At the grand old age of 70 I feel I have the right to make some observations on what it has been like living a life in the UK.
I didn't realise it but, right up until the mid 1980s, the country was still very much in the shadow of the Second World War and the loss of empire. Without a reference to the wider world I had no way of knowing the pace at which other countries were developing. The government still tried to run everything: the coal board, the gas board, the water board, the egg marketing board. The list was endless. One government department manufactured faulty cars (British Leyland) another ran GPO telephones. It was a dreadful mess but I knew no different.
I do remember reading a comment by a visiting American history professor — very much an Anglophile — which said 'Britain is a hundred years behind the rest of the world and proud of it'. I felt at the time it was a bit of an exaggeration. I'm now not so sure.
From the mid eighties and then through the Blair government years the UK began, at last, to change — at least in the south of England. Some of that change was forced on the country by new technologies and some by new political fads. Is the country a better place in which to live, now, compared with the 1980s? I'm honestly not sure. I know you have to take the bad with the good. But does it have to be this bad?
I live in a country that, after all this time since the war that ended in 1945, is still shabby, still on its beam ends, still lurching from financial crises to financial crisis. What has gone wrong?
I'm drawn to the inescapable conclusion that the issue boils down to two things: incompetent government machinery (I include politicians and the civil servants) and a population that is both lazy and risk averse.
Since the so-called 'brain drain' of the 1960s anyone who is half-competent has left, having lost patience with the way things are going in this country. It's a harsh thing to write but it is true. Throughout this period our population has steadily grown to an unsustainable size because of the secret Establishment plan to allow anyone, however useless or dangerous, to live in this country.
The consequence of unregulated and undocumented immigration has been an ever increasing body of new laws to try to control the uncontrollable.
There was a time in my youth when a person's word was enough to complete almost all types of transactions. Hard to believe now when we need two forms of photo ID and a series of computer data checks to clinch the most simple deal. Since the 1980s the whole tenor of the country has changed. Everyone is assumed to be a crook unless they can prove otherwise. Indeed with the enormous web of laws, rules and regulations the government and it's subordinate agencies are doing their best to catch everyone out for some infraction of the rules. And every misstep seems to carry a penalty of five years in prison and unlimited fines.
We have become a nation in which most of the population live in fear of putting a foot wrong, such is the heavy hand of the state. It is like living in a country invaded by a cruel and oppressive regime. Did we actually defeat the Nazis?
I once said to someone — in uniform and taking careful notes — there are too many laws in this country. He was horrified and made a written note of my words that, no doubt, still languishes on a secret file somewhere. The truth is, I was paraphrasing something that Winston Churchill said nearly a century ago 'If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.' Of course, because my interrogator had received such a poor education he was unaware of such learned opinions. A great many of the people alive today do not understand the concept of a free and generally contented society because they have lived their lives with the tyrannies of minute-by-minute surveillance and oppressive government policies.
All of which bring me back to my earlier question of why are we a failed country and why aren't we progressing at the same rate as the rest of the civilised world? The Russians toppled their cruel Tzarist aristocracy and replaced it with a system of strict controls on everyday life in which bureaucrats created a regulation for every activity. The Soviet system killed individuality and the country never transitioned into the modern world. The UK is going down the same route. The new equality means sharing out the meagre contents of the larder instead of encouraging adventure and the associated risk taking necessary to explore new horizons.
If I were a young man today, as a first step I would emigrate to The Netherlands, a country that manages to combine individual responsibility with personal freedom. As a result, for its small size its mastery of new technologies and increasing slice of world trade, makes it a very significant global player. That country is doing everything we are failing to do.