scratch the surface of all that is corrupt, distorted and gruesome in 21st-century Britain. It says nothing of the shameless determination of the ruling party and its cripplingly inadequate leader to ignore its own manifesto promises to hold a referendum on the European Constitution, forcing on the country a treaty it knows is near universally loathed. It says nothing about the same government's readiness to lavish billions on a clapped-out bank in Newcastle so as to protect its vote there. It says nothing, too, about its willingness to pretend that blatant law-breaking on the part of its own members when raising funds for pointless internal elections can always be justified so as not to compromise its patently useless leader, in effect an institutional readiness to assume that laws passed by itself in the hope of embarrassing its opponents should apply only to these opponents.

It is a world scarred by quangos, reviews and consultants, one in which insane wastes of public money and a vast, bloated public sector are taken as read; by an immigration policy manifestly out of control (if 'policy' is not too polite a term for a world in which no one has any proper idea of the numbers involved); and by gargantuan government departments that regularly lose details of their clients. Above all, it is a world defined by government ministers whose default position is always to lie.

Can I stress this last point? They don't obfuscate. They don't equivocate. They don't even mislead. They lie.

It's what they do. It's what sustains them. It is their life-blood.

On the whole, I'd say there were serious reasons to feel depressed.

Welcome to the world of the Bottler's moral compass.