Chapter 32: Yours Wrathfully

We give below another of the long-missing items recovered by our star reporter, Trixie Larkspur. She still won’t tell us how many she has left. This one is quite a tirade, so if you don’t like groaning sounds, stop here. Ed

For the attention of Mr W. Rider-Hawes, Editor of Madazine

Dear Sir,

Having tried unsuccessfully to get my views published by any one of the quality newspapers or periodicals, I am reduced to contacting you, more in hope than expectation that my comments will reach at least a few readers. No doubt some of them will share my exasperation at the fact that so much has gone wrong in Britain. I give below some examples:

• We have quangos and regulatory bodies headed by people who avoid responsibility by asserting that they cannot comment on individual cases. The obvious reason is that they were put in place on the ‘jobs for boys’ basis and never had any intention of being taken to task in respect of their supposed duties.

• What is amiss with our education system? Why are we repeatedly found at or near the bottom of the table of broadly comparable countries when it comes to literacy and numeracy? And why are we permitting vast numbers of people to study totally pointless subjects at our universities? No wonder so many of them can’t find work.

• Why are we allowing apparently unlimited net immigration at the same time as our indigenous people are breeding like rabbits, with the result that we are now close to having standing room only in the land? This is intolerable and something should be done about it.

• We are often told by our politicians that we are among the richest countries in the world. This is rubbish. Our national debt is already sky high and is increasing by leaps and bounds, thanks to the government’s failure to get the promised grip on our annual deficit. And why is it that this ‘rich’ country of ours seems to exist in a state of permanent crisis? During the last week I have heard that the National Health Service is on its last legs, that the lights are likely to go out very soon and that virtually every other country in Europe has, in terms of daily consumption, at least twenty times as much gas in stock as we have.

• Clearly the less well informed among us are being misled – and not only by politicos. The media play their part. I will not go into what is heaped upon us by television and newspapers. Radio alone will illustrate my point. The broadcasters concerned tolerate very sloppy standards. In the last couple of weeks I have heard a plethora of grammatical, syntactical and statistical errors while listening to what is widely regarded as a flagship radio station.

• Radio transmissions are also responsible for a great deal of illness in the land. Why? Because they are constantly talking about diseases. If one were to listen to the station I referred to above for a while day, one would hear the most dreaded medical conditions mentioned time and again. I maintain that listening to Radio X can seriously damage one’s health.

• Why, in this supposedly enlightened age, are we choking in traffic? When trying to get around my hometown on foot, I cannot cross the narrowest alley without having to wait for at least one car to drive into or out of it. We should be getting masses of people onto the existing railway system instead of contemplating an absurdly expensive high-speed line which will benefit only a handful of expense-account junketers.