Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

Our country is now held together with goodwill and sticky tape. As successive Conservative governments have ripped up society with austerity, privatisation, Brexit and disaster capitalism, we survive because
frontline workers and volunteers go way beyond the call of duty.

This week's @PrivateEyeNews provides further evidence of the UK's slide towards total regulatory collapse. The Financial Conduct Authority is so beholden to the government's deregulatory agenda that it's now licensing obvious money-laundering outfits as "fit and proper".

That's what gets me about all this: it's the wilful demolition of a functioning society, enabling spivs, chancers and conmen to take over. It's the same with the destruction of environmental standards, building standards, food standards, employment standards etc.

They seem to WANT it all to fall apart.

I doubt many people know how far this has gone, and how devastating the consequences are.
Here, in two tweets, are a couple of examples I've written up. But it's a similar story in almost every sector.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Nothing. Works. Any. More.
And that's not an accident.
It's the design.
theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

There is no good reason for any of this to happen.
Far from effective public services and regulation being "unaffordable", as the Tories have long claimed, it is their failure that is unaffordable.

If the UK becomes a failed state, it will be a failed state by design.

I feel intensely frustrated by how little public understanding there is of the implications of regulatory collapse, how we are still conned by claims of "elf n safety gone mad" and how essential public protections are dismissed as "red tape".
It's as if Grenfell never happened.

I see some people wondering whether the frontline workers and volunteers who are holding the country together despite the government are facilitating the Tory agenda, by showing that things can still work.
No. They are the resistance.
They keep alive the hope of a better time.

Incidentally, deregulation does *not* cut red tape. It's a major CAUSE of red tape (ie pointless paperwork).
Deregulation delivers chaos.
Chaos causes bureaucratic overload.
There's a paper about it here:
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

More on the topic here: theguardian.com/commentisfree/…