🧾🏚️Welcome to the UK economy, where taxpayers hand over £1.2 trillion and receive in return… collapsing schools, a wheezing NHS, potholes that qualify as minor craters, and a government that operates like a fraudulent Kickstarter campaign. The headlines say we have a £30–40 billion “black hole,” but here’s the real cosmic void: public value. You’re not crazy for wondering what exactly you’re paying for — because spoiler alert — it’s not results.
🧱 Creating Nothing
: Government Spending Like a Tech Bro Without the Startup
Britain’s financial model has all the flair of a drunken aristocrat with a Platinum Amex — except instead of champagne and yachts, it’s consultants, concrete defects, and contracts awarded to someone’s cousin named Nigel.
Every year, the UK state asks citizens to cough up:
- £275B in income tax 💸
- £180B in National Insurance 🏥
- £170B in VAT 🛒
- £90B in corporation tax 🏢
- …and billions more from duties, councils, and fees they invent in meetings nobody understands.
Then they spend over £1.2 trillion, mostly on servicing a bloated machine that can’t even keep schools from crumbling — literally, thanks to RAAC concrete, the architectural equivalent of using wet biscuits to hold up a roof.
This isn’t a tax system. It’s a subscription model for decline.
🧠 If This Was a Business, It’d Be Liquidated
Imagine a CEO walking into a boardroom and saying:
“We burned through a trillion, failed all KPIs, borrowed £120 billion more, and now we need you to increase your payments. Oh — and the services are worse.”
Shareholders would riot. But in government? That’s just called a Budget Statement.
The only enterprise that could get away with this level of dysfunction is one that legally forces you to keep funding it, regardless of performance. And voilà — democracy! Where else can you legally extort people for services you fail to deliver, year after year, while blaming external market forces and legacy systems?
💸 We’re Paying — But Where’s the Build?
It’s not even about tax anymore. It’s about value. The social contract is supposed to be: we pay, you build.
Instead, we’re trapped in a sad cycle of redistribution without creation — like a house party where everyone keeps passing around the same half-eaten sandwich.
Want to talk fairness? Try this on for size:
- No national industrial strategy
- No green energy transformation
- No education reform
- No national innovation infrastructure
- But plenty of donor peerages, failed IT projects, and suspiciously profitable PPE middlemen
In short: it’s not that the government can’t build — it just doesn’t. Because it’s too busy maintaining a system that rewards failure and funnels resources to insiders.
🧾 Citizens’ Counter-Offer: We’ll Pay — But You Build Something
Let’s flip the script. Here’s a reasonable deal from the people to the state:
- 🏥 Build infrastructure — Schools that won’t collapse, hospitals with actual staff, energy we don’t have to beg for. Leave something future generations can use, not just pay off.
- 🚀 Create value — Invest in tech, science, and education so we stop pretending service jobs are the apex of national ambition.
- 🧹 Audit waste — Cut the bloated managerial sludge that clogs every department like cholesterol in a government artery.
- 🤝 End cronyism — No more contracts to donors, cousins, or the CEO of “Completely Legit PPE Supplies Ltd.”
- 📈 Give us a stake — Let citizens co-own revenue-generating public assets. Data infrastructure, public transport, energy grids — why should private cronies skim all the profit?
Until that happens, don’t be surprised when people look at the Treasury’s annual guilt-trip and ask:
“Wait — you want more?”
🔥 Challenges 🔥
Why are we funding a trillion-pound bureaucracy that can’t even fix a f***ing pothole? 💥 When do we stop settling for “tax-and-decay” and start demanding a system that actually builds things?
Leave your demands, rants, and brilliant fixes in the blog comments — not just on Facebook. Let’s stop shouting into the void and start stacking up ideas that actually stick. 🧱💬
👇 Smash comment, smash share, smash the system with your best roast.
🔥 The top takes will be published in the next issue of the magazine. 🔥
Chameleon Magazine 
Leave a comment