TOM ARMSTRONG
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.
When you consider what a working man pays, it is enough to make your blood boil. He sees the income tax bite off a chunk of his earnings before he even touches them. Then NI is piled on top, a second income tax by another name. VAT is applied to every transaction he makes, stealthily adding nearly a quarter to the price of most goods and services, even though the State adds no value whatsoever. Fuel duty ensures that every time he fills his car he is handing over a large portion of that money to the Exchequer. Alcohol duty, tobacco duty, council tax, stamp duty, inheritance tax: the endless list continues. The State, in all its grasping greed, is taking more from each of us than landlords or banks ever dreamed of. Rent and mortgage were once the great burdens. Now the real rentier class is the State, extorting payments for the privilege of living and working.
And that is before we count the regulatory burdens, which are another form of taxation. Every rule, every target, every compliance exercise adds costs that businesses must pass on to the consumer. The perfect case study of this madness is Net Zero. Here we see a policy concocted by international bureaucrats and the green ‘elite’, swallowed whole by our Establishment without a whisper of debate. Ordinary people are told they must re-engineer their lives around a set of arbitrary carbon goals that are neither achievable nor justified. We must swap our cars for electric vehicles that are more expensive, less practical, and dependent on rare minerals mined by child labour abroad. We must rip out gas boilers, perfectly efficient, and replace them with heat pumps that struggle in the British climate and cost thousands to install. We must pay “green levies” on our energy bills, sending already strained households into fuel poverty, just so that ministers can preen themselves at climate conferences in faraway capitals. This is regulation as punishment, regulation as moral theatre, imposed on a people who were never asked, and who cannot afford it.
The absurdity is that the science behind it is cod-science. It is not settled, is not beyond dispute, and a large number of real scientists, with expertise in the field, dispute it. The climate is changing. It always has, across centuries, but the Establishment’s demands that, unless we surrender liberty and prosperity to unelected global technocrats the planet is doomed, is transparently wrong and equally obviously a tool of control. It is a means by which government multiplies itself, extends its reach, and justifies endless new forms of intervention. And the cost falls not on the billionaires jetting to Davos, but on the ordinary pensioner choosing between heating and eating, on the family whose weekly shop creeps ever higher, on the small business throttled by green compliance forms.
The expense of government today cannot be justified under any circumstances, but the hideous burden we carry is made much worse by the appalling ‘value’ we get for our money. I can think of no area of government, national or local, that proves even a small fraction of the value for money we expect from Tesco, or even the worst airline. Consider crime. For all the taxes we pay, can we walk the streets safely? Knife crime in our cities spirals, burglaries are ignored by the police, more concerned with “hate incidents” than protecting citizens. The sense of order and security that government is supposed to guarantee has broken down, yet the budgets of policing and criminal justice grow inexorably. We are paying more and receiving less.
Or consider welfare. Here lies one of the most obscene scams of all. The welfare state was sold to the British public as a safety net for those who had fallen on hard times, a temporary cushion while they regained their footing. In practice it has become a permanent lifestyle for millions, for whom worklessness is normalised and subsidised. The working man is robbed of his income only to see it handed out to those who contribute nothing. The incentive to self-reliance, the pride in earning your way, has been eroded by a welfare bureaucracy that punishes independence and rewards dependency. And the cost is not only financial but moral. A people cannot remain free if they are bribed into servitude. And don’t get me started on the vast amounts wasted on the results of the mass immigration few of us have ever wanted.
The waste is staggering. We are told that taxes are necessary for the NHS, a perennial excuse for every grab at our wallets. Yet the NHS is the largest employer in Europe, a leviathan drowning in managers and bureaucrats, perpetually in crisis despite ever-rising budgets – but with some of the longest waiting lists and poorest outcomes of any ‘developed’ country. Where is the value for money? Why do waiting lists lengthen, why do ambulances queue for hours outside hospitals, why do patients die for lack of care? The truth is that the NHS, like every other government department, has become a black hole for resources. It absorbs more each year, delivers less, and demands unquestioning loyalty under the banner of a state religion.
Local government is no better. Councils levy ever-higher council tax, yet streets are filthy, bins uncollected, roads pitted with potholes. They waste fortunes on “diversity officers,” “climate strategies,” vanity projects and inflated pay and pensions for those at the top, while the basic functions are neglected. Regulatory quangos proliferate like weeds, each with its own staff, salaries, and mission to interfere. From Ofgem to the Environment Agency, these bodies exist to create rules, impose fines, and obstacles, each raising costs for us all. The machinery of government is self-perpetuating: it exists to expand itself, and every crisis becomes its excuse to grow bigger.
But the State does not produce wealth. It only consumes it. Everything it spends, it first takes from someone who earned it, and with each transfer value is lost. The bureaucrats are funded by the taxpayer. Their decisions impose costs on the productive economy, and their existence is used to justify the next layer of bureaucrats. We are paying for the parasitic apparatus of officials who regulate services into dysfunction.
For pensioners, the picture is particularly cruel. They spent their working lives paying into this system, taxed at every turn, promised a secure retirement. Yet their pensions are meagre, their savings eroded by inflation, their energy bills inflated by government levies. Meanwhile, they still pay VAT, council tax, fuel duty—there is no escape from the taxman even in old age. It is a betrayal of the social contract, but more than that, it is evidence that the State is not the benevolent guardian it pretends to be. It is a predator, feeding on the very people it claims to protect.
And it is monumentally incompetent. Passports can take months to be processed. The courts are backlogged. Schools churn out pupils who can barely read. Border control is non-existent, with illegal migrants ferried in by the thousands while the government lectures its citizens about compliance and fairness. We pay and we pay, but the State fails at the most basic tasks. This is not mere inefficiency, it is contempt. The rulers no longer feel answerable to the ruled, because they know the taxes will keep coming, enforced by law, extracted by threat.
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.
If we are to reclaim liberty, the backlash must begin with a rejection of the State’s overreach. We must cease to regard taxation as inevitable and see it instead as the theft it truly is. We must question the legitimacy of Net Zero, of quangos, of endless welfare, of every scheme by which government multiplies itself at our expense. We must demand freedom to spend our earnings as we choose, to live our lives without regulatory shackles, to restore the dignity of self-reliance and the right to keep what we earn. Only then can we roll back the tyranny that has crept upon us, clothed in the language of progress, but rotten to the core.
This article (The State: A Burden Become Unbearable) was created and published by Free Speech Backlash and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Tom Armstrong
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