Britain is Suffering in Shocking Ways — But Its Leaders Don’t Care
Dec 21, 2022
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Take a hard look at the picture above — if you can stomach it for more than a second or two, that is. What is it?Whois it? Where was it taken? What story is it telling? The old woman looks like she might be a refugee. Or have just survived a war. Or perhaps some natural disaster befell her.
Do you want to hear the real story? Prepare to be absolutely shocked. “A 93-year-old woman was left ‘screaming in pain’ while lying on the floor with a broken hip during a 25-hour ambulance wait.”
Welcome to Dickensian Britain.Think about that for a second. It’s not just a picture. It’s a portrait. Of a failed state. A society in profound, utterly shocking, jaw-dropping levels of distress. It’s not just one story, but dozens, thousands, millions, of the staggering level of ruin that Britain inflicted on itself.
A 93 year old woman…screaming in pain…waiting25 hours…for an…ambulance? Tell me your stomach doesn’t turn. It doesn’t, because most of us are moral, sane, decent people. But Britain’s leaders appear to be no such thing. They appearnot to care at all.
So, like I said, welcome to Dickensian Britain. It’s not just about the dire, head-spinning, stomach-churning distress people are going through, the mind-blowing descent into impoverishment.
It’s also about the other half of what Dickens dramatized. Indifference. Cruelty. Scorn. From the very top.The really shocking part of the story isn’t just that the poor old lady was screaming in pain, waiting more than a day for an ambulance…it’s that Britain’s leaders essentially just say: “What’s the problem? Suck it up!”
It is nothing short of astonishing. Words fail me at this point, and that rarely happens, but this, it has. What can you say when a nation’s leaders literally…don’t care…about this extreme, off-the-charts level of ruin? When they have no apologies to offer, no plans to put in place, no course to correct…when they think that grandmas screaming in pain waiting more than a day for an ambulance…isn’t even a problem? Shrug — hey, grandma, I don’t know, take some aspirin. Ambulances? Those are only for people who deserve them. Not you. Sorry, grandma, if you die, you die. Did you really deserve to live anyways? Happy Christmas!!
That’s what Ebenezer Sunak’s government ispractically saying to Britain. They’re not being told, for example, oh God, what an emergency, don’t worry, more are on the way, we’re fixing it. They’re beingtold not to evencallthe emergency services. You die, you die. Happy Holidays, from Ebenezer Sunak and the Team at Brexit, Inc! Good luck, you’re going to need it. If the lack of heating doesn’t kill grandma, well, I guess the lack of doctors, nurses, paramedics, ambulances, money, and everything else basic in a society just might. Hey — remember — Ebenezer Sunak loves you.Grin.
What do you even say to that? Tell me, because I’d like to know. I’d like to say just that, but even I’m speechless, because this level of neglect is absolutely unprecedented in the modern history of rich societies.I have never seen it happen anywhere else, because it hasn’t. But before I continue that part of the story, let me tell you how bad it really is, because we’ve only — I know, it’s crazy — just begun.
You might think to yourself, well, surely that’s an isolated incident, right? That can’t be…the norm? Old women screaming in pain for over a day…waiting for help, any kind of help, to arrive. Surely that’s anexception.
You’d be wrong. don’t take it from me. Take it from paramedics themselves. Ask one, and it seems they’ve all got a story like the above.
Tom, 33, who also did not want to give his last name, has worked with East Midlands Ambulance Service for five years and said he would be striking on Wednesday if he was on duty. “I’ve attended elderly patients who have been on the floor with broken hips for over 20 hours.”
Or take this example:
Former GP receptionist Deb Robinson, 53,saidher son and his partner called 111 at 6pm on Tuesday and were told their newborn, struggling with his breathing and coughing, needed an ambulance. The parents of the baby, who remains in A&E waiting on a bed, were forced to rush him to the hospital themselves at 11pm.
There are endless stories like that. Which is why the nation’s healthcare workers are going on strike. Paid a pittance, and worked to the bone — they’ve now reached the point that the system’s collapsed, and that’s not my word, theHealth Secretary himselfadmits it. And yet the government? Itflatly refuses to negotiate. At all. It’s just…silent. It refuses to lift a finger to address these shocking levels of privation.It doesn’t care. Because certainly, if you did, you’d be at least sitting at the negotiating table with paramedics and nurses and doctors desperate tosave people’s lives. You’d be trying to solve what’s a very, very real — so real it’sliterally deadly— problem.
But not in Ebenezer Sunak’s Britain. There, PM Ebenezer watches all this happen…and gives this weird, ghastly grin. He doesn’t even get how grotesquely inappropriate it is to be smiling in days like these. Especially while his government watches the nation just…collapse.
Ebenezer Sunak’s Britain? That country? It’s like a Christmas Carol, except the Three Ghosts aren’t of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. They’re all named Brexit.Their job isn’t to scare this Ebenezer into changing his ways — it’s to scare him into not changing a damned thing to the point of not lifting a finger to pick up a pen and even write the merest hint of a speech about fixing the nation’s astoundingly broken systems and institutions. These ghosts say: smile, Ebenezer. The pain’s good for them!!
And they’re not just visiting dear old Ebenezer, they’re visiting the Labour Party, too, and scaring it just the same way, but I’ll come back to that.
The ghost of Brexit past says: Brexit means Brexit.What the…what the hell does that mean, you might ask? It’s a shibboleth in modern-day Britain, a kind of phrase that’s been repeated so often it’s a mantra. It means:everythingmeans Brexit. Everything is Brexit. The future of our country can only be about one thing, forever, Brexit — Britain as some kind of fantasy-utopia super-island which the entire world worships and envies and beats a path to.
Sshh, says the ghost of Brexit Present. Never mind thefacts. That theeconomy’s shrinking, at least until the end of the decade, it looks like, because, well, now we’re a lot poorer.And you know what poorer countries can’t afford? As many nurses, doctors, paramedics. Ambulances. Hospitals, schools, teachers, which is whythey’rerunning out of money, too. Ignore that. Here, here — here’s a pretty scapegoat. See those refugees? See how dirty they are? Filthy things, aren’t they? They’re hateful. Why, can’t you see it on their dirt-caked skin? They’re the problem. The impure among us. The sickness of our misfortune comes fromthem.
And there, in the corner, grins the ghost of Brexmas Future.It smiles wickedly, because it sees a far, far poorer and more ruined country than eventhis. One in which there isno more NHS, because now healthcare is properly, fully Dickensian. Ambulance? That’ll cost you a tuppence, ma’am — sorry, I mean, at least 2000 quid, and that’s the kind that’ll take hours. What’s that? You want it right away? Sure, sure! The VIP Package begins at 5000 pounds. We take all major credit cards, and also you can do time in the workhouse.
The ghost of Brexmas Future sees a nation whose expansive social contract and once mighty public goods have been torn up — and in its place is a privately owned dystopia, a place where “Freeports,” aka “zones” run by corporations, have spread like cancer, and, well, more or less everything else is shuttered, because Britain’s a net importer to begin with, so who’s trading with it anymore? The ghost of Brexmas Future ponders branding itselfWeyland-Yutani, and establishing colonies on boarded up shores the failed state of Britain.
Ok, forgive me. It’s not something to really get lyrical about. Let me put the above more formally, and concisely.
Brits not being able to get ambulances for their dying elderly relatives and little newborn babies is a Big Deal. Because of course, it’s not just about ambulances at all. Let me express this grim situation more technically, and you’ll grasp at once how bad it really is.
What Britain now has is a shortage of…healthcare.Allof it. From doctors to nurses to ambulances.They’re going on strike precisely because therearen’t enough of them, and those who are aren’t paid remotely enough to not just make it worth it, but to even eke out a livable income. What kind of a nation, though, has a shortage ofhealthcare? Healthcare is one of the most fundamental and critical systems a society can have.
A shortage of healthcare isn’t a problem we should ever see not just in any rich country, but at this juncture in human history, even in middle income ones. The only place we should really see it is in desperately poor nations, which have to make impossible choices, like paying off interest on debt, or buying their people antibiotics and employing doctors and nurses. Worse, Britain’s shortage of healthcare isn’t temporary — caused by, I don’t know, too many nurses this week getting sick with the flu: it’spermanent.The NHSneeds to employ over 150,000more people to fix its waiting list ofsevenmillion.
For a nation like Britain to have ended with one of a society’s most basic and critical systems going into a mode of absolute, total failure — shortage — and worse, that shortage to be permanent? It’sstaggering.It’s the result of years upon years of not just neglect, butmalice. This is the society that Britain’s fanatics wanted — and they conned the average person into believing them, with Big Lies. What was perhaps the biggest promise that sold the swindle of Brexit to the average person? That it’d deliver an extra350 million pounds a week to the NHS. LOL — if it had, Brits would be able to get healthcare now, but they can’t, and that’s squarelybecauseBrexit has a) rapidly shrunk the economy, b) caused amass exodus of skilled workers, c) hollowed out the labour force while d) simultaneously giving fools and fanatics like Ebenezer Sunak absolute power to not have to lift a finger because, well, Brexit Still Means Brexit, until, one day, the “sunlit uplands” Boris Johnson spoke of — Britain becomes Fantasy Island, Big Lies having somehow magically made it rich — finally arrives.
That day is never going to come.Ever.Britain is now permanently poorer, and what “permanently poorer” means, in practice, is that systems are now permanentlybroken.To ever have a functioning NHS again —ever— means that Britain will have to strike a far saner deal with the EU, so its economy can even just tread water again, rather than decline into oblivion. That’s the only way it can ever happen, because otherwise,the money isn’t going to be there. Brexit haskicked off a doom loop, in other words, just as everyone sane said it would, and finally, the average person is discovering, to their horror, that they made a huge mistake in falling for the swindle. But they can’t do anything about it, because the Ghosts of Brexit Past, Present, and Future are haunting Britain, and nobody much knows how to exorcise them.
So there’s Ebenezer Sunak, grinning his wierd phantasmal grin, while grandmas scream in pain…while kids shiver in the cold…while families choose between heating and eating…smile, Britain! The sunlit uplands! They’re just around the corner. No, not the last one. No, not that one, either. The next one. Just hold on. You’ll see. It’s all going to turn around — you just have to take the pain.
Absolute power. Not to lift a finger. I have never, ever seen anything like it, outside hardcore failed states.Think about what happens in America, after one of the problems its notorious for — school shootings. Yes, they’re a major problem. But outside the fanatical Trumpist wing of the GOP — now firmly rejected by most Americans — even most politicians will say it’s a Big Problem. Joe Bidencertainly will. LizWarrenand Berniewill. The list goes on and on.
Can you imagine Joe Biden saying to Americans, sorry, guys,just don’t call the ambulance? Are youkidding me? Even America’s not that bananas, precisely because its leaders don’t have absolute power.But Britain’s do, and that’s because Brexit is the idol that everyone’s now forced to bow down and worship, or else. Or else your political fortunes are over before they start, since the entire discourse is now fanatical, captured by lunatics and extremists, who are still out there spouting inane Big Lies like “Brexit will fix the NHS” — while grandma and little Johnny are choking to death on the floor because no help is going to arrive. Crazy town, but me drive the point home.
Can you imagine Justin Trudeau saying to Canadians, sorry, guys, hey, listen, just don’t call the ambulance? You can’t, because that would bevictim blaming.It’s not some average person’s job to manage a healthcare system so it can perform basic functions, it is the goddamned government’s. And if a government can’t do that most fundamental of jobs…what business does it have being in power? What’s thepointof it? Except toabuseits power?
Or try and imagine, I don’t know, Emanuel Macron saying to the French, mes Amis, n’appelez pas l’ambulance. It’s your fault, not ours. Your problem, and your job — not ours. The French would be in the tiny streets of Paris’s 8th arrondissement with pitchforks and maybe even guillotines in hours. This is a nation that’ll strike over the quality of food it gets, after all.
Other nations don’t fall for this repugnant, sickening routine, that has become routine in Britain.Gaslighting. Victim blaming. No ambulances? Shrug. Just don’t call them! See? Problem solved!
What is this…idiot-world? Am I on drugs? What kind of utter moron does that make sense to, because that’s not a solution, it’s barely even a Big Lie — it’sdrivel.
And yet this is the approach Britain’s government takes to everything now. The solution to no ambulances? Just don’t call them! LOL — simple! Can’t afford the heat? Don’t turn it on!! Buy a jumper, and, I don’t know, give your kids a hot water bottle. And by the way, say hello to Tiny Tim for me, says Ebenezer, grinning that weird empty-souled grin. What’s that? Electricity’s too expensive? You can barely afford to keep it on for a couple of hours a day? I know, here, cut back!Buy anair fryer!
This is actually what’s happening. I kid you not. The government, instead of accepting responsibility for the ruinous state of Britain, for its endless list of now immense social problems, for the absolutely shocking levels of privation people are experiencing…it tells them tojust stop living a modern life.After all, that’s what all this amounts to. Don’t call the ambulance. Don’t take antibiotics. Don’tturn on the heat. Don’t use electricity. Don’t cook your food using an oven. LOL…are you…serious? This is the answer Britain’s government has to the problem of the ruin it inflicted on a once proud nation? To turn the clock backwards so people aren’t evenlivingmodern lives at all?
Where does it end, exactly? The Stone Age? Because it’s already looking pretty Victorian out there, in the once bustling and prosperous streets of England’s fair and pleasant land. Grandma’s lying on the floor, screaming in pain, little Johnny’s choking to death, the heat’s not on for more than a few hours a day, but so what, because blackouts are on the way anyways, and there you are, cooking your food on a stone. And you’re one of the lucky ones, because, hey, well, at least you’re not making a regular trip to the food bank which isregularly out of foodbecause so many do, at least you still have a job, at least you’re not losing it all.
Happy Christmas, Britain. Ebenezer Sunak and the team at Brexit, Inc wish you all the best. Have you topped up your electricity meter yet — tsk, tsk, better do it, for the hour or two you can still afford. Hey, how’s Tiny Tim doing? He’s got Scarlet Fever, that’s now racing across the country? Ah, what a pity. Too bad there’s a shortage of antibiotics, huh? Good luck to the little guy — he’s going to need it. Grandma doing alright? She had a bad fall? Sorry to hear it. Shrug. The strong survive, and the weak, oh well. One less mouth to feed, did you ever think of it that way? Oh, did you think this was a social call? It wasn’t. Do you have a ha’penny for the Corporation? You see, we can to help you, the team at Ebenezer Sunak and Partners, a Registered and Licensed Failed State Broker, but only, first, we need toGet Brexit Even More Done, so that it finishes you off. Did I say that part out loud? So sorry. What’s that? Desperate times? Nobody should be lying on the floor screaming for help? Just remember, whatever you do — don’t call the ambulance.
UmairDecember 2022
