In their latest search to find some part of British life on which they haven’t yet rained down misery, Labour is seeking to discourage shotgun ownership. From the time of the 1689 Bill of Rights, it has been the law of the land that Englishmen may bear arms. Since 1870, modest laws have incrementally come in to qualify this old liberty, but the latest decision of Labour is in keeping with their obsessive desire to crush all remaining liberties in these isles. 

‘I’m leaving the UK’ has become a genre on YouTube. An astonishing number of short videos, usually made on smartphones, show people standing in a field or sitting in the car, explaining to their viewers why they are leaving the United Kingdom. These videos have appeared in the last six months, and the reasons given for leaving the UK are invariably that the country’s infrastructure is collapsing, the National Health Service isn’t working and no one will reform it, the streets are unsafe, the police do not address crime, taxation is too high, houses are too difficult to obtain, quality of life is getting ever worse, cost of living is too expensive, the government interferes with every aspect of private life … the list goes on. People are miserable—that much is clear.

One of the few redeeming aspects of life in the UK is the old-fashioned pub. But with over 400 pubs every year closing across these isles, these are oases of everyday culture that are fast drying up. When I go and sit quietly in the corner of my local pub and eavesdrop on the townsmen and countryfolk, there is a common theme to all the conversations I overhear: this country is going to hell in a handbasket.

Certainly, part of the problem is that the current government has combined extreme centralisation with acute incompetence, which, if you think about it, is probably the worst possible combination of any given government. Senior front benchers in parliament have been found to lie about their former careers, the cabinet cannot put together a workable budget, Ed Miliband wants to cover what’s left of England’s internationally admired countryside in solar panels and wind farms, and the government is coming after the poor, the retired, and the farming community with a wrath of which no one can make sense. As words like ‘remigration,’ ‘repatriation,’ and ‘deportation’ are fast mainstreaming across Britain’s public square, Labour continually fails to address the country’s serious immigration problem, and meanwhile, Prime Minister Starmer has publicly dismissed rising concerns about the rape of British children and vulnerable young people by Pakistani gangs as a “far-right bandwagon.”