I know many Speccie readers keep abreast of what’s going on in the mother country. I know I do, in part because I studied there many years ago and have been a regular visitor, although not so much in recent years.

A reasonable summation is: from bad to worse. After all those years of unstable Tory government, and notwithstanding the triumph of the Brexit vote, the Starmer Labour government has proved to be utterly incapable of leading the country. Its economic performance is woeful; the country is basically broke; and the borders are essentially uncontrolled.

Social cohesion has dramatically fallen away and there are parts of the country that are unsafe. There are many areas of London in which holding a mobile phone in public is seen as some sort of invitation for a thief to grab it. Pickpockets abound on the Underground.

Petty crime aside, there are too many instances of serious criminal offences occurring. But in the meantime, the police spend their time trawling through people’s Facebook entries to detect instances of ‘hate crime’.

Two-tier policing is a clear feature of law enforcement, with its most obvious and upsetting example being the official blind eye that was turned to the grooming gangs in parts of England.

In the meantime, illegal migrants – the government prefers the term irregular migrants – on flimsy dinghies continue to journey across the Channel from France. The numbers are now close to 25,000 arriving just this year, with estimates of the likely annual total now around 50,000, the highest number ever recorded.

As the BBC blandly states ‘more than 170,000 people have arrived in small boats since figures were first recorded in 2018’. Most of these entrants are young men, mainly from Africa, and they are then housed, fed and watered at taxpayer expense for extended periods. Very few are ever deported even if they fail to meet the asylum test.

Successive attempts to staunch the Channel crossings have largely failed. The Tory government gave the French government 500 million quid to pay for extra police to stop the migrants. Those who arrive this way are now told they won’t become UK citizens, but so what. And those who are found guilty of crimes can now be deported, but the numbers leaving via this route are trivial.

In the meantime, the rival people-smuggling gangs that roam around the camps in Calais are making a killing, sometimes literally. They are vicious and violent, and they mean business. The French police are no match.

Let’s face it, the po-faced Sir Keir Starmer, being a massive leftie, doesn’t have the guts to do anything about the unregulated flow of undesirables across the Channel. He is an ‘open borders’ man and he would fly to the moon rather than withdraw the UK from the European Court of Human Rights – the final recourse for rejected migrants in the UK. This is notwithstanding the deep unpopularity of the unregulated flow of migrants over the Channel and the taxpayer-funded largesse thrown in their direction.

Then we come to the hapless and bungling Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves. Take it from me, she doesn’t have a clue as the economy bounces along the bottom and the Treasury coffers empty out.

She has had a few attempts at repairing the dire budget position, many of which she has had to reverse. She planned to scrap the winter fuel payments that weren’t means-tested. But in response to unrelenting political opposition, Keir Baby eventually gave in and left Reeves with no choice but to back down.

She imposed a new extreme tax arrangement on non-doms – those born outside the UK but who live there, at least for part of the year – hoping to raise around an additional £50 billion by the end of the decade.

With billionaires fleeing every week, this target is looking increasingly forlorn. Given that the non-doms will also be subject to the punitive inheritance tax rate of 40 per cent, in five years’ time, there may be very few still around.

She then had a go at tightening up the conditions attached to receipt of government disability payments which was designed to save the country several hundred million quid in due course. The changes actually seemed reasonable and sensible, with a large degree of grandfathering attached to the policy change.

The fact is that the UK has a much higher rate of inactivity among the working-age population than other countries. Reeves’s aim was to reduce that rate, albeit by a small margin. But in a case of déjà vu all over again, she was forced to back down and ended up a blubbering mess in the House.  Not a good luck for a senior minister, Rach.

The UK’s budget position is truly horrible, with the most recent budget deficit coming in around 5 per cent of GDP. Since the massive Covid overspend, the budget position has not markedly improved. The UK’s government debt is around 100 per cent of GDP.

Into this grim mix comes Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that he must live on another planet given his determination to push on with a series of highly damaging measures in the name of achieving net zero 2050. Talk about a true believer – he’s basically bonkers.

The UK now has some of the highest electricity prices in the world and the loss of manufacturing jobs is growing apace. But Miliband is adamant that renewable energy must replace fossil-fuel electricity generation. At least, there is some role for nuclear power. Telling people how to live their lives is one of his favourite techniques – all to save the planet, planet Earth that is.

There are just so many rules about housing, transport, rubbish, eating patterns – it’s hard to keep up. But I presume many people don’t take too much notice and only comply when it’s absolutely necessary to avoid a fine.

Mind you, the Tories were big on this stuff, too. It was Theresa May who set much of it in motion by legislating net zero in the Climate Change Act and having an unelected committee, the Climate Change Committee, bark out instructions every two years. The Climate Change Committee and the Politburo have a lot in common.

Starmer and his government stumble from one catastrophe to another. It’s clear that he and most of his senior lieutenants never wanted to leave the EU and are doing their darndest to rejoin the UK at the hip to the greatest extent possible, including by throwing money at the bludgers in Brussels. Why you would want to hitch your wagon to the EU is anyone’s guess, given the problems of that unwieldy customs union.

But ‘open borders’ Starmer doesn’t view the world in that way. The Europeans are his friends. They believe in big government, in socialism really. He will soon find that he has more friends across the Channel than he has at home.