urban sprawl in Britain - Expat in Kaliningrad, Russia

The topsy-turvy world of life in the UK

From the dress code and behaviour of Britain’s young ‘ladies’ to the conflict in the Muddle East, post-civilised Britain is a mass of contradictions.

[This post appears in the ‘Meanwhile in the UK‘ category]

As sanguine and sagacious as you are, you would not, I am perfectly sure, have jumped to the conclusion that our esteemed Headmaster, Sir Keir Starmer, had completely dropped his marbles when he allowed the loony left, a motley ragbag of Labour MPs, cabbage-looking Greens and limp-wristed Liberal Democrats, to railroad him into disallowing UK airbases to be used for the deployment of US aircraft required for service in the Middle East. If Sir K knows nothing else, he sure does know his onions when it comes to choosing strategically between the preservation of the centuries-old US ‘special relationship’ and running the risk of riots, which, had he not capitulated, the anarchistic left and its unholy migrant confederates would have no doubt unleashed upon the streets of Britain..

Rampant riots on Britain’s streets, with their concomitant rape of the already endangered public purse, cost a third-world ransom and are, moreover, when televised for all the world to see, an embarrassing indictment of failed political leadership unless brought swiftly under control with the sort of robust measures that Britain never employs; the only exception being when those that protest are white, whereupon rest assured that every last man jack of them, as distinct from last man Ali, irrespective of sex or age, can expect their impudence to be met with the ‘full force of the law’. Another downside to be had from riots is that they are bad for happy endings as written at the ballot box; indeed, they incur the unfortunate consequence of lingering in the collective memory and then later, in wild abandon, leaping out in the voting booths as ‘Xs’ in rival MPs’ boxes.

Palestine What a State! By the UK in a State!

Bearing this conjunctively in mind with the volatile state of Britain and the clear and present danger of nationwide civil unrest, even the most vehement of Starmer opponents would probably have to agree that in refusing ‘bad-ass’ Trump’s request for U.S. planes to land on British concrete was the better part of valour, as also was, it might be opined, his subsequent refusal to send one of His Majesty’s rowing boats to assist with the tricky political task of de-mining the Hormuz Straits.

Now, the less charitable among you, ie those who refuse to read The Guardian on the grounds that it might incriminate their reputation and common sense, might be inclined to paraphrase my diplomatic articulation in preference for words less minced and state with convincing clarity that the Starmer way on this occasion, and indeed on many others, had less to do with standing up to Trump than it had with appeasing the migrant masses of whom he is, to borrow freely from Northamptonshire’s vernacular, most possibly rather ‘frit’, although we should ameliorate by admitting not without reason. But then what can one expect if one continues to fill the country day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and forever until it’s goodbye to us with hordes of people who just don’t fit and from countries wherein is found Britain’s most implacable enemies? I wonder how much room there is behind the settee at Number 10 and if nationally it is large enough to accommodate us all when Elon Musk’s prediction of something akin to a civil war kicks off across our imperilled nation from ‘Hoots mon’ to Cornish pasties.

Elon Musk Violence Speech Hits a Raw Liberal Nerve

Much is made in parliament and in the eager-beaver media about the looming threat from historic adversaries, Viking-like would-be aggressors romping in from abroad (you notice I mention no names). There is so much bandied hype about a conventional country-on-country attack upon our sceptred isle, which, although it is not impossible, remains, at least for the moment on the bright side of improbable – let us take as our chosen analogy that it is not entirely impossible that one day ousted Prince Harry might actually wake up and also grow up, but that there is nothing so far in his behaviour to suggest that this possibility will ever transcend improbability.

Nursery rhyme heard from an open window of the Primary School for Blatant Publicity…

Prince Harry went to Ukraine
He isn’t a prince just an exported shame
And after he came home again
(Although he hasn’t got one.)
Nothing was changed; all was the same
The news of him of which we are sick
Make him, for the many, look like a dick.

Perhaps he should change his name to Prince Richard Head.

Life in the UK – it’s all so peculiar

Like the many that preceded them since the end of World War II, this Labour government, which you went and elected – alack a day and fie! – has no plans, no strategy and no backbone, absolutely no political will and, one keenly suspects, no real executive power to halt the migrant invasion from France or to send the buggers already here back to whence they came. As Elon Musk’s, we must conclude, credible prediction, that civil war is on its way takes root in the nation’s consciousness, all that the present government does is continue, as the Tories did before them, to apply to the vicious gaping wound the ointment of capitulation and the accommodating sticking plaster whilst casually sticking two fingers up at the concerns and ultimate welfare of the indigenous population.

Reform Mass Deportation Bill is the Way to Save UK

The normalisation of policies that contradict, confound and confuse the actions expected of government in pursuit, one would ardently hope, of an outcome that favours the country’s health in all its myriad forms – and these not by a long chalk from Starmer’s lacklustre lot alone but as a legacy laid down by a series of not-fit-for-purpose governments stretching back to the end of the Second World War – is red-carpeting the migrant march to the accommodation tune of a tidy eight million pounds a day, costing the British nation dearly, not only in misspent ackers but in the loss of the cultural sense of who we are, the bewilderment of what we are becoming and the fear of what will become of us. as personal and national security are compromised like never before.

Brits told Be Vigilant as boats sail in on tide of terror

Eight million pounds a day is an awful lot of money – an awful lot to spend on people whom we neither need nor want and could very well do without.Think of all the positive things that could be done with all that money. Think of the potholes in Britain’s roads that long to be repaired, of homeless Britons on British streets deserving a roof over their heads, of a most inadequate military, underfunded and demoralised; of new hospitals, new schools, funding for the NHS, real investment in real renewable energy (if you feel that you must think of this) and a thousand other etceteras, etceteras, along with so-ons and so-forth.

The British media is a spilt piss pot, an overflow of alarm stories bent on dunking us into the slops of the country’s parlous economy, rancid with predictions of an economic slowdown and a terminally stagnating GDP. And yet, with all this talk of the United Kidthem heading for the skids and becoming ever more potless, hardly a mention is made, you could say not surprisingly, of the exorbitant and unholy drain on the country’s faltering economy by the perpetual and perpetuated infinite migrant invasion. Bookmark how much it costs to house these delightful darlings: it’s £8,000,000 a day*! And this expenditure in a country where many of its inhabitants cannot afford, in the depths of winter, to switch the domestic heating on. Let me repeat that figure again for the liberal hard-of-hearing: £8,000,000 a day! (*These figures are taken from an assessment made in 2023, which equate to a total annual cost exceeding £3 billion.)

UK Utility Bills Fiasco: What a Gas Freezing is

The rocketing cost of home energy bills
Over the past five years, the annual surge in costs of domestic gas and electric bills has been successively and neatly blamed on a jamboree of circumstances ranging from coronavirus to Ukraine and now the war with Iran. I, personally, am glad about this because I have long distrusted my suspicions that the energy crisis is all to do with greed and that everything used to talk it up is nothing but excuses. The sticking point for me is that as each and every crisis that forms the basis for the hikes subsides or, as in the case of coronavirus, vanishes overnight, the higher cost of energy never returns to what it was before the crisis was invented.

There are among our energy companies, who seem to be raking-it-in, some who seek to explain away these sudden precipitous peaks by recourse to pious allusions to the investment they are making in the nicely named renewable energy, but I think we all know by now, or if we don’t, we certainly should, that the imposition of net zero, paying 30 pence at the supermarket whenever we need a shopping bag, and all those other touchy-feely save-the-planet schemes are hand-in-glove with another suspect cause, the humanitarian industry, that global ideological racket belying the altruistic motives of philanthropic billionaires (so-called), hidden-agenda NGOs and need-to-be-scrutinised charities. We’ll just stop short of coining the phrase ‘ideological gangsterism’.

Mass building projects, new towns, associated infrastructure and net zero defined

If you want to know what topsy-turvy means in its relationship to net zero and all the other save-the-planet rackets, just head off into Cambridgeshire and take a look at Peterborough – a sprawling conurbation of the most utterly reprehensible kind.

The same urban sprawl is possibly being masterminded for the rural area of North Bedfordshire. South Bedfordshire has already become a save-the-planet farce: a rotten, unsightly mess of sprawling Lego-type house developments and noisy traffic-spewed roads that crisscross and run in fume-ridden, thundering parallel across a blighted and shattered landscape. This kind of urbanised vandalism is a thin-end-of-the-wedge scenario that is about to be driven like a stake through the heart of North Bedfordshire’s slumbering countryside.

Already, thousands of wonderful new homes are poised to be built on the outskirts of Sharnbrook next to the A6, turning a small, grey stone village with centuries of rural history into yet another example of the corrosive link between profit motive, white flight and overpopulation.

New housing estate at Sharnbrook in Bedfordshire: more cars; more houses; more pollution. This is not saving the planet. — A fleet of ‘War of the ‘World’-type excavators are already tearing up rural Bedfordshire.

The A6, which at the best of times is already overburdened with heavy traffic, will, thanks to those lovely new homes and the masses due to occupy them, fall foul to a glutting influx of cars, the majority of which, with one or two exceptions in the shape of those funny whining things powered by electric that most of us don’t understand and more significantly cannot afford, will soon be belching CO₂ in ever-increasing volumes across the choking, stricken landscape. As the victim’s health deteriorates, a frustrating and clogged A-Sick will compel the rabbits in the new-build hutches, for which they have paid most handsomely, to seek out alternative roads on which to boldly go to get them into Bedford and beyond. Towards this competitive end, they will be rat-running their daily way through every local country lane in droves, forever in search of the Golden Fleece, the illusory traffic-free thoroughfare.

This same area of North Bedfordshire is also earmarked as the unlucky recipient of acre upon acre of environmentally unfriendly, ugly, intrusive solar panels; so many of them, in fact, that they will literally gobble up not only some of the county’s best and richest arable land but also turn what is today a truly beautiful example of English countryside at its most precious into a hideous plastic eyesore. Once the topsoil has been removed from century-old fields and meadows, it won’t be long before the relatively useless solar panels are pronounced dead and buried, like the arable land they’ve deprived us of, whereupon, hey presto, like a magician’s rabbit pulled out of a hat, all that sacrificed verdant land will turn, by a smoke-and-mirrors strategy, into a massive brownfield site, and before we can shed a validatory tear, up will sprout thousands of houses where wheat and barley used to be, like an overnight rash of toadstools.

Stop East Park Energy sign. Rural Bedfordshire threatened by acres of lost arable land to solar panels.

This scheme, and the scheming behind it, though it may look topsy-turvy to some, discounting, of course, the duped disciples of the environmental racket, is as plain as the nose on Pinocchio’s face.It could literally pave the way for those hundreds of thousands more houses which Labour so rejoices in, transfiguring, in this case, a magnificent part of rural Bedfordshire, as so many shires are being disfigured, into that deadly urban sprawl that once was the noted cathedral city of Peterborough.

Standing on the crest of the valley overlooking tranquil Bedfordshire, the question might enter your head, ‘Why would they want to bury such splendiferous natural beauty under piles of bricks and slabs of concrete?’ And the answer might come back to you, quietly but convincingly, carried on the melodious sweetness of freely given bird song and suggested to you in the whispering breeze, ‘To pave the way for white flight, as the UK’s major towns and cities devolve to third-world ghettos, the rich therein behind gated compounds and murder incorporated out on the streets. Is this England I’m describing or am I confusing it with South Africa? Perhaps, as E.A. Poe would say, ‘It’s all but a dream within a dream.’ Meanwhile, at the carnival, you pay your money and you make your choice!

Crime matters

Yonder, about 12 months hence (my, but doesn’t time fly – ay up, think of the planet. I wonder how many of them do when they are up there in the sky), I was standing at the checkout in Bedford’s wonderful Wilko’s when a skanky individual – there are a lot of them about – looking like one of Kenneth Grahame’s weasels, went strolling out of the shop, his arms laden with unpaid items. Like the conscientious citizen that I am, and also to test what I had been told, I drew the attention of a store attendant to the undeniable fact that Wilko’s had just been robbed. Rolling his eyes up to the ceiling in a manner that suggested he would rather I had kept this to myself, he nevertheless pursued the thief and came back on this occasion with full retrieval of the loot. As for the robber, he went scot-free.

The new deal in the UK is that shop assistants and shop security can watch but cannot touch: shoplifting in effect has become a kind of spectator sport or retail-sanctioned voyeurism. Shop staff and security are corporately disempowered from apprehending shoplifters for fear the company may be prosecuted for violating the criminal’s human rights. Moreover, the unverified story goes that should you ring the Old Bill and report the crime of shoplifting, you’d simply be wasting your time as well as the cost of a phone call, as they, the UK police, rarely, if ever, respond to such incidents, unveiling the reason, at a guess, why Britain is currently overwhelmed by a shoplifting epidemic and suggesting to the intelligent that this in part explains why good-old Wilko’s Bedford branch closed down.

Female shoplifter. Shoplifting is rife in the UK

Understandably, as a customer, the daily scourge of shoplifting may not be as high on your list of concerns as it would be if you owned a shop, but crime in all its variations, particularly crime to the person and serious crime at that, has reached an all-time UK high, suspiciously coinciding with profound cultural changes in the nation’s composition, with disproportional representation in certain ethnic groups and by conflicting, hostile creeds.

To be chatful of it, you could say that crime in Britain is ‘rife’, and yet it’s a funny thing, I’ll have you know, and you may think so also, how Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, known as the FCO, is altogether exceptionally good at passing judgement on other countries, warning us not to go there for fear of falling victim to crime at street and also state level, but never tells the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in fact any truth it would seem at all, about the dangers of visiting and living in Britain, especially when that living and visiting pertains to the city of London, which as every honest fellow knows, grows more dangerous every day.

Golders Green Terrorist Attack [April 2026]
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/london-golders-green-stabbing-essa-suleiman-attack-terror-jewish-latest-update-b2968192.html

“Home Secretary says likelihood of an attack in the UK is ‘extremely likely”

It is always ‘extremely likely’ and will always be extremely likely, as ‘we’ve ’let them in and ‘we’ keep on letting them in.

“Suleiman is a British national born in Somalia who had a “history of serious violence and mental health issues”, police say.

So, what’s he doing here? They all seem to have ‘mental health issues’, don’t they?

Mr Prime Minister, Sir, and the rest of the British Establishment, why do you keep on letting them in?

If they weren’t here, they couldn’t be doing what they do, could they?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c3ve2nr60xzt?post=asset%3A81999a10-ec0a-436c-ad97-47ff489f3aaf#post

‘Edith Binstock has lived in Golders Green for more than 70 years and says when she was young it “was the most amazing place to live in”.’

‘” I don’t know how it’s got to such a state… I don’t know when it’s going to get better. I doubt it.”’

I hope the left are listening …

In daylight, UK towns and cities look exactly what they are, but when night descends on Gotham, it’s best to scurry home, and once inside what used to be but isn’t any longer the revered and impregnable Englishman’s castle, quickly bolt and bar the doors. The real, fictional Gotham City had one distinct advantage: when the dregs seeped upwards to the surface, it could always call on Batman, whereas in Britain we think ourselves lucky if we see a copper from one week to the next, and when we do catch a glimpse of them, they are roaring rapidly past in their cars. What the eye don’t see, the report don’t mention.

But whilst visible policing may be a thing of the past and there’s no solution to crime, two things that we do have are a glut of fatuous politicians and a disingenuous media making blatant false assurances that there is no such thing as ‘no-go areas’ in our major cities. Of this they may be right. Take Londinstan, for example: here you can go wherever you like, just don’t expect to always come back, or always come back in one piece.

Where’s that policeman when you need one?

Life in the UK – it’s all so peculiar

No write-up on the topsy-turvy fragile state of Britain would be worth its weight in Asian barber shops without a word or several on the behaviour of Britain’s yoof, and in this respect I will not disappoint.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the ‘pleasure’ of spending an evening in a large Bedford pub, which shall here remain unnamed, although I know that my secret will not stop you guessing which one it is I am talking about.

The night it was a Saturday, and yoof were out in force.

This particular boozer, which is renowned for beer that is sensibly priced and grub that is affordable, acts on Friday and Saturday evenings as a meeting place and springboard from which, following an alcohol primer or seven and having strutted their stuff – their very noisy and raucous stuff – the country’s dubious future spills out of the frenzied pub onto Bedford’s bedighted streets like a carnival of zombies. The next stop for Hysteria isn’t exactly the Twilight Zone, but it’s as near as damn it is to swearing. They are heading off, one and all, and in all sorts of bold undress, to abandonedly disport themselves at one or other of Bedford town’s overpriced and over-rated cattle markets, which some, those we must assume deprived of the good fortune to have ever been, or have ever been taken, to anywhere half decent, like to refer to as nightclubs.

Mythological female creature, possibly a feminist — Does my arse look big in this mermaid costume

In observing this unruly and indescribable disembarkation, I asked myself the searching question, has anything really changed since the 1990s? The decade that tried to redefine woman.

Sporting hilarious bouffant hairstyles, massively square and padded shoulders and parroting to anyone awake enough to listen that their careers were all they lived for – even having children was a bind! But occasionally, if it had to happen, they would take time off to do it, providing they were back in the boardroom at 9am the following day – these larger-than-daft career women symbolised the prototype model for the upwardly shafted female; she who had been deliberately conned into giving up her home life for sitting in an office. Led to believe herself empowered, all she had really achieved was emancipation from common sense. Now she would face the grim task of juggling home and working life, while creating feral latchkey kids, stressing it out wage-slave fashion and giving it all to the taxman.

It was during this time, or shortly after, that perfectly innocent programmes, like the comedy On the Buses and the long-running Benny Hill Show, came under the feminist cosh. Indeed, poor old saucy Benny, after years of treating us and our fathers to a feast of tits and bums, was driven out of business by the ‘It’s far too sexist!’ Stasi.

New Woman, especially feminists, wanted it to be known that they were volcanic hairstyles and padded shoulders above the leering of mucky old men’ (although the old but rich and ‘toy boys’ appeared to be exempt). Sexual jokes and innuendoes were no longer to be brooked; the Italian pinch or pat on the bum became strictly a bridge too far, and as for those cheeky construction workers bound by tradition to wolf whistle whenever they clocked the cheeks of, or cast their eyes across, the various assorted feminine goods purposefully displayed to them, their interest in the freely on offer was ordered to cease forthwith; the whistling had to stop, although the setting out of the carnal stall continued unabated.

Now, I have no idea what goes through your mind when you first clap eyes on or meet a woman, but I’d hazard a layman’s guess that it has little to do with her credentials as a hot-shot exec female or whether she can or cannot hold an in-depth conversation on the philosophical works of Kant (Careful with that spell checker!) or has practical skills in woodwork. But the real question is, and has been since the 1990s, when PC first appeared, if, as we are led to believe, UK women regard themselves generically, that’s wholesale, as distant cousins to sexuality, demanding to be identified by their labour skills and brains, then why do so many still in this age of Ms equality, professional or otherwise, dress in what is defined traditionally as outfits worn by tarts (apologies to jam and biscuits)? Like charity that begins at home, sexual objectification begins primarily with the object itself, not, as alleged, the objectifying.

Anyway, getting back to this certain pub in a certain part of Bedford. Bedford isn’t Bedlam, and neither is this pub – on a Saturday night it is worse! You might want to call it a clusterf*ck! Liberals would describe it as a hip and vibrant venue, a popular haunt for the dynamic young – ‘inclusive’ and ‘diverse’, they would quoth – a lively, relaxed and fun-loving crowd just wanting to let off steam. And in this respect, indeed, they were. Some sights, I must confess, were steaming up my glasses, testing my resolve to define women in the new-age light as prescribed by liberal doctrine, but steel myself as I might to ignore what my eyes beheld and its impact upon my reprobation (Forgive me, Lord! For I am male!), I could not altogether resist Aphrodite’s timeless charms and the wish she would have me entertain to become, and instantly, younger – by about 100 years, I’d say.

Other ‘ladies’ there were who were steaming in a different fashion, and yet, although they were out to get the same thing as their nimble counterparts, as they lumbered around like steamrollers with huge, tree-trunk, cellulite legs clad in bum-hugging skirts or shorts that were much to short for them into which they had awkwardly squeezed, and sometimes squeezed far too tightly, making them look like sausage meat overstuffed in skins, I wondered if they would ever get what it was they were after or remain for the rest of their days in a limbo state of disappointment. It’s exactly times like these that I’m glad I’m vegetarian. Had Stan, Jack and Benny been here, they would have had a field day! And here’s the topsy-turvy of it, for in spite of all we’ve been led to believe about modern British women, I think I can honestly say that I’ve never seen so many females embracing objectification since I worked on the local pig farm. Ah, so that’s what it reminded me of: that terrible shrieking din of youngsters and the letting off of their clouds of steam!

Large female arse in panties with 'Yes please' written on them

The contention of to what degree, if any, women ought to be obliged to take responsibility for the manner in which they dress and behave in public, if not merely for their own safety, then out of common respect for Modesty, is an issue framed in the larger debate of whether a rights-obsessed society should encourage every member of it, from politicians to media moguls to the happy-go-lucky migrants to women out on the town, to adopt the type of double standards that circumvent and short-circuit moral codes of responsibility, shaping the world’s wise opinion of the kind of society that Britain wasn’t but now, sadly, has become.

And if the answer is ‘no’, then where should such standards trickle from if not from the highest office in the land? Should the backdoor to double standards be left off its Yale lock here, then the thief that covets morality will perceive the right to go amongst us, sacking and plundering without redress and mugging us at will.

From turning your back on an ally, to turning the other cheek, as Labour’s Rochdale councillors did as cheeks were being turned; to letting the boats come flooding in; to ignoring the rising tide of crime; to an attitude of ‘sod their morrows’ by endorsing Sodom and Gomorrah; to paying perpetual homage to the one-way god of rights – this, then, is the topsy-turvy life, a life of confusing contradictions, that we live in the UK today. Thus verily unto you I say, and I am sure you will agree, that in pausing to examine it, it is all so peculiar.