IF you were attempting to fly off on your family holiday this Wednesday just as all outbound flights from the UK were grounded due to a technical failure, then you would have had a vivid close-up of broken Britain.
You know the place. The land where “nothing works”.
GettyUnbroken Britain was rampant when England’s women won the Euros[/caption]
The country where taxes are at an all-time high and yet public services are at an all-time low.
Where a deeply unpopular government presides over unfettered immigration, industrial unrest, porous borders, NHS queues, rising violent crime and economic paralysis.
If I had been one of 577,000 Brits decked by the latest air traffic chaos, you bet your life I would have been screaming: “Why does nothing work in this bloody country?”
Most feel that a raft of crimes are on the rise, from sex offences to knife crime to street mugging. Yet police stations are closed. Coppers are rarely seen on our lawless streets.
Burglars, shoplifters and phone-snatchers get away with their crimes.
Our capital has become Dodge City with a mayor who frets more about the American President than he does the anarchic streets of London.
But it is always worth remembering that there is another country — an unbroken Britain.
And it is just as real as the land of striking doctors, online haters, small boats, e-bikes dumped in disabled bays, brazen shoplifters, phone snatchers, knife crime, and all the rest of our litany of misery.
What my old mucker Ian Dury called reasons to be cheerful.
That unbroken Britain — strong and proud, stoic and resilient — was rampant when England’s women won the Euros.
“This team shows exactly what it means to be English,” said Lioness Chloe Kelly. “I am so proud to be English. This team is made of magic and made of steel.”
“We’ve shown during this tournament that we can come back when we go a goal down,” said hero goalkeeper Hannah Hampton. “We have that grit. We have English blood in us.”
The return of unapologetic, unabashed patriotism is long overdue. Remembering who we are — and why it should make us happy — can never be wrong. Those patriotic Lionesses spoke of something real.
This country has faced and fought tyrants for centuries. It has not been invaded for 1,000 years.
It is home to a tough, tolerant, quietly courageous, freedom-loving people with an instinct for good manners and gentle humour.
Fashionable self-loathing
Doesn’t that remind you of your family and your friends and everyone you grew up with?
We have so many reasons to be proud of our country.
Eleven years ago, Labour’s Emily Thornberry took a photo of a working-class home with a St George flag on display outside — because Emily clearly thought it was hilarious, darling.
But for all that ails our nation — and yes, there is plenty — I believe in my blood and bones that Emily Thornberry’s brand of fashionable self-loathing has had its day. Enough.
I am always proud of this country.
Our history. Our people. The freedom we revere. The creativity that has poured from these shores. The grit we show when our backs are against the wall.
Parts of Britain undeniably feel shattered.
But there is a national soul that is made of unbreakable material.
It was there in the smiling faces of all those different generations on the Mall, as they waved their Union Jacks and their flags of St George, responding to what George Orwell called, “The spiritual need for patriotism for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like it, no substitute has yet been found.”
Never forget that our unbroken, unbreakable Britain is real too, and we are right to feel an unapologetic love for it.
There are no small boats trying to get into France, are there?
MARIAH A TIME KILLER
PASinger Mariah Carey says she ‘doesn’t allow’ ageing[/caption]
MARIAH Carey insists that ageing is optional.
Asked how she deals with getting older, Mariah flounces: “I don’t allow it – it just doesn’t happen.
“I don’t know time. I don’t know numbers. I do not acknowledge time.”
David Bowie once told me exactly the opposite.
“The years seem to go faster,” Bowie told me just before his 50th birthday in January 1997. “And that’s because the years really are going faster.”
The David Bowie theory of time was that it accelerates as we get older because one year is always becoming a smaller percentage of your life span.
For Bowie, at 50, a year was just two per cent of his life – a fleeting fragment.
But when David was a ten-year-old boy at Burnt Ash Junior School in Bromley, a year was ten per cent of his life.
Mariah Carey, that admirably defiant diva, 56, says that we can ignore the passing of time.
But David Bowie insisted that time is forever slipping through our fingers.
I wonder who is right?
LISTEN TO NEV, RACHEL
PAGary Neville is a Labour supporter who is also a successful businessman[/caption]
GARY Neville is that great rarity – a Labour supporter who is also a successful businessman.
We think of Gary as an acid-tongued football pundit.
But – as his website proudly states – he has been a property developer since he was 21 years old, he is the co-founder of the production company Buzz 16 and his investment business, Relentless, is now ten years old.
So when Gary Neville talks about this Labour Government’s relationship to business, they should listen.
Gary points out the intolerable burden that has been placed on British business by Chancellor Rachel Reeves hiking employers’ National Insurance contributions.
“I honestly don’t believe that companies and small businesses should be deterred from employing people,” he told Sky News.
Neville is right – hammering employers is the dumbest move of a Government that claims to crave economic growth.
Our Government is stuffed full of people who have worked as a lawyer (Keir Starmer, David Lammy), economist (Rachel Reeves) and trade union representative (Angela Rayner).
Incredibly, there is not one entrepreneur among them.
Can’t they find a seat for Gary Neville around the Cabinet table?
LIAM AND PAMELA HAVE GUN AND DONE IT
PAThe Liam Neeson-Pamela Anderson reboot of The Naked Gun is being praised by critics[/caption]
AGAINST all expectations, film critics are hailing the Liam Neeson-Pamela Anderson reboot of clasic cop caper The Naked Gun as a comic masterpiece.
“This is one of the funniest films I have seen in years,” said my colleague Grant Rollings in The Sun.
“So funny it made me physically crumble in my seat on multiple occasions,” gasped the Telegraph.
There are two reasons this is weird.
One – in recent years, comedy has gone out of fashion in Hollywood.
And two – although the sequel, reboot and film franchise are all the rage in Tinsel Town, they are usually never as good as the original.
Until Liam Neeson flashed his lurid underpants and got out his indecently large Glock. Until Pamela Anderson, above with Liam, brilliantly reinvented herself as a comic femme fatale.
Until now.
I suggest that no film this year has received rave reviews like this remake of The Naked Gun.
And I hear you cry – surely you can’t be serious?
But I am dead serious.
And don’t call me Shirley!
THUGS ON RISE
MOHAMMED Fahir Amaaz has been convicted on three counts of assault at Manchester airport, including attacks on two female officers, PC Lydia Ward and PC Ellie Cook.
The CCTV footage of Amaaz using what was described in court as “a high level of violence” is truly sickening.
PC Cook had her nose broken by this violent thug.
Once upon a time – how long ago it seems! – men in this country did not think it was acceptable to hit women.
And now, God help us, some of them do.
PROVING that our footballers have far more money than they know what to do with, Erling Haaland’s partner Isabel Haugseng Johansen poses with a £330,000 diamond-encrusted crocodile-skin Hermes handbag.
Now that’s what I call a sick bag.
Isabel Haugseng Johansen poses with a £330,000 diamond-encrusted crocodile-skin Hermes handbagInstagram
Are we meant to be impressed?
Frankly, the notion that some beautiful crocodile was skinned to provide some narcissistic rich person with clicks on Instagram turns my stomach.
A crocodile is a wild animal.
Never a handbag.
ON a golfing trip to Scotland, Donald Trump took time out to knock Net Zero for fore.
While Sir Keir Starmer sat mutely by his side, the POTUS pointed out that there was a “vast fortune to be made for the UK” if the Government reversed its self-harming policy of denying new licences for gas and oil extraction from the North Sea.
Trump also railed against wind turbines and the madness of ignoring shale reserves.
Starmer said nowt. Perhaps he knows that the Orange King is right.
And that green goon Ed Miliband, the swivel-eyed major nutjob of Net Zero, is wrong, wrong, wrong.
AS JK Rowling turns sixty, she is rightly hailed as a fearless women’s campaigner.
Joanne also deserves the thanks of a nation for her achievement as a writer.
Nobody ever did more to give generations of children a love of reading that will stay with them for a lifetime.
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