Is it just me, or is the UK heading from first-world status to third?

The UK used to be the fourth largest economy in the world, and we are now sixth, with predictions that we will fall to tenth by 2050. We used to have a world-class health service but today it is an embarrassing shambles with a waiting list stretching to six years for many treatments. We are currently paying to train doctors who then promptly jump on a plane to work elsewhere for better pay. We used to have an enviable education system but that has fallen and, if Labour get in, they will tax private schools to the point that some 100,000 private school children will be flushed into the already vastly over stretched and under funded system. Our universities, with the exception of Oxford and Cambridge, have virtually dropped out of the top ten list for the very first time but still leave our next generation of workers saddled with over £50,000 of debt before they even start their first job.

The UK used to be a manufacturing powerhouse but… no more. Automotive companies are leaving the UK in their droves and, as stated in the House of Commons last week, the UK has missed the boat in the race to build battery factories. Tesla has turned away from the UK as ‘not open for business’ and is currently planning to build billion-euro mega-factories in Germany and France. Elon Musk was quoted as saying: “Brexit has made Britain too risky to construct our mega factory there, and my relationship with the UK government is choppy at best’. Since his $44 billion purchase of Twitter, he has dramatically scaled back all operations in the UK.

The UK military has been starved of cash to the point that the head of Nato questioned if we were even able to fulfil our modest commitments to the bloc, much to the acute embarrassment of army Generals. If the Falklands were invaded again, the best we could do is mail a second-class envelope with the keys! Of the two aircraft carriers we built, to much hype and fanfare by the government, one has been broken down for over 18 months and they are cannibalising the other for parts. A senior US general has privately told Defence Secretary Ben Wallace the British Army is no longer regarded as a top-level fighting force.

Our roads are shameful, with pot holes the size of a small planet littering every road in the country to the point that people are now being forced to go out and fix the holes in their own roads to avoid the inevitable damage to their cars. It is estimated that it will cost £12 billion to fix them all, and the government has allocated just £200 million which will cover three B-roads in Horsham. Our rivers are so filthy that swimming in the Ganges would be safer, and preferable.

The trade unions have the country in a death grip, demanding a totally unrealistic 19% pay increase for NHS staff and similar amounts for just about everyone else. As Labour is funded in large part by the unions, and they get in at the next election, we are all totally screwed as they would have to capitulate yet certainly cannot afford it.

The new stealth taxes coming in will drag one in five workers into the 40p tax rate by 2027 - the ‘biggest tax-raising measure since 1979’. This will leave us all poorer, fuel inflation, depress development and cancel any increase finally agreed for the strikers.

The UK inflation rate of 8.7% is comp-ared to Spain (4.1%), France (5.9%), Germany (7.2%), India (4.7%) and the US (4.9%).

I could go on for a hundred pages but suffice to say we are buggered unless we get our act together now. In business terms, the government is the board of UK PLC and the people are the shareholders. We are the ones who get to vote on the board every four years - Labour or Conservative? Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer are the only two choices we are allowed to have for CEO. Our system is broken.

The only answer l see is for the rapid formation of a credible third party and the change to our voting system to bring in proportional representation. The trouble here is that all this needs the agreement of Parliament, and they are the last people in the world that would vote for such a thing. The lunatics really are in charge of the asylum – and we are all the asylum residents.

Depressed? You should be as we are all passengers on a train running over a cliff and can do absolutely nothing about it.