I wrote a book called “Crap Towns”. It seemed funny at the time

Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity.

Today, I think it's clear who would be being laughed at by whom. The fates of places have so radically diverged that we no longer have a sense of collective identity. All of the places listed in Crap Towns are now unrecognisable, for better or worse. Those familiar shops are now gone; in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all. Half the leisure centres have shut and we all know which half.

The upper middle class might have become more humourless and puritanical, but I think that's a subconscious self-defence mechanism, a manifestation of noblesse oblige without real obligation. The working class are too angry to laugh and certainly aren't willing to be laughed at. We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.

> in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all.

Charity shops, vape shops (used for money laundering), Turkish Barbers (used for money laundering), Automated Laundrettes (used for money laundering), Car Washes (used for money laundering), Phone shops (used for money laundering), Kebab shops (used for money laundering)

Banks and privatised utilities (used for money laundering.) Politicians (used for money laundering.)

This is the UK's entire economy now - extracting the wealth of the people who work in the UK and moving it to foreign owners.

London looks rich because some of the money sticks to the sides while it's passing through, but it's still being siphoned from the provinces through the City and out - to tax havens, foreign mafias, foreign aristocrats, and giant foreign corporations.

It's important the population isn't allowed to understand that the UK is a colonised country. So there's a huge media machine making sure the peasants blame "immigrants" for small-scale criminality, and poor people for being feckless and unproductive. It's useful to make sure everyone keeps fighting about racism/immigration and gender issues to keep them from looking at structural economics and the destruction of democracy.