The Idiot Who Ruined Britain

The Idiot Who Ruined Britain

Has a Prime Minister ever held on to power so desperately? There’s Boris Johnson, rocked by scandal after scandal. What the Brits call Partygate means that Boris’s administration made the lockdown rules — and then proceeded to violate them time after time, boozing it up at parties, while the nation couldn’t see it’s dying grandparents. And yet, like a mad king, Boris refuses to go.

How many scandals? Who can even remember at this point. There was the time his Health Secretary gave a multimillion covid supplies contract to…the guy who ran his pub. There was the time the Health Secretary was caught on CCTV kissing his aide, during a pandemic with social distancing in place. There was the scandal of lobbying, the scandal of covid contracts, the time it was discovered that MPs were deleting Whatsapp messages to prevent being investigated…the list is seemingly endless.

And now, Partygate.

“In the name of God, go!” That was what David Davis, the Tory grandee shouted, in sheer frustration — because Boris’s tanking ratings are tanking the Tory party, too. But as Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, put it, he appears to be a man without shame.

And yet as dismal as all that is, that’s not even the bad news. The bad news? It’s this. Like all of Boris’s other scandals, this one only serves to hide the deeper truth. It’s noise amidst the signal, really.

The truth is this. Modern British history will be divided into BB and AB — Before Boris, and After Boris. What do I mean by that? Boris has been the most consequential Prime Minister in modern British history — disastrously so. Boris has pushed through the farthest right wing agenda in memory — he’s made the stuff that even the hardest of hardened ultra conservatives barely dared to dream about come true. All of it.

Boris has made radical transformations to Britain which are so far right that they make Margaret Thatcher look like a lightweight, a nobody of history, a veritable socialist. And those transformations will scar Britain and wound it for generations to come. Yes, Boris’s agenda has been far, far more hard right wing than even Thatcher’s. Really. Even Thatcher didn’t manage to eliminate the BBC and dismantle and privatise the NHS and break with Europe to boot.

To put that in perspective, I’m going to make a comparison. Boris has been worse for Britain than Trump was for America.

That’s going to make some Brits scoff, perhaps, so let me teach them a lesson that nobody in Britain quite seems to be grasping, how Boris really has been worse for Britain than Trump was for America.

Until 2019 or so, when Boris took office, Britain still had a chance. It had decided, foolishly, thanks to Big Lies and mass propaganda, unchecked, even aided, by journalists from the Guardian to the BBC, on Brexit. And yet there could have been a saner Brexit — a soft, gentle one, where Britain was still part of the EU’s single market and customs union and so forth. That would have mean that business and people didn’t get drowned by red tape and bills, and life could have gone on almost as usual.

Alas, Boris wouldn’t have it. He pushed for the hardest Brexit imaginable — determined to humiliate the EU, by proving how macho and tough he was, and therefore Britain was. He didn’t seem to understand that the EU didn’t care about his brinksmanship — after all, it’s ten times the size of Britain, economically. And so Boris, in a tremendous mistake, pushed too far — and there was the hardest Brexit there could be. Now Brits face a massive series of shocks — shortages of everything from appliances to cheese to carbon dioxide that fizzes beer and cools meat. Just like anyone sane predicted. Boris made Britain a permanently poorer country — and that is now never going to change, even if one day Britain rejoins the EU, because this “economic scarring,” as we economists call it, is permanent.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Imagine if Trump suddenly broke up with America’s biggest trading partner — China. Imagine that every single good which came into America from China now had reams of red tape, customs fees, handling fees, and so forth attached to it. What would happen? Quite obviously, the American economy would go into a tailspin. Sure, “growth” might still happen — but the average American would face huge, huge price shocks, even more than the inflation of now. Walmart is basically a way station for Chinese goods, a warehouse with sliding doors — and snap, just like that, the average American would find him or herself unable to get the basics. Scores of American businesses, dependent on inputs from China, would go bankrupt.

That is what is happening to Britain is today. You don’t have to look very hard to see it. A record number of businesses declared bankruptcy after Brexit. Honda and Toyota closed their plants in the UK. British Steel went into liquidation. Dyson, Barclays, HSBC, Panasonic, Sony, and Lloyds moved their Europe headquarters out of the UK since Brexit. That is what breaking up, suddenly, with your biggest trading partner will do, in the hardest terms possible. It might be clever politics, if you’re a nationalist demagogue — but it will wreck your nation’s economy, more or less permanently.

Trump talked a good game about China. He blustered and bluffed and boasted. He huffed and puffed and insulted and belittled. But in the end? He didn’t accomplish very much at all. He placed tariffs on Chinese goods, to some degree — which are responsible for a good deal of American inflation today. But that’s it. Trump didn’t manage to break up with China for good, because it would have been frankly suicidal for the American economy.

But Boris did manage to break up with Britain’s biggest trading partner. He outdid Trump.

Are you beginning to see what I mean I say Boris has been worse for Britain than Trump was for America? I’m not kidding. Nobody much in Britain seems to be thinking this through — how painfully true it is, to really understand the damage left behind by just three years of Boris. Not even four, like Trump.

And yet I’ve barely just begun. China to America isn’t what Europe was to Britain. Brits had the right to live and work and be educated across Europe. In other words, Britain enjoyed a far deeper relationship with Europe than America does with China — and Europe is the world’s most successful region, by far, with it’s highest living standards by a very long way. Now, though? British living standards are poised to drop to American levels. To put that in perspective, Americans live shorter, dumber, meaner lives than Europeans in nearly every way. Their life expectancy is much shorter — between 5 and 10 years. They’re far less happy. Their democracy is in tatters. Soccer moms threaten to kill their neighbours kids. That’s the path of nationalist demagoguery Boris has sent Britain down.

How so? Well, take a moment to understand how British living standards are falling — and are going to keep falling, long after Boris has gone, but mostly thanks to Boris. Boris achieved something that Britain’s ultra conservatives have dreamed feverishly about for decades now — but had no real idea how to accomplish — stripping back its social contract to American levels.

Let’s take the example of the NHS. Ultra conservatives have hated it for decades — not just because it provided Brits excellent healthcare, and thereby boosts living standards, but because it is a living, breathing, everyday example of true equality, justice, and freedom — not hierarchy, dominance, and privilege.

And yet it took Boris to begin destroying the NHS in earnest. Now, American capital is moving in fast — precisely because the NHS is being privatised. It’s farming out basic services — everything from beds to tests — to subcontractors. Naturally, American hedge funds — and the “healthcare management organizations” they own — are already slavering over the profits to be made. Brits can’t quite see the endgame yet — they don’t really know when services or tests are being provided by private companies, under the aegis of the “NHS.” But to an astute observer of both finance and healthcare, the end is already crystal clear. No more NHS — not as Brits know it.

Already, sadly, the NHS has been crippled. You can barely get an appointment for basics. That’s not an accident. A decade and more of austerity left it starved, underfunded, badly short of doctors and nurses. But it was Boris and his revolutionaries who took it to the final step — deconstructing it, stripping it down to its constituent parts, and preparing it for the next step, which is obvious to any sharp-eyed private equity executive: selling it off.

Boris has pushed British public healthcare to breaking point, and then past it. That’s not even getting into how Britain had Europe’s worst Covid outcomes by far, precisely because of Boris’s (in)action. The NHS is now barely a shell of itself. But that is not by accident — it’s by design. The point was to destroy it private equity style — break it apart, strip it, sell it. Do Brits really want to live in a society with American style healthcare? That is what they are about to get — and sadly, they still seem too clueless and foolish to really grasp it. But American hedge funds don’t buy up entire blocks in central London for American style “clinics” for no reason.

The NHS was one of Britain’s crown jewels, a true public good, a social institution envied and admired the world over. Yes, there will be something called the NHS. But it won’t be a public good anymore. It will probably be something more like a loose network of clinics that offer the most basic services — and for anything else, you’re probably going to have to pay, unless you want to wait years. The rest of this trajectory is just details — this NHS trust declares insolvency, that one can’t make ends meet, they get sold off to the lowest bidder. That is why the Americans are waiting in the wings — because this path is now more or less inevitable, the privatisation having begun in earnest already.

A Britain without a functioning NHS, though, is also one with catastrophically falling living standards. Like what? Like lower life expectancy, more illness, more depression and anxiety. The loss of the NHS is greater than Brits yet understand or know. They are so wrapped up in daily scandal they can barely see the forest for the trees. The big picture? Boris has systematically deconstructed Britain’s post-war social contract — something closer to European social democracy than American style liberal democracy, and replaced it with something much more like American hyper-capitalism, based on individualism and competition and greed. But we all know how that ends — just take a look at America right now.

Remember Trump? America never had anything remotely close to an NHS — and Brits don’t know how good they have (had) it. All Americans had was this mess called Obamacare — you buy “insurance” on a “private marketplace.” It doesn’t work, but it’s better than nothing.

Trump was determined to destroy even that. And guess what? He failed. He couldn’t pull it off. He tried again and again, but he was stymied by the courts, the legislature, the judiciary.

Trump didn’t destroy Obamacare. But Boris has destroyed the NHS.

Again, do you see the point I’m trying to make? Brits don’t really seem to be getting any of this. They’re blinded by the endless daily scandals. And yet in hard political terms, Boris has pulled it off again and again, accomplishing what the ultra-hard-right could only barely imagine making happen, putting in place an agenda so radical that even Thatcher couldn’t come close to accomplishing it — he has dismantled Britain’s social contract, taking a torch to its public institutions, setting them on fire, and Brits will be paying the price for generations to come.

Yet that story hardly ends at the NHS. How did Boris try to save his skin when Partygate first broke? By ending the BBC. He announced that the BBC’s “license fee” would be eliminated in five years. No money, no BBC. For the uninitiated, Brits pay a couple of hundreds per household to keep the BBC going. Not much — but again, Brits don’t seem to understand that. What do you pay in America for TV — that’s a veritable wasteland by comparison? A hundred dollars or more…a month.

The money to be made here is obvious, and again, American capital already has British culture and media in its sights.

Brits, having been degraded into coarse nationalism by this coarse man, seem not to understand what a gift and jewel the BBC is. Yes, it didn’t cover Brexit well, even cheered it on. Yes, it is imperfect, capable of bias. But on American TV? There are no multi-part documentaries by artists and scientists and professors and musicians. There’s no David Attenborough or Emily Maitlis. There’s no sense of duty or dignity to inform and enlighten. There’s no taste. It’s just pornography — violence, greed, sex, stupidity.

The loss of all that is immense. Far, far more immense than Brits, obsessed by the daily scandal, having been made small and fearful, are able to see. The entire world respects and admires the BBC. It is a global institution. For a very good reason. In Britain, it does the things only a true public good can do. It keeps people sane, educated, gentle, kind, informed, alive. Yes, I mean that — even given the way it fell down on Brexit. For companions’s sake, again, think of how utterly misinformed Americans are compared to Brits.

Public goods keep people rich in trust, social bonds, ties, connected by shared values and culture, bound by shared experiences. If you’re cynical about that happening in Britain, take a hard look at America — that’s what a society without any of those becomes, and Britain’s not there yet. But it’s heading that way, thank to Boris.

Remember Trump? He attacked journalists par excellence. He’d shout at them, insult them, call them names. He’d even threaten to go after them and put them in jail. But in the end? It was bluster, bullying, bark without much bite. That’s not to say such attacks didn’t have an effect — they did. But what Trump didn’t do was wreck American media wholesale. Boris did. Trump didn’t end up destroying America media — or the good bits of American media, period, as few and far between as they are. Don Lemon and so forth are still on air, holding him to account.

But Boris really did manage to end the BBC.

Again — see what I mean when I say that Boris was worse for Britain than Trump was for America?

I’ve given you three examples. Now let me distill a few concluding points. Brits are not really thinking any of this through. Their public sphere and public intellectuals have fallen down badly on this score. Yet the truth, so far as I can see it, is painfully simple.

There was Before Boris, and there’s After Boris. Boris has managed to push through, in three short years, the hardest right wing agenda in modern British history. It was far, far harder right than even Thatcher, whom the British hard right admires the way Americans remember George Washington.

Boris has managed to accomplish things that the British ultra-hard right only ever barely dared to dream of — dismantling the NHS, privatising it, ending the BBC, breaking up with Europe. He’s managed to push all of them through, in just three short years. He has completely reshaped Britain — deconstructed any semblance of a social contract heading towards European style social democracy, and replaced it with one much more akin to American atomised capitalism, dog-eat-dog style, the strong survive, the weak perish, and money and power are all that matter — and there’s nobody much left to even remind you that life was or could be any different.

Boris has been the most consequential Prime Minister in modern British history. He’s made the ultra-hard-right’s wildest, most outlandish dreams come true — all of them. Just like — snap — that. With sheer bluster and clownish charm and what passes for charisma in a broken country. Whether he stays now or goes? That’s very much besides the point. The mission, my friends, has been accomplished.

And Britain will never be the same again.

Umair
January 2022