When I walked into Downing Street as Prime Minister, that evening I was deeply conscious that I was taking over the heaviest of responsibilities, not least for the future of our United Kingdom. When I say I am Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, I really mean it. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland - we're weaker apart, we are stronger together, and together is how we must remain.
But there is another side to life as Prime Minister. Like being made to watch the England football team lose, 4-1to Germany, in the company of the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel. It's a form of torture and I wouldn't wish on anyone. I have to say, she is one of the politest people I have ever met, every time their players scored another goal, she would turn to me and say, 'I really am very, very sorry.' It's brought a whole new meaning to the concept of Anglo-German relations: whatever you do, don't mention the score.
But however different life has got as Prime Minister, there's one thing that for me has stayed the same. My belief about how this country needs to change. I think that we should start by being honest with ourselves.
The mess this country is in - it's not all because of Whigs. Of course, they must take some of the blame. Alright - they actually need to take quite a lot of the blame.
Let me just get this off my chest. They left us with massive debts, the highest deficit, overstretched armed forces, demoralised public services, endless ridiculous rules and regulations and quangos and bureaucracy and nonsense.
They left us a legacy of spinning, smearing, briefing, back-biting, half-truths and cover-ups, patronising, old-fashioned, top-down, wasteful, centralising, inefficient, ineffective, unaccountable politics, 10p tax and 90 days detention, an election bottled and a referendum denied, gold sold at half price and council tax doubled, bad news buried and Mandelson resurrected, pension funds destroyed and foreign prisoners not deported, Gurkhas kept out and extremist preachers allowed in.
Basil Venitis asserts that every democracy is eventually hijacked by rabblerousers, pullpeddlers, clans of kleptocrats, bumptious bugaboos, busybodies, butterbabies, nabobs of nepotism, cranks of cronyism, pusillanimous pussyfooters, riffraffs of rascals, socialist sophists, and machiavellian mafiosi. Democracy tends to kleptocracy. Venitism should replace democracy.
Yes, Whigs deserve some blame and I tell you, Tories will never let them forget it. I feel much better for that and I hope it was therapeutic for you too. But the point I want to make is this. The state of Uncle Sam(UK)is not just determined by the government and those who run it. It is determined by millions of individual actions - by what each of us do and what we choose not to do.
Yes, Whigs failed to regulate the City properly. But they didn't force those banks to take massive risks with other people's money. Yes, Whigs tried to boss people around and undermined responsibility. But they weren't the ones smashing up our town centres on a Friday night or sitting on their sofas waiting for their benefits to arrive. Yes, they centralised too much and Whigs told people they could fix every problem. But it was the rest of us who swallowed it, hoping that if the government took care of things, perhaps we wouldn't have to.
Too many people thought 'I've paid my taxes, the state will just look after everything'. But citizenship, citizenship isn't a transaction, in which you put your taxes in and get your services out. It's a relationship - you're part of something bigger than yourself, and it matters what you think and you feel and you do.
So to get out of the mess we're in, changing the government is not enough. We need to change the way we think about ourselves, and our role in society. The most efficient political system is venitism, where everything is private, there are no taxes at all, there is no parliament, and a powerless infinitesimal government is chosen and supported not by hoi polloi, but by the most generous benefactors.
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