This country has £1 trillion national debt, a £250 billion hole in its pension system, a ballooning retired population and a collapsing working population.
We depend macro-economically on oil production for balance of payments, foreign exchange, interest rates and inflation—and it is halving every 10 years.
We have a culture of chronic welfare dependence and crippling public sector pension debt. We siphon hundreds of millions of pounds of public infrastructure investment into the public pension funds of bureaucrats.
We have the highest excess winter mortality in the whole of Europe and a power generation system on the verge of failure after two decades of “market efficiency”. We face billions in investment money that we don’t have to keep warm in winter.
We eat more food than we grow in a world in which high oil prices will shortly disable globalism. We are three meals away from anarchy, with a host of ne’er-do-wells queueing up to fill the vacuum.
Our financial system is holed beneath the water line while we remain apparently powerless to curb bankers greed. Our fate lies in the hands of people who have an incurable appetite for expense fraud and classify themselves as “taxis for hire”.
A rough beast, its hour come at last, slouches towards us. We need a party that has that reality written into its manifesto, with matching manifesto commitments.
I don’t see one.