Britain in 2018 seems like a country having a kind of slow-burning nervous breakdown. From a social point of view, the bonds that hold society together seem to be falling apart, while from an economic point of view, swathes of the country are populated by towns and cities that have simply lost their purpose, seeming to be there just because people happen to be there, not because the people really have anything to do there.
Both these issues, in the two links highlighted, come at the social and economic perspective from differing ideological ends of the spectrum, but the conclusion that can be reached appears similar: that Britain is socially-broken, and economically-moribund.
The nature of British society has fundamentally changed since the end of the Second World War. Like all developed countries, it has gone from being a male-dominated society, to one where women have a great role in the working world (note, I am not saying that women have "equal rights"; there is still a long way to go on that score). Society has become more racially-diverse (though, again, that does not mean racially-equal), and more sexually-liberal (generally-speaking; in some ways it could be argued to even have backslid, depending on the issue).
On top of that, social bonds have loosened, partly due to changing social attitudes, and also due to the changing (and more unpredictable) nature of work. The "changing nature of work" is partially a result of government strategy (or sometimes, lack of): in the last thirty years, the British economy has shifted massively in the direction of London, exacerbating a slide that had already began with the demise of empire.
Here is where the two articles mentioned at the start overlap in their concerns. The social bonds that have broken have done so as a result, at least in part, due to economic policy. The Libertarians that led the Thatcher government saw how the larger part of the population outside of the South-east of the country were being supported by the industries that were inefficient. Their solution was to either get rid of them, or if they didn't change, allow them to die. Thus we had the huge structural change of the economy from the 1980s onward, with a service-led economy that was only sustainable in the long-term for one part of the country: London and the South-east of England.
The social effects of this were not hard to predict, and are evident in every town and city outside of the South-east of England. In those towns and cities most badly affected by having their key industries disappear, the jobs that replaced them were primarily low-skilled, low-paid and low in productive value. In short, they were what could also be called "shit jobs", where job satisfaction was through the floor.
The vicious circle of this is that it affects all parts of the local community: unhappy workers are also unhealthy workers, low-skilled workers are much more likely to resort to alcohol or substance abuse, domestic violence, and so on. And then there are the unemployed, and unemployable, for whom these issues are even more acute. So the long-term effect is to create, on top of "shit jobs", "shit towns". Not surprisingly, there are even websites devoted to this whole issue.
This was all true before the financial crisis, where the economy outside of the South-east was funded by massive household credit and a large dollop of self-delusion, helped along by the self-interest of the The City. Property speculation is a "British disease" seldom seen in Europe; those countries that had succumbed to this mania (such as Spain) seem to have learned their lesson since the financial crisis.
Not so in Britain, where the self-delusion goes on and on, for lack of any rational alternative. An economy based on services alone cannot maintain a population of sixty million in the long-term. It is economically impossible. To paraphrase a famous political saying, a service-based economy might fund some of the economy all of the time, or all the economy some of the time, but not all of the economy all of the time. The Libertarians who led this structural change more than thirty years ago were not stupid; they knew that a service-based economy would leave half of the country in a permanently-moribund (or deluded) state. They just didn't care.
Bringing this up-to-date, the Libertarians that are leading the charge for Britain to leave the EU without a "deal", seem to be even less interested in the fate of those that are already falling by the wayside in society as it is. The potential consequences of Britain leaving the EU without a deal have been looked at elsewhere, but it is telling of the extent of Britain's decline that the country could be so easily hijacked by the dangerous agenda of these ideological extremists.
Outside of the self-contained bubble that is London and the affluent South-east, the decline of British society since 2010 is visibly evident. The surge in rough sleeping, the surge in food banks, the surge in drug use (even in the countryside), the surge in casual violence etc. etc. These are all unmistakable indications of a society falling apart. With government cutting local spending by half, with some councils already bankrupt or close to it, the predictable social effects are all there in plain sight. The government has an agenda that tells everyone that they no longer care; not about crime, not about poverty, not about the vulnerable.
Inequality in Britain has been high compared to other developed nations for decades, but the post-war consensus was a genuine attempt to reverse that. The Libertarian "project" of Margaret Thatcher quickly "restored" Britain's famed levels of inequality, with some of her advocates even claiming that inequality was a good thing. This is the classic response of a Libertarian. Since the Conservatives returned to power in 2010, they have "succeeded" in reversing all the good work that the previous Labour administration had done in reducing child poverty; in just seven years the Conservatives had "succeeded" in more than doubling child poverty levels, that had been previously halved over thirteen years under Labour. I suppose to a Libertarian, that would be marked as an "achievement"?
The Libertarian "project" that was started under Thatcher has now reached its logical conclusion with Brexit and austerity. After 2010, the latter was economically-justified by the government after the financial crisis on the grounds of necessity, even if there were few economists who could find any real evidence to support its imposition today; its justification was only ever ideological rather than economic. Support for Brexit was then led by a hard-right Libertarian faction with the Conservative Party itself (which itself had its roots going back to Thatcher's time), which has had effective control of the government since it won the referendum. In seeking a "Hard Brexit", they are pursuing what they see as Thatcher's undying wish: to convert Britain into a neo-liberal "utopia".
Politically and ideologically, then, it seems that Britain has run out of road. The ten years since the financial crisis have just seen Britain being led down the road of smaller and smaller gains for more and more economic pain, till the point that no-one can go on any more, as the fate of the "zombie" British high street tells us. This is the take that Pete North (in the linked piece at the start of this article) seems to have.
I have some sympathy with his wider point, but he offers no solutions. He offers Brexit as a "solution" in that it offers seismic change to the fabric of Britain's economy and society. Thus may be true, but the same could be said of declaring war on your nearest neighbour. It isn't a real "solution" if all it offers is chaos for the sake of chaos.
Arguing in favour of chaos isn't offering solutions; it's nihilism. British society deserves more than that; unless you think that British society isn't worth saving. But that (I would argue) would make you little better than a Fascist.
In this toxic social environment, it's no wonder we have "culture wars" between "remainers" and "leavers", where an ideological civil war is taking place at all levels of society; masquerading at times as a war of "them" and "us", it pits the working class against middle class, town life versus city life, even man against woman. Thus far, the "culture war" has remained, barely-concealed, just below the surface, only breaking through at isolated moments and flashpoints. Brexit has come to symbolize both everything that is wrong with modern Britain, and everything that must change to restore Britain. It is a "culture war" that has its roots going back nearly five hundred years.
It's true that, in the current state of affairs, this schizophrenia might only be properly resolved, one way or the other, by Brexit. It is the realisation of this that is so depressing.
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