With HS2, the Post Office scandal, Grenfell and train tickets just the tip of the iceberg, Brian Reade is fast losing his sense of humour
Rarely has a quote from a High Court judge chimed so perfectly with the instincts of the masses. “Am I going bonkers?” was the cracker uttered by Judge Mr Justice Chamberlain last November after he was told there had been a catastrophic leak by the MoD, which had put thousands of lives at risk, cost taxpayers potentially £7billion, and forced the UK to secretly fly 19,000 Afghans here to live permanently.
And the government’s response to that was to beg the judiciary to hide any knowledge of it from the British people by imposing the kind of court order favoured by footballers who don’t want the world to know they’re having sex with their brother’s wife. To add unfathomable insult to life-threatening injury, the soldier who caused the calamity went unnamed, unpunished, and was moved sideways, and his boss, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, was promoted to First Sea Lord.
To answer your question, m’lud, no you’re not going bonkers. It just feels that way living in a joke of a country where nothing seems to work any more, where everything that can go wrong goes wrong, and when it does, the self-serving cowards who run the show hide the truth from view, shift the blame and punish no one. Welcome to Omnishambles Britain.
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A country where every big construction project, like HS2, gets bogged down with red tape and skilled worker shortages, takes years longer than comparable countries and if finished, comes in billions over budget. A country where young people struggle to get on the housing ladder because we’ve built fewer houses in the past decade than the average Lego enthusiast, making rents eye-wateringly expensive and forcing many to live in their parents’ spare room into their mid-30s.
A country where you have to take out a second mortgage to get a peak-time train ticket to its capital and which empties its jails of criminals because it did nothing about them getting full. A country which sees itself as a world-leading economy yet has to crawl to the American president with a letter from a man with a crown on his head, pleading with him to visit his palace in the hope he doesn’t hit us with tariffs. We are a nation that can’t control our borders even though vowing to do so was the main reason voters allowed politicians to cause economic carnage by divorcing our European neighbours.
A country that allows scandals like the Post Office, infected blood and Grenfell to happen, then tries to wheedle out of giving the victims recompense and justice. A nation that gets more angry about rappers supporting besieged Palestinians than the besiegers who are slaughtering them. A country where you wait 12 hours in NHS A&E corridors to get seen, the roads are riddled with potholes, local councils are going bankrupt, the welfare and care systems are broken, and the only thing that’s growing is the national debt.
I don’t know about you but I’ve almost reached the point where I’m finding it hard to get angry any more. The daily revelations of systemic incompetence, embarrassing U-turns and grovelling apologies just leaves me feeling beaten and ungoverned. I’m now resigned to the fact that this country is well and truly up sh** creek without a paddle. And thanks to the profit-sucking, sewage-dumping charlatans who run our privatised water industries, a creek that is very shi**y indeed.
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