The British government's "Command and Control" Coronavirus omni-shambles

The news that the 400,000 items of PPE the UK government ordered from Turkey had to be sent back is somehow befitting of an institution that has been shown to be clueless in their actions.

The government's systematic incompetence is made worse by its own dissemination, equaled by the way in which criticism of its actions is framed as being unhelpful or biased, as though a time of crisis should somehow absolve the government of accountability. In Hungary for example, that is indeed exactly the government's position.

Within the overall sense of chaos at the centre, the government has failed in almost every area of public health. The chaos over PPE provision is followed by the ventilator supply chaos, where the the ventilators asked for haven't met the government's standards, partly due to misunderstanding. The fact that these haven't been needed may well be a reprieve in one sense, though the fact that there have been thousands of elderly dying in care homes rather than being taken to hospital dampens any remote sense of "success" in the ventilators asked for not being used.

This comes on top of the closure of the London Nightingale hospital, which is marked as a sign of "success", while at the same time highlighting the unused beds there that could have been used for those dying in care homes, or the many "excess deaths" that are happening in the community as a result of people not going to any hospital at all. The hospitals opened for Covid-19 patients are not being used for their presumed purpose, while general hospitals are seeing far fewer non Covid-19 patients. The overall "excess deaths" tell us the story on that.

Then there is the testing fiasco. The "100,000 tests a day by the end of April" was only reached by fiddling the figures, and testing has since fell back to its previous modest levels. Within that, there are stories of tests being lost, poor communication, and so on.
The government is beginning to implement the system that South Korea had for "test, track and trace", albeit two months late, when it becomes a great deal more difficult to implement effectively. The small-scale trial testing system on the Isle of Wight has software issues, as well as being of questionable use when it requires close contact with people (i.e. breaking social distancing rules) in order to pass on information around the community.

The overall picture, then, is one of a government out of its depth. The rest of the world has been looking on at this level of incompetence in disbelief, while the government-friendly side of the media has been keen to deflect blame (NHS staff apparently being more likely to support Labour, so they are therefore "biased" against the government) or to gloss over the ongoing disaster entirely, with stories about Boris Johnson's bravery when in hospital, for example.


A hierarchy set up to fail

One of the key linking elements in this institutional incompetence is the organisation of government itself, and the ingrained thinking within government figures that any kind of crisis such as this must be "led from the centre". To be fair, this is a view that has been held within government for decades, but is especially true of the conservative wing.
It's best to understand England in particular as a historically hierarchical society, with its "public school" education system being the most important method of maintaining power within a limited core of society. By this thinking, power remains within the overall hands of  "the establishment": a loose social grouping of like-minded and similarly-educated people. Through their shared social connections, those in "the establishment" use the media, politics, and the arts to maintain their insidious grip on society. Those in society outside their esteemed group often have no idea why the lives of so many in Britain are set up to fail from birth, but merely take it fatalistically as their lot in life. This is the idea.

In George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four", the party operative O'Brien said "the purpose of power is power". With Britain, the Conservative government's rationale is similar. They believe they are the "natural party of government", and so their own incompetence is dismissed as something that couldn't be helped. Their natural assumption is that, as their own education has come from being part of the elite, anyone else in charge could only do an even worse job.
Their incompetence, though, stems from the corrupt nature of the hierarchy, with people being promoted far beyond their capabilities. Personal loyalty and ideological purity are the key to career advancement; competence and intelligence are merely coincidental. The so-called "elite" is no more intelligent than any other person in society, and in many cases, much less intelligent. You only have to look at how badly departments are ran by their ministers.

In many ways, England's historical hierarchy continues into politics today, with much of the media's portrayal of Westminster as a latter-day "medieval court", with daily reporting of metaphorical "palace intrigue" the norm. Many of these journalists being from the same "elite" background as the politicians, those selfsame journalists often seek public office themselves (such as the Prime Minister and his deputy, to name just two). This is just one illustration of the corrupting nature of the hierarchy, and explains a lot behind the motivation of the popular press.

So understanding the effect all this has on the government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, we can see that the government's own prejudice is to centralize control: for power to effective, the government's own hierarchical prejudice means that it is loathe to relinquish decision-making to those it doesn't trust. By this rationale, the only time it might feasibly relinquish control down the chain of command would be to undermine confidence in those lower down (i.e. only give others power to make sure they screw it up).
For example, one of the problems NHS England has had in obtaining PPE during the Covid-19 pandemic is due to the byzantine fracturing of the decision-making process. This fracturing happened when the government "reformed" the NHS in the early years of the Coalition. What was meant to be a decentralizing "reform" of a top-heavy institution turned it into one with thousands more middle managers. Now with dozens of smaller NHS authorities chasing after the same PPE, the result has been chaos and in-fighting within the NHS, all as a result of the "reforms" the Conservative government carried out during Cameron's tenure. One assumes this effect wasn't intentional, but by making decentralization a by-word for chaos, it boosts the government's own hierarchical prejudice for its own ends.

By contrast, Germany's federal structure has been to its advantage in this public health crisis. Its form of decentralizing power is designed for flexibility; unlike the British institution, where the government seems to make sure that decentralizing can only result in chaos and incompetence. The British government's own prejudice is for "Command and Control", to assume that only central government can have all the information or the key expertise, and against allowing others lower down in the pecking order the agency to make decisions on the spot. This all comes from the country's historical hierarchy.

In this public health crisis, this effect is deadly.


 

Inequality, injustice, social divisions and Brexit: an expression of Nihilistic rage?

Perhaps one of the cruelest forms of psychological torture is to be educated but poor, living within an unequal and unjust society. Trapped inside a body that instinctively craves for more, requiring intellectual and creative advancement, but is held back by the invisible walls of society, such a person can easily become a burning mass of resentment. Black people know all about this in America, and the historical source of their resentment is well-known.

In England, the historical source of resentment is the injustices carved into the class system. The pride in the British (and in particular, the English) flag that some of the white working class there have feels especially ironic, given that the flag represents the same system of injustice that has existed there for a thousand years. The education system is designed to entrench social divisions within society, with the only way to get an education that is worthy of the name meaning you have to pay for it.

Born into the wrong background, and your intellect is simply wasted; this is the most basic meaning of “injustice”: to have something useful to offer society, but to have your productivity and intellect deliberately repressed by the barriers of the social system. Meanwhile, those whose intellect is objectively inferior and whose nature is less productive, are indulged by a system that rewards the fate of their wealthier parentage; this is the most basic meaning of social immorality and corruption, where the poverty of the poor is exploited by those who fear losing the injustices that keep them in their place. 

“Know Your Place”

Libertarians argue that such injustices would, over time, equal out under a free market; that intellect would naturally balance against any inequalities in the system. But this can only be true in a system where there is equal opportunity; where the rich have an equal opportunity to fail as the poor have to succeed. There is no such system in place in America, let alone in England.

In England, the social system is designed to instill a sense of “knowing your place”; a Westernized and more genteel version of India’s caste system. The historical injustices and prejudices within society were one reason people settled in America in the first place, it should be remembered, and the “American dream” still exists there in people’s hearts regardless of the harsher reality. In England, no-one really pretends that such a “dream” ever existed; only the myths that were projected by its ruling elite, with Churchill being among its most famous polemicists. Even during the days of Empire, the best way for people born there to thrive was to leave Britain itself and seek out a life in one of the overseas “colonies”.

This explains why some people still have nostalgia for the Empire, and see Brexit through the same revisionist lens. The “Empire” was seen as a success because people had somewhere else than Britain where they could make a stab at being successful. This explains why the Scots were among the most resourceful of pioneers and colonists; given the dearth of opportunity (and the ingrained prejudice) at home, they sought a more just chance at success overseas.

So when the empire began to fall apart after the Second World War, and the “homeland” itself became a destination for the “colonials”, the irony (and sense of injustice) was not long in being felt by the “natives”. That same sense of bitter injustice was the root of the racism that greeted those who came from overseas to settle in Britain; not a country with streets paved in gold, but a country with inhabitants that brooded in quiet resentment. Wind the clock on several decades, and that same brooding resentment is felt in many parts of the country; the source of it is the historical injustices mentioned at the very start that were never put right.

Deaths of Despair  

     

Industrialisation led to parts of Britain that had never known prosperity and productivity becoming more prosperous and productive than some towns closer to the capital itself. Added on with the effect of empire and a captive (and advantageous) overseas market, in spite of the still-entrenched inequality, the whole of the country seemed to be thriving.

After the Second World War, the trend that had led to some parts of the country losing their primary purpose of existence began to accelerate. Still trapped in the embrace of a fundamentally unjust social system, post-industrial Britain lacked the dynamism to find a sustainable economic model. Instead, the ruling elite turned to Libertarian morality.

The British economy is, in fact, slowly dying. Britain lacks a sustainable economic model for the 21st century. Creating an economic structure that relies almost entirely on collating power and wealth within the capital, it allows the rest of the country to atrophy; returning Britain to the same structural inequalities that existed prior to Industrialisation. Due to the corrupt injustices of its social structure, those in power lack the intellect to deal with the issues rationally, instead only seeing the issue through the lens of protecting their own interests. They would rather ignore the rest of the country’s suffering and resentment – thus not dealing with the issue rationally – and deal with the consequences of that resentment as and when necessary. This is the archetype of reactionary thinking.

The result of that reactionary thinking has seen towns and cities across the country to slip into a kind of slow-motion social breakdown. These are the “deaths of despair” – of suicide or through the self-abuse of poor diet, over-drinking or drugs – that have seen a growth over the last few decades, and a surge in recent years. These are places that literally have no future; their economy has ceased to have an identifiable function, and the government doesn’t care enough (or lacks the intellect) to do anything about it.

In this sense, the future of post-industrial Britain may well follow the (nihilistic) prediction that the Conservative government made forty years ago: there are places in the country that will simply be allowed to wither and die. Such a sociopathic level of indifference is a damning indictment of Britain’s social structure, and there is a valid question to ask whether this structure’s own future is finite as well. How long will it be before the corruption at the top becomes so entrenched and so reactionary that it either eventually over-reaches or runs out of steam entirely?

Nihilistic Rage

There is a narrative (which has some merits) that the Brexit vote was the result of years of accumulated social frustration at the inequalities that had been allowed to fester within Britain, and England in particular. This is an over-simplification, as the vote would not have been possible without an at least equal sense of spoiled entitlement from the Middle classes of England’s rural heart also choosing to believe in a form of nostalgic revivalism, where a mythical cultural homogeneity could be restored. A more accurate representation would be to see the Brexit vote as reflecting both of these contradictory and opposing ideas;such contradictions only being possible in such an unequal society at Britain.

This social inequality explains the attraction of Brexit to those who feel they have no future. As they were told migration and the EU were responsible for their sense of resentment and despair, they turn to the politics of anger as the only way left that explains how they feel, regardless of who is peddling the message and what agenda might lie behind it. In this way, the "politics of anger" is also a manifestation of the nihilistic sense of having no future. If you have no future, you can easily become indifferent to what happens to everyone else now; as far as those people are concerned, they might well be happy to metaphorically let it all go to hell, if it would allow them at least a moment of grim satisfaction at seeing everyone else brought down to their level. These people seem to have become so nihilistic, they don't even care about their own future well-being: they simply want to have a single moment of feeling in control, even if all they want to do is press the self-destruct button.

This explains why the surge towards Nigel Farage's "Brexit Party" is at its most sudden and most incomprehensible in the parts of the country that would be the worst hit by the kind of "no deal" Brexit he advocates: the deprived post-industrial areas of Britain where there is already little in the way of a sustainable local economy. These areas are simply past caring; when you've already hit what feels like rock-bottom, outsiders telling you things will be terrible just sound as though they lack any ability to see things from your point of view. 

It is this psychological separation that is another manifestation of Britain's social divisions; parts of the country that economically and socially feels as though they are on a different plane of existence, as though "the centre" simply doesn't even know they exist.

This is how Britain has become such an object of morbid fascination to outsiders; hypnotized by the spectacle of self-destructive madness that is taking control of events: the all-consuming "black hole" that everyone seems to be dragged into.

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.

Brexit and the parallels of WW1: a study in complacency

For all the many commemorations of the events of the First World War that have happened in recent years, what the media have spent little time looking at are the lessons learned from the events leading up the the outbreak of war, and how the war itself was conducted.
This blogger's own study of Kaiser Wilhelm (and his connection with Turkey's Enver Pasha) tells us how important the psychology of those in power can have such a great effect on outcomes; literally, making the difference between life and death, war and peace. The contemporary parallels with Donald Trump - and any potential comparisons with "Kaiser Bill" - are interesting in themselves, as they tell us how easy it is for dysfunctional personalities in positions of power to attract other like-minded misfits. Thus they create a dangerously-combustible administration, both for each other as well as everyone else.

Christopher Clark's "The Sleepwalkers" is one of the best studies of the run-up to the First World War, in terms of his analysis of the personalities and interpersonal interactions involved, as well as the wider context.
Related to this, "The Ottoman Endgame" (by Sean McMeekin, published in 2015) tells us the tale of the Ottoman Empire's last thirty or so years of life. British hostilities during the war are explained in excellent detail, and one passage of the book describes the misguided thinking behind the British government's decision to attack the Dardanelles straights and the Gallipoli peninsula. A hundred years on, in the current shambolic context of Brexit, it's hard not to be struck by the author's choice of words:

"The doctrinal conception of the Dardanelles campaign was still in flux when the naval bombardment began. At some level, there was an element of wishful, almost magical thinking involved. Churchill may or may not have really told Kitchener that the campaign would be won with the super-dreadnought (Queen Elizabeth) with her "astounding effectiveness" and "marvelous potentialities". But he did insist that the fleet could get through on its own. As for Kitchener, he changed his mind more often than anyone else. On the day of the bombardment, Kitchener insisted that an amphibious operation at Alexandretta (on the Mediterranean coast) was preferable"

The use of the McMeekin's phrase "magical thinking" cannot have been one purloined from the current Brexit mess, as this book was written long before the referendum campaign even started. But what this passage tells us is how complacency is the hallmark of all policy disasters. Not only that, but the strategic indecision that the British government were in over their campaign against the Ottomans a hundred years ago is mirrored by that of the current government over Brexit.
In this blogger's previous post, we looked some of at the Second World War myths that surround British identity, and marked out Churchill's elevation to that of historical icon as being particularly misguided. In effect, his role as Prime Minister during WW2 rehabilitated his discredited image from that known during WW1 and afterwards (as well as the morally-questionable actions taken when Prime Minister). But what everyone remembers today is that the man on the current Five Pound Note was a national hero.


The Sleepwalkers

This brings me to the personalities of the current government, and how they compare to the personalities in government a hundred years ago, sleepwalking as they are into a national crisis.
The fact that Boris Johnson has written a biography on Churchill, and the fact that he fancies himself as an articulate writer and orator in the same mould, tells us all we need to know. Interestingly, Boris' rise to the highest levels of government (The FCO) in his early fifties mirrors that of Churchill's at the same period in his life (when he was Chancellor in the Baldwin government in the 1920s). Boris seems to dominate political life in government in the same manner that Churchill did back in the 1920s, when, like Boris, he was an often exasperating figure.
Apart from the opportunistic Foreign Secretary, other prominent self-serving cads include the recently-elevated Gavin Williamson (now Defence Secretary). Meanwhile, there are Liam Fox and David Davis, whose attitude to Brexit and its intricacies is the complacent belief that somehow everything will work out fine, using solutions to problems that have never been tried before, and blithely expecting the EU to accept all this on trust. Sajid Javid, the new Home Secretary, seems to see Brexit through the same distorted free-market lens as Fox and Davis, where the potential opportunities that Brexit presents are given much greater weight than the far more real difficulties that leaving the single market brings to the economy. As with Gallipoli a hundred years ago, "magical thinking" is the norm.
It might be fair to summarize the rest of the personalities in government as being either a) clueless and complacent, or b) horrified but silent. The silence comes from the necessity to maintain the illusion of unity in government, by repeatedly delaying the required debate. And at the head of all this is Theresa May.

It is May, and her personality, that is perpetuating the absurdity of government inertia. Everything about her personality seems fatally unsuited for the deadly-serious task at hand: what has been called her "dull-witted rigidity" in refusing to reverse her decision to leave the single market and customs union; her reactionary instinct to close down debate; her small-minded parochialism that prevents her from seeing an outsiders' perspective; her naturally-conservative aversion to embrace a challenge or take a real risk.
All these factors come together to create a perpetual lethargy in government, where her administration is now a hostage to events. Instead, it somehow hopes that the EU itself will provide the answers to Britain's problems, from the unresolved (unsolvable?) Irish border, to a relationship with the EU that will be both outside the customs union but provides easy access to the single market. It is no wonder that Brussels is losing patience with such arrogance. Meanwhile, the arrogance is magnified as the British government treats the Irish position on the intractable border issue as though simply because Britain is bigger than Ireland, Britain must get its way. According to Britain, Ireland and the EU should help Britain to solve the problems it created for itself. Meanwhile, EU support for the Irish position is based on the simple fact that Ireland is in the EU and Britain isn't (or soon won't be), which is completely lost to the British government. They still see things through the lens of the Imperial power-plays of yesteryear, and yet wonder why outsiders don't trust them.

It is this arrogance that breeds complacency. The same kind of arrogance was found in the European capitals in 1914, when everyone expected that the war would be over by Christmas. Churchill's belief (arrogance?) that the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 would be an easy victory found fruit in the earlier victories that Britain had against the Ottomans in the first few months of the war (in Mesopotamia and Suez). Thus Britain created for itself the belief that Turkey was a pushover.
Britain's government today seems to have the same complacent belief about the EU. Because Britain usually got what it wanted from Brussels when it was in the EU, when it came to Brexit, the belief that "they need us more than we need them" infected the minds of the British government. It is clear that many of them still believe that, even after being repeatedly told by Brussels of the fundamental error of their thinking. Many of them still believe that, when push comes to shove, Brussels will cave in at the last moment. There is no rational basis for this assumption.

So what we are left to assume is that the current British government is dangerously deluded, almost as dangerously deluded as many European governments were in 1914. The difference now is that the only ones that will really suffer from the British government's "delusions of grandeur" will be the British people themselves.

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.

Theresa May: Britain's worst Prime Minister?

The title of Britain's worst Prime Minister must have a number of contenders, but for the sake of contemporary relevance, Theresa May has few rivals in living memory to compare with. David Cameron's tenure in office ended in being defeated by his own vanity; in the EU referendum, gambling one time too many that he could predict and manipulate the political weather for his own benefit. His time in office was therefore an exemplar in the use of vain posturing and low politics that covered his own shallow sense of morality. His term as Prime Minister achieved little of real substance, except for his "austerity agenda" setting up his successor with a plethora of mounting domestic problems (economic and social), and the self-inflicted mess of Brexit.
The author has said before how Theresa May was dealt a poor hand when she succeeded, so anyone would have struggled. With hindsight, it is now painfully apparent that Theresa May was perhaps the  person in Cameron's senior cabinet least psychologically and intellectually qualified to deal with the issues at her door. She is a prime example of an utter mediocrity who has risen far above her station, and is now holding her office simply for the convenience of her party.


Useless

If the definition of the Prime Minister's role is to deal with the nation's problems and make decisions, then Theresa May is by definition failing to carry out her constitutional duties. As wonderfully satirized by John Crace, "there’s hardly a part of the country that isn’t falling apart around the prime minister’s ears as she devotes all her attention to doing nothing about Brexit" . 
Crace sums up the situation succinctly. Week by week, aspects of life in Britain take on elements of Gothic Horror: hospitals unable to cope while they also face mounting staffing problems; the education system seemingly in slow meltdown as teachers leave in droves over the ever-mounting and soul-destroying work schedule, while many private academies are facing their own financial apocalypse; some local councils now facing the very real threat of insolvency due to government-imposed austerity; an economy that provides only poverty-level work for many, leaving thousands in malnutrition and struggling to pay the bills; a housing market that works more like a Ponzi scheme for the rich, while leaving everyone else struggling to pay for ever-rising rents in (often unsafe) housing. And then there's the homelessness epidemic that is a result of much of the above.

All these problems, and countless other social issues, are going unaddressed while the Prime Minister is supposed to be dealing (but not dealing) with Brexit. While the fact that she now presides over a minority government she helped create doesn't help, this doesn't mean the government is incapable of action. On the contrary, a more pro-active and forward-thinking Prime Minister would take the opportunity to work with the opposite bench in parliament to get legislation through, in the manner of a "national government". This has happened in the past, as it is necessary for any minority government to function in a meaningful way. But she is psychologically and intellectually incapable of doing this (more on that later).
As her role in Downing Street seems to be simply to hold her party together long enough to see Brexit through - by the end of March next year - everything else becomes neglected, even critical decisions on Brexit itself. Because her party and her cabinet is irrevocably divided on Brexit and the desired outcome, May can do nothing but make pointless, superficial noises on the issue that are in reality meaningless. In this sense, she is the helpless adjudicator in an ideological coalition of incompatible ideas. If she seems to veer too close to the "softer" side of Brexit, the "hard" Brexiteers rein her back. If she veers too close to the "hard" end of the spectrum, those at the other end make their own "noises off". So far, hers is a government by procrastination and indecision, incapable of making a decision.
And because of the lack of any real decision-making, the UK may still end up leaving the EU next year without any real deal at all and no meaningful transition. The indecision is also causing the country's business leaders to seriously wonder about the future of the British economy. It's no wonder that in receiving no words to the positive from London, the EU is drawing up its own plans. The only place to get sane council on Brexit these days is in Brussels. 


Heartless

The other problem with May is that on the rare occasions she is decisive, she seems heartless.

When it comes to Brexit issues such as EU citizens rights and migration, her former role as Home Secretary seems to colour (or more accurately, tarnish) her outlook: keen to reduce immigration regardless of its human impact, she seems willing to use EU citizens as "hostages" in the negotiation, threatening to withdraw their rights after March 2019. Apart from the psychological toll this would have on the millions of Europeans in the UK, it demonstrates how little thought she has given to its real impact on millions of families. Then there are the draconian methods used by the Home Office to detain and deport EU migrants currently, effectively persecuting them for being unable to make an economic success of their life in the UK.
Apart from Brexit issues, there are the already-mentioned domestic issues that May is making worse, not only through her inept inaction, but also through her stubbornly-myopic view of politics. Her background as a provincial (insular?) Home Counties vicar's daughter seems to play a part in this, being incapable of seeing the many problems of other parts of society, except at the most superficial and prejudicial level. Margaret Thatcher seemed to have a similar problem (and with, in some ways, a similarly-provincial mindset). But Theresa May takes this lack of empathy to a different level of indifference: while Thatcher's indifference might have been explained by a form of intellectual detachment, May's indifference seems to come from a more deep-seated psychological insecurity, where she dresses up her own sense of inadequacy in an unbending persona of rigid orthodoxy. This also explains why her instincts are reactionary and authoritarian.
This also further explains why she struggles to look human at times, and why she struggles to understand the problems of people she can't relate to. In times like this, when under attack for her perceived lack of humanity, her instinct is to become psychologically abusive and mean-spirited. As seen in her recent attacks on Jeremy Corbyn at PMQs, she laid into the NHS problems in "Labour Wales" and the policing problems in "Labour London", even though her government is ultimately responsible for cutting the funding to both.


Brainless

Another form of May's failure is her long record of incompetence and political short-termism.

The earlier example of May's commitment to restricting the rights of EU citizens in Britain after March 2019 is also an example of her insular thinking: by restricting the rights of Europeans in Britain, it forces the EU to restrict the rights for Brits living and working in the EU. So May's thinking is both counter-productive and thoughtless.
This pattern continues to her stubborn insistence on Britain leaving the single market and the customs union, which anyone with a semblance of understanding of the practicalities would know it meant the British economy quickly falling apart without any replacement systems in place. But again, apart from her failure to grasp even the basics on many issues, from the economy to social issues, she is only able to think one step at a time, incapable of longer-term or three-dimensional thinking.
This form of political short-termism has plagued government and the economy for years, but Theresa May seems to encapsulate the problem completely. Her job is to keep her party in government long enough to complete Brexit; what happens to the country in the meantime or afterwards seems irrelevant.
Incapable of thinking two steps ahead of the game, she is constantly being manipulated into doing whatever the person with the loudest voice at that moment (usually a Brexiteer) has to say. As said earlier, her minority government was her own fault, but as she is intellectually incapable of any forward thinking, it also means she is incapable of knowing how to work with the opposition to get anything done in parliament. Even on Brexit, the one thing she is meant to be focused on, she is incapable of getting opposing sides to work together and reach a sane compromise. As far as she is concerned, the opposition is the opposition, and working with them, even in the national interest, would be anathema. Better that the country go to the dogs than let the opposition get a sniff of power, so it would appear.

For all these reasons, Theresa May makes a strong case for Britain's worst Prime Minister. The fact that she is running the country (at least on paper) during the most diplomatically-intractable time the country has had since the Second World War, which will have long-term consequences for the country's future, is appalling.

Brexit and UK government strategy: Imperialistic Pretensions

A good way to assess a country's true psychology is to look at how it treats other nations.

The UK's relations with Europe and the rest of the world are currently going through a radical reconfiguration, thanks to Brexit. But equally, the way that the UK government is handling Brexit and its relations with its near neighbours in Europe is also highly-revealing in telling us the true nature of the country's leaders, and their motivations. As a result of this, European observers of the negotiation process between the UK and the EU are having to sharply re-evaluate their preconceptions about Britain's sense of morality. They are beginning to realise that Britain's honesty and transparency can no longer be taken for granted. They realise that Britain is behaving like a "troublemaker".


Divide and rule

When the chips are down, Britain's government has an instinct for devious behaviour (in particular towards its own population).The British government's negotiation strategy with the EU (if it can be coherently said to have one), seems to follow on from the same tactics, which Britain also once used when it was an Imperial power.
Back in the day, the British government's strategy for keeping the colonies under control was one of "divide and rule". In India, this was about balancing the different ethnic sides off against each other. The tensions between those sides (e.g. Hindu versus Muslim) were then stoked by Britain as a deliberate policy to sabotage the growing independence movement. This then made post-independence violence all the more certain; as we know, millions died in violence during those population exchanges. Earlier in Britain's rule over India, we had the Indian Mutiny, which caused widespread devastation, and also numerous famines over time that caused the deaths of millions, to the general indifference of its British rulers.
Closer to home, and another example of "divide and rule" that is often forgotten by Britain's population, was the treatment of Ireland: the land "across the (St George's) channel" that was effectively Britain's colony, with much of its Catholic population treated as virtual slave labour. Institutional indifference led to the potato famine, causing the deaths of millions, and the widespread depopulation of Ireland. Meanwhile, there was Northern Ireland, where again, Britain's ignorance of its bloody past and persecution towards the Ulster Catholic minority, is widespread. As we see, the policy of "divide and rule" is still at the heart of how the government runs the country even today, thanks to the DUP. And that doesn't even mention the current government's arrogant attitude towards the Irish government as part of its negotiations with the EU (more on that later).
The same could be said of Britain's rule over Palestine, where the Arab majority were played off against the Jewish minority. As the violence between them and their British overlords got increasingly out of hand, the British left the whole mess to the newly-created UN, who were totally unable to deal with the situation. As with "divide and rule" in Ireland, the Middle East is still dealing with the after effects of that today.

Britain, as an Imperial power, therefore had a long reputation for dealing with its colonies in a Machiavellian manner. The three mentioned, India, Ireland and Palestine, are just a few of the more glaring examples. There are many others. Of course, this strategy was common among all "Imperial powers", and Britain was very far from the worst in this regard. However, the cases of India, Ireland and Palestine are three stains on Britain's colonial record - in terms of the collective human impact of their policies - that stand out even among other acts of colonial infamy by other powers. Britain may not have used torture on an mass scale like some other Imperial powers, but it would be naive in the extreme to think of Britain as a paragon on Imperial virtue, like as it has been with some, nostalgic over the past.

The manner in which the UK government has dealt with the EU during the negotiations follows the same path. On one hand, Britain's Prime Minister talks of wanting a "deep and special partnership" with the EU based on trust and co-operation. But on the other, while negotiations are ongoing with the EU as a whole, her government (and the PM herself) seeks to drive clefts within the nations of the EU itself. Firstly, Theresa May and her ministers engage in the type of diplomacy that looks for issues that individual members of the EU might agree with Britain on, separately from the rest of the EU; the purpose of this is to build some kind of "inner coalition" within the EU that might be more supportive towards Britain's goals. Secondly, in the case of Germany, David Davis seems to be on a strategy to win over the support of its industrialists that would then act a some kind of "lobby" to pressure Angela Merkel on Britain's behalf. In this case, it is like developing a "cleft within a cleft". His comments just recently, where he blamed France and Germany for holding up the negotiations, support the view that Britain's strategy is to drive wedges between nations, as well as even wedges between interest groups in the nations themselves.
These two examples show not only the glaring lack of tact of Britain's government, but also reveal its government's true motivations: treating Europe as a kind of "colony" that can be manipulated and exploited to achieve its goals.

Looking at this objectively, it paints a very poor picture for Britain as a nation to be trusted. Not only is it being devious; it is being tactless. And everyone can see it.
It is almost reminiscent of the tactless behaviour and self-defeating diplomatic strategy of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II. When he came to power, he wanted Germany to be a great power, but also one that had good relations with its neighbours. Through a series of misjudgments, Germany fell out of favour with Britain, Russia and France, leading the Kaiser to look for alliances with nations that others were wary to be close to. This left Germany diplomatically-isolated from the major Imperial powers, leading its government to seek self-reliance as the best form of defence. We know where that ended.
In a different context, Britain's government seem to be repeating many of the same kind of blunders: making enemies where it should be making friends; while in seeking to divide existing alliances, the only effect this has is to unite them against itself as their common agitator. This kind of "imperialistic approach" will only end in failure, while showing to others that Britain's motivations are antagonistic in nature.


"Special treatment"

Apart from the Imperialistic strategy of "divide and rule", there is the UK government's (equally Imperialistic) mindset of expecting the EU to do everything for them, give in to all their demands, while offering little in return.
This is the lazily-entitled mindset that Britain had seen in remission during its membership of the EU. In many ways, joining the EU was an admission of Britain's relative weakness in the post-Imperial world. As it was not in a position to make demands, it allowed Britain an opportunity to reshape its own sense of identity. Brexit represents a backwards step to the entitled, patronising attitude that the country had during its colonial past: nothing is ever Britain's fault.
David Davis seems to summarise this mentality well: a monoglot who is incapable of understanding even the basics of his brief, or seeming to care. To him, Brexit all seems like a bit of a lark. As far as he sees it, Britain has already offered "compromises" (I struggle to think of any), and so the onus is on the EU to do the same. This attitude ignores the fact that the EU is simply following its own rules, as clearly laid out in statute in the Lisbon treaty. This has been explained repeatedly to Davis, who never seems to listen. The EU is not setting out to "punish" Britain; it is simply explaining the rules as they stand, and what is and isn't possible within that framework. But Britain's government wants the EU to ignore its own rules in order to indulge its wishes. In its lazily-entitled thinking, Britain has all the bearing of a haughty Imperialist of yesteryear that expects "foreign lackeys" to do all its work for it, while it wallows in its own self-satisfaction, ordering others around.

For some reason, Britain thinks it should be entitled to some kind of extra-legal cloud-cuckoo land where it gets "special treatment" from the rest of the world.

Expecting "special treatment" on one hand, while enacting a strategy of "divide and rule" on the other, Britain's government has simply slipped back into the lazy Imperialistic pretensions of a hundred years ago, but minus the Empire.
While the negotiations with the EU continue, the rest of the world (who Britain expects to have preferential trade agreements with) must look on with a mixture of bemusement and bafflement. If Britain can't even negotiate properly with its supposed "friends and allies", what chance has it got against anyone else?

Brexit: The Ultimate Blunder? How this is Theresa May's "Poll Tax"

The excellent book "The Blunders Of Our Governments" goes into great depth at how governments get things wrong, often with catastrophic results. The scale of the catastrophe just depends on the scale of the blunder.

One of the biggest (and most famous) "blunders" by any UK government in modern times was the Poll Tax. Looking at the sheer incompetence of how the government is managing its Brexit strategy, it's hard not to to draw parallels with how the Thatcher government blundered into a crisis entirely of its own making, and the current one. Some of the time scale over the issues - how it was a "slow burner" that gradually gained more and more inescapable momentum - also matches. To see how well the events of thirty years ago and today mirror each other, we'll have a look at the basics of what went wrong with the Poll Tax.

The idea of the Poll tax had its formation in the 1970s, thanks to think tanks that looked at "outside-of-the-box" solutions (mirroring what we see today with the government's Brexit strategy). The idea was one of a number of options at reforming "the rates", where council tax was paid only by those who owned property in the area. By early 1985, after the government had began its privatisation agenda, it looked in more detail at reforming local government and the system of "the rates", to make it equitable, so that everyone paid what was fair. In a famous meeting at Chequers, the Poll Tax was one of a few options put to the government, but by a series of interactions, some high-placed people in government saw the Poll Tax as the only true way to fully reform the system; all the other options seemed either unfair or meaningless half-measures. After a period of time, further discussions and discreet lobbying (also - looking at the practicality of the idea - from some in the civil service), it was in the end agreed that the only way for it to work was for a "big bang" implementation. In other words, having some kind of "transitional" arrangement was pointless and administratively confusing; much better to go straight from one system to the next, and iron out any potential glitches along the way. Those in government against all this (and there were a number of them) were silenced by the momentum that gradually built in favour of this radical reform; they were also quick to make their opposition well-known to others in government, to avoid any guilt by association.
Thus the Poll Tax was introduced through a combination of groupthink in government, as well as cultural disconnect. The problems (and the riots) are well-known. It now clear that the selfsame mistakes have took place with Brexit thirty years later, but now on a scale (and potential impact) many times greater.

Like with the Poll Tax, Brexit was a "slow-burner". Initially it was an issue with a small faction of the Conservative Party, some media hacks, editors and the like. But all these people had influence (and with that, gravitas) as well as money to back them up. Like with the Poll Tax, Brexit became an issue thanks to political events: where the Poll Tax came to be seen by Thatcher as a way to reform troublesome local councils, Brexit (or, at least, the initial offer of a referendum) came to be seen as way by Cameron to silence the hard-right in the party that were more ideological kin to UKIP. It took around five years (from the Chequers meeting in 1985 to it being implemented in 1990) for the Poll Tax to fully burst into life, warts and all. Brexit - if we call March 2019 its "implementation" - will have come to exist in the public sphere for a similar period, when the EU referendum was first promised by Cameron in early 2013. Like how the Poll Tax was ambushed on the rest of government, who were then hostages to its fate, Brexit made the same of Cameron, when the referendum made Brexit a reality. His successor, Theresa May, was then even more beholden to the hard-right ideologues in the party, even though she was not a fervent believer in the idea herself. As mentioned earlier with the Poll Tax, it was the desire for a "big bang", as well as the desire to make a radical reform, that led to the chaos of its implementation; the desire among some in government for a "Hard Brexit" without a transitional arrangement follows the same blinkered thinking that dismisses compromises such as staying in the EEA or EFTA as a "betrayal" of the cause. This stubbornness leaves the potential for heaven knows what kind of chaos to the UK economy come March 2019.

Once May succeeded Cameron as Prime Minister, Brexit took on a whole life of its own, like the Poll Tax did with the Thatcher government thirty years ago. Those who opposed the Poll Tax were seen as "wets" or lacking the boldness necessary for real reform; those now opposed to "Hard Brexit" are these days seen as "Remoaners" or saboteurs who are trying to undermine the government. This is the result of groupthink and cultural disconnect, as well as a deferential respect for those in authority, assuming that they must know what they are talking about . If anything, these issues are far worse this time around, given how high the stakes are. With the Poll Tax, those affected could (and many did) ignore their threatening letters from councils, which resulted in an eventual (partial) climb-down from the government; by contrast, the economy of the entire country is at stake thanks to the current "blunder", and the only way to escape it would be to flee abroad.

The Thatcher government had almost a "revolutionary" aura about it at times. Cameron's and May's government have been in some ways even more radical, and not in a good way. The desire for "reform" among the hard-right in government led to various ministers leading their departments as their own pet project. In a sense, Cameron's relaxed attitude to ministers pursuing their own agendas also led to scandal and scandal: the direct result of having an "experimental" government agenda.
This is what marks out the Conservative government of today as being different from earlier incarnations: whereas earlier governments took risks from time to time, the current government seem to actively encourage them. If you are not a risk-taker, it seems, then you lack the drive and radicalism necessary for the government's wider agenda. This kind of callous recklessness and shallow disregard for the wider consequences is unprecedented in any British government of modern times: it's almost as if they want things to fail. While some of it is down to the glaring incompetence of ministers, some of it can only be driven by the agenda of an amoral, manipulative few.

Thatcher's Poll Tax ultimately was a sign of the government losing the plot; it was only a change of Prime Minister, and a little luck, that allowed the Conservatives to stay in power for seven more years from its initial implementation disaster. A "Hard Brexit" would be a disaster on a scale a thousand times more disruptive; who knows what the political ramifications of that would be?

Brexit: the result of accumulated incompetence? Parallels with "Atlas Shrugged"

Following the government's strategy and "progress" with the Brexit negotiations, I was reminded of  the plot to Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" (the author wrote a series of articles on this novel's symbolism).

Ayn Rand's original working title to this mammoth novel was "The Strike". The premise behind the story being: what would happen if all the smartest people refused to work? So the story follows as, one by one, various stalwarts of industry and other brains of American society begin to disappear, as the government of the day slowly takes greater and greater control of the economy. The process becomes self-reinforcing as the government takes up more of the slack left behind as more and more of the "best and brightest" disappear from public life. In the end, left with an over-bearing government led by a mass of collective incompetence, accidents become commonplace as the country literally begins to fall apart. The "best and brightest" finally reappear to save the nation from itself when the government loses control of the situation completely. The reader is left with the implication that these "best and brightest" will then restore the country under a new system where the government is entirely absent from any role in the economy and the public sphere.

The story reads as an indictment on "government" as a whole, as an autocratic system which feeds incompetence and inefficiency; the opposite to how the private sector is meant to be ran. While I'm no fan of Ayn Rand, following the government's handling of Brexit, it's hard not to draw (ironic) parallels with their rank incompetence and descent into chaos, and that of the government portrayed in "Atlas Shrugged". In the same way as the "best and brightest" fled from their posts in light of the fictitious government's actions, the same seems to be true of various parts of industry in the UK during the Brexit process.
Most of industry warned during the referendum campaign that to leave the EU would be bad for the British economy; now that the government seems to be lurching towards leaving the EU with no deal at all, some giants of the economy are reminding the government in stark terms of their own economic interests. If the government pursues this course to leave with no deal in March 2019, they will be forced to make their own "contingency plans": put simply, they will up sticks and leave the sinking ship as quickly as possible. While the UK will leave the EU in March 2019, big business - and the financial sector in particular -  need clarity far sooner: no later than the end of this year, to give them time to make adequate preparations. Similarly, Britain's airline industry needs to know what the "deal" will be no later than March 2018, to make suitable preparations. The government's incompetence and incoherence has been given very short shrift, and will result in real consequences much more quickly than they think. The initial effects of Brexit on the economy may be only a few months away; a harbinger of what is to come.

Since the referendum, it also feels as though all those who supported "Remain" (i.e. much of the intelligentsia) have been quelled into silence by the febrile and menacing feel in the public sphere; like how many "captains of industry" are making contingency plans to flee with their assets, large parts of the intelligentsia have seem to have gone AWOL. It's no coincidence that some of those have also applied for (Irish) EU passports, perhaps to better enable their own flight after Brexit. While the intelligentsia have absented themselves from the discourse (perhaps seeing how impossible it is to reason with incompetents), the country descends into madness. It seems as though industry and the intelligentsia are getting their excuses in early, as if to say "we warned you; you didn't listen. It's not our fault".
The irony here is how the government's agenda is being guided by those who are huge supporters of Ayn Rand's ideology; it is almost as if they want the government to be led by incompetents (as in the plot of  "Atlas Shrugged") - to bring about the economy's collapse, and allow them to take over.


A failure of government

The EU can see how badly the country is being ran, and its strategy now with Theresa May seems almost one of pity. Unfortunately this seems as doomed to fail as any other strategy, for as much as May and her government completely misunderstand how the EU works, the EU seems to equally misunderstand how the Conservative Party works. The EU tries to "make nice" with May over the possibility of a deal (by - wrongly - thinking that this positive mood music will encourage May into making the necessary concessions); meanwhile, May is encouraged to see any sign of "flexibility" on the EU's part as a sign that they are willing to make concessions, so sees no need to give ground. So both sides seem to be feeding each other with false hopes of a deal, to encourage the other to make the kind of concessions which may well be politically impossible. Both sides are in a bind - a kind of "Gordian Knot" of epic proportions.
May may well go down as one of the worst Prime Ministers the country has ever known, certainly in modern times. Her personal characteristics seem to work against the process gaining any momentum at home. To begin with, she has autocratic tendencies, to the extent that any serious debate over the issues is knocked down. This has led to the extraordinary situation where there has been - now sixteen months on from the referendum, and nearly seven months on from invoking article 50 - still no proper debate in government about what its actual Brexit aims are. All that has been said so far is woolly rhetoric to paper over the vast differences in government. The EU doesn't know what the UK government wants because the UK government itself doesn't know what it wants. It is truly astonishing that May could trigger article 50 for the start of negotiations without her government having a clue what its final position was.
This is partly due to the weakness of May's position as well; even when her government had a majority, she was loathe to start a proper debate on Brexit that would lead to open differences in government. The result is that the open differences have surfaced anyway, because she has done nothing to diminish them. Now her government doesn't even have a majority, this has made those differences even more apparent, with the loudest voices from the "Hard Brexiteers" carrying the most sway. In the same way that the intelligentsia have largely gone AWOL in the country at large, in the Conservative Party, the most rational voices have been silenced by the headbangers. And while this goes on, Theresa May sits in Downing Street and does nothing, as she is too weak to act: a hostage to fortune.
It is May's position as a mere "caretaker" presiding over this chaos that fatally diminishes the prestige of the role of Prime Minister of the UK.

This all feels like the inevitable result of the gradual degradation of the quality of political discourse in Britain.
There was a time when politics was inhabited by people of intellect, with ideas and (some) moral standing. John Major may not have been an intellectual giant, but he at least seemed to possess an aura of integrity. Tony Blair may have had an ambiguous moral compass (e.g. Iraq), but at least he was smart, and improved the state of the nation overall. (Doctor) Gordon Brown may have had his flaws, but when the financial crisis happened, he did the right thing at the right time, by saving the economy from imminent implosion.
David Cameron was a sign of the things to come. He treated politics as a game, even to the point of playing with his country's own future. He thought he was smart, but he was merely "lucky"; until his luck ran out. He filled his cabinet with similar chancers like George Osborne, and the rest with people whose loyalty or affiliations were more important than their rank incompetence. Theresa May was so long-standing in her position as Home Secretary for the same reason.
It is this gradual but self-evident decline in the quality of Britain's politics that led to Brexit in the first place: it's what happens when the establishment is left to rule though passive compliance. UKIP's incoherent ideology was allowed to take over the political discourse; the result now is that the government has copied its core agenda almost in its entirety and it's treating our democratic institutions as a complete joke. The government now thinks that democracy is a system where you can ignore the opinions of the people you don't agree with; they think the judgments of experts can be ignored if they disagree with their own prejudices.

If you're not worried, you're not paying attention.

Brexit: The "Disaster Capitalism" Theory

People inclined towards conspiracy theories seem to have more and more evidence each week that the Brexit negotiations appear to heading to an ultimate breakdown and a "Hard Brexit", with the primary beneficiaries of this situation being vulture capitalists. However, the term "vulture capitalists" would be misleading here, as conventional "vulture capitalism" is about making money from an unforeseeable traumatic event, such as the sudden collapse of an economy; when the "traumatic event" (e.g. "Hard Brexit") is helped along by the actions of the "vulture capitalists" themselves, it becomes something far darker - deliberate chaos.


"The name's Barnier, Michel Barnier..."

In this narrative, "Brexit" would more closely resemble the nefarious plot of a James Bond film: where a shadowy group of powerful interests plot to destroy Britain's economy in order to become rich from its carcass (anyone familiar with the recent Bond films might see an eerie parallel in the premise behind "Quantum Of Solace", for example). Taking this narrative further, these same "powerful interests" would be conspiring with others - "useful idiots" - who would act as unwitting accomplices and enablers to bring about the desired outcome. People in the West who are apologists for people like Vladimir Putin, for example, are certainly acting as "useful idiots" in trying to excuse Russia's self-interested actions (such as over Crimea and Ukraine). Similarly, those who try to make moralizing excuses for "The Brexit Agenda" are simply embarrassing their own reputations. These people are simply deluding themselves into thinking that brazenly amoral, opportunistic actions are somehow something more benign.

Continuing the earlier James Bond theme, as a fan of Bond films in general, it's interesting to consider where people like Fleming and other writers drew their inspiration. While the quality of the films is highly-variable, some of the most engaging plots are those that are believable (or fool you into thinking they are). All art is based, in part, on real life, and the James Bond series is no exception.
For instance, it's impossible not to watch some of the films and be shocked at the sociopathic cunning behind it all: like eponymous Auric Goldfinger and his plan to get rich by irradiating the USA's gold supply at Fort Knox; Max Zorin's utterly amoral plot (in "View To A Kill") to gain a monopoly on the silicon chip market by causing an earthquake that would destroy Silicon Valley; Renard's plan in "The World is Not Enough" to cause a spike in the oil price by targeting Istanbul; Le Chiffre's plan in "Casino Royale" to blow up a plane to make money on the stock market seems tame by comparison to earlier plot lines, but this made it seem all the more believable in the unpredictability of a post 9/11 world. These plots and these "evil masterminds" are all deliberate exaggerations of anything possible in real life, but what makes it all so watchable is how easy it makes it to suspend disbelief. That being said, 9/11 proved to all of us that a seemingly unthinkable nightmare only remains so until someone crazy enough actually thinks about doing it. Going back to Russia, the idea of Crimea being "taken back" by Moscow also seemed an idea for the fruitcakes, until it actually happened. Ditto with Brexit. Like conspiracy theorists, it's easy to suspend disbelief when reality itself seems so unbelievable.

The author doesn't share the dark, paranoiac vision of the conspiracy theorists on Brexit: this isn't some kind of James Bond plot line come to life. The UK government hasn't been infiltrated by agents of the Kremlin; Michel Barnier isn't a "secret agent" out to sabotage Britain's future outside the EU. However, there is always a chink of the light of truth in some aspects of any conspiracy theory: the idea has to come from somewhere, after all.


When the vultures circle

The premise of "disaster capitalism" was thought up by Naomi Klein. On the Brexit negotiations, there is now a mood in the government that leaving the EU at the end of March 2019 with no deal is actually a goer. In other words, to leave the EU without any agreements in place would be fine, as they think any disruption to the economy would be considered minor, or at the very worst, worth it in the long-run.
Setting aside the suspension of disbelief needed to take this view seriously, it's worth looking at where there are comparable examples in modern times of such a situation. What is being seriously considered in government is an effective "reset" of the British economy to before it joined the EEC and EFTA, more than fifty years ago, and for this to occur overnight on 30 March 2019. The government are saying they are willing to completely change the rules and framework that has guided the British economy, from one system to another, without a transition. This is what "Hard Brexit" means.

It's hard to find an exact comparison to this situation; the closest we can get is finding when another large, developed nation changed the structure of its economy overnight. One modern example that comes to mind is Russia.
Naomi Klein cited the example of Russia's post-Communist economy when talking about "disaster capitalism". Russia's economy had been Communist for seventy years. It changed to an unregulated free market economy overnight. What this meant in reality was that a small number of individuals ("oligarchs") took advantage of the chaotic situation and its lack of enforceable "rules" to buy control of sectors of the economy. Corruption became the way to do business; meanwhile, the day-to-day economy tanked. It took ten years and a currency crisis for the country to get back on its feet. The end result, when things recovered, was that corruption became a way of life and the country's tentative attempt at democracy ending in the quasi-authoritarian rule of Vladimir Putin. This regime was then supported through the politics of nationalism.
This is one example of what happens when "disaster capitalism" takes control of the economy. It is the economic equivalent of "shock therapy". Other nations have also been guided to a similar course; after an economic crisis, the IMF's solution has been the same kind of "shock therapy" that results in years of turbulence. And this moment, when the economy is so vulnerable, is when the "vultures" descend.

It is in this kind of "turbulence" that the vultures see opportunities for rich pickings. The UK leaving the EU without any kind of transition and without any agreements is the same kind of environment that would attract these vultures. While the government is in denial about the turbulence that would be created as a result of a "Hard Brexit", those that see rich pickings in this environment would only encourage it.
"Hard Brexit" Britain would not be Post-Communist Russia, of course, but because the British economy and its intellectual manpower has become so enmeshed with the EU over the last forty-odd years, it simply has no means to easily adapt without it. Short-term chaos, at the very least, is inevitable without long-term planning: this would be Britain's version of "shock therapy". The question of the extent and duration of the chaos depends on the government. The fact that the government are a large part in denial about it simply makes the chaos more likely.

In this sense, the "disaster capitalists" are also agents of chaos, which makes the idea of there being some kind of nefarious plot so easy for conspiracy theorists to believe. The reality is more complicated. Brexit was once only an obsession of a few marginal figures, that had the implicit support of some elements of the media. It was a confluence of different factors - the same factors that saw the rise of UKIP - that got us where we are today. The same is true of the government's lurch towards "Hard Brexit": while this may be supported by a small number in government for their own ideological (or amoral) reasons, the government as a whole - and Theresa May in particular - seem to be sliding towards it almost by accident. As mentioned elsewhere, the government seems intent on a "wrecking ball" strategy in the negotiations. Whether this is a deliberate ploy to attain a "Hard Brexit" (given they think it will have little negative effect on Britain's economy), or simply a bone-headed negotiating tactic (as a facile attempt at "brinksmanship" for the EU to grant concessions) is irrelevant, as the end result will be the same: chaos of some description to Britain's economy.

So Britain's "Hard Brexit" may not be the result of any conspiracy at all, but more likely because of the sheer incompetence and stupidity that guides those in government; and these frightening levels of incompetence make Britain's future all the more uncertain. It is also this incompetence at the heart of government that makes Britain a ripe target for the vultures; like sharks, they smell blood. Like hyenas, they can smell the rotten state of affairs.