Dirty Old Town

On Thursday, June 7, the Brits will reelect Tony Blair and his gang of liars for a further five years. Polls are predicting an unprecedented landslide victory for a man whose ability to lie and spin are second to none, and in this I include Bill Clinton, the liar par excellence. After four years in power Blair has even changed his accent, downmarketing it in order to appeal to the common man. In fact, Blair is so blatant about spin, he announced, "This is no time for soundbites, but I feel the hand of history on my shoulder."

Never in my 35 years of covering British elections have I seen such a grinning hyena of a megalomaniac, a man who nightly smarms his way into the living rooms of what one of Germany's most popular and serious news magazines called "The English Patient." According to Stern, which sells more than one million copies a week, Blair's Britain is a land of poverty comparable to the Third World, with failing public services and a totally incompetent government. The article begins with a description of Stepney Green in the East End of London. "Here in Stepney are some of the most wretched and rundown parts of England?Many of the children are undernourished as if they came from an underdeveloped country. Tuberculosis is rampant in this quarter, where sometimes up to 10 people are living herded together in one room."

Britain's National Health Service, or NHS, has been bandied about as a successful socialist experiment by crypto-Marxists such as Hillary Clinton. In truth, the World Health Organization believes that 25,000 cancer sufferers could be saved each year under another system. The head of Britain's hospital consultants, Dr. Peter Hawker, complains that the Health Service is in such a parlous state that he would not want his family treated by the NHS. This is not an exaggeration. I recently visited a friend in the hospital and was appalled that such conditions could exist in a European country. Patients left on trolleys, mixed-sex wards, low morale and dirty rooms reminded me of a Sudanese hospital I spent time in 40 years ago after a hunting accident. Yet Tony Blair calls it his crusade to improve the NHS and make it the best in the world. It is as hollow a crusade as Clinton trying to wiggle out by asking the meaning of the word is. But Blair knows the power of repeating a lie. He believes in the all-encompassing power of words, however meaningless, and his lies are working.

But more from Stern. It reports that many of the British are uneducated and stupid: "In the land of William Shakespeare and Harry Potter, one in five adults is practically illiterate and barely able to add up the small change in his pocket." This I can personally confirm. The complete apathy about the forthcoming election is typical. The average Brit is more concerned about a football player married to a pop singer than the lies being told by Blair's gang. The average Brit is dirty and unkempt and grossly undereducated by comparison to other Europeans. The country is horribly crime-ridden. (I live in Cadogan Square, probably the poshest square in London, yet crime in the area is rampant; I was attacked by three black youths some time ago, and Charles Glass was attacked also; there is not a single person I know who hasn't got a horror story). None of the public services work well, and public transport is the worst in Europe. Even the famous English manners are quickly disappearing. English yobs (skinheads who drink beer and whose idea of a good time is to beat up a cripple) are now the norm, and civility an almost dirty word.

Last week race riots broke out in Oldham, a suburb of Manchester. Whites fought with Asians, mostly Pakistanis and Bengalis. Blair's spin doctors blamed it on white racism. Of course they would. The riots had nothing to do with racism, however. They had to do with lack of jobs. Asian unemployment in Oldham runs to 40 percent. The area is one of deprivation and sheer desperation. Housing is substandard and education New York public school-like. The manual laboring jobs in the textile factories that Pakistanis and Bangladeshis arrived a generation ago to take up no longer exist for their children. And there's nothing in the once great industrial town for the children of the white workforce. In reality, Oldham was a powderkeg waiting to blow. Boredom and frustration were the real reasons for the riots, plus the empty promises by politicians to provide from cradle to grave.

Once upon a time, Pakistanis and Indians were known for being not only hardworking, but very law-abiding. Coming from the Third World, they expected nothing for free. Not so their children and grandchildren. These have assimilated and absorbed the aggressive, antisocial behavior patterns common among whites in the inner cities. Ditto for the Afro-Caribbean community. The young blacks of Britain are among the most violent in Europe, as well as among the poorest.

The government is to blame for these disasters through its incompetence, but it relies on spin and friendly BBC coverage to divert attention. Take the foot-and-mouth epidemic. All over the country stinking great fires produced more dioxin and other cancer-causing toxins than all dirt-spreading companies of Britain, the Stern article reported, yet the government insists that it's all over, and the BBC confirms it.

Why are the Brits sleepwalking into a destiny they claim to detest? I assume they are either too stupid to realize what Blair is doing, or too cynical about their own ability to control their destiny. Just after the election comes the London season, a round of parties such as Royal Ascot, Henley and the June balls, which will divert public opinion for a while. But the problems will remain, and there's one thing I know for sure, however: I'd hate to be poor or sick in this green and now unpleasant land.