Britain is falling apart – and it could finish the Tories
BStrikes, lockdowns and a woeful lack of economic planning have left the country in a state of decay
These were meant to be the Roaring Twenties. Instead they’re shaping up to be the Rubbish Twenties
eyond the chaos in Westminster, Britain is falling apart. Eventually, possibly sooner rather than later, order will be restored in SW1. But whoever takes over is going to have a far bigger mess to clean up than the current state of our Government today.
Anyone who has been in Britain over the past few months can feel it: that sense of deadness, randomness, flyblown disrepair and a new mediocrity. We have a cost of living crisis, a fuel crisis, a materials and food supply crisis – only some of which can be blamed on the aftershocks of Covid and the war in Ukraine. Glutted on furlough, many people aren’t bothering to work. People and things aren’t working – at home as well as abroad.
Tube stations close at random due to “staff shortages”. Airports are in total chaos and flights are being cancelled by the thousands. There are few visible police on the streets. Crime is soaring. Those who can afford private health care have – reluctantly – given up on the torturous NHS.
Unions are stronger than ever and threatening widespread and crippling strikes; there are fears of the first general strike since 1926. These were meant to be the Roaring Twenties. Instead, they’re shaping up to be the Rubbish Twenties.
It is getting increasingly hard to get around. By summer 2022, in a blow to millions of urban dwellers’ sense of security, freedom and fun, we find that Uber is totally broken, and even extortionate black cabs are in severe shortage after years of being gazumped by ride-hailing apps.
A 70-something-year-old acquaintance I bumped into last week near Piccadilly Circus at 9pm, lugging a suitcase, was dolefully scanning the road for a black cab after having given up on Uber: I told him gently that his best bet was to take the Underground to King’s Cross, and he reluctantly agreed, perplexed by this hostile new London, amenable neither to hope nor money.
At least the Tube was running, and so was his train back to Cambridge. Crippling strikes on both rail and the London Underground – some of the worst in their history – have made it almost impossible this summer to go anywhere, including to work, for weeks at a time. Night Tube strikes went on for five months, which felt like an eternity for Londoners.
How have we got to a point where unions are once again holding us hostage unless wildly unreasonable demands are met, and nobody has anything to say about it?
Labour offers drizzly mixed messages: Sir Keir Starmer called himself “a proud trade unionist” in a punchy 2020 campaign video but warned his frontbenchers not to cheer the RMT on at the picket lines. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have merely blamed Labour. It has been farcical.
So what is the action plan? Being able to get around using public transport is not a small thing. It’s fundamental to daily life and to the economy: to the knowledge that you can go out, and also get home; that you can keep appointments, professional and personal; and that as a woman in a city at night, you don’t have to hang about on streets waiting for a bus that may never come.
Being able to get out of Britain, and back into it, is just as fundamental. It is what constitutes the basics of life in the modern West, particularly in the country of what was, until 2019, Europe’s busiest airport – Heathrow. Travel within Britain is all too frequently a nightmare, but getting out has become one too. That sense of helpless stuckness is the first taste of something very unpleasant for my generation – especially those of us who, until the pandemic, had been utterly accustomed to cheap, lastminute travel to Europe. Those born after the 1970s regarded it as their birthright.
You’ll want to get out the violins for this one. I wanted to go to Berlin last weekend and in the pre-pandemic era, I would have. A couple of clicks, £80 in flights, quick Airbnb booked and Bob’s your uncle – you barely even notice you’re on the Gatwick Express before you’re swigging wheat beer in the Tiergarten.
But it was £700 to get to Berlin last weekend by the time I looked: easyJet had sold out or cancelled flights, leaving BA and one or two others. Flights were at hideous hours that you’d only accept if desperate. Getting to Berlin was therefore out of the question and I stayed put.
This may sound like a case of the first-world sniffles. But tell that to the millions upon millions who, having been cooped up and rule-bound for more than two years, now jolly well want to go on holiday. Except, the world they last knew in 2019, the one where Europe was within reach for working families, even in summer, has gone bust.
In the case of the airport mayhem, a perfect storm of macroeconomic crises and stupid industry-think has resulted in staffing shortages. But the sense of decay in Britain more widely, congealing around the prospect of months of striking – including by BA and other airport staff right at peak holiday season – is terrifying. It took all of Thatcher’s courage, intelligence, conviction, hard work and clever government planning, through the stockpiling of coal, to see off the miners. There is absolutely no indication any similar type of strategy is in place for the next period in which, left as is, Britain will once again be brought to its knees by unions, leaving us with the honour of once again sliding down to second-world status.
The Conservatives under Boris Johnson haven’t had a clear economic or a social strategy: under whoever comes next, they will have no choice but to get one – and fast.