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I am wary of people who speak about “broken Britain” because the phrase is an unhealthy symptom of the British obsession with their country’s decline compared to the rest of the world. This fixation has made Britain an easy victim for political leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Liz Truss who promote toxic remedies for an apocalyptic version of the nation’s ills that is hysterical, exaggerated and likely to make a bad situation considerably worse.
Self-destructive overreaction to Britain’s faltering status in the world is paradoxically accompanied by a fatalistic underreaction stemming from a feeling that the game is over, we lost and there is nothing we can do to change the result. Moreover, it is easy to suppose that the British crisis is so pervasive and responsibility for it is so widely and thinly spread that nobody is really to blame.
In terminal retreat
People in Britain treat with curious relish evidence that the country is in terminal retreat. There is, for instance, a fascination with the so-called Mississippi Question, which revolves around whether or not the country is poorer today than Mississippi, the most deprived state in the US, judging both by their gross domestic product (GDP) per head.
Analysis reveals that Britain is a little bit better off, though only because prosperous London skews the balance in its favour, according to the Financial Times.
I am not arguing that Britain’s comparative decline is not real and increasingly visible in the overstressed NHS, local government, railways, water and sewage, Army, Navy and Diplomatic Service. Everywhere from the Post Office to Thames Water there are grisly examples of incompetence and decay. Despite heavy rain in January, for example, a half-empty reservoir in Oxfordshire could not be filled because the floodwaters were polluted by untreated sewage.
Gigantic sums are wasted by government without those responsible ever being brought to account. During the pandemic, the test-and-trace programme failed to make “a measurable difference” to the spread of the illness despite spending £23bn, according to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.
Disastrous attempts to change direction of the country
This fascination with Britain’s own relative decline might have proved harmless had it not repeatedly fuelled disastrous attempts to change the political and economic direction of the country over the last 40 years. This zig-zag course is justified by gobbets of fake history such as the illusion that the UK was in some sort of pre-revolutionary phase, like France prior to 1789 or Russia in early 1917, during the radical 1970s.
Nevertheless, such fears were used to explain the necessity for something close to a counter-revolution under Margaret Thatcher which brought about deindustrialisation, privatisation and deregulation for which we are now paying the price.
One aspect of Britain’s bid to escape from an exaggerated version of its own decline is the way it has looked to the US as an exemplar which it ought to follow. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan famously marched their countries to the right hand in hand. Politically this was understandable enough. After the Suez Crisis in 1956, the British state drew the entirely sensible conclusion that it had better stick close to Washington in order to maximise its influence. UK governments may have kow-towed excessively to the US, but they were scarcely alone in this.
What has been truly damaging to the UK is the belief of its political leaders that what works in a country with such vast resources as the US will likewise work in Britain. A small government may be feasible in the USA, but since the early 18th century, Britain has had a powerful, well-administered state. It was the Royal Navy, not British industry, that was the backbone of the empire. British pre-eminence had much more to do with victory in the Napoleonic wars and very little to do with free trade.
The Conservative mantra about shrinking the size of the state, cutting taxes and reducing regulations is the precise opposite of what Britain did at the height of its power. The whole idea of the UK as “Singapore-on-Thames” and a “buccaneering” free-trade entrepot was always a fantasy that ignored the nation’s traditional strengths. Going down this road simply accelerated the supposed decline it is meant to avert.
Broken Britain
“Broken Britain” was a phrase first used by David Cameron in 2010 in the run-up to the general election, after which he moved smartly to do some vigorous breaking up of his own. Austerity prepared the ground for Brexit, which departed radically from traditional British practice. As one French journalist remarked caustically at the time: “For three hundred years, British policy has been to keep the United Kingdom united and continental Europe divided: Brexit does the precise opposite in both cases.”
Brexit itself was never as weird as those who opposed it liked to pretend. Most countries in the world have sought national self-determination, even though it might have been in their immediate economic interest to remain part of some larger entity. The greatest damage inflicted by Brexit was political, not economic, because it served as the vehicle for a cadre of British political leaders peddling fake remedies for problems that were largely of their own making.
Yet hysterical warnings of a British meltdown have gone far to sap the British self-confidence. Anti-declinists have proved more dangerous than declinists because their antidotes are for the most part snake oil whose failure to work is explained away by conspiracy theories. Boris Johnson boasted that Brexit would boost trade and cause no problems in Northern Ireland. Rishi Sunak claims that deporting a few hundred asylum seekers to Rwanda will stop small boats from crossing the Channel and would somehow resolve the huge surge in immigration.
But it is Liz Truss with her “10 years to save the West” who has taken the rhetoric of national calamity to new depths of absurdity. Her efforts to avert disaster were supposedly sabotaged in 2022 by the “deep state” whose members include everybody from the BBC to President Biden.
“Little did I know the establishment was about to use every tool at its disposal to fight back,” she says in her claim to victimhood which has strong echoes of Donald Trump.
At the height of the rows over Brexit in 2019, the former head of MI6, Sir John Sawyer, said that Britain was having “a nervous breakdown”. Its mental balance is still unstable as the Government twists and turns as it departs ever further from reality in its bid to avoid electoral extinction. It claims, quite untruthfully, that the streets of London have been taken over by hate-filled mobs, and declares Rwanda a safe place, contrary to the decision of the Supreme Court. Libya, Lebanon and Syria are broken countries, but Britain is not.
Successive political crises over the last few years have not led to much violence. Toxic prime ministers have come in but they have also been thrown out. An exaggerated perception of decline has done more to damage Britain than decline itself. On the other hand, if the last few years have not broken Britain, then it probably will not break at all.
Further Thoughts
The horrors of Gaza do not abate, though Western political leaders and much of the media ignore or treat them as if they are the new normal.
“The latest images of a premature child taken from the womb of her dying mother, of the adjacent two houses where 15 children and five women were killed – this is beyond warfare,” said Volker Türk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
“Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded,”he said in a statement, adding that he was appalled by the destruction of Nasser Medical Complex and al-Shifa Hospital, and the discovery of mass graves in and around these locations. He called for independent, effective and transparent investigations into the graves that reportedly contain 392 bodies.
Can you imagine what an international uproar there would be if pits full of dead bodies were being unearthed in Russian-occupied Ukraine? Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak and G7 leaders would be springing onto their moral high horses to denounce Vladimir Putin’s barbarism, impose fresh sanctions and call a meeting of the UN Security Council.
As it is, there is barely a squeak of protest from Biden and his G7 allies over the bloodbath in Gaza, though student demonstrations are erupting at universities across the US, in a modern version of the Vietnam war protests of 1968. Republican politicians are stirring the pot and university administrations are panicking, as the chance of students being involved in violence grows by the day.
By his complaisance – which many see as complicity – in the Israeli scorched earth campaign in Gaza, Biden has succeeded in spreading the ethno-religious hatreds of the Israel-Palestinian war to the US. For all his public calls for Israeli restraint, he has granted the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) effective impunity when it comes to killing Palestinians in Gaza and increasingly in the West Bank. The three big US levers to influence Israel – weapons supplies, diplomatic protection and humanitarian aid to Gaza – are not used.
Unsurprisingly, much of the world concludes that the White House is not unhappy with what Israel is doing in Gaza, otherwise it would stop it.
Israel’s direction of travel is towards a second Nakba as in 1948, with 2.4 million Palestinians finding Gaza uninhabitable. All talk of a “two-state” solution is a hypocritical mask for Biden and Western leaders to be seen to offer something to the Palestinians, safe in the knowledge that Israel will accept nothing of the sort. White House spin speaks of the US President’s frustration, anger, even profanity when speaking to Benjamin Netanyahu. But, given the express delivery of US weapons continues uninterruptedly, Biden’s well-publicised strained relations with the Israeli Prime Minister either have no impact or are PR.
I have yet to see a plausible explanation as to why Biden continues to greenlight a violent ultranationalist government in Israel which damages his chances of re-election as president as well as US interests in the Middle East and globally. Biden’s motives remain a great mystery. Could it be that his total support for Israel froze solid during his early years as a senator and has not changed since, regardless of Israeli actions? Or is it because he cannot do without the backing of billionaire pro-Israel donors for his presidential campaign, as many close observers of US politics believe?
I suspect that the White House grossly underestimates the political price it will have to pay for its role in the destruction of Gaza. The administration may have convinced itself that the absolute monarchs in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and the military dictatorship in Egypt, care nothing about the terrible fate of the Palestinians. A new pax Americana can be established with Israel and Saudi Arabia. Maybe this cynical calculation is correct, but I doubt it. Popular anger in the Arab world is running too deep. Not even dictators and monarchs will be able to ignore it forever.
Beneath the Radar
Not much good has come out of the Rishi Sunak premiership, but stringent measures to stop people smoking tobacco might be one of them. I did not always think like this, since I smoked heavily until about 2004, though I had an earlier non-smoking break between 1981 and 1998. Even then, though I knew that smoking was potentially lethal, I was more open to the idea that giving up was a matter of personal choice.
But my half-sister Sarah Cockburn, a barrister who wrote detective stories under the nom de plume Sarah Caudwell, died in 2000 at the age of 61. Her early death from throat cancer had been brought about by a lifetime of pipe smoking.
My friend Christopher Hitchens, who was seldom without a cigarette in his mouth from the moment I first met him at university, likewise died of throat cancer at the age of 62 in 2011.
Overall, the likelihood of an early and nasty death is so strong in the case of smoking tobacco that it overrides libertarian arguments to the contrary. Moreover, the highly addictive nature of tobacco means that smokers are not exactly free to give it up.
Cockburn’s Picks
I liked the piece on protests at US universities in The Guardian by Robert Reich, former US Secretary of Labor, entitled “Protesting against slaughter – as students in the US are doing – isn’t antisemitism“.
This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from i. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.