Britain Doesn’t Understand How Much Trouble It’s In — But the Rest of Us Should
Image Credit: Tayfun Salci
Britain Had Three Options Left to Get Out of the Mess It’s In. After Today, It Has None. HINT: THE FOLLOWING ISN’T JUST ABOUT THE UK.
by umair haque
It seems like eons ago that I wrote a little essay saying that poor foolish old Britain’s plight was about to get worse. And lo! The Gods, as they do every so often, delivered. Actually, it was just yesterday that I wrote that.
And today, the new PM appointed his new cabinet. LOL. Why do I laugh wryly, and why should you, you ask? Well, consider the lessons to be learned…from this absolute trainwreck of a cabinet.
Let’s begin with the obvious — to everyone but Britain, that is, but anyways, the obvious. Britain made a Big Mistake, the biggest, perhaps, in modern history — Brexit. And thanks to Brexit, it’s now a poorer country. It’s economy is smaller than it was going to be. The pie is smaller. And that leaves a very, very small number of options.
One of those options is to strike a relatively sane deal with the EU. Why would that matter? Food prices just rose by an eye-watering — and wallet-shattering — 16% in Britain. That’s the highest, by a very long way, in the rich world, and a very large part of it, probably half or more, is because of Brexit. Britain’s a net importer of everything, particularly food, and where once lorries rolled back and forth carrying all kinds of it, now they’re stuck in queues, stopped because deliveries and orders have shrunk, stalled because of red tape. So…obvious, right? Do a sane deal with the EU, so people can put food on their tables again.
Just one problem with that. The new Deputy PM is the kind of guy who’s made his career on insulting the EU. Taunting and mocking and jeering at it. He’s not just a Brexiter, he appears to genuinely hate the EU, like the now cliched delusion goes. Good luck, then, Britain — because this government isn’t going to do a better deal with the EU — one that eliminates red tape and brings down trade barriers — even if people can’t put food on the table anymore.
What’s the lesson here? It’s about ideology. Fanaticism. Trumping (ha) any form of sanity. A sane government would surely put the material living standards of the nation before ideology. But Britain’s last few — how many PM’s have there been since Brexit? — stopped caring about their nation long ago. Now, they’re the purest example of ideologues the world sees outside Venezuela and North Korea, and no, I’m not kidding: Brits are literally going hungry, and yet, the government cares more about its delusional ideology than simply going back to the negotiating table in order to put food on the dinner table.
Not to mention the bizarre game of musical chairs of failed state governance Britain has been playing for more than half a decade now, where yesterday’s Minister of This becomes tomorrow’s Minister of That, on and on into oblivion, but not one among them has the vaguest hint of a solution to the country’s woes, because they’re all fanatical, delusional true believers in a ruinously failed ideology.
That kind of behaviour is scandalous for a rich nation. It’s precisely the kind of thing that the world expects from nations like Venezuela, for example — putting ideology above not even just pragmatism, but reality. Hey, man, people are starving. Do you think maybe the Grand Revolution could just…I don’t know…we could put over there for a minute, so we can eat? We don’t expect rich, developed nations to act like this: to put fanatical, fantastical, delusional ideology over the material realities of, say, feeding the nation.
Nor do we expect rich nations to just be the kinds of places that sit, there, glumly, go hungry, while half of them cheer on their own plummeting living standards, just because ideology’s a thrill, a rush, because they feel that they’re part of some Grand Revolution.
If I had to sum it up, this is Soviet style behavior. Do you remember what happened to the Soviet Union? Well, it had an ideology. It was called “communism,” and the idea was pretty simple, “workers committees” would plan how much stuff people and towns got, what they did, where they lived and worked, and so on. All fine and dandy in theory — who’s harmed by an idea, really? But in practice? Disastrous. The central planners couldn’t calculate how much the factories should produce in order to feed the nation — or wouldn’t, because of corruption. But ideology was to rise above reality. The system had to work — or be said to be working, even when it obviously wasn’t. Reality? So what? That is how the Soviet Union grew famed, among other things, among other forms of poverty, for its bread lines.
Exactly the same thing is happening in Britain today. Not in the details — the mechanisms — but in the dynamics. A catastrophically failed ideology — to the point that people can’t put food on the table — refuses to acknowledge reality. Over and over again. Britain has now had not one but many governments which steadfastly refuse to acknowledge the gap between ideology and reality — hey, people can’t put food on the table, maybe the Grand Experiment has failed, or maybe, I don’t know, we could try to soften it for a while? How about that? Nein! Comrade! You must be a good comrade! You must always believe in the system!
It is flatly crazy to see a rich country making itself poor this way. Not because, I don’t know, a giant meteor hit it, a huge earthquake struck — but just because ideology has triumphed over reality, and now nothing matters anymore but the delusions of the ideologues, over and over again, while the average person’s life falls apart. Like I said, the only real analogue for what’s happening in Britain now is the Soviet Union, or maybe Venezuela.
The other way that Britain has out of the mess it’s in is immigration. Why? Well, for a very simple reason: remember how Britain’s a net importer? One of the many things it imports is labour, too. To pick crops and clean flats and drive lorries and all the other mundane, humdrum jobs that make an economy go. But now, as a consequence of the Word-Which-Can’t-Be-Said-xit, labour shortages, huge ones, have broken out across the economy.
When I say huge, I mean huge. Britain’s once-famed NHS, for example, is on its knees, and it needs tens of thousands of doctors and nurses. It needs them, now too, because waiting lists are already years long. So Britain has two options. One, it can train “real” Brits to be doctors and nurses, and people can go without healthcare for a generation or three, if that goal of having enough “really British” healthcare workers can even ever be reached. Or it can import them.
See how that situation works? It holds true across economic sectors, from lower-value ones, like retail to hospitality to leisure — maids, cashiers, fruit-pickers — all the way up to professional occupations, like doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants. Britain is a nation that imports labour, and there’s nothing wrong with that. No nation in the world has ever grown for any sustained period of time without immigration, precisely because importing labour is one of the ways that a country gets rich. Why do poor countries so often stay poor? Because they more or less always try to block immigration, and so they don’t ever enjoy labour surpluses — they always have chronic shortages, and can’t build people’s skills, invest in their talents, and so on.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise. Not so long ago, Britain was a genuinely cosmopolitan nation. Its great cities were privileged to be gateways towards Europe in one direction, America in the other, and Asia, in the next. As a result, it built industries which helped to coordinate the entire modern global economy, which is basically rich Westerners buying gobs of stuff made in Asia — think of a Lloyd’s of London, or its many banks. Britain benefited tremendously from being a linchpin of the global economy.
And that was about immigration. Because imagine that you’re a banker, asked to move to London, to help do big business deals, or, I don’t know, thinking of opening up a branch of a renowned art gallery there, or even just opening a factory there. You probably want a functioning society, and that means one open to immigration. How else are you going to invest? Hire people? Hell, how are you going to manage a serious enterprise, organization, business, anything, in a country where nationalism means it doesn’t have enough doctors and nurses?
So. The second way out of this mess for Britain is immigration. The idea that “all those jobs” would go to “real Brits” hasn’t worked out, not just because Brits don’t particularly want to pick fruit and clean flats, but because there aren’t enough of them to do it. And trying to force that to happen is only to say that all those functions can’t exist in an economy, and fruit and cleaning and car trips and whatnot skyrocket in price, which is, wait for it, another aspect of what getting poorer means.
Sounds easy enough, right? Oh, wait. The new lady in charge of the country’s internal affairs — think of her as America’s Secretary of State — is so fanatically against immigration she wants there to basically be none. She’s said that she wants tens of thousands of immigrants a year.
Sound like a lot? Think again. “As of 2020 there were 9.2 million foreign-born UK residents, accounting for 14 percent of the overall UK population.” Made of? “From March 2019 to March 2020 (at the time of writing, the most recent period for which there were data), the United Kingdom received 708,000 migrants.”
So the new equivalent of the Secretary of State basically wants to shut down immigration. Imagine for a moment how flat-out crazy town that is. Nobody — and I mean nobody — sane tasked with running a modern society should believe anything remotely like that, because of course it’d cause economic ruin, almost overnight. Imagine that suddenly, those steady streams of helpful and polite doctors…drivers…teachers…professors…scientists…cleaners…houseworkers…dishwashers…nurses…dried up.
The results would be absolutely catastrophic, for any modern society. If you’re American, just consider how any business you go to during the day — any single one, from a mega-mart to a Starbucks to a local diner — would fare if Trump’s demon offspring succesfully managed to stop immigration. Half of them would have to close within weeks, is a pretty good estimate, and we haven’t gotten to schools, hospitals, universities, and clinics. The economy would be decimated.