Boris Johnson won’t have done much for the UK’s reputation. From his scathing op-eds on Barack Obama’s genealogy to quoting a colonialist poem by Kipling in Burma, to betraying the Unionists of Northern Ireland, his critics accuse him of shaming the country on the international stage. .
On the other hand, there is an image that he will have lavished without counting on the foreign press: that of an English caricature. Eccentric raggedy with imperialist pretensions, quick-witted who hides a temperate character, rogue with a classical culture, Boris Johnson fits at least with an undeniable, albeit pathological, national stereotype.
As he packs his bags, a British metaphor will remain after his term, that of the queue. The British have never spent so much time hanging around.
If you want to go to court, you will have to be patient. Thousands of victims of violence and sexual assault have to linger for at least a year before their case is heard, because of the considerable delays that accumulate in the courts of assizes.
A beleaguered healthcare system
What if there were only the courts… There are 6.5 million people in England waiting to be taken care of by the National Health Service [service de santé public], a record. In April 2022, the average NHS patient spent 12.6 weeks waiting. Until 2013-2014, you had to wait four hours on average to be taken care of in the emergency room – today, the waiting time has exploded, sometimes exceeding twelve hours, an absolute record according to statistics from the NHS. Not to mention the delay and therefore the suffering to endure to have an appointment with the dentist, and the kilometers to travel to find a general practitioner.
The result is unnecessary deaths, and the British tend to fall back more and more on the private. The government is trying to straighten out a beleaguered health system by using the effective increase since April in social security contributions, but without much result.
“I don’t see how an increase in appropriations would solve this problem. Our workload is such that we would above all need to strengthen our capacities, told me the head of an endoscopy department in a public hospital in the north-west of the country. There are clearly people dying because of it.”
Behind this situation, there are the dysfunctions of social protection: a puzzle that Boris Johnson says he has tackled head-on. Only you