– Britain is finished. Thirty years of bad governance, ideological confusion and relentless self-sabotage have ruined us.
This is what Allister Heath writes in The Telegraph.
We are heading for bankruptcy, our international reputation is ruined, our society is divided, our citizens are poor, unhealthy and demoralised, the public sphere is littered, and our institutions are discredited. Crime and disorder are at an intolerable level.
Those who can, flee. Under Labour, pound millionaires has left the country every 45 minutes.
Value creation is disappearing, there’s a housing shortage, and infrastructure is in free fall. Energy costs are sky-high and power cuts are looming. So he’s talking about the UK, but he could just as easily be talking about Norway.
Goods, services, housing, transport and healthcare are being rationed by government, and congestion, over-regulation, bureaucracy and propaganda are crushing anyone with ambition, courage or creativity.
We long for a hard reset, but Keir Starmer, our worst prime minister in fifty years, is doubling down on the toxic mix of socialism, class warfare, uncontrolled and often low-grade migration, confiscatory taxation, net zero extremism, regulatory zeal and woke nihilism that has brought Britain to its knees.
Norway, too, has its worst prime minister since the war, and suffers from the same problems as the British. But the Norwegian state is coping, because it has the Oil Fund. Unfortunately, it is of little help to a de-prioritised and increasingly poor population.
Starmer is incapable of imagining a different way forward. The same is true of our government, and the result could be fiscal Armageddon.
Rachel Reeves may have realised the disastrous situation, or at least she should have. For her massive tax increases have led to lower tax revenues and higher national debt.
Investment in British industry has ground to a halt. Here in Norway, we’re seeing almost nothing but green industry start-ups, all of which end in failure.
Reeves is cosying up to China to save the British economy. The British are selling their souls to a communist dictatorship. The panic in Downing Street seems pretty clear.
A former superpower is about to be transformed into a developing country in need of help from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Some hoped that socialism could “work” if it was combined with a massive increase in labour supply. But the desperate, anti-democratic experiment of extreme levels of migration has failed, both socially and economically:
It hasn’t boosted productivity, GDP per capita is falling, and far too many of the new arrivals will end up withdrawing more from the welfare state than they pay in taxes.
Donald Trump is demanding that NATO countries spend more money on defence. Then idiotic projects such as mass immigration, aid, ineffective climate measures and the financing of the disaster in Ukraine must be cancelled.
The great lie of British politics is that there is no alternative, that all parties should be equal, that the consensus of recent decades between Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Tories is the only sensible or moral way forward.
Consensus has become a dirty word, especially after the consensus on climate policy was deemed scientific proof by virtually all Western politicians, who clearly cannot define what the word science means.
Trump 2.0 has exposed the folly of this approach. The President’s agenda for renewal is astonishingly radical and could make him one of the most significant presidents ever.
The UK’s only hope is to replicate almost all of his reforms, minus the protectionism against friendly states or the attempts to conquer new territory.
Trump has signed hundreds of executive orders and is attacking the madness head-on. His stance on energy is simple: Drill, baby, drill!
Starmer’s hope to promote artificial intelligence in the UK is doomed, precisely because of the lack of energy.
Trump is pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement and repealing federal laws that mandate electric cars.
He supports clean technology, but only in the context of freedom of choice and market competition, the US under Trump is entering a new boom, led by machine learning, driverless cars, massive medical advances and the commercial exploitation of space.
He is abandoning or reversing all of Biden’s measures against billionaires and Silicon Valley; his strategy is to outgrow America’s own fiscal problems and unfunded liabilities, and he is determined to entrench a pro-growth tax system.
Illegal migrants are leaving, while the British are buying expensive hotel stays and the Norwegian government is funding immigrants for life. Does anyone seriously believe that Europe can compete with a US under Trump?
He wants to shrink the American state, crush the Blob and force public servants to work for, rather than against, elected governments. He has banned home offices for federal employees.
Brussels and Oslo think we can beat the US by being first with “green industry”. The problem is that profitable green industry is a dream of the future. For the time being, battery factories and offshore wind power are just giant deficit projects.
Trump has fired all federal DEI employees. Diversity, equity and inclusion are being replaced with meritocracy.
It’s a huge shift, a true revolution. Trump also wants to rescue students from critical race theory, which has encouraged anti-Semitism and anti-Asian racism.
The ideological divide between the UK and the US has never been so wide. The entire EU and Norway are in the same situation. But we have a choice:
We can continue with our mistakes and race towards miserable irrelevance, or we can swallow our pride and learn from Trump. Which will it be?
Unfortunately, we all know the answer to this question.
