REFORM won the Runcorn by-election by just six votes. A Labour activist told me that she thinks she knows the reason: Goat Man.
In one ward, there is a man who has apparently filled his derelict house with goats and burns their manure in his garden.
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Residents have complained but nothing happened. If the Labour council had dealt with this unsanitary behaviour, they might just have won the seat.
Goat Man may be particularly unpleasant but every neighbourhood has its unsolved anti-social behaviour. My nemeses are the car thieves.
I watch them from my London balcony smashing side windows and grabbing whatever they like.
I used to call the police but nothing happened. No squad cars ever arrived and it took 20 minutes to get through.
I complained to my councillor but she passed me back to the police, who told me: “We do not work the nights often.”
I’ve shouted at the thieves and once chased them down the street but I worry I’ll get stabbed.
Fewer than one in 100 car break-ins in London results in a charge.
Shoplifting is at a record high, fly-tipping is up 50 per cent over the past decade and there’s a burglary every three minutes.
Most people say they are seeing more anti-social behaviour, while police- recorded incidents are at a historic low.
Everywhere we look, Britain seems grubbier and more unpleasant.
Welcome to Scuzz Nation.
Decay outpaces repair, crime goes unpunished and the social fabric has been slashed, graffitied and left by the road.
Twice as many shops are empty as in 2007; the rest sell vapes. There are lots of Middle Eastern barbers too.
Police in Shrewsbury recently raided one as part of a money laundering crackdown; the barbers claimed a turnover of £1.8million — impressive for a town of 76,000.
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Optimists say reported crime is trending downwards.
True — but most people who witness crimes do not report them, with over half believing police will do nothing. Who can blame them?
Victims have less than a one in ten chance of seeing justice.
I once caught a Polish street scammer defrauding someone near London’s Victoria Station. I called 999 and was told the police couldn’t arrive for at least an hour.
I said she might be part of a gang and I was putting myself at risk. The call handler burst into tears.
The scammer was crying too, fearing deportation. (She needn’t have worried.)
No one in authority wants to do what is necessary to stop the scuzzy, unhappy decline of Britain.
Gus Carter
The policeman on patrol has largely been replaced by the “roadman”, a street drug dealer.
His face often hidden by a balaclava; over his tracksuit he carries a designer bag for dealing drugs.
Cocaine-related deaths are now ten times higher than a decade ago.
The roadman sometimes indulges in extreme violence with a zombie knife.
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A friend at a pupil referral unit in Bristol had to stop a gang of roadmen from storming his school.
He held his back to the gate as one of his pupils collapsed in front of him.
My friend watched as another teacher tried to scoop the boy’s intestines back into his abdomen.
The boy survived but later got arrested for slashing another child.
Offences involving blades have nearly doubled in ten years.
There’s been a shift towards violent nihilism in Scuzz Nation, partly because safety nets for wayward young men have vanished.
Since 2010, cash to councils has fallen 40 per cent, so apprenticeships and youth centres were cut. Some parentless teens are put in halfway homes with addicts.
Others get only tents. Box ticked. Problem solved.
Councils have cut anything that can be slashed without risk of litigation.
Nearly 1,800 public toilets have closed in a decade; libraries were sold off and fireworks displays scrapped.
Bin collection has been outsourced to firms that make unrealistic bids.
In Croydon, Veolia won a £22million deal — and removed 1,000 street bins to cut costs. Littering soared.
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To increase revenue, councils hike fees on leisure centres and raise prices for consumers. Parking charges are up too.
We’ve mixed the worst of capitalism with an ever larger state.
Privatised water companies edge toward bankruptcy. Bills spiral, shareholders profit, and record levels of sewage pour into rivers.
Parts of Scuzz Nation make us uncomfortable, especially immigration.
According to the Centre for Migration Control, one in five Albanians here has been arrested and one in 36 is in prison.
A Home Office report calls Albanian gangs “the main wholesaler to powder cocaine retail operations”.
Oh well. It’s only when faced with something as sadistic as the grooming gangs scandal that our anger become public.
Widespread revolt
Scuzz Nation is partly to blame there, too. The NHS and social workers looked away. Victims say police ignored them.
Fear of discrimination haunts the public sector. The Met Police Federation chairman was sacked last month for saying: “There seems to be an assumption of racism from the off, particularly when it’s a white officer and a member of the public from a minority ethnic community.”
But just look at Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford. In Scuzz Nation, appearing tolerant matters more than doing the right thing.
One suspects somewhere in the Treasury, a group of analysts has made a detailed formula: the tax-to-crapness ratio.
On the one hand, voters resent living in a degraded country. But we resent losing ever more of our wages, too.
The result is that taxes are as high as they can be without widespread revolt and public services are always just shy of collapse.
Scuzz Nation is built on such miserable efficiencies. Is it surprising that the public vote in such numbers for those who say the system is broken?
No one in authority wants to do what is necessary to stop the scuzzy, unhappy decline of Britain.
- A longer version of this article appears in the current edition of The Spectator magazine.
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