THE BIG READ: Our beautiful country is now going downhill terrifyingly quickly

A total systems failure is going to require solutions more radical than anyone is yet ready to talk about

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

GIVEN that this site is called “State O’ The Nation”, I do feel under an obligation to give an occasional overview of that very thing.

And at the risk of coming across as akin to the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnets of desolation phase (“no worst, there is none…”), I must observe today that dear old Blighty is in a terrible state and there is no sign of anything much getting better anytime soon.

Something close to a total systems failure is afflicting us. We haven’t enjoyed significant growth in pecuniary living standards per head for close to a generation. Our armed services are hollowed out in a way not seen in living memory. They are struggling to recruit young adults who tell pollsters in ever-greater numbers that they would not fight and die for the hot mess their country has become.

Our political class keeps writing gargantuan cheques on yet more borrowed money – for foreign aid, carbon net zero, finding housing for illegal immigrant gatecrashers – sinking us ever-deeper into debt. Privatised, foreign-owned water companies pump raw sewage into our great rivers at volumes which make them unsafe for leisure users. Angela Rayner is preparing to chew up more green fields forever in a huge house-building programme, without even contemplating a restrictive immigration policy to stabilise the population first.

But of the myriad crises – economic, social, environmental – it is in the area of the law that the rot surely runs deepest. There is obvious two-tier policing of public spaces. A modern judicial caste drawn largely from the political left has ruthlessly exploited the constitutional reforms of the Blair governments to seize power and impose the “progressive” values of the elite permanently.

Hence, we are about to see the idea of everyone being equal before the law ended, with certain sympathised-with identity groups given the privilege of a guaranteed pre-sentencing report: blacks, Asians, women, sexual minorities. But not ordinary white blokes.

On top of that, we have seen the emergence of a de facto Islamic blasphemy law based around the misuse of public order and incitement legislation, so that activist Muslims, for example, can render the burning of a Koran (a horrible act) an illegal one just by kicking off with sufficient vigour.

This is not all. Left-wing political motivations are now officially regarded as mitigating factors in sentencing – see the current debate over Just Stop Oil closing the M25 – while right-wing political motivations are treated as aggravating factors. So breaking the law while campaigning against climate change will see you get a lighter sentence while breaking the law while campaigning against illegal migration will lead to the book getting thrown at you by judges who regard support for multiculturalism and liberal attitudes towards “refugees” as the only tolerable outlook.

Increasingly often judges are letting these values-driven considerations creep into their sentencing remarks. In a recent case of vandalism of a statue of Paddington Bear, the actual judge hearing the case condemned the offenders on grounds that their behaviour encompassed everything that Paddington would be against. Judge Sam Goozee told the vandals, who had been drunk: “He represents kindness, tolerance and promotes integration and acceptance in our society…Your actions were the antithesis of everything Paddington stands for.”

Funny how Paddington has prospered by becoming a no-borders ideologue, while his children’s TV contemporaries the Wombles have ebbed away as a cultural phenomenon by dutifully continuing to pick up litter in this era of fly-tipping and street-as-dumping ground.

Meanwhile the parade of foreign criminals - including paedophiles and rapists - successfully fending off deportations through ludicrous interpretations of their “human rights” goes on and on. You will remember the Afghan rapist who couldn’t be