Now I've left Britain, here's what you look like
Granted, I make frequent trips back. What I most miss in a small town just west of Lisbon is my friends and colleagues, whose dry, casually cynical sensibility dovetails with mine. Given the average periodicity of meet-ups in London, I'd have seen these people less often had I stayed put. Because I left Britain. I didn't leave the British.
I still read The Times and The Telegraph. I watch Spectator TV, Spiked Online podcasts, and YouTube appearances by Matt Goodwin, David Starkey and Brendan O'Neill. Am I suffering separation anxiety? I'm still emotionally and politically enmeshed in British affairs. But my personal fate is no longer joined at the hip with the increasingly distressing fate of the UK.
Thus six officers can no longer pound on my door to do me for a 'non-crime hate incident' (a charge that Americans refuse to believe is even real). But the British state will now imprison locals over online bursts of purely rhetorical frustration, while giving rapists a rap on the wrist.
The country that gave conceptual rise to free speech no longer believes in it. Instead, the primary purpose of the British constabulary is to suppress the unruly passions of a native population it holds in contempt.
At least my lights will still go on when Ed Miliband's net-zero fanaticism crashes against the brick wall of reality. By closing power plants that aren't replaced, Britain has neglected long-term energy planning for decades. Its exorbitant electricity relies dangerously on imports and intermittent renewables. Yet it may take blackouts — entailing what we euphemise as 'unrest' — for the government to get a grip, and new power plants don't spring up overnight.
In the birthplace of Brunel and the Industrial Revolution, nothing works. Trains are late or cancelled. Heathrow goes dark. It takes months and endless hair-tear to install a single residency's fibre-optic cable. Construction is eternal; roadworks languish untended indefinitely, backing up traffic. Britain can no longer build anything. HS2 is an ever-costlier white elephant. Tradesmen are little kings, but finding one to do repairs to a reputable standard is like winning the lottery.
Small boats and sky-high legal immigration will continue to wreak demographic havoc. This change is permanent. Millions of immigrants from clashing traditions will bring only more of their friends and families. None of these people are going home. A succession of governments has systematically watered down British culture, until it's a pale solution with no distinctive flavour, like over-extended squash.
Supposedly, a leading 'British value' is 'fair play'. So let's talk about fairness. Amid an ever-escalating housing shortage, itself powered by mass immigration, your government uses your money to provide a free water-taxi service to your shores and to put up low-skilled, overwhelmingly male foreign citizens in four-star hotels. No one's putting locals in free hotels.
Ten million working-age inhabitants are on benefits. Almost half of universal credit recipients need neither work nor look for work, and over a million are foreign-born. Soaring disability payments allow anyone to retire to a life of Netflix if they're worried or sad. At once, the tax burden is the highest of the postwar era and set to rise further.
Small businesses are hammered. The British tax code severely punishes success at shockingly low levels of income. This is fair? If you haven't downed tools and thrown yourself on the mercy of the state, you're a sucker. Modern Britain rewards sloth, irresponsibility and self-pity.
Why is the mild-mannered academic David Betz now such a popular guest on British podcasts? Because Betz, a professor of war in the modern world, assesses the forbiddingly high likelihood of a British civil war.
Not that Portugal is Valhalla. It's notoriously bureaucratic. Residency application was costly, complex and exhausting. That residency has already passed its renewal date, but the immigration system has a backlog of over 400,000 cases and now we're in residency limbo. I'm crap at languages, and I miss British banter. We get a tax break, but that status is temporary and we Americans must declare every sou of worldwide income to the feds wherever we live.
Portugal also has problems with imported energy, housing and immigration. Supermarkets don't even carry cumin, much less English mustard or treacle. Our local dry cleaner shrank my jumpers into doll's clothing.
Yet we'd never have afforded our spacious house in Britain. The Portuguese are as warm as their weather. I'm unlikely to forge the same deep connection to Portugal that I did to the UK, but, hey — it's a two-and-a-half-hour flight to Heathrow, so I can keep a foot in both worlds. Ironically, the red wine is both rich and cheap; the fish is fresh; the coastal walks are enchanting.
The most striking contrast from afar is the emotional colour of the popular mood. The Portuguese emanate a soft, calming peach, like the sunset over the sea from our balcony. They take their time. They seem contented with the modest ambitions of their small post-empire state. Yet even when your weather is fair, from Lisbon, Britons appear a wan umber. You seem gloomy and aggrieved — and for good reason.
Sure, I could have stayed in London. When it's close up, one often doesn't notice steady but gradual decay. A debt-fuelled fiscal collapse and an energy crisis remain agreeably abstract, mere talking points, until they happen.
I take no pleasure in the observation that the UK is falling apart. But in the comments under articles like this one, native Britons are vowing to leave in droves. Others express relief that they've already left or sorrow over ambitious children lost to Dubai. And should Sir Keir Starmer capitulate to a wealth tax, the exodus will get worse
Lionel Shriver's most recent novels are Should We Stay Or Should We Go and Mania.
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