If we were really an island of strangers, as Sir Keir Starmer attested this week, then it might be OK. The real problem is that we have to interact with the bastards, so they cease being strangers and start being people who have a function in our lives. The old cliché had it that in the UK you were never more than ten metres from a rat and this is probably still true, except it’s five metres in Birmingham.
But it is also true that you are never more than ten metres from a skank. A foreign skank, a British skank, makes no odds. Someone pig-ignorant and witless but possessed, nonetheless, of a kind of neolithic cunning. Probably tattooed, probably insistent that they shouldn’t be judged.
I thought all this while reading Gus Carter’s Spectator cover story on Scuzz Nation last week, which – excellent piece though it was – rather understated the case. A Soylent Green nation whining and endlessly grasping for handouts, narcissistic and entitled. I suppose the term ‘Scuzz Nation’ sums it up quite well: a place where, to borrow from Tom Waits, ‘No one speaks English and every-thing’s broken.’ Waits had been referring to Copenhagen and it may well be true there, too.
Broken things – trains, health services, people – do not arrive here unbidden by accident; they are not visited upon us in a vacuum. We bring down a state of scuzz by buying into patently stupid ideologies and electing the wrong people. Much of it is simple. If we want a nation where people work for a living, then don’t pay them more than the entry-level salary of a job for not working.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in