We’re Bizzies Doing Nothing

Nothing is getting done.

Last month I went to see the movie Scrapper. A charming film, set on a modern East London housing estate. It’s about Georgie, (Lola Campbell) a 12 year old artful dodger who is scraping by alone after the death of her mother. She’s doing OK. Nicking bikes, pulling a fast one on Social Services, and hanging out with her lanky pal Ali, when, out of the blue, or in this case, over the back fence, her estranged Dad arrives back in her life. That’s basically the plot right there. Christopher Nolan this ain’t.

Not sure it’s still on at the cinema. But I expect it will turn up on Netflix soon enough. But when it does, I urge you to give it a look.

Not least because even though Scrapper is set in an unashamedly working class community, it is a story refreshingly, and almost unbelievably, not driven by, and deep breath here, Poverty. Exploitation Racism. Tory cuts. Homophobia. Depression. Drugs. Transphobia. Racism. The legacy of ‘Fatcher. Class division. Racism. Under privilege. White privilege. Gammons. Country lines. Dodgy landlords. Capitalism. ‘Hate’ in its many and various forms. Or racism.

Instead the narrative is propelled by warmth, tenderness, and the stuttering attempts of two broadly sympathetic and likeable characters, to reconnect.

I’m not daft. I appreciate that working class life can be a lot tougher, and often bleaker, than how it is portrayed in this particular movie. This is, at heart, a fairy story.

However in a pleasant change from most films covering similar themes, the characters’ working class life informs the choices they make, it does not make up the sum total of who they are.

If there is a message, it’s subtle, slight, but still powerful, and again not something you often hear in the 2020s. It’s simply this;

Most people, at their core, are alright.

Neither heroes nor villains. But on balance pretty decent. Doing the best they can, with the hand they’ve been dealt. And that in itself, might be enough to recommend it.

It’s an upbeat movie, silly, with lots of funny episodes. As if someone finally got hold of old Misery Guts, the ever put upon I Daniel Blake, and cheered him the fuck up.

The biggest laugh out loud moment comes about half way through when (spoiler alert), main character Georgie and her dad are inexpertly attempting to boost a couple of push bikes from a cycle rack, when suddenly the police turn up, in the form of two uniformed coppers, and proceed to chase them on foot all over the estate.

I couldn’t stop laughing. Ok. As I said, Scrapper isn’t meant to wallow in the misery of its own verisimilitude, but this was so unrealistic as to be hilarious.

The idea that in 2023 two British coppers would chase a 12 year old bike thief a couple of miles around a housing estate struck me as more hopelessly fantastical than the last three nonsensical Star Wars movies combined.

Wait what? Rey is Palpatine’s granddaughter? Yeah well, compared to this, that makes perfect sense.

The modern police service isn’t interested in chasing bike thieves any more than it can be arsed checking security camera footage when ‘investigating’ a burglary, or lifting a finger to retrieve a stolen iPhone. Even with GPS tracking enabled. (Pro Tip coppers: It’s always enabled).

If you don’t believe me just ask Fiona Bateman, a mum from Witney in Oxfordshire who got so little help from the police after her son’s bike was stolen, despite having CCTV footage clearly identifying the thief, that she tracked down the crook herself, and camped outside his house until the police were finally shamed into taking action.

It took three days.

Forget crime, our super Bizzies are super busy with other things these days. And it seems the only way to rouse snoozy Plod out of zi’s rainbow coloured clown car is to commit a proper serious crime. One that could have a lasting and detrimental effect on the well being of society.

For instance West Yorkshire police took time off from not solving burglaries, not arresting shoplifters, and not chasing down muggers to track down and question one naughty 73 year old Nana for the non crime of taking a photo of a tiny sticker. A sticker which suggested that allowing grown up men with dangly bits to hang out in ladies changing rooms full of women and young girls might not, always, be the very best idea.

The cops in Hebden Bridge apparently completed their dangerous granhunt with the aid of the same sort of CCTV footage that the cosplaying coppers couldn’t even be bothered to look at, for Fiona Bateman in Oxfordshire.

In its defence, West Yorkshire police force did strike a significant blow for law and order recently when it managed, with a mere seven officers, (the thin rainbow line is nothing if not stretched to breaking point) to corner an autistic teenager in her own home, and bravely arrest her, with no regard for their own safety, for suggesting that the pinch faced police officer standing grumpily outside, reminded her of her own crop haired lesbian nana.

Justice is served. And I don’t know who. But someone in this story will be going down.

It’s not just West Yorkshire, police forces all over the country, seem to be enthusiastically subcontracting themselves out to one side of the culture war, rather than fighting, you know, actual crime.

Perhaps like every other public institution in this country the police have simply been assimilated into the machine. Infected like everything, from our civil service to our museums, and even our armed services, by the creeping cancer of leftist authoritarianism.

Perhaps, more charitably, they are overcompensating. Maybe after decades of heavy handed tactics and recent bad headlines revealing an unreconstructed constabulary harbouring more than one rapist or murderous police officer, this is an attempt to redress the balance.

Perhaps, and scariest of all, they wholeheartedly believe this guff.

Of course we are encouraged to consider a different reason for their current ineffectiveness. After years of cuts by you-know-who, the national police service has been left under resourced and ill equipped for the increasingly complex demands we all place upon it. It’s too difficult, too complicated, and too much of a logistical nightmare, to police modern Britain.

And no wonder. There are over 67 million of us in Britain right now. Or if the Channel has been calm this week, 68 million.

But sorry, this argument simply doesn’t wash.

If you park outside my house, on a Sunday afternoon, two inches over the yellow line, and then forget to move your car before you go to bed. You can expect a shiny yellow PCN attached to your windscreen by 8.31am on Monday morning.

I recently received two PCNs on consecutive days for riding my motorbike into a barely noticeable new bus lane on Tottenham Court Road. An ANPR camera spotted me, photographed me, identified me, fined me and sent out the letters demanding payment, before I’d even arrived home. Twice.

I’m not telling you all this to claim my Victim Points. I’m simply suggesting that a state which can, in a city of nine and half million people, electronically track each and every one of our vehicles, and within 24 hrs automatically issue fines to individual drivers, does not lack resources.

A state which can do all this, could use those resources to track down and return your stolen, GPS enabled, iPhone.

It simply chooses not to.

After all, what’s in it for them? Who’s getting the £130 fine? No one.

And putting crooks through the court, and god forbid, prison system costs the state time and money. Time and money which could be better spent lecturing us about our eating habits, accommodating illegal immigrants in hotels, or holding navel gazing COVID Inquiry for the bargain price of just £160,000 a day.

And it’s not just the police.

Our schools are falling down. To save money, many were built with a type of concrete, which it turns out, has the shelf life of milk. Fair enough. No one could have seen that coming. Apart from all the people listed here who’ve been warning about the imminent concrete catastrophe since 1995. 

So around 100 schools have to be closed. And the kids sent home while their classrooms are rebuilt.

If only there had been a more convenient time over the last four or so years when this rebuilding work could have been done.

Maybe when the schools were empty anyway, after being pointlessly shuttered to protect healthy kids from a disease which practically speaking, posed them almost no risk whatsoever. You know, a time like that.

On the plus side, at least stuck at home watching Tik-Tok our kids might actually be saved from having to learn that everyone, including them, is on some kind of sex spectrum. (Do you feel sexy kids? Hands up all the children who feel sexy!) Shudder.

And it’s not just that all the old stuff is falling down. We can’t build anything new either.

Because our government, in its efforts to appear sin free and environmentally pure, has cleverly tied its own hands.

The legal commitment to Net Zero by 2050 means that every single major infrastructure project, not just Rishi Sunak’s new North Sea oil and gas licences, can be challenged in the courts on the grounds that building pretty much anything bigger than a bus shelter is incompatible with the government’s legally binding obligation to turn modern Britain into a rickets riddled shanty town, by the middle of the twenty first century.

It seems that the High Speed 2 vanity project is finally, mercifully, running out of steam. It will no longer extend from Birmingham to Manchester.

So after already spending nearly four hundred squillion pounds on the project (Look, the government doesn’t seem to be very forthcoming about the actual amount of money spent so far, at least I struggled to find it online, so I just thought I’d do what they do when asked about HS2 costs, and simply pulled some figures out of my arse. Soz.), the government has decided it can’t actually build a railway that no wants, which goes nowhere anyone wants to go, for a cost that no one is prepared to pay. What a surprise.

Rishi Sunak is clearly trying to back out of HS2 faster than a gagging commuter backs out of the inevitably blocked toilet on a Friday night Intercity.

Even if a version does trundle on, it looks like they will move the main southern hub to Old Oak Common, which is so far out of Central London, I’ve literally never heard of it.

But when the HS2 boss responsible for the Old Oak Common project, Huw Edwards (no not that one) was recently caught with his trousers down (honestly, not that one) and asked about the new plans, he gamely attempted to sell the idea that passengers would probably prefer to be dropped off at Old Oak, actually.

Especially considering how handy they might find it for such local attractions as HMP Wormwood Scrubs, and Chicken Land Peri Peri Fried Chicken restaurant (4.6 stars Uber Eats). As opposed to the originally planned terminus at Euston Station, which they might well have found annoyingly convenient for London’s West End shopping, restaurant, and theatre districts.

To be honest, the only potential plus side of the whole ill conceived folly was the promise that Euston Station, an ugly fag strewn carbuncle of crumbling bus fumed  concrete, sharp elbowed Pret A Manger desperados, teenage pickpockets, sallow cheeked smokers, duvet clutching homeless,  and clip clopping grim faced business women, would be razed to the ground in a glorious miasma of brick dust, asbestos and resentment.

Forget HS2, travelling anywhere in this country is so hellish that if you do manage to get from A to B without earning yourself a speeding fine for recklessly overtaking  a mobility scooter, (20mph speed limit! I mean I like kids. But not that much),  losing an axle to a pot hole, being thwarted by the blue haired tarmac huggers of Just Stop Oil, or spending three hours stuck at Crewe  thanks to strike action called by bullet headed Bolshevik bovver boy Mick Lynch, you finally arrive at your destination suffering from what can only be described as a form of survivors guilt.

I could go on. But I’m trying to keep these posts a bit shorter, (good luck with that) and obviously these moans don’t even scratch the surface of Britain’s current problems.

We have aircraft carriers with no aircraft. Prisons with no prisoners. Hospitals with no doctors. Armed police with no weapons. Air traffic controllers with no air traffic. A border force which fails to enforce our borders. And maternity nurses with no souls.

Our city high streets are littered with shuffling crack addicts, aggressive charity hawkers, zonked out rough sleepers, ferret fingered drug dealers, snarling Bully XL devil dogs, predatory phone thieves, and actual mountains of litter, overflowing from untended fly bloated bins.

Plus everything stinks of pot.

Is there anything in Britain that works?

Yes. The Tax Office.

The UK tax take has never been higher. That the state is currently gobbling up 37% of GDP in taxes which is frightening enough. But it is actually spending 46% of GDP. And borrowing the difference from our grandchildren.

It supposedly distributes this tsunami of cash on our behalf, providing us with essential ’public services’.

I don’t know about you. But I don’t feel very well serviced.

Our work from home, cash guzzling governing class seems to have forgotten its core mission. Police our streets, secure our borders, maintain our power supply, run our health service, collect our rubbish.

Instead it seems intent on devolving so much power to quangos, independent bodies, steering committees, charities, NGOs, corporations, stakeholder groups, and most terrifying of all, the Scottish and the Welsh, that it no longer has the ability, even if it wanted to, to actually get anything done.

It all seems self defeating and counterproductive until you realise we are governed by a ruling elite whose power, prestige and influence is predicated on the maintenance of this sclerotic status quo.

And with so few major decisions to take, and so little real work to do, our governing class seeks other ways to justify its existence.

Abandoning the legitimate business of government, and minding our business instead.

Busy bodying itself with every trifling aspect of our lives. Meddling in everything from what food we eat, to what we can look at on the internet, to increasingly what thoughts we’re allowed to think.

Allowing the creation of entire new bureaucracies, their only purpose to mercilessly enforce the petty diktats of destructive identity politics and divisive ideologies.

Demanding we become more self loathing. More shameful of our past, more terrified of our future. More fearful of opening our mouths, laptops and front doors.

The only genuine changes they want to make, and we saw this most clearly in their vicious, hysterical reaction to Brexit, is to reduce the power of democracy to make any real difference to our lives.

And to ensure that in the future, any form of dissent, whether in the form of ‘climate denialism’, or lockdown scepticism, or in any increasing number of rigidly policed ideological areas, become not just socially unacceptable, but actually illegal.

We have handed our country over to technocrats. Smugly self confident of their own meagre abilities they boast of their own efficiency and competence.

But in reality they are like the guy forever running round the office with a blank piece of paper.

Achieving nothing but their own advancement. Wasting time. Leeching resources. Adding zero value.

Busy doing nothing.

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Thank you for reading Low Status Opinions.

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I think we all sense that the country has ground to a halt recently, especially since the lockdown fiasco, nothing at all is getting done. The Tories seem to be panicking as well they should, but it all seems too little too late to me, despite the recent narrowing of the polls. What do you think?

Please feel free to comment. I’m hugely lucky to have so many brilliant readers supporting me, I always love to hear from you. I do try to reply to all good faith comments.

That’s it for this time. After that rant I’m off for a lie down.

Thanks again. See you next time.

Busy doing nothing