So, you may well ask, who is running the country? Clearly not our multiracial cabinet. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has caved in to the blob and Home Secretary Suella Bravernam has yet to be seen dragging a single illegal immigrant to a barge off Bournemouth, let alone to Brize Norton for a free flight back to whence he originated.
The problem for people like these is that they watched Yes Minister on TV in their younger days, and assumed it was an instruction video on how they should relate to their Civil Service advisers: with abject servility. As with so many things, the venerable Tony Benn was absolutely correct when he said that the Civil Service ran the country and being a government minister was a constant battle against them. He was dead right on Europe too but, sadly, he also peppered his orations with such left-wing nonsense that few took him seriously.
The resignation/sacking of Dominic Raab is nothing short of a disgrace. The offence archaeologists got to work and trawled up any instance over his career, way beyond any statute of limitations, of when he had asked someone to do their job. The accusations went from the ridiculous, eg ‘tomatogate’, to the sublime, ‘he once phoned me’, and the most substantial accusations which made their way to Sunak’s desk should have been dealt with quickly and dismissed along the line of “yer ‘avin a laugh”, leaving Raab in situ.
And that’s just England and whatever influence over the rest of the United Kingdom (which we fund with little thanks) that is under the purview of Westminster. What about our ‘devolved administrations’? Northern Ireland has long descended into ungovernability; in fact, it has had no functioning government for several years now. The reasons are complex, and there are most certainly faults on all sides. Quite how Northern Ireland gets by is a mystery, but it does beg the question of whether they need a devolved government at all and, in fact, how much government any of us need.
Next we move north of the border where any semblance of government has disappeared, but it may explain what the police were looking for in Nicola Sturgeon’s garden. It is becoming increasingly clear that the SNP are a bunch of grifters who have probably been living off the fruits of the subscriptions that their members pay for the privilege of playing a part, however small, in the social and economic destruction of their country. Of course, under the iron rod of sub judice in Scotland I can only speculate on the reasons prominent SNP people keep getting arrested and then released. Rumours are that the handcuffs will soon be clicking on Nicola Sturgeon’s wrists, but the police officers assigned to the case are probably cowering under their desks. Old Nic is, by some accounts, pretty handy with an iron as a weapon.
Which brings us to Wales where, uniquely, they still seem to have a functioning devolved government in the form of their Assembly. But the problem for the poor Welsh people is that the Welsh Assembly, like the Scottish Government, is in the grips of another bunch of nationalist loons, Plaid Cymru. If Scotland is an economic basket case, with oil, whisky and tourism at its disposal, then Wales does not even possess the basket. Fanatical about the use of their incomprehensible language and notoriously inhospitable to people who do not speak it (i.e. everybody who does not live in Wales) they have no industry to speak of and whittle away their time renaming mountain ranges. Unless international sheep tourism catches on, there is no hope for Wales which probably needs its Barnett Formula money more than Scotland.
Therefore, the countries that constitute the United Kingdom range from the ungovernable to the ungoverned. This, of course, does not mean that nobody is in charge. Having hundreds of Border Force officers on the south east coast of England to welcome illegal immigrants, making sure the police have sufficient resources to hunt down golliwogs and administer non-crime hate incident reports and ensuring that the NHS does not fall short of its quotas of equality and diversity officers does not happen by accident. It’s a comfort to know that our taxes are not being frittered away.
Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.
