Snap and Scribble

Britain gets more ridiculous every day! It seems to be in an uncontrollable downward spiral of mismanagement, greed and general shoddiness.

Take Heathrow, for example. It’s probably the busiest airport in the world – and it’s one of the worst, too. The whole place has the air of a rundown country bus station, or a shabby channel ferry port, and it’s always absolutely packed with people.

They just opened a new terminal there a few days back – terminal 5. It’s supposed to be some sort of fabulous improvement on what’s gone before. But there was trouble even before it opened. They’d planned to scan everyone’s fingerprints when they entered the place, so they could control who got onto planes, etc. Then, just a few days before it was due to open, they discovered that this would actually be illegal!

And they’re paying some moron many tens of thousands of pounds a year to organise this stuff – maybe hundreds of thousands.

Then, when it eventually opened, it was complete chaos. Nothing worked. Flights had to be cancelled. And passengers were held up for hours on end – if they were lucky enough to be able to fly at all.

How hard can it be to make an airport work? Well, ok, it’s quite hard, but it’s done every day at thousands of airports around the world. Even poor third world countries can make their airports work better than Britain can.

People are stealing the cable from power lines and phone lines. Kilometers of the stuff gets pinched every week, apparently. This place is deranged! There was some drongo on television the other night who got severely burnt trying to steal live cable from an electricity sub-station!

Public transport is a joke. Well, it would be a joke if so many people didn’t have to rely on it to get to work. There are major stuff-ups on the railways all the time. It’s been privatised, of course…

Everywhere you look in this country there’s blatant evidence of completely incompetent management. But they expect you to have a degree and a good CV before they’ll hire you to wash dishes. But the mismanagers are all getting stupidly rich from the outrageously high salaries they’re getting.

The City of London (the part where all the banks and stock exchanges etc are) is packed with people who are frantically grabbing everything they can get their hands on. They make stupid amounts of money every year – mainly by doing things that most people would think should be illegal (if they could understand them).

Apparently they now work round the clock in the city. And violence on the streets there has rocketed!

If you’re rich enough, you can live in this country but claim you live somewhere else – and legally not pay tax. They know you live here, but you still don’t have to pay. “Non-doms” they call them – non-domiciled something or other. There was a bit of a fuss about it recently, but the government shrugged it off with the usual “if we tax them they’ll go somewhere else” nonsense. If they try and tax me, i’ll go back to Australia!

And the poor, as usual, are getting poorer.

But there’s not all that many real poor in this country though. There’s vast amounts of people who are relatively poor. And there’s plenty of people who think they’re poor. But most of the people who think they’re poor are a lot better off than my parents were when i was a kid – they just waste most of their money on rubbish.

This place is completely mindboggling. It’s like a third world country in some ways. But most third world countries are gradually improving – while this one’s getting worse.

I’m so glad i’ve got an Australian passport!

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