The Problems of UK Ltd.

There is something profoundly wrong with this country. Nothing seems to be as it should be. Have we allowed ourselves to drift into this condition or has it been imposed upon us by forces concerned only with their specific or individual welfare? The government seems frantic to appear very busy, so it turns things upside down without any real proof that what they are doing will be beneficial.

The NHS seems to be under threat. Spending has doubled in the last 10 years but very few people think that the extra money has improved things by more than a small percentage. Most of the extra seems to go on paper-shifting. Now the new Health Secretary, Andrew Landsley is intent of putting all controls in the hands of GPs and allowing private companies to bid to supply services. This system will surely result in GPs employing the same bureaucrats that we have now - but, perhaps, more of them. And private companies will only bid to supply profitable services - so they make money - and we will left with the rest paid for out of the public purse.

Education is a mess. We have arguments about student fees and this week we hear that some pretty awful universities dotted around the country intend to charge the same fees as Oxford and Cambridge to train their students in shelf-stacking type degrees. Ludicrous. Many graduates leave universities with useless qualifications in non-subjects. So we need something better and fewer students in universities.

In the last few weeks, we have watched in horror Jamies's Dream School, in which the ubiquitous chef, Jamie Oliver, has set up a school for three months with a very qualified head master plus a wide selection of people, very successful in their various fields who have tried to impart some knowledge and wisdom into twenty 18 year-olds who came out of school with no qualifications and now wanted to turn the lives around. Almost without exception they were ignorant, undisciplined, arrogant rude, useless thugs. They didn't bother to try to find out who were the people who came to talk to them - people like historian David Starkey, political spin-meister, Alistair Campbell, Chere Blair, Simon Callow, Rolf Harris and so on. They couldn't even bother to turn up on time; they could hardly read at all - none had ever read a book - arithmetic was almost beyond them. They came to classes and chattered away, taking no notice of any teacher. They swore constantly and reacted like pit-bull terriers of the worst kind if they were challenged. They talked on their mobile phones all the time; sent text messages; they fidgeted. Simon Callow tried to talk to them about William Shakespeare - he may as well have talked to a stuffed donkey; at least the stuffed donkey would have kept quiet. Then he took them to a theatre to watch him perform - only for them to behave as they always did and cause the rest of the audience to come near to rioting. Trying to teach this lot was a waste of time, money and energy. They were totally unaware of the magnitude of their own ignorance and they had no respect for anyone or anything. But the trouble is, they were not untypical. This week the teachers have gone on strike at Darwin Vale School just outside Blackburn in Lancashire because of the chaos that reigns in the class-rooms. They are complaining about a level of disturbance, destruction, violence, abusive language and indiscipline which is so far beyond anything that ought to be accepted that it is almost too much to imagine. Most of the kids will come out of this school barely literate and with no control over their own behaviour that they will be virtually unemployable for anything but sweeping the streets - and for that they would probably be too idle to bother turning up for work. Other schools complaining about the conditions in the classrooms as the situation deteriorates week by week. Is it surprising than even the hard-working white van men are trying to put their kids through private schools. The Blair/Brown government doubled spending on education but God knows what the money has been spent on. About half of all children come out of school with not even five passes at the minimum grade in GCSE. Again this suggests functional illiteracy. Industrial leaders complain that these kids are unemployable. Sir Terry Leahy at Tesco has told us of efforts made by his company to try to drum something into the brains of these useless children. Our schools have slipped further and further down the league tables of educational success internationally so that now we are beaten by many a third world country. It is a desperate situation.

And then there are the banks, with their ridiculous debts and their absurd payment regimes. The roads are over-crowded and falling to bits. The railways are in private ownership yet cost us more in subsidies than they ever did in public ownership. We are heading for a crisis in power generation because decisions have been put off and put off. Are we still choosing the nuclear option? After Japan?

This was the country that created the Industrial Revolution. We built railways all over the world. We set out national infrastructures in many colonial countries that are still in place today. Would India be able to make progress in the world as she does today without the democratic structures and the language left behind by Britain? But now we seem to be unable to get out own country sorted out. The wage structure needs to be changed so that people are paid sensible wages that match their jobs. It is crackers for any investment banker to be paid more than £40 million in one year - no matter how good he [or she] is. For that sort of money I would expect someone to have done something equivalent to discovering penicillin. Tax evasion and avoidance should be stamped out without fear or favour and the Black economy stamped on with very serious penalties for those who transgress.

This week a think tank has calculated that the total government debt is really £3.6 trillion. Look at it another way. It is £3,600,000,000,000. It is £60,000 for every man, woman and child in the UK. The figure includes the official debt - about £900 billion; plus the public sector pension debt - £1,200 billion; plus debts incurred lending to banks - £800 billion; plus the PFI on-going debt - about £165 billion; plus Network Rail - £24 billion. These numbers don't include private debt - on mortgages and credit cards, etc. However are we going to pay back these borrowings?

I could go on and on. It is depressing. But what can be done? Ideas, please to David Cameron.

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