Britain's dogged attempts to imitate its overgrown colonial cousin are fun to watch. Following every trend and fad on the other side of the Atlantic must be giving Britain a cause to feel superior to its more desate neighbours over the Channel. In London you hear police car sirens so many times, you'd think you're on a set of a Hollywood movie. CCTV cameras watching every nook and corner, credit card history, abandoning railway system in favour of private car ownership: Britain went to great lengths not to be like its European neighbours. Most of the copycat routine is quite harmless and even, to a degree, natural: after all, UK does share a lot of cultural heritage with the USA.
However, adopting America's major prosperity-generating mechanism has turned out disastrous. I am talking about the vicious system of living from borrowed money with no plans to ever repay the debt. In fact, it is a British invention: Americans just perfected it and took it to an extreme, pushing the national debt over 11,300,000,000,000 (11.3 trillion) dollars. In the heyday of Tony Blair's Cool Britannia it seemed like it would go one forever. The economy was booming for over a decade fuelled by crazy borrowing and overbloated housing prices, creating the false sense of well managed prosperity growth.
However, the jig is finally up. Big boys of the City and Westminster who were so good at the cheek-puffing game of appearing important and with-it turned out just a bunch of shockingly incompetent liars. The irony of it is that the very people, bankers and poiticians who cocked up world's fourth largest economy will be, at utmost, be given severance packages and shuffled around while the rest of the population will be stuck with the bill.
By the way, that bill has just been hiked up to a trillion pounds by those shit-for-brains good-for-nothings. It's like borrowing a grand to pay the hundred you owe. Smart move, Eyebrows.
