Politics in Britain has become national theatre – a pantomime played out under the flicker of nostalgia. The same actors shout the same lines to an audience that pretends not to know how it ends. We’re told to boo at Brussels, cheer for Britannia, and clap hard enough to revive a country that’s quietly slipping into managed decline.
The Conservatives destroyed the very country they claimed to protect. Fourteen years of austerity, cronyism, and Brexit vandalism left public services gasping. The “party of business” throttled trade, and the “party of law and order” left the courts, police, and prisons in tatters. They wrapped it all in the Union Flag, convinced no one would notice the smell.
Labour now governs with its hands tied – half the knots of its own making. Starmer’s team inherited a scorched economy and still feels obliged to prove itself to markets already reassured. Competence has replaced conviction. You can’t rebuild a nation on the same austerity logic that broke it, yet here we are – cautious, beige, and waiting for growth to fall from the sky.
Reform UK is a pub fantasy with a flag on the bar. Farage sells nostalgia to people mugged by history – a pint, a grin, and a scapegoat. Behind the bravado lies a wish list of uncosted tax cuts, deportation fantasies, and climate denial dressed up as “common sense”. It’s not a manifesto, it’s the venting hour after last orders.
The press plays its role too. Outrage is Britain’s last growth industry. The same papers that cheered austerity now howl about broken hospitals and dirty water. The same columnists who toasted Brexit now rail against the chaos it spawned. They trade in national misery because decline sells better than competence. Their readers, the very constituency they helped fleece, are now told to blame migrants and “wokeism” rather than the men who wrote the cheques.
Our institutions – monarchy, BBC, NHS – endure by inertia. No one dares reform them; no one knows what to replace them with. They are ghosts of a confident country now reduced to muttering about “heritage” as if it were a policy.
Immigration isn’t the cause of decline – it’s the decoy. The real rot lies in an economy built on cheap labour, low investment, and inflated assets. We learned to kick down instead of look up. Populists thrive because they give people villains small enough to hate.
The “will of the people” is a myth frozen in 2016 amber. To admit Brexit failed would be to admit they were conned, and that’s too much for those who built their identity around it. It’s political taxidermy – all form, no life.
Britain’s decline was never inevitable. It was chosen. Every crumbling school, every late train, every boarded-up youth centre was a policy dressed as destiny. The Tories called it “fiscal discipline”. In truth it was redistribution in reverse – from those who work to those who own. The landlords, the financiers, the hedge-fund donors, and the privatised utilities did splendidly. The rest of the country paid the bill.
And the Tory and Reform answer to this economic vandalism? More of it. More tax cuts for the wealthy, dressed up as “tax cuts for everyone”. They’ll trumpet a penny off income tax while clawing it back through frozen thresholds, stealth taxes, and higher VAT. The poor get the headline; the rich get the windfall. It’s a magician’s trick – distraction and deceit, all performed with a patriotic grin.
So when Labour now talks of taxing wealth properly, of closing loopholes and clawing back a share from those who grew fat off decay, the right-wing press erupts in outrage. How dare anyone come for the winners of decline! Yet these are the same editors who spent fourteen years cheerleading the very policies that enriched that class – the austerity, the deregulation, the property inflation. They built the fire and now squeal about the smoke.
Fair taxation isn’t revenge – it’s restitution. The public purse was looted to fund private wealth; putting some of it back is the bare minimum of justice. Every road, school, and hospital that enabled their fortune was paid for by the very people they now deride as “the left-behind”. Taxing them isn’t class war – it’s a refund.
No one in Westminster is honest about class. “Levelling up” was a slogan without a postcode. The political elite still dine, marry, and educate within the same few miles of SW1. Working-class Britain remains a prop – rolled out for speeches and folded away after.
We are ruled by nostalgia, governed by caution, and informed by outrage. The right promises the past, the left promises patience, and the press promises panic. The result is paralysis disguised as debate. Until someone tells the truth – that the real enemy isn’t Brussels, migrants, or “wokeism”, but cowardice, complacency, and wilful amnesia – the pantomime will continue.
Those who caused our current condition are protesting the loudest about the consequences. And the supreme irony is that they're now gathering round those who would make the situation infinitely worse.
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