What Greenhouse; The State Of The Nation…Innit

The recovery continues apace. As I sit writing this missive, I’m six weeks in and although the stairs continue to present something of a challenge and I’m still using a stick I feel that I’m probably over the hump. Thoughts turn, although not that often TBF, to how much easier things might have been had I been offered the hip replacement when the problem was first discovered, a mere (almost) seven years ago. Still, never mind that, we are where we are. As I’ve previously stated, being somewhat incapacitated allows for time to look a little more closely at what’s happening in the “news”. I’ve even taking, when I’m in need of a good laugh or a bit of a stimulus to my blood pressure, to watching the lunchtime tellybox offering. It can amuse and enrage in equal measure. Information is starting to filter through about the poor quality of as many (currently) as 30,000 insulation installations that have gone badly wrong, mostly due to either shoddy workmanship, the unsuitability of the property, or both. Yet another grandiose government scheme gone badly wrong, where con merchants take advantage of lax oversight and quality control standards and people who can least afford it are left counting the cost. It’s just as well we now have Great British Energy to come to the rescue, I’m sure it’ll just about pay for itself (or be superseded by another equally useless and horrendously expensive Quango) by the turn of the century, or thereabouts.

The brouhaha surrounding Farrij Junior continues to rumble on. It can now be revealed (allegedly) that literally hundreds of people, who all went to the same school as Nigel, but didn’t actually know each other, can attest to the fact (without any real corroboratory evidence) that he’s, literally, the reincarnation of Adolph Hitler, cloned with Benito Mussolini and a slightly more deranged and bloodthirsty Pol Pot. All the usual suspects are coming out of the woodwork, many of them with nothing more than a permanently blunt axe to grind, calling for him to apologise, but not before he submits himself to a version of “Poena Cullei“. This is a now updated form of punishment, dating back for millennia, where the accused is tied into a sack along with a Green Party politician dressed as a dog, a Your Party spokesperson masquerading as a clucking hen, a BBC Verify apparatchik in a monkey suit and a drunken ex BBC correspondent impersonating a snake, before being thrown into the river Thames. If the sack sinks, they’re all innocent of any wrongdoing. However, four of them will be guilty of Farage Derangement Syndrome, even if it floats.

Back in the olden days (2010) David Cameron proposed “A Bonfire Of The Quangos”. At the time it was estimated that it would cost £millions to abolish, but doing so would eventually benefit the country, it turned out to be a lie. At the time there were in the region of 280 such (arms length) bodies. Today there are over 480, with an estimated total staff of over half a million people, a great many of them doing little or no productive work, but all of them financed, at nobody knows what cost (it’s £billions) from the public purse. I only mention this because I’ve just come across mention of a group of people called (somewhat grandiosely) “Chief Resilience Officers”. Although strictly not Quangocrats, there are at least 300 such people in the UK. What they actually do is anyone’s guess (mine is not very much), but it’s a very lucrative game to be involved in, with salaries ranging from £65k+ to well over £100k. If the average is, let’s say, £85k, then that’s an annual cost to the taxpayer of around £25.5 million, before office space, laptops, travel expenses and dining out costs are taken into account. Nice work if you can get it, although I’m guessing you’d have to know all the right people to have even a sniff of a chance. More “jobs for the boys” if you ask me.

Apropos of the state of the nation, I was tickled to come across the below social media post earlier today in regard to an incident in a car park at Heathrow Airport. I have the permission of the original poster to reproduce it in full, although he isn’t bothered about an attribution. I think it covers, in a most colourful and well written way, what many of us feel about so much that goes on within our society and how poorly, most of the time, incidents are dealt with, often to the detriment of the ordinary citizen. I know bad stuff happens and I know there’s always a chance that something will go terribly badly, but there only ever seems to be one of two reactions, one based on full panic mode and the other based on lackadaisical incompetence.

The Heathrow incident is such a depressing vignette of our tawdry, miserable, inadequate yet overbearing police these days.

Following two budgets, based on untruths, manipulated figures, ideological preconceptions (as opposed to anything remotely resembling pragmatism) and community “appeasement”, which have led to the retail and leisure sectors being put under quite severe financial pressures and a consequent drop off in recruitment, one of the governments latest “primary focused missions” is to try to encourage younger people (so called NEETS)  to take up posts within the said sectors. Whether or not this is before they’ve completed their apprenticeships or their polytechnic courses, your guess is as good as mine. There’s one thing certain, it’ll be pointless them trying to get a job in the NHS, as we continue to import people to fill positions within our “envy of the world” health service, regardless of whether said people can actually speak English or are even properly qualified for the jobs they’re employed to carry out. At the same time many UK trained doctors and nurses are, for a variety of reasons (not least the one already mentioned) unable to find work at home and are increasingly being forced to seek employment outside of the country (or sector) that trained them!

Is there a scintilla of light at the end of the tunnel? One would hope so, but I doubt that anything our current government promises to do will improve the lives of ordinary people in the long term, although short term fixes (or bribes, as they’re more commonly known) are clearly the order of the day. Chin up though, it looks as if our Ange is on her way back into government and we can all look forward to those days of low cost energy, plentiful housing and well paid employment that have been this governments “primary focus”, “overriding mission” and “plan for change” as it creates “a new Britain for all” through the simple expedient of “kick-starting the economy” by adhering strictly to its “fiscal rules”.
 

© Colin Cross 2025