Politics

Great Britain in crisis: a kingdom without glory

The cashier at the supermarket Wimbledon Morrisons has white hair and desolately kind look. She, like many of her colleagues from this resale in the London tennis district, was among the first to see the crisis arrive. «If you want to find everything you need, it is better to come in the morning, already in the early afternoon the products begin to be scarce. And nobody replaces them, at a continuous pace, as in the past. They do not want inventories that should be wasted … ». They are no longer opulent times in the United Kingdom, the recent collapse of the pound due to the speculation of the bond markets is only the last wave of the perfect storm that has invested the country that was of Churchill and go to denying it. The British middle class, who is the one who pays taxes and send ahead everything, is so aware of it, that lowers his shoulders and pulls straight. On the eve of the New Year who has just passed, in London illuminated day by the administration of the Labor Mayor Sadiq Khan, the restaurant on the top floor of the department store John Lewis in Chelsea, at 1pm he could no longer serve lunch for lack of stocks. Before the pandemic he would have worked uninterruptedly until the closing time. Customers even protest, instead of the Fish and Chips, are satisfied with the cappuccino and a piece of cake. “What do you want, is like this everywhere,” comments a gentleman who has been attending the place with his wife for at least forty years, “there are those who are worse”.

And it is true: the percentage of poor in the United Kingdom has never been so high, As political commentators have always noticed, always outside the schemes such as Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart (the first was Tony Blair’s consultant, the second lost in the leading to the leader against Boris Johnson and then came out of the party) protagonists of the highly followed Podcast the rest is politics. “Today’s United Kingdom” say “he has to face a situation in which hundreds of thousands of people who live in benefits are, something that is not seen in other European countries”. According to the latest report of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the number of the indigent ones, once all the extraordinary supports disappeared, returned to the pre-crovid levels: 14.4 million people (22 percent of the population), including four million of children and two of retirees. In ten years, the number of homeless people has increased by 120 percent. In Manchester, last week the municipal administration closed the tent city of homeless erected by protest in front of the town hall and London continues to have the percentage of higher home -home residents in the kingdom. How does the hymn say? «God saves the king, he makes him victorious, happy and glorious. For a long time you reign on us »…

There seems to be nothing victorious and glorious in the kingdom of King Charles today. And the sovereign already does it, surviving cancer, together with daughter -in -law Catherine. But many are not received their own care from a health service on the ropes that shows no signs of recovery. The Board of Nurses has released a 400 -page report that denounces the catastrophic situation of British hospitals, where the elderly patients die in the hospital corridors and in the bathrooms where they are left waiting even for ten hours and nursing operators do not even notice them promptly because They are too few. Not to mention the social services that if you put all their shortcomings in line, Italy looks like a Nordic country. An example for everyone, the case of the killer of the girls of Southport, that Exel Rudakubana who last July killed three girls on a dance course in his former school and wounded ten other people. It was discovered that he had been reported to the authorities in charge since he was 13 years old, he had been diagnosed with an autistic syndrome and nobody was busy. Now that he has committed a massacre, the government has opened an investigation, but like him in Great Britain there are thousands of them. In the speech held by Starmer on the case, the premier emphasized the failure of the radicalization prevention system by the online terrorist groups, leaving the deepest motivation last. “This violence is also a sign of a country folded over itself,” he said, promising an epochal change.

However, few believe why today’s Laburists resemble conservatives all too much who preceded them, once they arrived in the government. They got caught to accept inappropriate gifts, national newspapers reveal uncomfortable friendships that interfere on legislative projects, suffer the same pressures from the power lobbies. Opposition politicians are not saved: the conservative leader Kemi Badenoch Pare Elly Schlein, all taken to break his iron line of principle and unable to breach the heart of ordinary people. His interventions are harmless and the party itself tends to think that the internal self -criticism period is the alibi to hide the lack of ideas and proposals. “If the Labor Government is in difficulty, the conservative party has little to please” comments Tim Bale, deputy director of the UK research institute in A Changing Europe, “since his representatives and anyone who guides continue to operate within the circle Restricts of media and strategic toilets whose concerns and interests are always too distant from those of the average of the British and even more far from those of their lenders. It happened the same, in 1997, when the conservatives were outclassed by Blair ».

If this is the general picture, it is not surprising the result of a survey carried out for the newspaper The Guardian who reveals how young people are attracted by the idea of ​​a strong and snubbing leader the importance of democratic elections. Nigel Faragestar of reform UK, supported by Elon Musk He declares that he could become prime minister with the next vote. However, he too of his bankruptcy choices, such as the Brexit who dragged the kingdom where he now is now. At the beginning of the year another newspaper, the Independent, slammed all the numbers of the catastrophe on the front page and is not a nice portrait for a country where in the two-year period 2021-23 exports to Europe fell 27 per 27 per One hundred and the imports of 32 and the bureaucracy blocks the trucks for days on the borders of Dover and Calais. Always the same survey says that the two thirds of the interviewees believes that the best years of the kingdom are now behind them. Never as now we hope that, once again, the polls are wrong. The current government remains the arduous company to concretize the “epochal” reforms such as the one on the social system and find a balance between Europe that its predecessors have repudiated and the America of Trump who keeps it at a distance. God save the premier, it would be said.