The German news magazine Stern has attacked four years of Labour rule for making Britain "more Third World than Third Way", a country with crumbling public services and populated by racist "twits".
In 12 pages of grim black-and-white photographs and uncompromising text, the notion of "Cool Britannia" is derided by Stern, a leading news weekly selling over a million copies.
"Behind the glittering financial towers in London's East End, tuberculosis is rampant, with up to 10 people herded together living in one room," writes reporter Bernd Dorler as he follows a doctor making house calls to apartments that "reek of curry and poverty".
"This is the Third World and I dispense Third World medicine," says Dr Sam Everington, who says working in Britain's National Health Service is comparable to his first posting in a bush hospital in Zimbabwe.
The NHS is in a desperate state, the article says, so bad that the World Health Organisation believes that the lives of 25,000 cancer sufferers could be saved each year under another system. For Germans, who complain that British views of Germany are stuck in the 1940s, the portrait of Britain in this week's Stern could be of a similar vintage.
The pasty faces of adults and children alike stare out from the pages, with a child's micro-scooter the only evidence that these are not photographs of ration-book Britain.
The public education system is as neglected as the health system, the article says, breeding "the twits of Europe".
"In the land of William Shakespeare and Harry Potter, one in five adults is practically illiterate and barely able to add up the change in his pocket."
A trip on the London underground is more like a visit to a dominatrix: "You emerge brutalised, humiliated and mishandled. And all this at red light district prices."
As passengers put up with regular breakdowns, strikes and broken escalators in the century-old network, managers believe the way forward is to infuse the smellier stations with a new perfume called "Madeleine".
One of the most scathing comments is attributed to the "Irish Agriculture Minister", who dismisses Britain as "the leper of Europe".
Even the looming general election will provide little chance of revenge for voters, who are almost certain to re-elect Labour as the lesser of two evils. They have no way of punishing Labour for everything from the Millennium Dome, "a symbol of the extent of the failure of Blair", to the mishandled foot-and-mouth crisis.
However, the Conservatives still have some appeal. "Their dull xenophobic slogans appeal to the underlings of her majesty," Dorler writes. "In Great Britain racism and xenophobia are smouldering like the foot-and-mouth funeral pyres."