Consciousness of Sheep
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Recently I have been mulling whether Britain might be better off applying to join the BRICS, or possibly becoming a vassal state of communist China – a kind of reverse of Hong Kong in the nineteenth century, providing China with an offshore base adjacent to the European Union. My – not entirely frivolous – thinking was that at least Chinese engineers know how to build highspeed railways… including tunnels which don’t collapse in on themselves. And then there’s the nuclear power stations that Britain seems incapable of delivering on-time and within budget. Chinese engineers build these in just five-years, while ours take the best part of twenty, so that more nuclear capacity is being lost to decommissioning than we are able to replace it with. Nor has the UK proved any better at building the promised offshore windfarms, even as our supply of affordable gas is dwindling… thank goodness there isn’t an energy crisis in Europe.
Not that energy and railways are the only things in the UK which don’t work these days. In military matters too, British strategists are belatedly waking up to the fact that these islands are de facto undefended. After more than a decade of cuts during which recruiters went out of their way to deter the sons and daughters of the working class from joining up, retiring General Sir Patrick Sanders took to the airwaves at the end of January with the bizarre call for the return of conscripted national service. Although this seems to have been more a way of publicising military weakness than a genuine attempt to rebuild the British army, the general was quickly disabused on two fronts. First, and most publicly, opinion polls found that only a third of those of military age would volunteer, even if the Russian army was marching through Trafalgar Square. Second, and more tellingly, the general was informed that Britain no longer has an adequate economic base even to support its existing army, still less an expanded army which would have nowhere to go – all of the barracks have been sold to housing developers – and could not be equipped – the UK cannot support an expanded arms industry.
It is, however, the once glorious Royal Navy which has been publicly humiliated this month. First, both of the white elephant (lack of) aircraft carriers were stuck in port due to mechanical breakdowns when, presumably, they should have been flying the flag in the Red Sea – something navy chiefs will not be too unhappy about, since aircraft carriers are particularly vulnerable to drone and missile strikes in confined sea areas. Nor is this the end of the Navy’s woes, as rumours abound that government ministers have been in contact with Kim Jong Un, as one of the few world leaders proven to be able to launch a nuclear missile… our £17-million-a-pop ones seem to prefer heading straight to the seabed.
At least the military can console themselves with the certainty that they won’t stay in the headlines for very long. Civil aviation is already vying for the masthead, as potential passengers are increasingly refusing to board Boeing planes which bits regularly fall off mid-flight – Boeing famously refused to redesign the 737 to accommodate the latest, larger, generation of lean-burn engines; relying instead on what turned out to be fatal software to (fail to) mitigate instability. But most likely, declining profits and rising costs will cause other manufacturers to cut corners so that, in hindsight, the 2010s might turn out to have been “peak air safety.”
These are merely the high-level breakdowns that the establishment media consider newsworthy. But beyond the affluent enclaves of London and the archipelago of top-tier university districts, everything breaking down is just a fact of life which only occasionally breaks into media consciousness. Like the faux outrage about NHS dentistry earlier this month (must be an election coming). As it happens, NHS dentistry was one of the first victims of neoliberalism in the 1980s, when Thatcher cut the funding, and dentists responded by going private. In the years since, dentistry has become the closest thing to the American system within the NHS, with most people using dental insurance to fund any dental surgery they might require. And the reason it has become a news story in 2024 is that ever-fewer people have been able to afford the insurance since the 2008 crash, and particularly in the inflationary post-lockdown period.
Nor is it only public services like healthcare which are increasingly inaccessible. Most of Britain’s small towns and villages are now excluded from the banking and financial system as a result of bank closures. This has left small businesses and charities which deal in cash and cheques having to take a day out to travel to the nearest city just to deposit currency into their accounts. And even the work-around of Post Offices acting as banking hubs only works in the towns and cities which still has them, and only then when they can attract enough staff – not easy in the wake of the Horizon scandal – to continue providing the many other Post Office services.
Getting anywhere in the UK is proving to be an increasing headache these days too. Britain’s dire train service made the news for a different reason this week, as celebrity consumer champion Martin Lewis was forced to endure the kind of conditions Britain’s commuters live with day-in and day-out. Lewis tweeted:
“This train (London – Sheffield) is disgraceful. Every seat taken, every standing space taken, scores sitting in mid train corridors so I guess 500 people on it and ONLY ONE WORKING TOILET at one end, so people must crawl over each 100s to reach it. It’s degrading, like something from the 19th century.
“PS and as I walked to the loo, apologising profusely, a number of people asked me to say something publicly about it.”
Meanwhile, the new “environmentally friendly” electric buses being introduced to British cities are proving to have a nasty habit of bursting into flames in what experts call a “thermal runaway” – they cannot be extinguished by firefighters. Beyond the cities though, finding a bus at all – even a spontaneously combusting one – is about as rare as hens’ teeth following the removal of government subsidies and the introduction of ever more punitive traffic restrictions.
And don’t go thinking that private transport is an option either. In the aftermath of lockdown, the cost of private car use in the UK has spiralled out of control, with compulsory insurance among the biggest contributors to transport inflation. In part, this is due to the higher prices for imported replacement components which have also been in short supply since the first lockdown. But with the cost of living eating into the incomes of even members of the professional-managerial class, there has also been a big uptick in claims where, previously, the claimants would have eaten the loss so as to keep their no-claims bonuses.
This is particularly true of that all-too-visible symbol of Britain’s decline… the now ubiquitous pothole. The deliberate policy of not resurfacing roads, in place since 2010, has rendered even the high-speed motorways and A-class dual carriageways unsafe. And again, whereas prior to lockdown, motorists would have accepted burst tyres, buckled wheels and broken suspensions as just part of the routine cost of commuting, in these harder times, we have seen a big increase in the number of insurance claims for pothole damage. More astute readers will note that this becomes a classic death-spiral, since local authorities have to use their road repair budgets to reimburse insurance companies for the cost of vehicle repairs… and so, even fewer potholes get fixed. Although, on the other side of the equation, the inevitable increase in insurance premiums will help cut the number of people who can afford to drive, thereby cutting the potential for car-meets-pothole claims.
The point is that the UK in particular – and Europe more generally – is already well into the post-peak oil collapse that had been predicted decades ago. The only reason few people have noticed is because it didn’t follow the sudden crash trajectory into a Mad Max future that so many commentators predicted. Rather, everything that makes a highly overpopulated modern civilisation possible has been gradually breaking down. But for the most part, most of us have been finding ways of muddling through… because that is what people have always done. And since, for the time being, we each – like Martin Lewis on his ill-fated train journey – only encounter breakdown from time to time, we can convince ourselves that this evidence of collapse is both localised and reversible. Indeed, I suspect that most of us still believe that swapping the seating arrangements for the puppets in the parliamentary Punch and Judy show can still change things for the better.
This is not to say, of course, that we can avoid some pretty spectacular disruptions along the way. A repeat – most likely on a bigger scale – of the 2008 banking crash is overdue. And we cannot rule out further insanity of the lockdown, Russian sanctions, or net zero kind on the part of ruling elites who are now entirely untethered from reality (the only way Herr Schwab will ever realise his ambition of having a computer chip implanted in his brain, is if one of his bodyguards decides to smash his head in with a laptop). As for the rest of us, it is time to break out the popcorn. Because very few of us are going to come through the collapse alive… and as ever more of our life support systems breakdown, those who survive will do so by luck rather than judgement.
As you made it to the end…
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