I used to like going to Brighton but that was when it was a slightly seedy but dynamic city with a good nightlife culture both for the straights and the gays. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where there was a pub where there were inscriptions over the bar in Polari, the once secret gay slang. It’s also a place where I have had some good party times, back when I did such things.

But that was then. Since then it’s become a bastion of middle class leftist thought and activity, created in part by a circular procession of left wing students voting for deep greens and far leftists but who leave the place before the full scale of the disasters that they’ve voted for start to kick in. That penalty for the student elected leftists has to be paid by the permanent residents who suffer poor services, lunatic policies, virtue signalling and fiscal waste.

The rot was there under previous Labour administrations which is why Private Eye referred to Brighton as ‘Skidrow on Sea’ but it accelerated exponentially under the administration of the Green Party. The policies of this party decimated recycling rates, drove car-bourne visitors away to such an extent that businesses in the city lost a million pounds and the city can’t even manage rubbish collection properly.

Julie Burchill, a writer I have been aware of and have admired for years is a long term resident of Brighton and treats it as her special place but she recognises that things have gone wrong for the city and the cause of these wrongs can in large part be blamed on the Greens. Here in this Spectator piece, Ms Burchill lays into the Green fanatics who did their utmost to destroy the city that they governed.

Ms Burchill said:

I love living in Brighton and wouldn’t dream of moving anywhere else. But I am privileged to do a thing I love for a living, when and where I want; for people who need to get around it on a daily basis, Brighton is an increasingly unpleasant place to be. A good deal of this is the fault of the Green council, the UK’s first ever; looking back on their recently ended rule, it feels like the city was overcome by an invading force who tried their best to destroy it, leaving residents looking around in dazed disbelief.

Ms Burchill, pointing out that the Greens were only truly popular with the students who churned through the local voters register every two or four years, said:

Apart from students, there were few people the Greens actually liked having here in Brighton. Those made to feel unwelcome included those who were born here (priced out), the working-class young (ditto), tourists (they planned to close public toilets) or those who preferred the naughty seaside-postcard town before Green Year Zero.

The old saucy Brighton was anathema to these pronoun-ed puritans who even attempted to ban the Christmas Day charity swim for ‘health and safety’ reasons. Why would you move to the louchest city in Britain and attempt to turn it into Gilead-on-Sea?

This is an excellent post by Ms Burchill and sums up what happens when middle class lefties and greens take control of a city and attempt to mould it to fit their ideologies which is that all those who work and contribute to the success of a place, get utterly and completely shafted. The students who vote for the green and far left nutters rarely have to suffer the adverse effects of what they vote for because by the time that the problems are visible to they’ve long moved out to somewhere else. It’s the ordinary people, the workers, the disabled, children, business owners and those who work in the real not the imagined economy and who live in these places for the long term, who pay the high price for green and lefty virtue signalling.