In total agreement here with Nelly Gay. London is a shithole.....culturally it is a fantastic city, the museums are free and astoundingly good, it has a truly cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic community, but rents are atrociously high, the property market is rising currently by around 6-8 percent a year (way over inflation), the public transport is in dire need of attention, commuting in or to London at rush hour is akin to many a person's idea of Hell.
The NHS is struggling to cope, underfunded, mismanaged, there are threats to close large hospitals that serve major population centres in Cities and large towns....and to merge them with other existing hospitals...which is sheer madness as presently these hospitals are straining at the seams already.
When I want to see my GP (I live in Brighton a small city) I have to wait generally for 3 days to see her.
My partner Patrick is from Guadeloupe (French Caribbean) and he has had to go back there for 3-6 months as he injured his back at work....he was given 4 months physiotherapy when there was no diagnosis given on his back injury! Fucking insane...then after waiting 6 MONTHS to have an MRI scan on his back, he arrived at the MRI clinic only to be told that 'we forgot to call you, the machine has broken down!'. We came to the conclusion that the best thing was for him to go back to Guadeloupe, a small carribean island that has an amazing health service (it being a department of France). Within 3 weeks he has had 2 scans with results, laser therapy and a course of massage. We are hoping to reunite by Spring, but forced to spend Christmas apart.
I can't tell you how ashamed this makes me feel about the state of our country. I am a patriotic man, I love England, I am a country lad and spend 4 days a week back at my parents working for the family business in the forest...it is beautiful, but at the same time we are being crippled by extortionate business taxes, council taxes, water, electricity and gas bills.
This Labour government gift wraps everything, but if you take a peek beneath there is deep deep rot.....I travel around and the people of this country are generally depressed, immigration is way out of control....economically we are booming, but it seems that hardly any of this boom trickles down to public and service spending...most of it is blown away on a war that the majority of this country never wanted to partake in. Blair told the nation (after two million marched against the war, the largest peacetime protest in this country's history) that if the UN said no to the war with the US against Iraq, we would by no means go to war. The UN said NO...Blair..sorry...BLIAR...tripped us nonetheless down that dark road to war.
Blair and his cronies of spin par excellence need to be lined up and hung for robbing our country of it's sense of pride, of culture, and for sending it to the dogs.