While certainly enlightened in many respects, Britain is facing some very big problems.
First off, the United Kingdom hasn’t completely recovered from the economic typhoon that hit the world in 2008. They followed our lead and bailed out the perpetrators of the whole mess, the banks, but Britain isn’t as big and strong as the US and they were very over-extended through loans to other countries, like Iceland, whose economies also crashed; and then they got hit with a double whammy when the real estate bubble finally burst.
So, while Britain’s economy is definitely on the mend, it is still quite shaky. Other than London, there is no construction boom to speak of. For instance, we only saw about five high rise building cranes atop the skyline of Glasgow, and two in Edinburgh.
To be painfully honest, the whole place looks a bit shabby and in need of a good power wash; general weeding, starting with the gutters and rooftops; and some fresh paint.
So we need to recognize this real threat to their economic prosperity when we pressure the Brits into hitting the Russians with harsh economic sanctions over Ukraine. They genuinely want to send a stern warning to Putin, but it will definitely hit them in their own pocket books, so that scares a lot of people in the UK. And rightfully so.
These troubled times require clear and fast thinking, which is a bit of a problem for the Brits given their nasty habit of “binge drinking”. Recent studies indicate that 1 in 3 British men under the age of thirty still live with their parents because they can’t afford to buy their own place and are perpetual binge drinkers. It’s like “Quadrophenia” on fast forward. Equally troublesome, one in four young women are regularly liquored up and out of control.
On weekends in most towns and cities, it often resembles a Hieronymus Bosch painting. The streets are filled with loud packs of rough young men and tarted-up women, looking to pair up with an almost animal intensity. And the later it gets, the wilder the atmosphere.
Inna and I both agreed that the women seemed crazier than the men. We found it best to avoid eye contact after 10 at night when walking a busy street. It is safe to say that about a quarter of the young Brits are functional alcoholics, so getting the next generation to focus on important public policy issues can get a bit sketchy at times.
Another huge problem is immigration. The country is awash in Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, Africans, Jamaicans, Indians, and Arabs. And as with most of Europe, the Chinese are absolutely taking over. At the prestigious Glasgow University, it looked like most of the students were Chinese. And while I don’t want to get too down and dirty here, I have to say that they are uniformly oblivious toward anyone who is not Chinese. They tend to travel in small groups, speaking their native language. And they rarely mingle with the locals or even attempt to integrate at all with the British culture.
As many Americans, especially where the influx of new arrivals is the greatest, are getting fed up with the endless wave of immigrants flooding our shores, it is really starting to get ugly in Britain. There is the familiar refrain from the working class folks on the public dole that “they are taking all the jobs”; and I have no idea whether that is true or not, but I can tell you that we were in London for almost two days before we encountered a homegrown Englishman. It was weird as hell. And it is changing the face and national identity of Britain completely.
