What next?

[pat]

I know it's not a political forum but the dreadful shenanigans of our morally bankrupt government beggar belief. Two of the people responsible for drawing up Covid rules blatantly breaking them (Cummings with his 'eye test' drive to a beauty spot and Hancock snogging his aide) and Johnson refusing to do anything about any of them. At least Hancock has had the decency to resign. What a bloody shower they are. I'd love to know what the media in other countries are saying about our rotten, unfit-for-purpose government.

[mkenuk]

Please don't get me started!
Living abroad, I can perhaps see the state of UK more objectively than those who live there.
In short, I despair. The British public seem to want a corrupt, narcissistic, racist prime minister rather than one who is straightforward, honest, respectable and presumably very good at his job. Sir Keir Starmer was knighted for his work as head of the Crown Prosecution Service and seems, in my opinion,  to have everything necessary to be an excellent head of government.

Johnson's achievements to date seem to include splitting the UK, wasting a vast amount of money on projects that don't work ('test and trace' was a disaster) and appointing one of the most incompetent and dishonest cabinets in living memory. Good riddance to Matt Hancock (or, as he is apparently referred to in some quarters, 'Matt Handjob'!) Let's hope it's not too long before the rest follow him.

To answer your last point, the media in the rest of the world don't give a tinker's curse about the state of the UK. Corrupt governments are the norm in many parts of the world. I suspect, however, that some members of the EU may be experiencing a certain amount of 'Schadenfreude' as the wheels start to come loose on the Brexit bus.

[pat]

Although the people who voted Tory obviously have to accept their share of the blame for landing us with an utterly shameless, corrupt and incompetent government, a larger share of the blame must go to our ridiculous first-past-the-post voting system. In the 2019 general election it took 38,300 votes to elect each Conservative MP, 50,817 to elect each Labour MP, 334,122 to elect each Lib Dem MP and a massive 864,743 votes for the Green Party to get their one and only MP. Overall, 54.7% of voters voted for something other than a Tory government yet we ended up with a bunch of charlatans with a massive 80 seat majority, meaning that they can do whatever they like and no one can hold them to account. And of course with a result like that they're never going to change the voting system. No one who supports democracy can possibly think it's a fair system when over 50% of voters' preferences are ignored.

I'll be surprised if Sajid Javid will be any better than Hancock. About 4 years ago a planning application was submitted to my local council for a new housing estate of nearly 1,000 homes near to where I live. As such applications always do, it received strong opposition from local residents. Of course there was a degree of nimbyism involved - who wants 1,000 homes being built right on their doorstep - but there were valid reasons why the exercise wasn't viable, most notably the lack of infrastructure to support such a development, the extra traffic in an area where there are already massive traffic holdups at peak times, and also the fact that the houses adjacent to the site already suffer flooding due to excess water running off the fields, the volume of which is bound to increase when the land is concreted over. Our council (Tory no less) refused the application and the builders appealed. Sajid Javid came swanning into town to hear the appeal and said of course you can build there. I'm not saying that money changed hands but...

I was actually a member of a protest group that was formed to fight the initial application. Due to a donation from one of the group members we had a bank balance of £140. The builders, who are no doubt worth hundreds if not thousands of millions of pounds, threatened to take us to court if we didn't stop making trouble for them. It seems that when you have money you can do whatever you want, especially when you have a Tory MP in your pocket.