Comment
PIERS MORGAN
MY wife Celia took the bus to a meeting in London today.
There were two extraordinary aspects to her journey.
11
11
11
The first, that she was on a bus at all, a rarer sighting than Matt Hancock at his constituency office.
The second, that it took her 90 minutes to get from Kensington to Green Park, a distance of just three miles, and another 45 minutes to get to Blackfriars, two miles further on, via a cab she eventually hailed after abandoning the virtually stationary bus.
According to Google maps, had she simply walked the entire journey, she would have arrived at the destination an hour earlier.
Millions of other far more long-suffering commuters will have endured as bad, if not worse, experiences and the reason, of course, was that there was yet another London Underground tube strike, the sixth this year.
Read more from Piers Morgan
So once again, our great capital city was paralysed all day and night.
Many overland trains were also cancelled for reasons that nobody understood but I suspect were linked to train workers downing tools ‘in sympathy’ with their below-ground colleagues.
And that’s just those who still actually go into work at all.
Exhausted and enraged, Celia took refuge in a café that had a sign saying: 'Please be patient with those of us who bothered to turn up to work today.'
Most read in The Sun
Doesn’t that sum it all up perfectly?
Let’s be brutally honest: Britain’s broken.
Our public services are shot to pieces, everyone’s striking, violent crime is surging, energy and food prices are out of control, and our work ethic has collapsed.
Since the Covid pandemic, and the extended furlough scheme that paid everyone to sit on the sofa doing f**k all, we’ve become a nation of lazy, entitled, stay-at-home skivers who’ve gone from a ‘can do’, to a ‘why the hell should I?’ mentality.
Watch Piers Morgan Uncensored weekdays on Sky 526, Virgin Media 606, Freeview 237, Freesat 217 or on Fox Nation in the US
In 1981, just 1.5% of the population worked from home. Now it’s 36%, and 50 of the UK’s biggest employers say they have no plans to return all staff to the office full time.
We’re now on track to be the only country in the developed world with lower employment in 2023 than before the coronavirus crisis began, with record highs of ‘economically inactive’ people especially among the over-50s.
There are many reasons for this; sharply rising numbers of those who’ve been out of work for five years or more with long-term health problems, more people retiring earlier, and many legal migrants going home since the pandemic and Brexit.
But it’s also the case that millions of others got rather used to staying in bed during lockdown and have no desire to crawl back out of it now if they can possibly help it.
11
11
And to be fair to the work-shy wastrels, venturing out of the house has becoming increasingly nightmareish.
If the roads aren’t clogged up by incessant ‘works’ or rail strikes, then they’re blocked by the increasingly moronic Just Stop Oil protestors who don’t give a damn about whose lives they disrupt as they shriek and wail their lunatic demands.
One poor Essex man revealed yesterday that he missed carrying his father’s coffin at his funeral several weeks ago because the Dartford Tunnel was closed by protests.
‘How dare they?’ he exclaimed.
But the truth is they dare to do it because the police mostly sit back and let them, just as they now seem to sit back and let criminals carry out myriad offences from muggings to burglaries because they’re too short-staffed to cope.
Just 5.6% of reported crimes end in a charge these days (I reported a public death threat made to me on my son’s Instagram page in February last year, and I’m still waiting for a charging decision on the suspect 14 months after he was arrested), rape convictions have halved, financial fraud, especially online, is exploding and our courts are jammed with humongous backlogs.
11
11
So, justice is broken.
As is the once great NHS.
It’s just been revealed that a record number of people are waiting over four hours in England hospital A&E departments, and ambulance waiting times are massively missing their targets too.
People can’t get doctors’ appointments - the number of patients waiting a year or more for treatment has risen by a shameful 13 times. And the rate cancer patients see a specialist within two weeks of seeing their GP has also crashed to an all-time low.
Why is it so bad? Try this fact: there are 40,000 nurse and 8,000 doctor vacancies.
All this means many people are dying who shouldn’t be.
11
11
11
Want to see a dentist? Good luck with that, many are refusing to take on any new patients, including children. Some desperate people are even resorting to pulling out their own teeth with pliers to stop the pain. Are we back in Dickensian times?
Our asylum system is in tatters, 90% of schools are running out of cash, and our beaches and rivers have become stinking sewers.
Yet what else can we expect when those charged with running the country have proven themselves to be such a shambolic, shameful, rule-breaking shower?
Just look at ‘Sir’ Gavin Williamson, who was fired twice, given a knighthood for failure, and has now been fired a third time after Rishi Sunak inexplicably gave the incompetent weasel another cabinet job.
What will his reward be this time – a peerage?
And what message does his shocking CV send to the electorate?
Or indeed that of the aforementioned Matt ‘kangaroo testicle-muncher’ Hancock, now profiting obscenely from his own abject failure as health secretary and scandalous exit from government?
Thanks to Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng dragging us into the economic abyss with their reckless gambling, we’re now about to be slapped with massive tax rises at a time when most people can least afford them.
And forget about flying off to escape all this misery.
Air travel has become a living hell with constant late cancellations, and chaos at airports due to acute shortages of baggage handlers and ground staff.
Read More on The Sun
Read More on The Sun
So, there’s no escape, and I fear things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better.
But if you’re seeking at least one ray of sunshine amid all the misery, consider this: if Arsenal beat Wolves on Saturday, we’ll be top of the Premier League until after Christmas. Ho ho ho!
11
Topics