Britain Collapses

Great Britain is in the middle of an election campaign right now. The ruling Conservative Party is expected to lose and Labour to form a new government. Rishi Sunak’s Tories may set a record for losing seats. If they come out of this vote with 150 seats, an all-time low for the party, they will be doing well; some polls have them winning less than 50 seats. Either way, that government is done. So why should we care? First, because the UK has the world’s sixth largest economy (though its GDP is falling); second, because here is a lesson in Right-wing rule and every thing that results from it.

Living standards are down. Poverty is up. UK children are smaller than other Europeans of the same age, a result of austerity programs that hobbled food distribution and NHS medical care. About 700 children a year are treated for scurvy, rickets, and malnutrition. Wages are low, cost of living is rising. Taxes are at record levels. This is the worst economic performance by any Parliament in decades. A fifth of all English cities are bankrupt, including Birmingham, second-largest city in the UK. This is the result of the 40% cutback in funding over the last fourteen years of Conservative rule. London’s water supply is failing and other regional water supplies are in trouble with cryptosporidium and E.coli. Water services were privatized by the Thatcher government. The private owners have not kept up with infrastructure repair, preferring to take large profits out of these services. Energy companies are failing, too, in record numbers. There are numerous scandals, from fraud over covid supplies to the sub-post office “greatest injustice ever” to Windrush and the disentitlement of thousands of Caribbean workers.

With all those problems, why call an election now? Because things will not get better; because the Rwanda solution to the immigration problem will not work; because a bunch of disaffected Conservatives (the “Pop-Cons”) were trying to oust Rishi Sunak — things could only deteriorate for Sunak’s government. But the campaign has gone far worse than anyone predicted. First, there were the dodgy figures that the Tories tried to use against Labour that wound up being used against Sunak’s government. The first day’s campaigning being exposed as a staged event. There is the betting scandal — unable to pass up a chance to grab any cash floating about, Conservatives used insider information to bet on the date of the election. Then there was the revival of Nigel Farage as leader of Reform. Maybe Reform will do some damage to the Conservatives — already they have led them in the polls once or twice. (Farage says that he is modelling his party on Preston Manning’s Canadian Reform Party. Manning took down the federal Conservative party, then merged with it. Right-wing parties split up and reform constantly, in the grand tradition of “creative destruction”.)

Sunak has little hope of winning, he is trying to survive. He was chosen as PM by 140,000 party members, whose average age is post-retirement. So, Sunak is trying to keep the elderly Tories that elected him. He has campaigned on the notion that youth today doesn’t want to work, just play video games. Every older generation has believed that their youthful successors don’t work as hard as they did, are not as capable as they were, and probably could use some punishment to instill discipline. Thus Sunak has proposed National Service. Every young person will have to work for the Nation as a soldier or something until they are old enough to order younger people to do it instead. Young people may face sanctions if they refuse. Also, Sunak is proposing a large boost to pension benefits, especially tax breaks. That should work to keep the Oldies in line — unless Rishi makes a terrible blunder, like, for instance, skipping out of D-Day commemorations in order to create a campaign video. Since the people Rishi is trying to win over are the children of the “Greatest Generation”, you might expect them to be a bit miffed.

Sunak goes to TikTok to explain National Service to youth. This was a day or two before the Conservatives discussed banning TikTok altogether.

Meanwhile, Labour is keeping pretty quiet. Leader Keir Starmer has proposed a set of policies, but mostly is trying not to screw things up. Also, he is probably a bit worried about the enormous difficulties that his government will inherit. For example, the sub-post office mess which may cost a billion pounds to compensate people whose lives were destroyed by stupidity bordering on criminality. Some token bureaucrat may even be charged and convicted of something, but don’t expect that criminal to serve any prison time.

Hearings into the sub-post office scandal — “the UK’s most widespread miscarriage of justice” — are going on now, but these may just be for show, meant to delay or stop any action. This is the playbook: call hearings, delay, call some more hearings, delay, create a Parliamentary inquiry, delay, create a Commission to look into things, delay, and so on and on. The tainted blood scandal, where the National Health was distributing dodgy blood products that were infected with HIV and hepatitis, just reached some sort of conclusion after forty years of delay. Thousands, including hundreds of infants and children, died in the “worst treatment disaster” in the history of the NHS, even as Thatcher’s Health Minister proclaimed that HIV was not transmissible through blood transfusions. There’s only a few thousand people still alive that are eligible to receive compensation, which sounds like the plan all along.

Then there are the covid fraud cases. The most talked-about is that of Baroness Mone (pron. “moan”) and her husband. Take a look at that Wikipedia page: one fraud after another over the years and yet she is named to the House of Lords by David Cameron, who was Conservative Prime Minister when the party began to unravel and now has, fittingly, joined Sunak’s government as it completely disintegrates. Anyway, Baroness Mone and her husband were involved with PPE MedPro. a company that offered to sell you PPE gear — masks and gloves and so on. During covid, the UK government thought there was a shortage of PPE and gave a lot of money to speculators who actually had no stock to sell. MedPro got contracts for more than £200 Million, then supplied stuff that didn’t meet standards. MedPro is being sued by the government for £122 plus costs. The Baroness is typical of the covid fraudsters. There are a fair number of members of the House of Lords named in these scandals — another baroness, several Lords — as well as major donors to the Conservative Party. Only “the best people” as somebody or other once said. Anyway, the UK treasury has lost £9 Billion to these thieves.

The promise of privatization was that it was more efficient than public ownership, therefore cheaper. But it is public taxes that will pay for all this chicanery. Privatization is more expensive than public ownership. Period. If a public service is necessary — water, say — then the public should own it. Otherwise, they pay twice: once, to keep the service going and again, to bail it out once it fails. Starmer’s Labour government will have the opportunity to nationalize many failed programs. Hopefully, they will seize that chance, but even so, it will take a while to clean up this mess.