France.

Governments fiddle while Rome burns. Western Europe is facing two simultaneous crises: a cost-of-living crisis and large-scale illegal migration. The combination is a tinderbox. How long can political leaders keep looking the other way? But they do this because they enabled it.

Tony Benn’s 5 political questions: “What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? How do we get rid of you? And if you can’t get rid of the people who govern you, you don’t live in a democratic system.”

Britain is visibly decaying. Everything costs a fortune. Everything is decaying. Everyone is saying it. Living in Britain should be like hitting the jackpot. But successive governments have pissed our assets away. Often deliberately. Britain faces huge difficulties and we don’t have the calibre of politicians to deal with the issues being faced. We have the most useless, insincere and out of touch politicians ever seen in British history. It’s a dreadful situation. We are being led by a bunch of shysters with their nests being feathered by their corporate cronies. We are an island full of natural resources & with a temperate climate. We should have energy security, vibrant agriculture and fishing industries, blue collar industries to be proud of, manufacturing centres of excellence, but instead, it's all being destroyed, sold off or closed down. The industrial and community fabric of so many communities has been wilfully destroyed or neglected for decades. We have infrastructures and public services that are rotting despite having the highest tax burden in history. We have an ongoing cost of living crisis where supermarkets & utility & energy companies fleece consumers on a daily basis while showing record profits. And for all of this, I blame governments for being more concerned in political game playing, consolidation of power, suppressing freedom of speech, indulging in petty punishment rules and surveillance culture, facilitating corporate greed rather than addressing the many concerns and challenges faced by individuals and communities right across the country. Britain has turned into a total mess. Nothing works. Everything is bogged down in governmental petty bureaucracy or punishment politics. Pensioners, small businesses, students, farmers, fishing communities and the disabled are wilfully hammered by the Labour government. Over £100bn of taxpayers’ money is now spent per year on interest payments for the national debt, £30bn is being spaffed away on carbon capture machines, The cost of living for basic essentials like water, energy and food is through the roof. We are taxed to the hilt and yet public services and core infrastructures are rotting. We have water, energy and food security concerns despite having the national resources to be secure in all of these. We have successive governments literally asset stripping the country to give everything away to multinational corporations. We have massive amounts of poverty and homelessness. We have thousands of migrants arriving across the channel while £millions are spent every day on housing them in 5 star hotels. We have an NHS that is in a total mess with millions of people living in excruciating pain because they can’t get treated for months on end. We have governments who are more concerned with sucking up to the likes of BlackRock rather than fixing the mess that they created. And we even have a government who ram through plastering solar panels on thousands of acres of prime farmland while spending £50bn on sun dimming experiments. It’s an utter disgrace what has happened to Britain and for all of this, I blame successive governments. Also, community spirit has declined. Membership and attendance of the institutions that once bound communities - pubs, clubs, youth centres - has been in long decline. This is not nostalgia for a mythical past. It is the measurable result of decades of under-investment in maintenance. Deferred government maintenance is a false economy: costs compound, service reliability falls and the daily experience of the British public becomes a scenery of quiet degradation and a country that increasingly looks and feels as though it has stopped trying to maintain standards. It’s horrendous.

Communism requires a government to abolish private property, dictate prices, and punish unauthorised trade. Without that coercion it cannot exist and with it the pattern is shortages, stagnation and loss of freedoms as governments hoover up all the assets and public wealth. Socialism produces the same failures by concentrating ownership and investment in political hands: planners lack the knowledge and incentives to allocate resources efficiently. Corporatism is not a counterexample. It is a horrendous collusion in which large firms and governments jointly set rules, subsidies and barriers. The public pays for the losses while the government privatises the gains. It is government facilitated corporation privilege, not capitalism. Capitalism - supporting small businesses, private property, voluntary exchange and open competition under ethical business law - delivers the broadest rise in living standards precisely because it uses decentralised knowledge and aligns incentives and growth with results. It creates stronger growth and better infrastructures. Systems that concentrate economic power in the state always fail. Systems that let firms buy the state generate costs at public expense. Systems that protect open competition and private rights produce the most equitable and free societies.