Look, I get it. Nobody likes all the advertising everywhere, nobody wants the cameras everywhere or to be constantly reminded to look out for threats…

However, the advertising is no more prevalent or any different to that found in any Western democracy. It’s actually more tightly regulated in the U.K. than it is in many other countries. Determining that working class voices appeal to working class travellers (EasyJet’s core market demographic), is hardly radical. If you think that’s concerning, you should look at the data the Republicans and Democrats pull together every US Presidential election cycle…

As to the cameras, the warnings to look out, and so on, well it’s quite simple: the UK is one of the most terrorised countries in the Western World.

A strong ally of the US, a former colonial power, a country that sits on the UN Security Council and that has opinions, but much easier to reach than other countries, particularly as until recent times we had a welcoming attitude towards European, Commonwealth and other migrants, all adds up to us being a bit of a soft target. Our police officers don’t even carry guns. But then handguns are mostly illegal anyway.

For decades, the Provisional IRA regularly bombed and maimed their way through our cities, using their links to pariah states and money from ill-advised Americans to kill civilians in shopping malls and high streets.

Just yesterday I was visiting my old home city of Manchester and walked through a part of the town that caused me to remember the IRA truck bomb that detonated there in 1996. That site is just yards from the arena in which an Islamic jihadist suicide bomber killed 22 victims - some of them children - and injured over a thousand more, after building his bomb in an apartment directly across the road from where I used to live.

And of course even sleepy seaside towns didn’t escape the bombings, or people of status - Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was in the hotel in Brighton in 1984 when the IRA tried to kill her and her entire cabinet.

These are just two examples, there are dozens more.

IRA Bombings were so prevalent that even today it can be hard to find a place to put your litter in a train station or other public space.

And this is just in England. In Belfast, it was of course so much worse.

In more recent years there has been jihadist extremist attacking the U.K., with multiple deadly attacks in London (my now home city), and divisive right-wing politics leading us to a point where two politicians have been murdered for no other reason than having a mild opinion their attackers didn’t agree with.

An inability to prosecute sexual assaults and rapes at more than a 5% conviction rate has meant an unhealthy uptick in assaults against women who just want to use public transport safely.

A weakened policy against cannabis use meant that mental health units are now full of young men with paranoid schizophrenia, who on release often end up committing an array of anti-social crimes.

A rise in alcohol and drug abuse (particularly cocaine in recent years), means incidents of violent crime and fighting have risen.

Homelessness - driven by a decline in social mobility, and 13 years of reckless and foolish policies hellbent on misproven “trickle down economics” - is rife with other 160,000 people expected to be homeless in London this Christmas. Many of them veterans, all of them bitter, many of them prepared to steal to survive.

Police officers - armed with tasers and batons only, remember - wear body cams to capture the violent assaults committed against them as a routine part of their job.

I love my country. Genuinely, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. There are many great things about it.

But the picture postcard view of a twee nation that sits somewhere between Mary Poppins and the Paddington films just is not that realistic.

There are multiple factors contributing to a need - that most people don’t recognise when used to living in other less embattled countries - built up over decades of violence, and under funded public services, that mean the only way most people feel safe after dark is knowing that everyone knows that criminal and violent behaviour is detectable, prosecutable and will be dealt with thanks to the systems none of us really want.

The signs telling you to stand on the right, use handrails and mind the gap are mostly there to remind drunk people - and on most weekends, most Brits are off their faces - how to not kill themselves. They have been part of the transport network since its invention. Relax.

We have also seen a rise in the systemisation of personal accident compensation lawyers prosecuting transport bodies, that mean public authorities like TFL who operate the tube network feel they have to do all this to reduce payouts. I think you might find similar signs in other highly litigious countries.

I get that it’s jarring, and I wish it was all completely unnecessary. But it’s a long road to there from here.