BRIAN READE: ‘Immigrants aren’t accountable for UK’s issues – however I do know who’s’

The country is in a mess, says Brian Reade, yet so many people are way off target looking for the cause and directing their anger

It’s surprising that a country of fair-play lovers has a favourite pastime of punching down. Want a reason for low wages and a failing NHS? Bloody immigrants flooding the borders in increasing numbers leaving our small island full to bursting. Even though net migration was 171,000 last year, down from 944,000 in 2023.

Why do taxes keep rising? The 24 million scroungers sitting on their bloody backsides on benefits. Even though more than 13 million of them are state pensioners who have paid into the system, and almost 40% of Universal Credit claimants are keeping our economy going in low-paid jobs.

Low productivity? Lazy young sods living in their mum’s box room feigning ADHD. Even though unemployment among 16-24-year-olds has hit 16.2% because our economy has no jobs for them and we’ve built so few houses, the average age of a first-time buyer is 34.

OK, let’s blame militant trade unions, work-from-home civil servants, the BBC, striking doctors, net zero fanatics, terror-sympathising libtards, trans lobbyists, overpaid footballers or whoever picked the bloody Eurovision entry. If it’s not their fault that this country is crap, then whose is it?

Well, how about looking at three of Britain’s worst acts of self-harm over the past decade which shame us to this day: HS2, Brexit and Grenfell. In 2011, Tory Prime Minister David Cameron initiated HS2 to try to win over northerners, saying the estimated £32.7billion project would be a “catalyst for economic prosperity”. In 2020, Tory PM Boris Johnson gave it the go-ahead too, despite being warned costs were heading over £100billion. Today, we hear a much-reduced HS2 will cost more than Nasa’s Artemis Moon mission and won’t be ready until 2039.

In 2013, PM Cameron called a Brexit referendum solely to see off right-wing Eurosceptics, and in 2016, Johnson saw a chance to seize leadership by championing a Brexit he previously opposed. This reckless act has shrunk the UK’s economy by 7% with some analysts claiming it costs £100billion annually.

In 2011, Cameron waged a war on red tape creating a “one in, one out” rule where new regulations could only come into force if another was scrapped. Last year the Grenfell Inquiry, set up to examine how 72 people died in a tower block in 2017, found that this policy so “dominated” thinking that “even matters affecting the safety of life were ignored, delayed or disregarded”.

And Cameron’s government were found to have “determinedly resisted” increasing regulations and amending the Fire Safety Order to make clear it applied to the exterior walls of flats and apartment buildings. After the disaster, footage surfaced of Johnson from 2013, who as the then London mayor, told a politician who challenged the wisdom of his fire service cuts to “get stuffed”.

Neither Johnson nor Cameron are solely to blame for those national calamities but their fingerprints are at the scene. So what links them? Both are over-entitled, over-ambitious Old Etonian and Oxford elitists who saw running the country as their birthright. And once achieved, with promises that could never be fulfilled and problems kicked into the long grass, they ducked out. Leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab while they waltzed off to make private fortunes on the back of the mess they left behind. Maybe, when handing out the blame for Britain’s problems, we should try punching up instead of down. There’s a lot of people up there to be hit.