Phil's Mini-Blog

It seems that as immigration swells the UK population, emigration also reduces it. The population might not be going up, but those that are leaving are usually original UK citizens.

The reasons given are those that you hear about every day, but it’s only when you put them all together that it makes you think ‘Do I really want to stay here?’. Increasingly, people are coming to the conclusion, ‘No’.

Here are the reasons given; increased crime across the board, unaffordable housing, increasing taxes and bills, declining health service, cost of transport, increasingly unsociable people, plus many others.

When you’re been around the world a bit, you can get some perspective on this. Britain is not the worst place in the world to live. Chances are you’re not going to get shot on the way to the pub or catch dysentery once you’re in there.

However, if you go for a look around Europe and worldwide, you’ll see how it should be done. I can’t remember any country I’ve been to with a crappier train service than Thameslink into London. Crowded, filthy trains. All the Euro trains are cleaner, quieter, faster and on time.

Take health care. In Switzerland there is no NHS. You must buy insurance, you have no choice. When you have an accident, you get fixed straight away. If you’ve seen the mini-series ‘Can Gerry Robinson fix the NHS?’ you’ll know that the British NHS is stuck in the 70’s and has no way out in it’s present form.

Then there’s the housing market…

The government have no way of fixing these problems because if they tried, they’d get voted out. They’d cause too much turbulence.

For example, the government need to wind the NHS down. Maybe to a separate NHS 2.0, maybe to private health, I’m not sure, but at the moment the NHS is too big to manage and too big to upgrade. Just like in big companies, sometimes you have to rip it apart and start again - it’s not fixable. The government will not do this, it’s too dangerous because it’d get them voted out.

Public utilities. These need to be governmentally run with the work contracted out to private companies. At the moment, they’re run by a companies at the top level, with no competition, all the profit goes into shareholders pockets and no investment goes into the infrastructure. The government will not change this either, they mess it up and get them voted out.

The Thatcherite policies from the 80’s were about change and experiment and she was an inspiration. However, you don’t make omelette without breaking eggs, government has to clear up those eggs and keep changing things to improve.

Sadly that hasn’t happened enough in the last 15 years and that’s why we have increasing crime, crap trains, more tax and unaffordable housing. Thatcher was big enough to take on the biggest jobs, but everyone since then has only patched-up the side-effects.

Compared with Europe, are citizens now are more stressed because of pressure of work and we’re forced to be a leveraged futures trader with the purchase of our homes. The government have allowed wealth to move around almost at random with the purchase of a house at a fortunate time.

People feel they are forced to move home to get their children into a good school. What a ridiculous state of affairs that is. The UK government needs to promote society over business. Life shouldn’t be all about being a wage slave, getting a big house new car and not being very sociable.

We all have too much money to spend and don’t pay our personal dues to society. We pollute the environment too much, use too much fuel and don’t save enough for the future.

Because of the mismanagement of the economy by Gordon Brown, we are living well beyond our means because of cheap credit, which is putting the whole country in debt. The UK has more personal debt than most of Europe put together and sometime that has to be paid back.

It’s not surprising why the number of people moving out of the UK has jumped so much recently.