Kemi Badenoch has won the leadership of the British Conservative Party after a grueling series of voting rounds. Details of the voting at the Guido Fawkes blog, and details about the women herself at Kiwiblog. She got some unusual good news as she won in that the Tories have edged ahead of the new Labour government in one poll, which is extraordinary considering how new that government is, but not surprising considering they got their landslide with about 20% of the population.

That election is also reflected in this vote in that thirty percent of the Tory membership didn’t bother to vote!

But that’s the state of Britain at the moment, summed up well in the following Gen-Z diagram that’s gone viral.

Given the disconnect between Gen-Z and the MSM I was surprised to find an article, in The Telegraph of all places, that made clear the logical outcome of this, It’s time for the young and ambitious to leave Britain:

Over the next 50 years, government policy is expected to maintain revenue at around 40pc of GDP. Spending, meanwhile, is poised to cross the 60pc threshold last reached in 1944-1945, when German foreign policy led to unusually strong spending pressures.

It points out that even at the height of the Chinese Lung Rot pandemic at its most interventionist, State spending was 53% of the economy. Also it won’t matter which party is in power, given the aging demographics of the country which will render the NHS (National Health Service), the state pension system, and state-funded elderly care untouchable, as they already are.

Taxes will simply have to rise to pay for all this, until a natural limit is hit, and that limit will be the rich (1% of the population already paying 29% of the income tax) and young people escaping, the latter pushed even harder by the knowledge that all these systems won’t be able to hand out the same degree of largesse when it’s their turn to receive.

Immigration won’t help in the long run either, despite both the Tories and now Labour using it as a sugar rush for economic growth, and to prop up the NHS directly with workers:

The OBR believes each low-wage worker will cost Britain £151,000 by state pension age, £500,000 by 80 and £1m by 100. In other words, the “migration” strategy simply shunts the costs of today’s retirees into the future – and into the period where state spending is already unsustainable.

But where will British youth run to given that the entire West is facing similar demographic problems? I was surprised at one of the answers supplied by The Times, Dubai:

John Mason International, a removals company, reports a 420 per cent increase over the last five years in British nationals wanting to relocate to the UAE. The number rose by 45 per cent in the past 12 months…

It’s the third most popular residence for British expats, 240,000 Brits already live there, and it’s not all about rich ones but the young, who find that they don’t much care that the place is an autocracy or that heat in summer is a killer, plus being mainly sand compared to the green hills of their motherland:

The city is more affordable than London and that it was noticeable how many doctors and nurses they met were ex-NHS. None of them pay any tax. They cannot believe how easy interactions are with the state when every point of contact with it has been digitised.
….
Young British people are beginning to look at the state of the country, make a few basic back-of-the-envelope calculations, and decide to leave. The number of 18 to 24-year-olds who want to move abroad is about 30 per cent, a YouGov survey suggested this year.

I’ve highlighted that point to make it clear that it’s not just crass economics at work in the thinking, as the writer notes about a couple of his friends returning to Britain from Dubai:

When they arrived back in the United Kingdom they found themselves unable to use the lavatory on the train from the airport because every unlockable door had been smashed up. Inside one broken cubicle, urine sloshed around on the floor, permeating their shoes. They alighted at a city centre station where a giant billboard advertised the services of the Samaritans. Leaving the station, they passed two brittle men enjoying some crack cocaine as they took cover next to a parked police car with a rainbow flag stencilled on one of the doors. It was, of course, raining coldly as they walked back to the flat they rent but will never be able to afford to buy.

That’s Britain now after fourteen years of Tory rule, but Labour is already showing that it’s equally clueless about how to improve the place, just differently clueless as they’ve gone for a £40 billion tax grab, the largest in British history, loaded on top of an already weak economy. Tax tinkering and more State spending is not going to get it done and it may well be that nothing can be done to arrest Britain’s slow decline:

The Labour government cannot restore the conditions of post-war social democracy because the underlying basis of that economy, a strong domestic manufacturing base, no longer exists…The de-industrialisation of the North was a conscious choice made by successive Westminster governments, betting Britain’s future prosperity on a combination of London-centric financialisation and enmeshment in a globalised world economy.

The 2008 GFC showed the risks of financialisation and government responses to Covid, by disrupting supply chains, showed the risks of globalisation. Moreover, as with any compound interest, even a small effect builds up enormously over time, and when the measure is not growth but relative decline there comes a point where people can see the results with their own eyes instead of via economic stats:

The results of this decline are now palpable in every aspect of British life: in ballooning healthcare costs somehow leading to declining services, and the attendant national ritual of early morning calls to dismissive receptionists to compete for a narrow window of medical attention — and its corollary, the day-long trip to A&E, a desperate hack of the NHS system which must itself weigh heavily on national productivity.

Britain’s cloud of misery assumes concrete form in provincial high streets of unmitigated gloom, whose shuttered shops are punctuated by vape outlets, phone repairers and cash-only barbers, whose dubious legality are left unexamined by a state desperate for whatever revenue it can take; indeed even Oxford Street is now just another dismal provincial High Street.
…
Britain is simply a poor country: 43% of the population earn too little to pay income tax at all.

As with the previous article, reference is made to immigration and how that’s not really helping, given that it just props up businesses and industries dependent on low wages while overloading housing, infrastructure and social services: (“human quantitative easing”).

Overburdened with unaffordable commitments, with a declining tax base, the British state lurches from crisis to crisis, getting weaker, poorer and less capable at each turn (this is, by the way, the very definition of societal collapse)….As Britain’s economy withers, the tax burden falls increasingly on a smaller and smaller professional class, its younger members already crushed by student loans and rising housing costs, whose growing sense of despair at diminishing expectations is rapidly curdling into rage against the British state.

Rage – and self-exile to places like Dubai. Apparently Labour is going to try and use Climate Change to boost the economy, in the way that the threat of Nazi Germany did in WWII, but that’s self-defeating when Net Zero is driving energy costs relentlessly higher and the primary answer is more wind and solar.

In the face of all this I don’t see Labour making things better, but nor do I see a future Tory government, even one ruled by Kemi Badenoch’s ideology, doing much better on industry, productivity, the NHS or social services. As The Times said:

How much British values actually count for when they are attached to a state that appears to be failing in slow motion, regardless of which party is in government, is a question few of us want to ask.

Not quite true, Britain’s youth have already asked and answered this question.