The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

 

I was asked at a business conference shortly after my return to the UK what had changed most during my twenty years away. I answered that the police now seem more interested in what you say than what you do. The room fell silent as people took in the full import of this dangerous speech and the subject was hastily changed. No-one seemed to see the irony in that.

No real crime committed against me in the UK has ever been solved (I have been burgled repeatedly and have had the occasional item stolen from my office and hotel rooms). The police simply issued crime numbers for my insurers and showed no interest at all in catching the criminals. Indeed when I found the stolen goods from my first burglary in a local second hand shop and reported it, the police took the fence's word over mine; believing him when he said he had bought the items before the burglary occurred.

I spent two years of my life working as a manual labourer on construction sites in my youth and the rude, robust and sweary banter (suspended immediately as a matter of courtesy whenever women or children passed by) was a fun part of the job. I am saddened that I now live in a strange place where an employer is expected to pay £27,000 to a man, not even because he was called a rude name, but because he heard his colleague called one. What feeble creatures British workers are. What tender, girlish sensibilities they now have.

France can invade any time it wants. The tactics in the video would now reduce English defenders to quivering, offended wrecks clinging tearfully to the apron strings of Mother State.