Britain’s great 140 Character Crisis

As social media makes every event a national emergency, May must learn how to face down the Twitter mob and end . . .

LAST week the NHS collapsed. So did the national rail network, and the police service. This was preceded by an explosion in homelessness, and before that an implosion of the judicial and penal system. The year is seven days old. And, if you believe the reports, the country is already on its knees.

Except it isn’t. What we’re actually experiencing is life in the age of the 140 Character Crisis. And unless Theresa May and her Government get to grips with it, it will ultimately lead to a genuine national calamity that will subsume us all.

This phenomenon first appeared with the 2015 winter floods. Fuelled by social media, and the 24-hour news cycle, seasonal rainfall became an existential threat to Britain and David Cameron’s government. Lack of flood-defence investment laid bare the inhumanity of austerity. That the worst flooding was in Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire exposed the widening chasm between North and South. Tackling the issue was now an urgent national priority.

Then a week later it wasn’t. The residents of the affected areas were left to mop up and chase their insurance payments. But we, as a nation, had moved on.

There was a time when Britain’s motto was Keep Calm And Carry On. Today it’s Take To Twitter And Start A Moral Panic. Over the past five years – the lifetime of a typical parliament – we have experienced an energy-pricing crisis, annual winter-beds crises, a social-care crisis, a pensions crisis, a policing crisis, a crisis over cladding, sprinklers and overall tower-block safety, a housing crisis, a tuition-fees crisis, a rough-sleeping crisis, an amphibious-assault-ship crisis, a rail-overcrowding crisis, a rail-fares crisis, a food-bank crisis, a universal-credit crisis and an immigration crisis.

As far as I’m aware, none of these crises has actually been solved. Instead they have simply slid from the national consciousness, to be temporarily replaced by the next crisis on the rank.

As ever, part of this phenomenon is fuelled by the rise of social media. This week we have seen doctors – or people claiming to be doctors – tweeting they have been performing ‘battlefield medicine’ and providing ‘third world health care’. Which is hysterical nonsense. But as Donald Trump has successfully demonstrated, a tweet is half way round the world before the truth has its boots on.

Another problem is that, in the era of instant analysis, policy planning has become an almost exclusively reactive process. The police have faced deserved criticism recently. But they’ve also faced demands they channel resources towards everything from the terror threat and knife crime, through online abuse, white-collar crime, reckless driving towards cyclists and the hunt for Madeleine McCann.

But there is a much more fundamental reason for our 140 Character Crisis epidemic. Half the British political class are fuelling it. And the other half are too scared to challenge it.

There is a popular perception that our politicians always ingratiate their way into office with seductive promises of bread and roses. But in 1979 Margaret Thatcher secured power by pledging monetary discipline, a smaller State, and a reduction in public- sector borrowing. Tony Blair won a landslide in 1997 promising to stick to Tory spending limits. David Cameron and George Osborne bested their opponents in successive elections by openly committing to a programme of austerity. But then none of them came up against an opponent with the audacity of Jeremy Corbyn.

This week has shown Labour at its ‘your money wouldn’t melt in our mouth’ worst. Set aside the annualised shroud-waving in front the country’s A&E departments, and look instead at Monday’s rant over the rise in rail fares.

This, Corbyn tweeted from the sunshine of Coyoacán, was ‘The Great Train Robbery’.

It was immediately followed by the ritualised demand for the rena- tionalisation of the railways, and pledge this wouldn’t cost the taxpayer a penny because of recouped private-sector profits.

Which would be true, if Labour were only pledging to maintain a steady state of operation. But Corbyn isn’t. He wants more trains. He wants heavily subsidised fares. He wants more guards and other railway staff. He wants them to be paid more, and have better pensions, and have better working conditions. And the person he wants to pay for all that is you.

But dishonest and fiscally irresponsible though his strategy of credit- card socialism may be, at least Corbyn has a strategy. Theresa May’s plan for rebutting the perception that the country is falling apart at the seams has been harder to decipher.

Labour’s leader has a clear message – ‘austerity is crippling the nation’. The Prime Minister’s message – communicated by a close ally – is the following: ‘It’s not the age of austerity any more. You can see we’ve been introducing an element of fiscal loosening. We’re now pursuing a balanced approach to the economy and spending.’ A balanced approach to the economy and spending is to be lauded.

But in the age of the 140 Character Crisis it’s no response to the charge ‘You’re murdering the sick in their beds!’ Nor is it a response to the very real challenges facing the nation. Though hyped by the Twitter warriors, the pressures on the NHS are real. As are the social-care crisis, the pensions crisis and the dangers of additional defence cuts.

But at the moment the Prime Minister is unwilling to confront the nation with these realities, or the need to establish genuine national priorities.

SHE remains scarred by her experience in the Election, when she told the British people ‘We’re going to have to make s ome t ough choices’ and the British people replied: ‘No, I’m afraid we’re not.’ And that is where the real danger lies. Because though they will again slip from our consciousness, the crises that reared their heads this week are not simply going to vanish. Nor will they be magicked away by the Absolute Boy, and his strange brand of Left-wing Trumpian populism.

‘I apologise,’ Theresa May said as she toured the crowded hospital wards last week. It was a humble and empathetic response.

But in the age of the 140 Character Crisis, empathy and humility will not be enough.

SUPPORTERS of Chuka Umunna are breathing a sigh of relief after he informed them he has junked plans to start building a life outside politics. In the wake of the Election, he confided to friends that he saw no point in staying in Westminster, and was looking at options in the private sector. But I’m told he’s returned from Christmas with a new lease of life. ‘Chuka was down after the result. He thought Labour looked as far from power as ever,’ an ally tells me. ‘But he now thinks Jeremy isn’t going to be around for ever, and the Brexit debate is going to give moderates an issue to rally around.’ He was the future once. And maybe he will be again.