Brexit Britain: the new "sick man of Europe"?

There are many different ways that Brexit has been be analyzed in comparison to other historical events. The kind of comparison depends on what angle the observer comes at Brexit from. The "deal" that Theresa May has secured from the EU on Britain's post-EU status brings to mind other comparable historical events, and none of them look good.


An imperial vassal?

Earlier this year, this author compared the initial terms being offered to Britain as the price of a transition period to being asked to be the EU's "gimp". This was a graphic and deliberately harsh comparison, because the situation is historically so unusual. But the "deal" that Mrs May has secured from the EU now is even worse than that, precisely because the EU were forced into offering such a bad deal by May's own stupidity and intransigence.

The deal looks like "punishment" because Theresa May gave the EU no other option. In herself being unyielding on the issue of immigration controls and exiting the single market, this meant the EU could only offer Britain a deal that would be the worst of all worlds. May wanted to ensure that Britain could close off the free movement of people to and from the EU; but the price of that has been that Britain would be subservient to EU laws and customs, with no power over them and unable to act without the EU's consent. In any case, any future trade deal would be entirely on the EU's terms.
Meanwhile, as it would be outside the single market, Britain's exports into the EU would still rely on checks like most other "third countries", and making the country far less desirable as a place to foreign investors. And remember that this isn't just a "transitional" arrangement; its legal force is one that would exist in perpetuity until the EU says otherwise. In effect, it makes Britain a country without any of the advantages of EU membership, but with almost all the obligations; a country still firmly under the EU's thumb in spite of being outside it.

Talk of calling it "vassalage" might seem overblown, but in historical terms, the comparison isn't that far from the truth when you look at the details. Apart from independent control of its borders, the deal leaves Britain with control over little else in real terms, with the EU calling the shots on almost everything else, and Britain with no say, no redress and no legal power to stop it. By most reasonable terms, this is modern-day "vassalage".
It's clear from her apparent satisfaction with the deal that Mrs May is happy to see herself as effectively the EU's in-situ "colonial administrator" of Britain; a bland functionary overseeing the whims of the idiosyncratic locals. Their lot is not to make a fuss, but to keep their heads down and mind their own business. Under this deal with the EU, Theresa May rules as "quisling", content to rule the roost over an emasculated and moribund polity.   

Back in the 19th century, the imperial powers talked of "spheres of influence". In the modern day, the EU has a broad sphere of influence that encompasses the EEA, and arguably also other nations in a customs union with it. The USA has this with NAFTA and its broader "soft power" influence. China has this too with its growing ambitions across Asia and Africa (with its "String Of Pearls" strategy) and even into Europe, with its "Belt and Road" strategy. Russia, too, has got in on the act by (re)establishing its own sphere of influence under the "Eurasian Economic Union (EEU)". The Arab Gulf States have the GCC.
Britain's exit from the EU, in this wider context, looks like nothing more than an act of dangerous self-harm. The deal that Theresa May has now accepted with the EU leaves Britain outside of any wider sphere of influence, except in the sense that it would be controlled by another sphere of influence: the EU. In current terms, Belarus would have more legal standing in its relationship with Russia (as part of the EEU) than Britain would have with the EU.


A moribund polity

But to return to the 19th century comparisons, the original "sick man of Europe" was Ottoman Turkey, which by the middle of that century was in a chronic state of mismanagement. The phrase was made famous by Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, who sought to take advantage of Constantinople's malaise and expand his own sphere of influence at Turkey's expense.
This was the wider context that led to the Crimean War, where France and Russia vied for primacy over the Ottoman court. France (and later, Britain) pushed back against Russian stratagems to undermine Ottoman sovereignty. The Tsar's aim was to make him the legal protector of Ottoman Orthodox Christians inside of the Turks' empire, thus fundamentally undermining the supremacy of Ottoman law. This situation doesn't sound too far from modern-day comparisons with the EU's desire to protect the rights of EU citizens in Britain post-Brexit.
The difference with the current situation is that in the EU's case, it is about protecting EU citizens' rights that they already have, and ensuring those rights are not lost. In the case of the dispute that eventually led to the Crimean War, it was never really about the "rights" of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire; it was about Russian influence being used as leverage. A better contemporary example would be how Russia today has granted automatic citizenship to separatist Russian-speaking regimes that have broke away from states like Georgia and Ukraine; like in the 19th century with the Ottomans, Russia today applies the same tactics to undermine its "enemies", and invokes the call to defend Russian "citizens" as a reason to attack them.

Apart from the modern comparison to vassalage, Britain today draws other uncomfortable parallels to the Ottoman situation.
As a country, the nation is not being led in any meaningful sense by its government; it is staggering from one year to the next. For decades now, Britain has been led by short-term tactics from the heart of government. Since the end of empire, Britain has struggled to adapt to life in the modern world. It's industries quickly becoming inefficient and with its markets drying up, Britain joined the EU as a statement of realism. It knew that Britain could no longer survive on its own, given how the world was changing.
The problem was with the solution. This was not the fault of the EU (unlike what some "leavers" think), but with the Libertarians who took control of the economic and political agenda forty years ago. The result of this agenda was to turn dozens of towns and cities across the country into places that no longer had a real function: mining towns and manufacturing centres died. What replaced them was low-skilled work in the service industry. The agenda was only suited to London and the South-East, for that was where those who would make money from the agenda happened to live.

This expanded the levels of inequality in the country to a gulf. Since the financial crisis, the government have pursued an agenda that ever more brazenly amoral. The polity that pursues a Libertarian agenda does so now regardless of the damage it is doing to public finances and wider society; it does so because it has no other ideas.
A recent OECD report explained how Britain has become one of the most heavily-indebted nations in the world. Due to the government's cumulative asset-stripping, the government no longer has many assets to offset any loans or borrowing. The result of this mindless strategy is a massive black hole in public finances.
Meanwhile, things like the basic defence of the country and law and order are left to rack and ruin. The "Royal Navy" has become a sad decimated joke, made all the more ridiculous by having built an enormous aircraft carrier that we don't need and even lack the planes for. The country has a scattering of territorial outposts around the world, but (like with the Falkland Islands) no longer has the practical means to defend them. The air force is so cut to the bone it barely able to patrol the skies above Britain; likewise with the army, which is spread thin across various conflict zones, and is struggling to attract enough recruits as it is.
The state of law and order in Britain, thanks to cuts of government funding, has meant that in parts of the country there are simply not enough police to deal with crime, leaving people to deal with it themselves; meanwhile, thanks to cuts of government funding the state of Britain's prisons is so bad that they have become more dangerous than the streets outside. Britain is a society that is falling apart.

The Libertarian agenda, through the pursuit of austerity and welfare reform, has led to a surge, not only in inequality, but in crime, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse and malnutrition. In this sense, Britain literally has become today's "sick man of Europe", because the British government is destroying its society. 

 










 

Brexit and Britain's slow decline: a society falling to pieces?

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.

Brexit: a monumental "cock-up", or a "project" designed to destroy Britain? Historical parallels with Russia

There exist two competing schools of thought that try to explain how "Brexit" has been allowed to happen in the uniquely-disruptive way that it has.
On one hand, there's the thinking that the referendum and the government's slide into anarchic paralysis is the result of a gradual accumulation of amassed incompetence over the years, matched with a complacency of their vaunted position: in other words, a chaotic "Brexit" was made inevitable by the mismanagement and dysfunction at the heart of British politics. In this sense, for the ideological supporters of this (delusional) thinking, "Brexit" is a "coup de grace" that sees the final self-destruction of the "elite", to replaced by something "better".
One the other, there's the argument that "Brexit" is the result of malevolent design: the "disaster capitalism" theory, that sees a group of vested interests take advantage of the opportunities presented in the unique circumstances in British politics after the financial crisis. Put in those terms, "Brexit" is an idea that has been introduced from outside the political sphere, like a bacillus uniquely-designed to poison and divide British society, ripping apart its political class in a way that no other issue could. A hundred years ago, a small group of Russian extremists were able to take control of a weak and paralyzed Russian state, turning society against itself in a civil war, and completely re-shape the country in its own image. That same merciless "Marxist" zeal of ideology seems to guide many of those who support "Brexit" in government, where the only solution to any problem is the one that seems designed to cause the most disruption.

The more obvious analysis is that the truth is somewhere in between: the inherent weakness and disconnected elite of Britain, made clear from the financial crisis onward, are taken advantage of by the "Brexit agenda". Able to easily manipulate events due to this weakness and a society already fragmented by a weak economy and an indifferent government, the establishment falls into every trap set for it.


Russian parallels

Going back to Russia a hundred years ago, some of the parallels with Britain today are disconcerting. The "Brexiteers" take the place in contemporary Britain for the Bolsheviks of Russia; modern-day ideologues hell-bent with missionary zeal. The wider social effect that the financial crisis of 2008 had on Britain was not so dissimilar from that of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Granted, 2008 did not of course lead to "revolution" and anarchy in Britain as it did in Russia in 1905, but that was due Gordon Brown's government bailing-out the banks. If that had not happened, the financial sector would have totally collapsed resulting in unprecedented social disorder, like what really happened (under a different set of factors) in Russia 103 years earlier.
Russia's government action deferred unrest and revolt in 1905; in a similar manner, Brown's actions deferred Britain's social collapse in 2008. But deferring a problem doesn't solve it. This author has written before about how the 2011 riots in England brought to mind some uncomfortable parallels with the mass social unrest in Russia in 1905, but that article was written long before "Brexit" raised its head as an issue.
"Brexit" in this way feels like a social "reckoning" for Britain's government not dealing with the many social and economic issues in the country since the financial crisis; in the same way that the social shock of Russia entering the First World War created the circumstances that allowed the Bolsheviks to take advantage of a time of chaos. In the case of modern-day Britain, however, it is the ideological hard-right of the Libertarians that is taking control of events, shaping them to their own ends.
It took twelve years - 1905 to 1917 - for the Russian central apparatus to collapse under the strain of events; in Britain, it is a period of eleven years from the time from the financial crisis to the Brexit "year zero" to come in 2019. All the signs are that the British government has no idea what it is doing when it comes to Brexit, and leaving the EU without any plan in place next year will bring the structural apparatus of the country to its knees. It is this calamity that the Libertarian "Brexiteers" (read "Marxists") plan to take full advantage of.

The "cock-up" narrative of Brexit follows the same historical trends that happened to the creaking apparatus of Imperial Russia in the run-up to the Bolshevik Revolution. Britain's economy has given the phrase "false economy" a double meaning: the government and the private sector both cutting costs, through "austerity" and the "gig economy" respectively. These twin demons have been the result of a pathology of short-term thinking, cutting costs through an ideology that ends up costing far more to society in the long-run. Equally, the other sense of Britain's "false economy" is that the economy is running, effectively, on empty; it just hasn't become obviously apparent to everyone, as long as everyone keeps on pretending otherwise. The only visible sign of the malaise has been the retail casualties on the high street, which do feel like the first victims of this insidious "disease".
Britain's economy since the financial crisis has had the worst level of growth (i.e. the worst "recovery") of all major industrialized economies. On top of that, wages have stagnated relative to inflation, and jobs are less secure than in living memory. Nobody really has any money, while private debt has spiraled. In this way, there is nothing to hold up the British economy in the face of any national crisis. With those in power stuck in their complacency, Brexit is clearly the "crisis" that no-one in the establishment is remotely qualified to handle.
Imperial Russia's economy in the run-up to the First World War was in robust shape, at least on the surface. 1905 had been a shock, but the powers-that-be had been able to keep the economy going, and the social unrest had been effectively suppressed with the heavy hand of the Imperial secret police, the Okhrana. Thus, in spite of high levels of political violence, superficially the Russian state appeared strong. However, this masked the fact that Russia in 1914 was still a backwardly-ran country with a meagre industrial base compared to its rivals, with a highly-centralized state and enormous levels of deprivation for a "major" power. Much the same can be said of Britain even today.
The "cock-up" on Russia's part in the First World War was in having a policy of supporting a wildly-ambitious (and unruly) Serbian state, and when forced into war against Austrian aggression towards Serbia, Tsar Nicholas allowed his army to mobilize against (at the time, still technically neutral) Germany as well. In this way, Russia's muddled military strategy rapidly escalated a regional war into a continental war, leading to Russia's own eventual internal implosion.

The Bolsheviks have been called by historians as a German "bacillus", planted by the Kaiser into Russia to (successfully) knock them out of the war. The "Brexit Agenda" can be called less a grassroots movement than an "astro-turf" project, in many ways also implanted by "outside interests". In the modern, post-national age, those "interests" are corporate and disparate, faceless and yet omnipresent. In the past, such "revolutions" were the cause of mass movements; today they can be the cause of narrow, shadowy interest groups, able to manipulate events behind the scenes.
The Bolshevik Revolution was a shock to the rest of the world as Russia's highly-centralized state was seen as the last place that the Marxist menace could achieve power. In a similar manner, the way in which "Brexit" has come to transform Britain from a land of careful conservative dependability, to one consumed by irrational ideological zealotry, has blind-sided all foreign observers.
The highly-centralized and deeply-unequal nature of both Imperial Russia and the British state were one of the weak points in both powers, exploited by Bolsheviks and Brexiteers respectively. This allowed a deep well of social resentment outside the capital to fester; all that was required was for someone to find a scapegoat to channel that resentment into popular support. For the Bolsheviks the enemy was the "bourgoisie"; for the Brexiteers, it was the EU.
Equally, as stated elsewhere, the cause of the Bolsheviks and the cause of the Brexiteers was only ever, in reality, a marginal cause held by an insignificant minority. It was only a specific set of events that allowed them to come to prominence, and dominate the narrative. It was the weakness of the Russian state a hundred years ago, and the British state today, that allowed this to happen.

A "cock up" by the Tsar led to his downfall by the Bolsheviks; a "cock up" by Westminster has led to the path of its potential downfall by Brexit.   

Personality politics, the media and extremism: Brexit, Trump, and the rise of Populism in the 21st century

There have long been complaints that the world has been getting more superficial, and in the case of media (and its coverage of politics) the complaint seems to be well-deserved.

The problem boils down to issues like "ratings". In essence, its about making television "entertaining", and newspapers making their coverage popular. Political coverage therefore has to fit into the same lens in order to be accessible to the general public. Equally, however, the media operate in an environment shared by their political masters, meaning that overt criticism of some figures can lead to negative consequences for a media outlet (such as losing "access"); so a fine line is often taken by the fourth estate. Both these factors together explain how media coverage of politics has gradually become more superficial and less informative (and informed). The degree of that superficiality has only become truly clear with the rise of Trump in the USA and the cause of "Brexit" in the UK.

"Personality politics" has its roots in the political campaigns for people like Reagan in the USA, continued by the likes of Bill Clinton, which was then copied by Tony Blair. Following from Blair in the UK, we had David Cameron, who molded the Conservative Party in his own image.
The personality politics that these figures harnessed was about capturing the "centre ground". While much of Reagan's rhetoric was Libertarian in its outlook, in office he was often more pragmatic - and more "centrist" - than some people realized at the time. This explained why he won successive elections. Clinton and Blair achieved the same, using the same centrist platform, albeit coming from the other side of the political spectrum.
However, personality politics doesn't work in a vacuum, and it needs a media platform in order to thrive. That media platform has been intertwined with the political sphere for decades, as those in politics and the media often share the same background, educational ties and peer groups. In short, media coverage of politics occupied its own bubble: in the USA it was all about life inside "The Beltway", while in the UK it was all about Westminster gossip.
That superficial fascination with "gossip" was another facet of the entertainment factor in politics. As much of politics is dry and technical to the layman, it requires titillation and personality to bring it alive. This explains why the most famous politicians in Capitol Hill or Westminster were always the ones who were used acts of showmanship. In Ronald Reagan, a former actor, the USA had someone who understood this very well. Donald Trump today has his own exaggerated (but very successful) form of showmanship, clearly modeled on that of Reagan.

A wit might say that politics is the realm of the failed actor. The politicians that have been successful have all used these skills in order to gain the limelight; the politicians that naturally have these skills can rise all the more quickly, along with the movement attached to them.
In the UK, the rise of UKIP is matched with the rise of the politician, Nigel Farage. Here is a figure who has had far more media coverage over the years - going back twenty years - than has merited the popularity of his party. And yet, it was only after the financial crisis (more on that later) that he came to dominate the political sphere so disproportionately.
On one hand, politics became more "professional" during the tenure of Clinton and Blair, so that by the end of the 1990s, there seemed to exist a kind of "conventional wisdom" in society, supported by the media and the political class, that made some issues seem "taboo" to talk about. This was the flip side to centrism. The political class and the media seemed complicit to those on the ideological fringes in shutting-down debate, so that the number of issues that came to be reported on and discussed dwindled. Social issues like racism and homophobia were tackled by government for he first time in living memory, leaving those on the ideological fringe to claim that they themselves were becoming a "persecuted minority". Thus were sown the seeds of the far-right claiming that they were fighting for "free speech", against a complicit media and centrist agenda.

Changes in technology and the rise of internet media have also seen a hollowing-out of traditional news media, like local newspapers. National news agencies have also had to rethink their priorities in the face of falling revenues thanks to these structural shifts in the media industry. What this has meant is that the kind of in-depth reporting that was once common (think how "Watergate" became exposed) has become increasingly difficult to finance. This has meant tough choices, and the result is that the level of reportage and knowledge of issues is not as thorough or as deep as it used to be.
This explains, for example, how the media in the UK have been so poor at grasping the many issues surrounding the implications for Brexit for the country. Apart from how these issues are reported (i.e. the degree of superficiality already mentioned), and the issue of media slant (i.e. not wanting to go against "established opinion") is the issue of how well it is reported in the first place. Simply, the lack of technical knowledge apparent in those working for the media means that they often don't even know what are the right questions to ask to begin with, let alone whether they choose to ask them or not.
In this way, dissemination and lies by politicians pass by unchecked, assumed as fact by media figures who often simply don't know what they're talking about. There is the facade of media interrogation when politicians are interviewed or asked questions after their public appearances, but this lack of technical knowledge, along with the media's own reasons for not wanting to "upset" politicians (as this could damage future "access") means that the public only ever get a "version" of the truth. This is one reason why, if you want to understand a story in any real detail, you need to read it from several media sources, and find the balance somewhere between them all.

This is where "fake news" gets its fuel from, and why Donald Trump's press office talked of "alternative facts". In a time when the media has been under financial pressures due to the structural changes talked of earlier, this allows the more unscrupulous parts of the media (i.e. those with overt ideological agendas) to claim that there is no "real" truth, only many different forms of it. Because the media have been attacked as being too "establishment" for before seeming to favor "centrist" candidates, this leaves them vulnerable to attack from those who have an agenda against centrism i.e. Populists.
Populism and personality politics have found the perfect environment to gestate in since the financial crisis. While prior to the financial crisis, personality politics usually favored centrist politics (thanks to a like-minded media), since then it has been the Populists that have gone from strength to strength.


The rise of Populism

The media were as blindsided by the financial crisis as the politicians were. In some ways, the financial crisis saw the end of unchallenged rule of "centrism". With the ideological walls of the establishment being shook by the financial crisis (let's not forget that only government bailouts prevented a second "Great Depression"), it forced the media to reassess the fluid political landscape. In the USA, the rise of the "TEA Party", a hard-right faction of the Republicans, matched the concurrent rise of UKIP in the UK, itself effectively a hard-right faction of the Conservative Party.

While the TEA Party lacked one unifying, charismatic figure (with several personalities vying for preeminence), UKIP had Nigel Farage. In the years after the financial crisis, Farage's brand of British Populism (which like the TEA Party, had a Libertarian agenda) captured the media's attention. With Westminster seeming to represent all that was tired and out-of-touch since the financial crisis, most of the political "excitement" seemed to come from Farage. 
The media superficiality during the long period of centrist dominance before the financial crisis, along with earlier accusations of bias of "political correctness", meant that the pendulum swung the other way: disproportionate (and flattering) coverage was then given to Farage, allowing him to be seen as someone on the side of "the people" against the "the establishment". His background in The City was something that was easily brushed under the carpet. Meanwhile, those media outlets that did criticize his agenda were labelled as part of "the establishment" themselves, and so in the now-antagonistic atmosphere after the financial crisis, they couldn't win either way.

The only person in the political establishment in the UK that matched this new form of "personality politics" was Boris Johnson. After being Mayor of London for eight years, he had become the "king across the water" as far as David Cameron was concerned. Conveniently entering parliament in 2015 during his last year of tenure as London Mayor, he was able to use his position in Westminster as well as his media coverage to great effect during the EU referendum in 2016. Along with Farage, these two figures were largely responsible for the success of the "leave" campaign - the most obvious indication of the success of Populist "personality politics" over a centrist establishment.

And of course, at the same time across in the USA, we had the rise of Donald Trump. While the EU referendum was in full flow in the UK, the USA was in the presidential primaries, which allowed Trump to take advantage of the same anti-establishment agenda. Using the same skepticism that the "leave" campaign had towards "experts", Trump attacked "fake news" by the established media. And now with both "Brexit" as an unstoppable force, and Trump as an immovable object, we've entered an age when media outlets can be called "enemies of the people", and it all seem completely normal.

Populist "personality politics" could only have come to prominence due to the financial crisis, and the media's close connection with the political establishment. This allowed the media to be tarnished with the label of complicity. The superficiality of the media that gradually seeped into its culture led to its own decline, leaving it completely exposed, as the political establishment was, when the financial crisis came along. Since then, the political culture had become dominated by the rhetoric of Populism, supported by a media culture that has either lost its way, or is part of the same corrupt bargain.
As Populists generate greater "ratings", this means they get more coverage. It might make for good entertainment, but it leaves the media destroying its own integrity, to help the agenda of people who only see them as their puppets.

Broken Britain: Brexit as a "Coup De Grace"?

The author has written before about how many of those in favour of "Hard Brexit" see it in more esoteric, transformative terms. Such thinking is inherently dangerous, and it is even more alarming that some in high office actually believe in this form of delusional grandiosity. The people who are in charge of the direction and strategy of the government's Brexit plan are literally off with the fairies. Having a "vision" is one thing; but these people seem to be having "visions" of Britain that make you question their rationalism. This is what is truly terrifying about where the country is heading: it seems to led by people who are in the grip of "mania".

There are those in government who see Brexit as an opportunity to transform the nation into a vision of an orgiastic, free market paradise. Then there are those who, more fatalistically, see Brexit as the inevitable culmination of Britain's intellectual and moral decline; this narrative, its advocates argue, has been going on since the end of the British Empire, brought on by the Second World War, with Britain's entry into the "European Project" simply a sign of the country's national demise. In this narrative, Brexit is the "death blow" to the long decline, leaving a clean slate to start afresh.
This second viewpoint, held in certain "Brexiteer"circles, is controversial as its thinking mirrors much of the fatalism that can be found in the "Alt-Right" and classic Fascist thought (such as by Julius Evola).

As is common with extremist thought, the grain of truth that is contained in their thinking is twisted out of shape into something monstrous. Is it true that there are things wrong with Britain? Of course. Has there been an intellectual and moral decline since decades ago? When you look at the evidence of how the government, economy and its infrastructure has been ran in recent years, it seems self-evident. The political class at the highest level seems morally-absent of responsibility for their own actions and towards the lives of others. This explains how things like Grenfell can happen, the child abuse scandal, food banks, rampant homelessness, the "hostile environment", the collapsing public sector, and so on. The managerial class that run the day-to-day affairs of the economy are only interested in making a quick buck, with no thought towards others or the long-term future. This explains the Carillion scandal, Zero-hours contracts, the country's appallingly-inefficient transport network, and so on.
Put in these terms, it's easy to see how some people can be hoodwinked by extremist thought. Britain seems to be a country in terminal decline, so the thinking goes, and Brexit as a "coup de grace" would be one method of achieving real change.

Except that there are plenty of other methods of effecting "real change" that don't involve leaving the EU.
Britain's terminal slow decline has been self-inflicted, by the actions of a short-sighted, self-serving elite. The political system has atrophied, with the sight of its MPs still doggedly at work in a parliament building unfit (and legally unsafe) for purpose epitomizing the problem. Apart from the 2015 election, the electoral system has delivered hung parliaments since the financial crisis, and looks set to do so for the foreseeable future. The outcome of this could only ever be deadlock in the political system, with nothing being decided, and nothing being done about Britain's worsening and lengthening list of problems. Theresa May and her government symbolize this perfectly.
If the referendum hadn't happened, or the vote had gone the other way, it's easy to see that Britain's problems would have remained unresolved and allowed to fester as they still are now. "Brexiteers" would still be a pressure group on the government, poisoning Britain's relations with the EU because it made good short-term political sense at home. The current high street malaise that is afflicting swathes of Britain's retail sector is not really a result of Brexit, but down to structural failings in the market. These would have happened regardless. Nobody in government has an answer to this innate weakness in the nation's economic model; all that is needed to knock down Britain's lethargic economy is a stiff breeze. "Brexit", however, is an oncoming hurricane.

In this sense, since the financial crisis, Britain has had a zombie economy and a zombie political system; alive, but not really living. The moral and intellectual decline mentioned earlier has come about through a system that creates a class of people who superficially have the skills to administer, but without the intellectual dexterity or moral centre to provide real leadership. Because the system we're talking about is "the establishment", being of the right background, supporting orthodoxy, displaying loyalty and defending the system from outsiders are the traits that accelerate advancement. This is a corrupt, insular culture incapable of seeing outside its own narrow interests. Anything that challenges its position, such as a different way of doing things, must be suppressed.
Returning to the British Empire, it could be argued that if "Brexit" is seen as the "coup de grace" of modern Britain, then the Second World War was the "coup de grace" of the British Empire. In a sense, the real spiritual end of the British Empire was marked by the First World War, with Britain and France the only imperial powers to have really made amoral colonial gains out of it. Those "gains" were mainly in the Middle East at the expense of the Ottomans, and proved to be fleeting; poisoned chalices that proved that imperial greed had superseded strategic sense. It quickly became clear they were not worth having, and by the time of the Second World War, it was clear to their American allies that those empires were morally bankrupt as well as financially broke.

The recurring vice here is short-termism. Opportunistic greed was what saw Britain and France extend their colonial reach into the Middle East, and was a sign that Britain's leaders lacked the ability to see beyond the end of their nose. The same short-termism has been true of Britain's leaders since then, with the occasional exception (fighting against the tide). Churchill's imperialism was emotional and irrational. Britain's empire died because it was run badly, with little long-term strategy. Britain's economy has been run the same way ever since, with it becoming increasingly inefficient and unproductive. Forty years ago, factories were closing and shedding jobs because there was no strategic direction from the top; there an inability to think dynamically. The answer that came along was "neoliberalism", and the restructuring of the economy away from manufacturing and towards services. As we see now, that was only a short-term fix, shown up to be a charade by the financial crisis. And the economy was only held up after the financial crisis by creating a "zombie" economy, that was kept alive but incapable of real growth.

This is what is meant by "Broken Britain": a country that is structurally knackered, held together by a political class that is intellectually incapable of dealing with real challenges. Worse, in Theresa May, the sclerotic political establishment is led by someone who is literally only interested in holding power for herself and the interests of her party. It is a morally bankrupt government, presiding over a country that is slowly falling to bits.
This inherent weakness in both the economy and the political structure of Britain - where short-term fixes are seen as the only answer - is also a symptom of a failed democracy. There is the appearance of democracy, but the government of Theresa May shows less and less inclination to pretend even that veneer is worth maintaining. Since the referendum, all pretense at effective parliamentary democracy has disappeared, its views ignored, with May creating new peers for the House Of Lords at a whim. Since the referendum, parliament has become redundant in the government's eyes. Who cares what it thinks any more? The government don't, as they are now fulfilling the "will of the people"; and the electorate have even less respect for parliamentarians now than they did even before the referendum.
The argument that, due to its cumulative institutional failings over the years, Britain as we understand it has reached the end of its natural life is a persuasive one in many ways. Britain never really adapted to a role after the empire, with its industrial base shrunk to the point of no return, and its natural wealth depleted. While there are parts of the country that will always be wealthy, thanks to government policy the levels of inequality have become so self-evidently enormous and skewed in one direction that they cannot be sustainable. When Britain has regions that have both some of the highest and lowest levels of wealth within the EU, something is seriously rotten with the way the country is ran. As said earlier, it is this persuasive narrative the extremists are taking advantage of, in pushing for a form of Brexit that will completely sweep away the old order. It explains how both main parties in parliament have been consumed by more extreme elements, so that the only real choices on offer to the electorate are between "Hard Brexit" and some kind of "Hard Socialism".So the story goes, the pendulum can only swing so far before it swings back the other way. It is this persuasive narrative that is so dangerous, as it can only lead to a dark path, where chaos is used as a tool by those with few moral qualms.

The answer is not a Brexit "coup de grace", but a political class that is able to think dynamically, by seeking answers to problems from outside its own narrow, incestuous confines. The answer lies not in a "neoliberal" dystopia outside the EU, but in seeking strategic answers from within the EU.
Alas, this seems just a pipedream: the tragedy is that far more people want to believe that the Brexit "coup de grace" is the only way to bring about real change; in reality, it is far more likely to bring about a change for something even worse.

Britain's economy and government since the financial crisis: a problem of short-termism

There is ever more evidence that Britain is a country running on "borrowed time".


Economic short-termism 

Since the financial crisis, the country has never really recovered. All the figures show an economy that has levels of productivity so bad that they haven't been seen since the 18th century, before the country's industrialisation.
The pretense of a functioning "economy" exists, but it could be argued that all changes to the economy since the financial crisis have simply given the illusion of one. The economy that exists now is one of low productivity, low investment, low skills, low wages, and low security. Put in these terms, it makes one wonder how there's any real growth at all. There is a psychology of systematic short-termism, where many companies' only aim is to make ends meet until the next quarter. There is no thought given to longer-term planning; strategic thinking has gone out of the window.
This psychology has led, on one hand, to bringing down costs in any way possible: from companies like Carillion, who ran their affairs like a huge Ponzi Scheme, to the "casualisation" of the labour market, with the proliferation of zero hours contracts and deliberate underemployment. Meanwhile, the massive use of outsourcing is another way to cut costs, which is endemic in the public and private spheres. In this way, the illusion is created of the economy becoming more "flexible", as Larry Elliott mentioned in the linked article above, where it in fact simply becomes more nakedly exploitative. So the implication is that, since the financial crisis, the only way Britain's economy can stay on its feet is to regress back to 19th-century work practices. Except that the economy is doing so badly on some measures, that it's actually regressed to the 18th century.

And in spite of all these "flexible" measures introduced, services and construction, which make up to 80% of the overall economy, are floundering. With the retail sector going through what experts call a "transition", the effect on the ground is that those companies that are slow to adapt to the rise of internet shopping are simply losing customers at a punishing rate. Again, this is simply a symptom of a lack of strategic planning; something which seems depressingly common.
The irony here is that this has been predicted for years. With the collapse of manufacturing thirty years ago, retail and services have been taking up the slack. Except that now, thirty years on, retail itself seems to going through a similarly-testing period as was once experienced by manufacturing. Having an economy with such a large trade deficit thanks to the chronic lack of exports, Britain's is a consumption-led economy. Governments of the last thirty years have thought that "services are the future" for a country like Britain, which would fill the hole in the labour market left by the collapse of manufacturing.
After thirty years of "borrowed time", technology is beginning to test that theory on the high street, with very visible effects. In short, technology for many companies has been shown to reduce costs, with a need for fewer workers. Likewise, the rise in internet shopping has reduced the need for consumers to physically go to the shops on the high street. This "double whammy" has seen the proliferation of things like "self-service" checkouts and the gradual automisation of warehouse working, and also the closure of more and more high street shops and franchises as the footfall is simply drying up. While governments of the past thought that "services are the future", the "future" has since caught up with the economy. That "borrowed time" in which the economy was able to thrive on services alone, seems to be at an end.

These technological changes have been inevitable, but Britain's economy is poorly set-up to deal with them. For all the reasons mentioned earlier about how its labour market has "restructured" since the financial crisis, Britain's captains of industry have been too short-term in their thinking to consider the effect that these technological changes would have on the insecure and exploited workforce they have created.
As this underpaid and insecure workforce simply has much less money to spend, a "vicious circle" has been set up thanks to institutional short-termism. Workers with less money will consume less; if consumption declines, so do the fortunes of the companies that employ them. Everyone loses out, with the inevitable result being less money in the economy. This is the ultimate price of short-term thinking. It is an economic model that cannot work in the long-term.


Political short-termism

At another level, all the signs are that Britain has a political culture that is intellectually incapable of leading. Sharing all the same signs of malaise and short-termism as industry, the government is literally doing nothing about most of the country's problems, which are simply getting worse through government indolence. All that happens is that difficult decisions are kicked down the road, while the country's infrastructure, institutions and social bonds slowly fall apart.
Short-termism was the ultimate cause of the government's "austerity" agenda. It was politically expedient in 2010 for the government to claim that cutting the deficit was a necessary action, with spending needing to be cut across the board. However, all the economic figures since then have shown how austerity simply makes everyone poorer, including the government.
A government that spends less on government services that are there to improve public conditions is not saving money in the long-term. Companies with strategic thinking understand the importance of investment; government is the same. Governments that cut back on investment in their own population when the economy is doing badly are not helping the economy; they are making it worse. Reducing spending on mental health reduces people's mental health. Reducing spending on those with disabilities reduces how much money those with disabilities have etc. etc.

If the government continually reduces how much money it feeds into the public sector, the ultimate result will be lower tax returns for the government. It is a self-defeating measure. The same has been true of the wider economy, where fewer well-paid jobs in the economy since the financial crisis have simply led to smaller tax returns to the government. The reason why the former Labour government got into such a huge deficit during the financial crisis was largely due to the fact the the economy's collapse resulted into catastrophic collapse in the government's tax receipts from the overall economy. Unemployed workers don't contribute to the tax system. People with less money spend less.

On a different level, while the "transition" the economy seems to be going through could act as a painful "reckoning" on corporate short-termism, Brexit could well act as a "reckoning" on the government's own pathological short-termism.
A referendum on the fate of the entire country was chosen for the short-term political gain with the government's own party. Since then, Theresa May's government has conducted the Brexit process with the sole aim of keeping the governing party together, regardless of its potentially-disastrous effect on the country in the long-term. It has made itself look both ridiculous and obstinate in the face of reality. The government seems not to care about this, as long as it is the EU who can be blamed for any problems later on.

Brexit may well be the ultimate "reckoning" for Britain's broken economy and government. As economic short-termism can only work for so long before time catches up with it, the same is true for the government and Brexit. For the government, time is running out, as the EU keeps reminding it.

Austerity, Brexit and the Conservative Party: An undeclared "war" on British society?

Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) was famous for his "war on poverty", designed to eradicate the conditions that led to destitution. At times, it feels like the Conservative Party have an undeclared "war" on Britain's poor, designed to punish those segments of society that they feel are unworthy.


"Fakers"

Perhaps the easiest way to explain the mindset that seems to exist in parts of the Conservative Party is this: their contempt for those unworthy of their pity comes from the belief that they believe that most people who are homeless, unemployed, disabled, or just poor are lazy "fakers".  In this mindset, there are very few people who are "really" homeless, or "really" can't get a job, or a "really" disabled, or are "really" poor.
This is the most rational explanation behind the government's longstanding policy of austerity and welfare reform. Those in government simply refuse to believe there is a "problem" that needs their attention; the only "problem" as far as they're concerned is the lazy fakers who have been stealing the government's money (and, it is implied, added to the myth of the Labour government's self-inflicted fiscal crisis). This is the pervasive attitude that has permeated the media for years, matched by the government's own rhetoric on benefit fraud.
This rhetoric has extended out to the whole gamut of social policy. Basically, anyone who wants any money or help from the government is a source of instant suspicion, whose motives are assumed to be suspect. From the degrading treatment that many disabled people must endure to get government help, to those simply trying to claim financial support while unemployed, the system is now designed to find any way possible to withdraw help. Part of this comes from the long legacy of "austerity", where saving money in any way possible, regardless of how inhumane it is, is the first priority. If it means that disabled people are left to fend for themselves, well it's just one of those things. If it means unemployed people having to skip meals to stay alive, well, so be it. If it means people being evicted and left homeless, it can't be helped.
In this way, it could be argued that homelessness is a form of government-sanctioned punishment on those who are unable to look after themselves, either mentally or financially. Psychological weakness is the worst crime of all, as far as the government is concerned. As the government refuses to accept that the reasons for homelessness often come from genuine social and familial problems, the government therefore sees homelessness as a "lifestyle choice". This view was shared by a local policeman in the town of Ely, Cambridgeshire, who stated that there were no "real" homeless people in the town; those on the street were all "fakers".


"Trained indifference"

This attitude of those in the lowest rungs of society being there through either psychological weakness or by choice is prevalent throughout the Conservative Party. Once this view is accepted, it follows that those who are "weak" or "lazy" must be either punished or cut off from access to official channels, as this is seen as the only effective way to alter their behaviour. Those at the sharp end of this inhumane policy are seen on the streets, with the soaring numbers of rough sleepers in the UK (by some estimates at ten thousand) making them look like modern-day "refugees" of the government's undeclared "war" on the lazy and weak-willed.
The "war" is always in an officially-undeclared state because the government would never openly admit that its actions are designed to "punish"; it simply cuts off government help whenever possible and lets nature take its course. That way, the victim's fate whether to "sink or swim" can be pinned on the individual, and not the government. As far its concerned, the government's own hands remain clean. If the homeless person froze to death in the winter cold, it was because he refused to take responsibility for his own poor decisions. Officially, of course, such situations would always be a "tragedy", but a tragedy of the person's own making. That way, the government can keep its hands clean.

The government's policy towards those deprived and vulnerable segments of society is officially one of help; it could hardly publicly claim otherwise and still be considered to be maintaining civilised society. But that "official" policy of help comes with the huge caveat that the government only believes a small fraction of those deprived and vulnerable people in society are in genuine need; the rest are liars who are there by choice.

The austerity agenda is also part of a wider aim to fundamentally change the relationship between government and the people: namely, to remove the idea from people's minds that government is there to help you. By cutting funding to social care services, and by the simultaneous "welfare reforms", the government is making the idea of getting help from them seem more and more onerous, to the point that people stop trying. To a Conservative, this idea seems entirely natural, as an encouragement towards greater self-sufficiency and individual responsibility. But this idea of course forgets the social reality, that no-one is ever completely responsible for their own fate from cradle to grave. No man is an island.
Austerity can therefore be seen as a tool of social transformation; a form of social engineering and psychological manipulation. It is about changing how British people think. One wonders if the government's indifference to, for example, the very visible rise in rough sleeping isn't implicitly a kind of psychological "shock therapy" on the British public; Britain's streets being turned into a kind of open-air laboratory for social engineering, where the sheer frequency of rough sleepers gradually creates a muted indifference in people minds, rather like how long exposure to pornography has allegedly changed the way that young men think about sex. This "trained indifference" would then be part of the agenda of "psychological manipulation", bringing public acquiescence to the Conservative Party's "war" on the weaker elements of society. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to see what the logical conclusion of this strategy would be.


Psychological preparation?

With the streets of "austerity" Britain sometimes bearing the atmosphere of an open-air theatre of the grotesque, there's a case to be made that this might also be a kind of psychological preparation for the real austerity to come after Brexit. If people think that "austerity" is bad now, this may just be the beginning, after Britain leaves the EU and the single market.
All the reasoned voices (including the EU itself) declare that leaving the single market would be disastrous for Britain's economy. The reason why is because Britain simply doesn't have the infrastructure or know-how to efficiently deal with the sheer amount of bureaucracy involved in trading with the EU as a country outside the single market; in short, when all the costs of the extra bureaucracy involved are added up, businesses may well find it no longer financially viable to trade with the EU. The logistical nightmare of crossing to and from the single market is only one aspect of this that could quickly see the economy seize up in a matter of days.

I've gone into some of the details about who could benefit from this chaos before, but as with "austerity", the ones who will be the victims first in this kind of Brexit scenario would be the vulnerable and deprived. The kind of "shock therapy" from austerity since 2010 has been more a "slow-burner", where social problems have accumulated only gradually, until the issue reaches public awareness on the streets in the form of mass rough sleeping, and in local councils going bankrupt through a combination of mismanagement and lack of funding. A "Hard Brexit" scenario would be sudden and on a scale hard to comprehend, given its lack of precedent.
This is a situation that has the hallmarks of a government willing to preside over a society where some parts of it almost resemble a "failed state". Except this is one where the government seems to want to fail.

Numbers of rough sleepers in the UK: a more detailed look at "Britain's shame"

A recent report that looked at the number of rough sleepers in England revealed a bleak portrait of this too-often overlooked side of British society. In many ways, it seems to be the national "shame" that many people would rather turn their eyes away from on the street.


A bleak picture

In general, the numbers of rough sleepers in the country are rising everywhere, and in some places at an alarming (and thus highly-visible) rate. A more detailed look at the national spread of rough sleeping in the country can tell us which towns and cities, and which parts of the country, have the highest proportionate numbers. This might also tell us something about the nature of those areas and what is happening beneath the surface.

London's levels of rough sleeping have been well-documented, so I'd like to focus on the areas of the UK outside of the capital. This is not to downplay the bleak reality that thousands of rough sleepers have in London; I simply want this article to focus on the rest of the UK (although what's happening in London may well be linked to what's also happening outside of it).
In England, the major cities that have the highest numbers of rough sleepers relative to their size are Bristol, Nottingham and Manchester. Birmingham also has at least several dozen rough sleepers, though given the sprawling size of the city (as the second biggest in England), the numbers are slightly lower than the even higher levels seen in the first three cities listed, that have markedly smaller populations compared to Birmingham (such as the shocking rates seen in Nottingham in particular).

Outside of the major conurbations, rough sleeping has rocketed in a swathe of towns and small cities across England, in the South in particular, and this is the most visible illustration of the problem. The interactive graphic in the BBC link highlighted at the top shows a picture of rough sleeping now reaching epidemic proportions in the south-east (i.e. surrounding the wider London conurbation) and along south coast of England.
Along the south coast towns, there are a string of places such as Hastings, Eastbourne, Brighton, Portsmouth, Bournemouth and even Weymouth(!) and Exeter that all are experiencing extremely high levels of rough sleeping.
Meanwhile, there are a whole host of towns in the wider South-East (within commuter distance of London) that have the same, shocking numbers of rough sleepers: going clockwise from the Thames estuary, places like Southend, Maidstone, Canterbury, Reading, Slough, Swindon, and Oxford, Luton and Bedford all have extremely high numbers of rough sleepers relative to their size. Even Cambridge. Of those, Bedford, Luton and Southend stand out as having the highest propertions of all, given these are only medium-sized towns. What makes this all the more shocking is that the numbers of rough sleepers in these smaller Southern towns are much higher than even in much larger cities elsewhere in the UK. For instance, there are far more rough sleepers in Bedford than there are in Newcastle. Why this might be the case will be looked at later.

There are some details that appear to defy easy explanation, at least to the layman. For some reason, Lincoln also has an especially-large rough sleeper population, given the small size of the city. On the other hand, there are parts of England like the North-East whose rough sleeper numbers, while they have certainly seen a marked rise in recent times, seem fairly modest compared to the disproportionately much larger numbers in the the towns in the South. This seems somehow anomalous (though of course in a positive way), especially given the long-term problems within unemployment and poverty that that North-east has suffered.

Like in all the UK, numbers in Wales and Scotland have increased markedly, but compared to Wales and Scotland, England seems to have a disproportionately-bigger problem with rough sleeping, especially in the South. The question is: why?


Sinking to the bottom

Traditionally, the reasons for rough sleeping, at least at an individual level, can be many, but the most common ones seem to be problems with mental health, drug and alcohol dependency. However, as any expert would tell you, the last two reasons mentioned are usually tied with the first: mental health.
People who become drug and/or alcohol dependent can reach this state for a variety of reasons, but again, experts will tell you that they often reach that state through issues of family breakdown (often at a young age), and all the horrid side-effects that come with that. Put another way, these are people who have resorted to drink or drugs - "self-medication" -  as the way to escape their real-life nightmare. The same is true in any "sink estate" around the country; it's simply that those who become rough sleepers are in an even worse state of affairs, where they feel they have nowhere to go and so decide to cut themselves off from normal society.
So we can say with some certainty that those who "self medicate" are people who use drink or drugs to deal with mental health issues of one form or another. Also, another reason that many of these refuse to stay in hostels is that they "cut themselves off" in order to break their dependency. As some hostels can be riven with other "dependent" homeless with a ready supply of drink or drugs, some rough sleepers fall into a cycle of refusing beds in these institutions precisely because they don't want to fall back into the dependency cycle. Whether or not this rationale makes sense, or works, is another matter.

Apart from the "traditional" reasons for homelessness (and rough sleeping), an increasingly-common reason these days is simply being evicted by their landlord due to financial hardship. And this is not because of financial mismanagement, but simply being unable to make the money coming in (from work or welfare support) pay for everything. These people may well not have mental health issues at all, and have become rough sleepers for other reasons - shame (at feeling the need to admit their own sense of "failure" to family and peers); perseverance (feeling that they are just experiencing a "temporary setback" which will soon be overcome); or simply lack of other options (no close family network or friends to fall back on).


A stripped-down state

But for rough sleepers who are there for whatever reason, the buck stops with the government, and the spike in rough sleeping can be firmly laid at the government's door, for a number of reasons.

The traditional tendency for rough sleeping to be something associated with those with mental health problems goes back to the government's failure on dealing with mental health. This has been a problem for decades - exacerbated with Thatcher's "care in the community" - but has got far worse since the government began its cutbacks to mental health services across the board under David Cameron. Now local authorities no longer have the funding for local care of those with mental health issues, leaving them to fend for themselves. It's not surprising that the result is a spike in homelessness, for all the reasons mentioned earlier.
The government's "reforms" to welfare provision have impacted the money received by those with mental health issues (see above), creating financial insecurity where before there was at least some kind of safety net. Now these people are finding they are slipping though the net, and left to fend for themselves. From the rough sleeping figures, we know where that can lead.
Likewise, other welfare reforms, such as Universal Credit, are causing a surge in financial insecurity, not only for those who are the most vulnerable in society, but those who are also in work. This insecurity is what is feeding the rise in evictions, and thus rough sleeping.
Lastly, the government's "light touch" attitude to regulation has meant that the nature of work and housing has become more insecure. With local government budgets slashed, there is not enough money for local councils to enforce the regulations on employers and landlords that do exist; meanwhile, the government is doing little to encourage employers and landlords to change their often exploitative behaviour. All this means that there is added financial pressure on workers and tenants, making it all the more likely that they are just one "crisis" away from losing their job and/or eviction.

This kind of environment also makes it more likely that people will develop mental health issues and/or a dependency on drink or drugs, and into the downward spiral that too easily leads to rough sleeping by the other route.


An "English dystopia"?

It is this environment of exploitation and government indifference that is causing the rise in rough sleeping.
One final issue worth exploring is looking for an explanation to the geographical spread of rough sleeping in England. One thing that hits us, from a sociological point of view, about where rough sleeping is proportionately the highest, is the type of towns they are. The three that seem to have the highest proportions - Luton, Bedford and Southend - are towns that have done badly since the "de-industrialisation" of thirty years ago and are in a part of the country with a high rate of inequality. In my view, it is both these factors (poverty and inequality) that have contributed, and both working in tandem that exacerbate the problem. These are places that feel ignored, exploited and cheated by the centre, and are politically ripe ground for extremism.
As homelessness is seemingly a result of mental health and/or economic factors (that cause a "collapse" in the person's mental and economic stability; see also "crime"), it would seem logical that it is the towns and cities in the country with people most subjected to these factors that are most likely to have high rates of rough sleeping.
The combination of the two factors above (poverty matched with inequality) go some way to explaining why London, the wider South-east and the South coast have the highest rates of rough sleeping. Places like the North-east may have smaller proportions because the levels of inequality are less than in the South-east, even if the rate of poverty is more. Although the picture is complex, it is possible that the social bonds in places like the North-east are stronger due to lower levels of inequality, and this may account somewhat for the differences in the rates of rough sleeping.

Apart from the sociological factors, and how much a local council's social services budget has been cut, there is also the sad truth that some of these towns in the South are within commuter distance to and from London, and therefore it is relatively inexpensive for overwhelmed London councils to simply "export" these homeless to more far-flung, relatively isolated, towns.
That way, it becomes someone else's problem, and another aspect of the "English dystopia" that parts of the country have come to resemble under Theresa May.

An ABC of immorality: From Austerity to Brexit and Carillion

Morality is a political issue, and different sides of the political spectrum tend to see what is "moral" and "immoral" in a different way. To say that something is "immoral" is to make a judgement on another person's behaviour i.e. that what someone else is doing is "wrong" and harmful.

Politics enters the equation when you answer the question: "wrong" to who? For example, conservative morality (what many would call "traditional values") teaches us that homosexuality is "immoral", while capital punishment is not. Liberal morality would consider the former to be neither moral nor immoral (as it is private behaviour and not "harmful" to anyone else), while the latter (capital punishment) would be immoral as a form of state-sanctioned murder, apart from its ineffectiveness as a deterrent. In this way, liberals would see the traditionalists' view of morality as more emotional that rational: capital punishment is "moral" because it makes traditionalists "feel good"; likewise, homosexuality is "immoral" because it makes traditionalists "feel bad". For moral traditionalists, it is not about what is better for society, but what makes them feel better themselves. It is a form of moral imposition of their perspective on the rest of society. While traditionalists always couch their morality in the perspective of what is meant to be better for everyone, the reality is that they are imposing their morality, in dictating what they think others must and must not do. This "moral imposition" has been displayed in its most sadistic form in the territories controlled by ISIS.

Traditionalists in Britain see the liberal changes in social policy, such as the legalisation of gay marriage, to be a sign of the country's immorality. It is not coincidence that there is a large overlap in the same people who oppose gay marriage also being against EU membership, and against policies such as foreign aid, while also believing that a large proportion of welfare recipients are "scroungers".
From a liberal perspective, what traditionalists see as "wrong" are nothing of the sort; meanwhile, the real problems that exist in society (such as poverty, crime and social disparity) are explained by traditionalists as being down to individual decisions; choices that people have decided to make. Those at the top of the pile are there on merit, and therefore their behaviour is automatically considered more "moral" than those at the bottom.

Put in this perspective, both liberals and traditionalists in contemporary Britain may well think that the country has entered a pit of moral lassitude and denigration, but for very different reasons.

The symbolism of decline, decay and a rotten state slowly falling to pieces seems to run through Theresa May's government.
It was the Grenfell Tower fire that seemed a physical symbol this. The fact that this fire happened due to a careless attitude towards the rules, as well as a careless attitude towards residents' safety, epitomises all that is morally wrong with modern Britain. The rules, so it seemed, were only there "for show": the many loopholes in the system in place demonstrated how little those in charge of the systems in place really cared. What mattered was the appearance of safety, the appearance of following the rules. Then there are other examples related to Grenfell, that demonstrate the sheer "fuck you" attitude prevalent in some of the elite towards those less fortunate than themselves.
The immorality of those in the elite in Britain is now becoming more and more transparent. There was a time when their views were expressed in private, knowing that they would face a rightful barrage of criticism if they were ever leaked out to the wider public; now these immoral ("non-PC") views are expressed openly. In this way, the immoral elite are lauded by some parts of the press for "saying it how it is".


"Moral regression"

The liberalisation of society and the progress towards a more moral (i.e. considerate) view of dealing with others such as minorities is now facing a strong push-back from traditionalists, who support the regressive agenda driven by UKIP. The financial crisis seems to have been the hinge point on this "moral regression". Up to that point, David Cameron had supported many aspects of the progressive social agenda of the governing Labour Party, including its stance on public spending. But the financial crisis saw him opportunistically support "austerity" as a way to differentiate his party, and create a real "moral" difference between their visions.
Put in this perspective, "austerity" was labelled as a "moral" act, as a way to restore the traditional values of society. Aside from his progressive agenda on issue like gay marriage, on the issue of "austerity" and its wider social effect, Cameron became almost puritanical in his use of this agenda as a way to remodel the morality of British society. However, the reality of this agenda, in meaning to reduce public spending as a deliberate act to change society, was to make society more unequal.

As "austerity" has now caused councils to radically scale back on the kinds of services they can provide, the day-to-day reality has meant less money to maintain street lighting, clean the streets and collect rubbish. And that's just the things that can be seen on the surface. When the same agenda is applied to the criminal justice system, the result is more crime. When it is applied to the welfare system - such as through "reforms" like Universal Credit and changes to other benefits - the result is more poverty; poverty that means that some people cannot even afford to properly eat, or afford to live in proper accommodation. The visible effect of this is a huge spike in homelessness and rough sleeping. The effect of "austerity" has been to make some parts of the country resemble a "failed state".
This is the real "moral" effect of austerity, and this agenda is pushed even further by those who support Brexit. The case for leaving the EU was put into words that made it seem like a divine cause ("Take Back Control!"); the EU was seen as an "immoral" institution that was undemocratic and destroyed Britain's ability to manage its own affairs. The EU was seen as the reason for many of Britain's ills; the reason that many parts of the UK felt ignored was (apparently) because of the EU.
This campaign was based on deceit and exploitation of people's genuine fears to further the agenda of an immoral few. After David Cameron had used his position as Prime Minister to gamble the future of the country on a party dispute, Theresa May grabbed hold of the "Brexit Agenda" to cement her own place in power.


A moral nadir?

Theresa May has presided over perhaps the most immoral British government in living memory. At a personal level, May's only quality as a politician seems to be able to disseminate, abusing the use of the English language in order to communicate garbage. All of her apparent "strengths" are merely a sign of her lack of empathy, while she sits in Downing Street as the "zombie Prime Minister". In the first phase of her premiership, the day-to-day running of her office was done by two advisers who everyone else was terrified of and who seemed to be ones really in charge. After losing the election she called, they were sacked, and her government continued only due to a billion-pound payment (in effect, a "bribe") to the DUP. As this was a payment whose effect was simply to keep May in power, the moral denigration of government had thus reached new depths.
This was going on at the same time as the Grenfell fire, while the Brexit negotiations that went on through the latter half of the year were being ran from Britain by a government whose strategy seemed designed to madden its European partners in its incoherence, double-dealing and dishonesty. Meanwhile, the government was treating parliament with contempt over its handling of Brexit.

By the time that three ministers had resigned (or been sacked) in the space of seven weeks due to various personal and professional failings, nothing seemed surprising any more. Even the fact that in the first of those resignations, the Defence Secretary was succeeded by a man who kept a pet tarantula in his parliamentary office, felt like something that was to be expected of a former Chief Whip. The "freak show" of personalities that now run the government, while parliament legislates in a building that is literally falling apart (and is a fire hazard) is emblematic of the moral collapse at the heart of the country.

Apart from the slow-motion train-wreck that is Brexit, the news about Carillion's collapse explained how broken the government-backed system of "crony capitalism" really is. This is a system that literally makes no economic sense to the government, other than to give the appearance of private sector success, while appearing to save the government money. Like with the fake system of health and safety in place at Grenfell, PFI is another "fake" system. Carillion ran its business like a Ponzi scheme, with each new contract paying for the last one. This follows the same path as has happened in other sectors, like energy and transport.
Lies and the facade of following the rules are what runs through how contemporary Britain seems to be ran. The housing market in London is supported by dirty money from Russia, the Middle East and elsewhere. The tax system is there only "for show", as the rich know all the loopholes they can use to avoid it, leaving it to the "little people" to be the ones that follow the rules. The only "moral" people, it seems, are those not rich enough to know how to exploit everyone else.

Austerity and Brexit Britain: "managed decline" or destroying the state?

The term "managed decline" when referred to Britain has been banded around for decades, ever since the end of the Second World War also marked the beginning of the end of its Empire. Joining the then EEC was about banding together with other European nations as a way to recognise the reality of Britain's diminished status as its Imperial status fell away. Since then, and in the last thirty years especially, Britain has seen a "restructuring" of the economy away from those sectors that effectively relied on its Imperial status for its survival and towards a service and finance-centred economy that was more dynamic to modern demands.
That "restructuring" is what the Tory Libertarians in government see as Britain's future. They see Britain outside the UK acting as a "Singapore-On-Thames", free from the shackles of EU regulation, free to trade with developing economies around the world; a "stripped-down" state that encourages its labour force to be forward-thinking and proactive about the country's challenges.

This vision is as delusional about the future as it is dishonest about the past. Just to name one example, the environment secretary, Michael Gove, is now talking about how the government ought to in the future grant subsidies to allow fields to return to their natural, wild state. As he claims, the CAP benefits wealthy landowners to provide perverse outcomes to agriculture. Thus, "Brexit Britain" will be about returning some of the countryside to its pre-industrial state.
This kind of policy would be considered laughable, except that this is a policy recommended by the chief minister responsible for agriculture. It is certainly true that the current rules benefit landowners; but to suggest that the answer would be for the government to pay for land to left deliberately unused is, for one, financial suicide from the government's point of view, and two, an utterly inefficient use of a commodity when the country will need to make money from all the land it can get after Britain leaves the EU. This "solution" also offers nothing on the much bigger issue of how much of the land in the UK is owned by a tiny number of people.

In other words, the government identifies a problem, then recommends the worst possible "solution". This has been a trend in this government for years. Other examples include the subsidies that the government pay to the privatised train companies (some of which are owned by foreign governments); the subsides paid to the privatised energy companies (some of which are also owned by foreign governments); the money now paid to universities by government in the form of student loans (much of which will remain unpaid) to pay for its policy of hugely-increased tuition fees. Then there are the numerous companies that the government "outsource" to in various capacities, from the justice system (prisons and detention centres), to the welfare system, and so on. These companies then almost always do the job that government did in a far more incompetent manner, because they have much tighter overheads to worry about (even with government assistance).

To pay for all this corporate largess, one solution the government came up with was "austerity". In the government's (false) narrative, the financial crisis was the result of the Labour government's overspending. Therefore, the Conservative government's main priority was to reduce government spending in any way it could. This also served the wider purpose of fitting in with the Libertarian agenda close to the heart of some in government, including those also in favour of Brexit. In this way, "austerity" was a means to an end: about permanently changing the perception in society that government was a reliable "safety net".
Cameron's idea of the "Big Society", formed prior to his conversion to the "austerity" agenda, was originally about the community helping out those in trouble, in order to help government. Instead, the "Big Society" under an "austerity" government has become a sick joke: where Food Banks are established in order to help those who cannot even afford to properly feed themselves (even those in work!), thanks to the government's own policies. In this manner, the government now praising the "Big Society" during a time of government-imposed austerity is a little like being attacked on the street, to then see the attacker later visiting the hospital where you are being treated for your injuries, in order to praise the staff for their work! The "austerity agenda" has spread into the welfare state, so that thanks to changes to disability assessment and the introduction of Universal Credit, more and more people are now unable to afford simple essentials, and some are homeless as well as starving.


A "failed state"?

In this way, aspects of Britain under the Conservative government have took on the appearance of a "failed state": where the government has effectively wiped its hands clean of whole areas of civil government and social welfare. Local governments are now deliberately starved of cash, with the result that essentials like bin collection and street lighting (without even mentioning the closing of "non-essential" things like local libraries) have been downgraded due to lack of money. Parts of the country look increasingly grubby and ill-maintained precisely because central government refuses to provide the cash. Meanwhile, the nakedly-visible increase of homelessness seen on the streets is the marker of a government that is failing its citizens.
Bear in mind again, these are conscious decisions by central government: they are choosing to do this. The money could be found if it wanted it; it simply chooses not to find it, and chooses to allow these services to wither.
In other areas such as policing and the prison service, cuts to funding have a direct consequence on public safety: the increase in violence and street crime is there for all to see, while the police state openly that certain crimes (like petty theft) will go un-investigated because they simply lack the resources. In prisons, violence is reaching levels closer to those seen in the developing world, rather than those expected for a G7 country.
Meanwhile cuts to defence also have reduced the country's ability to even properly monitor its own borders, let alone its involvement in overseas engagements. Vanity projects like the huge aircraft carriers now being put into service simply act as concrete evidence that the government is more interested in vain distractions than the reality of Britain's pygmy-like status on the military front, compared to its rivals.

The "austerity agenda" has now morphed into the "Brexit Agenda" since the referendum, but the goals are almost identical, in terms of its internal impact on the country.
The Libertarians in government behind the "austerity agenda" are the same people behind "Hard Brexit". They believe in a stripped-down state because their faith in the free market comes above all else, and clouds their judgement over the positive effects that government can have on society. Because they believe that free market will always do things better than government, it follows that for their agenda to succeed, "government", by definition, must be seen to "fail". If government is seen as efficient, this hampers their agenda for the free market to take the place of government services. To give one example, the success of the temporarily re-nationalised "East Coast" train service is an "inconvenient truth" that goes against their belief that privatised rail must, by definition, be better than state-owned rail. The fact that no other countries in the world operate train services like they are done in the UK (because it is seen by outsiders as madness) is besides the point. Following this logic, only if society sees that government cannot function will society believe that the private sector is better than the public sector.
The government's agenda is to prove to society that government cannot work. As they see it, this is the only way that people at the lowest rungs of society can be pulled from their torpor of dependency - the toughest form of "tough love". If the result from this agenda is mass poverty, homelessness, an epidemic of crime and a breakdown of the social fabric, this is just a "means to an end".

Put in this light, the "Brexit Agenda's" advocates inside government are working to effectively bring down parts of the system of civil administration from within. It is about destroying faith in government by deliberately destroying government. Because its advocates are from a wealthy elite that pays for services that it does not use (such as the welfare state), the predictions of economic collapse following a "Hard Brexit" perversely work in their favour, as a trashed economy would be ripe for the picking. This also explains why, on the other hand, those in the corporate elite who are the beneficiaries of government largess (while the rest of society gets a metaphorical kicking) are tied to those in government. The corrupt connection between Westminster, Whitehall and the corporate elite, through the common thread of the establishment, explains all this.

The largess promised on the landed elite after Brexit, like the example Michael Gove has given, is another form of patronage in a broken system. The "managed decline" that was first seen after the Second World War was, for some parts of the country, not rectified by being in the EU, but was used by the Thatcher government and its successors as an excuse to "restructure" a society stripped of union power. This explains why there are parts of the country, in the North of England and South Wales, that look more like a kind of urban dystopia, plagued with under-investment, unemployment, ill health and crime.
This policy of deliberate "managed decline" is another facet of the "stripped-down" version of the state envisaged by some Brexiteers. The parts of the country (and the economy) that are dynamic should be encouraged; the parts that are not should be allowed naturally to "die". This is a form of Social Darwinism by another name.

Whether the advocates of this agenda are dangerously delusional or deliberately dishonest is unclear; but the outcome for the rest of society from this agenda is as clear as day.