Pride of Britain (2)

Amid scenes of chaos that would shame a banana republic BA introduced the world to Terminal 5 yesterday - and it was an unmitigated disaster. It's not just that the much vaunted baggage check in system turned out to be a complete turkey - inaccessible car parks, dodgy escalators and lifts that get stuck all added to the chaos that even the Boulting brothers may have considered too improbable to satirise.

I'm not sure, but I bet they didn't have the scenes of chaos like they had yesterday when The Queens Building opened in 1955. The days when Britain used to build things that worked how they were supposed to are long gone. Of course the progressives will tell you that we are all so much more sophisticated today, everything is more complicated, but that is bullshit. Forget the computerised systems, how long have we known how to make lifts that go up and down or escalators that escalate? When did we forget that one of the things required for a car park was access for cars? Not far from where I live there is a new Sainsbury's with a car park that is also hard to get in and out of - so this is not an isolated incident.

And how does this bode for 2012? Compared to the Olympic games, building an airport terminal and a baggage check in system is a breeze. If Terminal 5 is anything to go by then the Olympic games will be a disaster of unmitigated proportions. The truth is that Britain is not any more sophisticated than it was in 1955, but we lack the skilled people we had in in those times. We no longer have great engineers, designers and workers because we no longer look for them. In the drive to produce an egalitarian system we forgot that a nation actually needs "elite" people - the cream of the crop, the best of the best - to create elite designs.

As I said yesterday, a nation that makes nothing is nothing - and to make something you need to have the people who know how to make things. We gave up on that long ago. Britain was once a nation of innovation and sophistication. The success of Britain was built on leading edge technology - whether it was an industrial process, farming method or the latest in fighting ships. That success was no accident - it was forged on fortitude, shaped by our desire to remain a free and independent nation that was not subject to the whims of a foreign power.

When we signed up to the EU we gave up on that desire to remain free and independent. If we are not independent as a nation then we are not independent as a people. A dependent nation breeds dependent people - socialism is dependency, dependency is death.