With a new American President due next week, it’s a bit early to ask the famous question: “How goes the Union, Mr President?”

However, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is in a different position. We have a government that has been nearly 12 years in power. So,

How goes the Union, Mr Prime Minister?

Gordon Brown never answers questions, even at PMQs, therefore I will answer for him:

At the close of the first decade of the 21st century, Britain has a two-tier system of economic organization.

First and definitely foremost, the Public Realm, as New Labour likes to call it, is a Command economy. It commands a massive £650billion income from the non-State economy that creates Britain’s prosperity. By common consent much of this money is wasted. It has a tendency to drop off the radar as if it were dumped into landfill sites. No trace of it is ever found again.

One man, Gordon Brown, presides with an iron fist over the Command economy of Britain and has done so for 12 years. He determines its work practices by a mind-numbing system of targets and procedures.

In return, the workforce, some 25 per cent of the overall labour market, gets job security, high salaries, and gold-plated, index-linked pensions paid six or seven years earlier than those of the toilers at the wealth-creating coalface.

The inferior, or private sector, is the milch cow of the Brownian system. It comprises those who work for themselves, for partnerships or joint-stock companies. Latterly, it has seen its much-admired pension funds rifled and ruthlessly downgraded by the Prime Minister personally. Allegedly, like Robert Maxwell before him, he has freely taken from the private pension pots to fund his own agendas and client state.

To make matters worse, the private national prosperity generator has been driven at the pace of a high-performance racing car for almost a decade to feed the lust for money (“resources” as it’s coyly described) of the favoured multitude in the Command economy.

With the private sector now in a state of collapse, the tribe within the Command economy is doubly protected by job security covenants and salaries paid for by massive State borrowings against the future wages and assets of the wealth creators. The children of such folk are already indebted by government to the tune of £17,000 ($25,500) each. The burden will take a generation or more to pay off.

With the UK in economic freefall, the future of both sectors is in doubt. The public sector now needs a milch cow and a golden goose to continue its extravagant destruction of wealth. Only debt and printed money can keep it inflated. These processes show no sign of slowing down, indeed such activity is on the increase.

There’s a great deal more I could tell you about the social state of the country, its sink estates peopled by a primordial underclass, its rubble of an education system, the tattered remnants of its once proud Armed Forces, its broken-beyond-repair Constitution, and its enforced membership of the alien European Union.

But there is only so much bad news we can take, or impart, in one sitting. The nation will take its nuclear revenge when next it is permitted to enter a polling station for a General Election.

And that is the state of the British nation.

John Evans

Recent Related Stories
Is socialism the new quid on the block?
Public failure and Superdemocracy
A real-time slump is not like the history books