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Tuesday 27 October 2020

369. Greece here we come…

Back in the annals of this blog (post. 239) at about the time Theresa May was hooking up with the DUP to force through a Brexit deal which wasn't quite as bad as the one we are about to end up with, I outlined how easy the drop from global cultural, social, military, intellectual and economic power to national has-been. How dizzyingly steep the slippage from a premier league functioning state to a basket case. Like Greece (sorry Greece). The difference being that the UK managed it in about two decades rather than centuries.

Your ‘decline pivot point’ may vary. Certainly if you look at the improvements in the lives of British working people post-WWII, you’d say the decline, the crushing of those hard-won rights and improvements, began with Thatcher. Ironically, the Iron Lady was mad and dangerously destructive but not stupid. She was pro- remaining in the EU.

However – as shorter memories are a feature of modern public life, if one discounts the Thatcherite selling off of the national family silver as the very start of the rot (I don’t) then maybe take the illegal invasion of Iraq? Yes – that old chestnut. Undoubtedly the contemporary world has never been the same and devastating illegal invasions never look good on countries that go around the globe claiming to be morally superior to others. Plus of course – as I repeatedly mention on this blog (I’m sorry if reality bores you) it destabilised the Middle East and led to ISIS and yada yada yada.

But if you want to know not when the disease set in or when the roots began to atrophy but when the tree began to topple – you couldn’t do better than June 23rd 2016. That was when those like Boris Johnson, who had drivelled on for years that the problems facing the UK were not to do with inequality, not to do with impoverished education provision, the selling off of school land, over-crowded classrooms, growing personal debt deepened by student loans, less and less access to the justice system by those at the bottom (as legal aid was cut and cut and cut) attacks on workers’ rights and wages with the spread of zero hours contracts… no – none of those things had brought British society to its knees – it was foreigners and Brussels in particular. Hey presto Brexit.

Foreigner blaming by those who benefit from a rotten system is as old, obscene and stale as the British aristocracy and Brexit is as much of a nationalist self-harming mystery to the rest of the world as Donald Trump. But while he is – please god – about to be shown the door – we are only just at the very start of Brexit horrors as negotiating deadlines slide and the government pretends they’ve won something only to let the very firm next deadline slide and concede more and more until it starts to look like ‘our’ team are just turning up at Brussels begging to be punched in the face just a little harder – oh just one more please, now we really feel like we’re making progress!

Yes. Here we are with the government bickering over feeding poor children while shelling out £7,000 per day to consultants who have repeatedly failed to get covid test and trace to work, a trick South Korea mastered at the start of the pandemic. For ‘consultants’ obviously read, mates of the Tory party. Here we are with a health service which was the envy of the world struggling badly to cope with its ordinary workload after less than 10 months of a predicted pandemic. Here we are with crumbling infrastructure (e.g. transport) , a miserable record on the environment (now being made worse by the ecological destruction caused by HS2) while Boris Johnson frantically tries to make a pigs arse out of a sow’s ear because his “oven ready deal” of January 2020 turns out to have been cold turd pie.

By the time Boris Johnsons and his administration of lunatics and incompetents and corrupt deluded morons is through, banana republic will sound like a compliment…

Greece here we come, minus the warm sea, sun and ouzo...