A Burden Become Unbearable

Tom Armstrong has a powerful FSB reminder of of how hopelessly burdensome and ineffective UK government has become.  


The State: A Burden Become Unbearable

The British people were once free. Not absolutely free, no society has ever achieved that, but free in a real sense, with the State kept on a short leash and its power limited by both custom and necessity. That nation is gone. We live now under a government so bloated, so intrusive, so suffocating in its reach, that it bestrides every area of our lives like a grotesque colossus, demanding money and obedience without public support.

It has become tyrannical not in the jackboot sense of an old-fashioned dictatorship, but in an inhuman bureaucratic nightmare, a thousand regulations and petty taxes binding us tighter than prison bars. The tragedy is that this tyranny is paid for by us, the working people, the pensioners, the savers, through a cancerous system of taxation that has metastasised into the biggest single expense of our lives.


The whole piece is well worth reading as a reminder of the absurd, cloying bureaucratic tyranny which has sucked the life, the vital spark out of our freedom and almost everything we once valued. 

Also worth reading because there is not the slightest sign of meaningful reform, no bonfire of the quangos, no hint of more productive spending, no sign of any official realisation that things are becoming worse.

Government in Britain has become the single greatest threat to our liberty and prosperity. Its taxation devours our income, its regulations suffocate our enterprise, its failures impose yet further costs on us. It is tyrannical not only in its hunger for control but in the sheer arrogance with which it squanders the fruits of our labour. The doctrine of Net Zero epitomises this arrogance, a delusion used to demonstrate virtue while imposing austerity on everyone else. The welfare state is another, keeping millions dependent in order to justify the existence of the bureaucrats who administer it. Law and order, health and education, all are failing, despite or perhaps because of, the endless flood of taxpayer money.

The truth is stark: the State offers appallingly bad value for money. We are compelled to fund it at levels that consume the largest share of our income, only to be met with incompetence, corruption, and decay. It has ceased to be a servant and become a master, demanding more while delivering less, eroding both our prosperity and our freedom.