Good citizens

It looks as if things really are worse than we might have thought. Unemployable history lecturer Gordon Brown and provincial solicitor Alastair Darling were, for unfathomable reasons, put "in charge" of the British economy and they have managed to completely destroy in a decade. It took much longer for Stalin to ruin Russia's economy, didn't it?

So what should a good citizen do? Should we flee and leave the people to the fate they deserve having put the lunatics in charge of the asylum or do we stay and try and make things better? It's a difficult question. A quick review of the history of this century seems to indicate that Labour governments are a bit like biblical plagues: they come along from time to time and devastate the economy, then move on. But this time it might really be different: the land may never recover from this visitation, or at least it may not recover within my children's lifetimes, which is the same thing as far as I'm concerned. There is only one course of action open to the patriot: independence, as soon as is practical. We must be freed from the crushing yokes that are the legacy of Danish and French invasion. The experiment is over: we want a free Wessex, and we want it now. I can't see an alternative.

The problem, for normal middle class people like me, is that we're going to be paying vastly more tax to support the public sector (a public sector which is, by the way, planning to spend four billion pounds on management consultants over the next four years) and getting vastly worse services. Only the super rich will be able to send their children to good schools, take foreign holidays (now that the government is putting up the air ticket tax it will cost us £240 in tax to go to the US) and afford imported consumer goods. The tragedy of universal suffrage means that the half of the population dependent on the state can block any kind of action that might try and bring the budget back under control, so if you're not super rich or working for the government (or in a position to capture part of the national revenue through economically senseless political action, such as farmers or songwriters) you don't have much of a future.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]