From Theodore Dalrymple

I was awakened at one in the morning in my small and elegant hotel on the Herengracht, the resort of literary types, by that most terrible of sounds — raised English voices.

A group of standard English drunken thugs in their thirties had entered the hotel with their prostitutes in tow and were refusing to leave. They were conducting two arguments at once: one with the police, who had arrived to eject them, and one with the prostitutes over how much they should be paid (the prostitutes were demanding E300, and they were offering E100). Somehow the police involved themselves in this latter argument too; a policewoman appealed to them to find ‘middle ground’, i.e. (I suppose) E200.

I hesitate to sound like one of those Protestant divines who saw in outbreaks of the plague God’s justified vengeance on a sinful people, but as I looked into the crude red faces of those men in their bully-boy Saturday-night uniform of short-sleeved shirts not tucked into their trousers, exuding lager fumes and arrogant in their inalienable right to make a nuisance of themselves, I could not help but think that no other nation has ever more deserved a prolonged period of economic hardship and utter misery. The slump is indeed God’s wholly accurate and justified judgment upon the English.

God also visits judgement by allowing people to have what they think they want: Romans 1. A modern example is Barack Obama.