Why is everything broken?
POLITICAL TURMOIL AND CATASTROPHIC EVENTS HAVE CONSPIRED TO CREATE A CATACLYSMIC MOOD ACROSS THE NATION. HOW DO OUR TIMES COMPARE WITH OTHER SEISMIC PERIODS OF HISTORY ... AND CAN THE MESS WE ARE IN BE FIXED?
IT’S a decade since The Sun newspaper coined the phrase “Broken Britain” as a catch-all for any scourge it identified, from binge-drinking and gang culture to expenses scandals and the Government’s perceived inability to curb mass immigration. Coincidentally – or not, depending on how in thrall to News International you think the Conservative Party is – the phrase became something of a mantra for David Cameron in the run-up to the 2010 General Election, a campaign he fought knowing The Sun had switched sides and would be backing him. And because most things that are broken can be mended, “Dave’ll fix it” became the subtext of a political narrative which saw Cameron installed in Downing Street. Downing Street was where he stayed until – well, you know the next bit.
Fast forward to June 2017 and, as we reflect on the tumultuous events of the past year, the idea that Britain could have been thought broken because parliamentarians claimed expenses for duck houses and fitted kitchens feels like an anachronism from an earlier, more innocent age.
But if that Sun headline seemed too big and exaggerated for the problems it described, applied to the Britain of today it carries a portentous weight no-one can deny: right now the country really does feel broken. And perhaps this is why it all feels so serious – it isn’t just Britain that feels that way.
In our age of interconnectedness, a good deal of the real world (and a not insignificant part of the ever-expanding virtual one) does too. Looking around, binge-drinking seems a perfectly understandable response to an extraordinary period of upset and change.
So why is everything broken? Pick your reasons, there are plenty to choose from. Take Brexit, for instance, which has superimposed onto Scotland’s already bitter Yes/ No divisions another series of cultural, political and socioeconomic fault lines that run UK-wide and show no sign of closing. Take the four (and counting) recent major terrorist attacks, three committed by Islamist extremists on bridges and at a pop concert using suicide vests, knives and vans as weapons; one by a white Briton who ploughed into men outside a mosque in London.
Take the Grenfell Tower fire, which as well as killing at least 79, has provided a stark illustration of the inequalities in our cities, the scandalous state of our public housing and the way we treat people who live in it.
Or take a “zombie” Prime Minister struggling to cut a “confidence and supply” deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, who oppose same-sex marriage and whose manifesto was described by one online wag as “basically just the Bible, with fortnightly bin collections”. Take the Europe-wide rise of right-wing populist parties, from the nativist Danish People’s Party to Golden Dawn in Greece. Take their charismatic leaders, people like Holland’s Geert Wilders and France’s Marine Le Pen, or the mendacious, capricious, unscrupulous and verbally incontinent Donald Trump, the demagogue’s demagogue and now the most powerful man in the world.
Or take austerity, cuts to public services and the still unravelling financial crisis. Take hacking, cyber-bullying, sexting and the pernicious selfie culture. Take Syria, North Korea and the face-off between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Or take a sleeping pill and hope it will all be fixed when you wake up. But it won’t, will it? Of course, at any given moment you only know how bad things are relative to how good or OK or passable they used to be. What you can never tell is how bad they’re going to become. So have we reached breaking point yet? Who knows. But a study of history can at least provide models, show cause and effect in action. Let us track far enough back from catastrophic events to untangle the threads that took us there. That done, we can point up similarities with our own times and, hopefully, spot the danger signs.
Historians examining the origins of the First World War, for instance, will look at cycles of empire, economics and incipient nationalism, once they’ve exposed the com-
placent and incompetent elites who governed in Vienna, Berlin and London as the 20th century dawned. Historians examining the origins of the Second World War will point to mistakes made dealing with the losing belligerents in the first one, as well as an economic downturn in the 1930s which threw hundreds of thousands out of work and onto the breadline. And, of course, they’ll wrestle with Adolf Hitler, either a uniquely malign lightning rod or just the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on their view of historical theory.
Future historians looking back at the second decade of the 21st century might like to take a leaf out of Winston Churchill’s book. Or maybe just the title of it: the first volume of his six-part memoir of the Second World War was published in 1948 and was called The Gathering Storm. Certainly the forces unleashed by the global financial crisis which began a decade ago have caused the skies to darken alarmingly overhead – with the gloom being added to, perhaps, by the tear gas used to quell rioting Greeks, G20 protesters and Occupy Wall Street-ers. As Europe struggles with all this, the civil war in Syria (allied to political upheaval in Libya and Islamist insurgencies in Iraq, Nigeria, and Afghanistan) has displaced millions of people, many of whom have headed north in search of a better life. Or just any life.
In Britain, on the fringes of Europe, the question of whether or not to accommodate these refugees became conflated with the issue of economic migration from countries like Poland and Romania and was a powerful tool in the hands of those campaigning to take the UK out of the European Union.
So if you want a starting point for the upset of the last 12 months and the sense of paralysis and panic that seems to have gripped the political class during it, look no further than the morning of June 24 – a year ago yesterday – when we woke to learn that Brexit was to become a fact.
Since then we’ve heard talk of hard Brexits, soft Brexits, red, white and blue Brexits and open Brexits – such a smorgasbord of Brexits. However, the talks in Brussels proceed, it’s likely Theresa May’s weakened government will make a dog’s Brexit of it, and that’s the one we’ll be left having to rationalise to our children.
If that’s the backdrop to the current feeling that everything is broken and there’s nobody able to apply a fix, two recent sets of events have put it centre stage: the gruesome and tragic terrorist attacks in London and Manchester, and the Grenfell Tower fire. If the shaky camera-phone footage, the stories of tragedy and death and the near-oppressive rolling news coverage of the terrorist attacks wasn’t alarming enough, the Government’s decision to push the UK threat level to critical for four days following the Manchester bombing showed how close to the edge we are.
The threat levels from international terrorism are set by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, based at MI5’s London headquarters. They’re graded from low to critical and have been published since 2006. Until last month we’d only been at critical twice, most recently for five days in the summer of 2007 following the attack on Glasgow Airport. Critical is what we’d be at if a nuclear attack was imminent, by the way, and is the equivalent of the Americans’ DEFCON 1, which they didn’t invoke even during the Cuban Missile Crisis (to date it has only ever been used in disaster movies).
Notably, critical also allows the Government to initiate Operation Temperer, a top-secret plan cooked up in 2015 which only came to light when minutes from a meeting about it were accidentally uploaded to the website of the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC). In short, Operation Temperer will put thousands of armed troops on the streets of mainland Britain to augment the police, something that hasn’t happened in nearly a century. The current threat stands at severe, and is likely to remain there. So no troops on the streets for the foreseeable future.
HOWEVER, just last week the Chief Constable of West Midlands wrote on the NPCC website that cuts to police funding meant forces in England and Wales would struggle to cope with disturbances on the scale of the 2011 riots. Heard the phrase “function creep”? If the recent (placid) Day of Rage protest turns into a hot summer of revolutionary discontent that’s anything but peaceful, it’s not hard to see how tempting it would be for the Government to invoke Operation Temperer to deal with it.
That Day of Rage was called in large part as a response to the Grenfell Tower fire, and coincided with Wednesday’s State Opening of Parliament and a Queen’s Speech which laid out, over the course of nine minutes, a Government schedule with less meat on it than a falafel wrap.
The organisers of the London march were the left-wing group Movement For Justice By Any Means Necessary. In the end it passed off without any trouble, dashing the fervent hopes of the right-leaning English tabloids for a riot. But that may still come. In the last financial year Kensington and Chelsea council had reserves of £300 million and was able to write off £1.5m subsidising the Holland Park Opera company. A sprinkler system for Grenfell Tower fire would have cost around £200,000 to install. It’s the accumulation of facts like that which add up to an overwhelming sense of social injustice, and it’s these forces which foment unrest, especially when our political class appears distant and out of touch.
Theresa May does, and so does her government. In an abrasive and condemnatory editorial published two days after the fire, The Guardian described May’s awkward and faltering response to it as “off the pace, inarticulate, seemingly uncomprehending – a leader failing the great ordeal by disaster that is the ultimate test”. It also called the Grenfell Tower fire May’s “Hurricane Katrina moment”, a reference to George W Bush’s failure to react to a natural disaster which appeared disproportionately to affect New Orleans’s black and under-privileged population when flooding hit the city in the wake of the 2005 disaster.
But after the gathering storm, sunshine. After the diagnosis, the fix. Could it be that these tumultuous events have brought us to the brink of a change for the better? Corbynites would say yes, if we can elect a Labour government at Westminster. Anti-capitalists and social justice campaigners would say yes, if we can reframe the relationship between business and government and between the people and their elected representatives. Scottish nationalists would say yes, if we can refresh and renew our polity along social democratic lines and achieve independence.
But none of that will fix Brexit, or Syria, or the wider problems of the Middle East. It won’t remove President Trump from the White House or prevent British-born jihadis plotting attacks with blades and white vans. Desperate women and children will still put their lives in the hands of people-smugglers.
Still, better to be positive than not. And in that spirit, perhaps our best hope of a fix is right under our eyes – in the living room slouched in front of the telly or, more likely, chatting with friends on WhatsApp. Yes, it’s a teenager, a digital native, born into (and, increasingly, making savvy use of) an online culture which rejects mainstream media in favour of peer-sourced views and opinions drawn from across the web.
Nobody who was actually born in this century is yet eligible to vote, but that will change. And if this cohort’s elder brothers and sisters are anything to go by – the people who came out in their tens of thousands to listen to and vote for Jeremy Corbyn in the recent General Election – there is an angry and politically-engaged younger generation. They want change, are aching for it, and they’ll do it first with an X in a box and then with a trainer-clad foot jammed into the door of government. It’s hard to say if this revolution may be televised, but it’ll definitely be live-streamed on Facebook.
May you live in interesting times, goes the old saw. Some say it’s meant as a curse, but ill omen or not, our times are certainly that.
Of course, at any given moment you only know how bad things are relative to how good or OK or passable they used to be. What you can never tell is how bad they’re going to become. So have we reached breaking point yet? Who knows. But a study of history can at least provide models, show cause and effect in action