RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Shirking will turn cities into San Francisco

RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Shirking from home will turn our cities into basket cases like San Francisco

Tom Leonard’s brilliant dispatch from San Francisco in yesterday’s Daily Mail should set alarm bells ringing here in Basket Case Britain.

The City by the Bay, until fairly recently one of America’s most glamorous and expensive places to live and work, is locked in a death spiral, brought about by so-called ‘liberal’ policies on crime and the debilitating effects of the Working From Home cult.

To be honest, San Francisco has been going rapidly downhill for years now. When I last visited, pre-Covid, its once bustling downtown districts were already being colonised by drug addicts and the homeless. If you’re going to San Francisco these days, never mind wearing flowers in your hair, you’d be well advised to carry a pepper spray or sidearm for your own protection.

Crime is out of control, thanks to the flight of office workers from the centre and a lenient, Left-wing district attorney who refused to prosecute aggressive shoplifters, car-jackers and muggers.

The police, as Leonard reports, are content to stand and watch druggies shooting up in broad daylight. The streets stink of skunk and human excrement. The decay has been exacerbated by highly paid tech staff who flatly refuse to return to their offices full time, even though the Covid-19 pandemic has long since passed. 

‘To be honest, San Francisco has been going rapidly downhill for years now’

Once civilisation and trade depart, anarchy inevitably fills the vacuum. Starved of custom, businesses such as restaurants, bars and drug stores have gone belly up. A third of the commercial property in the city centre is now vacant. The exodus has been compounded by sky-high taxes and petty regulation.

And don’t think it couldn’t happen here. Our cities have recovered to some extent from the trough of the Covid slump. But the obsession with WFH, at least for part of the week, has come to be seen as an entitlement, most notably in the public sector — when it isn’t permanently on strike.

READ MORE: RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: The Government unveils plans to make us poorer and colder

The City of London, the engine room of our strategically vital financial services industry, is a virtual ghost town on Mondays and Fridays. Whitehall, the heart of government, is half empty most of the time.

Shirking From Home has become the New Normal, just as some of us predicted a couple of years ago when ‘flexible working’ was introduced to combat Covid.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics show just 44 per cent of the workforce back in their offices all week. That rises to around 50 per cent of civil servants.

And the myth that WFH doesn’t affect productivity has been blown apart by the waiting lists for everything from driving licences to passports, even before the latest wave of selfish strikes. This isn’t bad news for everyone. Some sectors of the economy are booming, especially fitness studios and beauty parlours. You can’t get a tee time at some golf courses most afternoons for love nor money.

In Liverpool, for instance, spending on midweek hair and nail treatments is through the roof. Meanwhile, shopping malls and business districts are practically deserted. Footfall in Birmingham is down more than 30 per cent. In Leeds, it’s 40 per cent.

It’s the same story in the States, where analysis of mobile phone data showed that the number of people playing golf on a Wednesday has increased by 300 per cent since Covid.

‘Crime is out of control, thanks to the flight of office workers from the centre and a lenient, Left-wing district attorney who refused to prosecute aggressive shoplifters, car-jackers and muggers’

San Francisco is an extreme case, but London is heading in the same direction, made worse by the anti-business, anti-motorist mayor, Genghis Khan. At least San Francisco hasn’t got an ULEZ charge.

Homelessness and aggressive begging are prevalent even in some of London’s most desirable postcodes.

There’s a stabbing epidemic and, just like San Francisco, some of the streets in the city centre reek of pungent dope smoke.

The police are indifferent to what they call ‘low-level’ crime, such as the widespread theft of mobile phones.

Sir Hugh Orde, former Northern Ireland Chief Constable, and the man who should have been put in charge of the Met a few years ago, recently told LBC Radio that he’d spent several hours walking around Central London without seeing a single uniformed copper on the beat.

The Old Bill even go out of their way to accommodate civil disorder, such as the tiresome XR and Just Stop Oil protests. As office workers desert our city centres, so vagrants, gangs and assorted ne’er-do-wells move in.

The Government has failed miserably to persuade those it directly employs to return to their desks. The public sector has become so emboldened that it now seems to consider actual work as an optional extra. In fact, many of them are outraged merely at being asked to do the jobs for which they are paid.

The former Conservative Cabinet Minister Alok Sharma was this week accused of ‘bullying’ civil servants after he rang them at home during office hours. You couldn’t make it up.

How dare he interrupt them when they are working on their golf swing or getting their nails done?

In Basket Case Britain, egged on by Labour and the unions, half the alleged ‘workforce’ believe it’s their yuman rites to do exactly as they please, where and when they please, on full pay, without the inconvenience of showing up for work. And to hell with everyone and everything else, including the fragile post- Covid economies of our once-great cities.

So if you’re going to San Francisco, don’t bother. San Francisco is coming here.

Do they think we’re in the first flush of youth?

She’s taking the proverbial. That was my first thought when I read that Thames Water executive Cathryn Ross was urging us not to flush our toilets after we’ve had a wee. I could also have lived without the mantra: ‘If it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown . . .’

What — let it drown?

Spare us the patronising nursery rhymes to get her message across. How old does she think we are?

Ross wants us to conserve water, largely because Thames loses 600 million litres every single day through leaks. But not flushing the lavatory is a bridge too far.

She says ‘climate change’ — what else? — means we could be facing long periods of drought in future. So we must save water where we can. Is there nothing we won’t have to sacrifice in the name of Net Zero?

And have you noticed that nowadays all the so-called ‘public services’ expect us to modify our behaviour to make up for their abject failure to their jobs properly — in this case, Thames Water’s inability to plug the leaks?

Same with the health service. We spent two years during Covid staying away from hospitals and GP surgeries to ‘Protect the NHS’. How’s that working out for you, then? Seven million patients waiting for operations, 12-hour delays at A&E and doctors and nurses on endless strike for more money.

When it comes to saving water, the Government is currently considering banning power showers and dual-flush toilets, which we were all being encouraged to buy not so long ago. A few years back, the U.S. government legislated to cut the amount of water toilets could use in half. Needless to say, they didn’t work, unless you flushed them three or four times.

Where my sister lives in Michigan, a roaring trade grew up smuggling old-fashioned khazis over the Detroit River from Canada.

The way things are going here, it will only be a matter of time before the Albanian cross-Channel people smugglers start filling their dinghies with long-flush toilets and power showers.

And coming soon, a new Government warning in every public loo:

Now please don’t wash your hands.

A teacher at a £20,000-a-year all-girls independent school has been reprimanded and sacked for calling her pupils ‘girls’.

She was forced to apologise after being told not all members of the class identified as female.

The Mail on Sunday revealed that one Year Seven pupil complained after the unnamed teacher had greeted the class with a cheery: ‘Good afternoon, girls.’

Call me old-fashioned, but what is someone who doesn’t identify as female doing at an all-girls school?

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