Warren Baister

🚨📉THE SLOW DEATH OF BRITAIN: We have shit water companies so we buy bottled water. We have rubbish police so we hire private security. We have terrible healthcare so we pay private hospitals instead. Airbnbs in Cornwall pay council tax but get no rubbish collection, so they pay Biffa on top. An awful lot of firemen are now volunteers. NHS dentists don’t really work anymore, so you go private or you pull it out yourself. Our roads are littered with potholes nobody fills. Your privately funded tyres and suspension are the collateral. You are forced under threat of criminal prosecution to fund the BBC, and it’s so bad you pay for streaming to get news or entertainment anyway. Your bins are collected fortnightly, so you drive to the tip. The tip now requires a booking, a permit and proof you live in the county. Garden waste is a separate annual subscription. On top of the council tax that used to cover it. Your GP surgery is an 8am phone lottery, so you pay £40 to an app to speak to a doctor in a different time zone. CAMHS has a two year waiting list, so parents remortgage for private assessments. Your child’s SEN provision is a legal entitlement, so you hire a solicitor to sue the council for it. The council spends more fighting you than the support would have cost. Physio is a forty week wait. Your back does not have forty weeks. Schools teach in portable cabins bolted to the playground because the actual building is held up by aerated concrete and hope. Half of them are technically insolvent. Parents fund the reading books, the glue sticks, the photocopier, the roof and increasingly the teachers wages - all via a PTA raffle and local fundraisers. The state offers “free” childcare hours that don’t cover the nursery’s costs, so the nursery bills you a “top up fee” for the free thing. Shoplifting under £200 is functionally legal, so Tesco hires guards - who crucially don’t even try to stop it - and you pay for them in the price of the milk. 999 takes an hour, so you buy the Ring doorbell, gather the evidence, file the report and get a crime number for the insurance you also pay for. Court backlogs run to years, so anyone with money settles privately and everyone else gets nothing. Legal aid is gone. Represent yourself. Passport and DVLA backlogs are chronic, so the state sells you a fast track service to escape the queue the state created. The trains are late whoever owns them, so you drive on the roads with the potholes. Public toilets are shut, so you buy a coffee you don’t want. The library is staffed by pensioners working for free. Street lights are switched off at midnight to save money in a country with a burglary charge rate near zero. You pay National Insurance for fifty years and they move the pension age. You pay the adult social care precept every year and then sell your mother’s house to pay for adult social care. Leaseholders pay for a “waking watch” because the state signed off the cladding and then billed the residents to fix it. Social housing sits on the most valuable land in Britain, allocated by need rather than proximity to work, 48% of zone 1 social housing is occupied by foreigners mostly welfare dependent - while the nurses, teachers and other workers who keep zone 1 running commute ninety minutes each way from Kent because we stopped building anything in 1979. Every one of these is a service you have already bought. The receipt is your payslip. The tax burden is heading for its highest sustained level since the 1940s. The service level is the worst in living memory. You are not overtaxed or underserved. You are actually BOTH, simultaneously, and the gap between the two is where your standard of living went. The state has become a subscription you cannot cancel and cannot use.