Not to mention the fundamentals, the ecological problem of an overpopulated island that was always going to, eventually, result in catastrophe. Why Britain is Collapsing How a Nation Ends Up on a Merry-Go-Round of Doom The joke heard round the world is that, famously, the lettuce lasted longer. Than Liz Truss, Britain’s PM, whose ill-fated term ended in just 45 days. 45 utterly disastrous days — in which Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, her Chancellor of the Exchequer, both radical libertarians, proposed borrowing mega amounts for tax cuts for the super rich, which proceeded to instantly crash the pound, tank the nation’s savings, and send interest rates soaring. This was self-inflicted ruin like a developed country had never seen in modern history. All of which raises the central question: why is Britain collapsing? How did it get this bad? After all, this episode was was just the latest in a long, dismal series of self-made catastrophes, stretching back over a decade at this point. And it might not yet be the culmination, as I’ll explain. By the way, even those of us who aren’t British can surely learn something from this stunning, historic debacle. History and the world are watching, torn between abject horror and surreal comic glee. So. The reason that Britain is collapsing is very simple. It goes like this. Brexit left Britain a much poorer country. Whoever the next PM is — Truss was the third this year — they will thus always have to manage the transition into becoming a much poorer country. They will face a series of bad choices. Austerity or borrowing? Tax cuts, which necessitate less public services — or rising taxes at a time people can ill afford them? Why has Britain seen a revolving door of PMs in recent years? Why is nobody up to the job? Because whoever the PM is, they face this Hobson’s choice — a dilemma, in which there are only bad choices. And that, in turn, invites charlatans, pathological liars, and fanatical demagogues. Whoever Britain’s PM is, nobody can really do this job. Managing the transition to becoming a much poorer country necessitates navigating this dilemma, but there’s no good choice, really, among the options, because, again, Britain is now a much poorer country. How do you “manage” a transition to that, people having less to go around? You can’t, really. All that’s left is to a) lie, and tell people they’re not poorer. That’s the Boris Johnson approach, and it works marvelously, because in Britain’s being goofy has the same kind of charismatic pull that being a cowboy did for Reagan in America, or at least playing one in the movies. Then you can b) pretend that somehow you can rationally “plan” and “think” your way out of being poorer, projecting the illusion of competence — that’s the approach some contenders will take, like Rishi Sunak. Or you can c) try to bully and bluster your way out of being poorer, which is the approach the Brexit true believers still take, who are right there still insulting and taunting Europe. Finally, there’s d): adopt a radical utopian vision of total social transformation, which is the Liz Truss approach. The bitter truth is that none of these approaches matter. Hence, a revolving door of Prime Ministers and power figures who espouse various ones spin in and out of favor, rise and fall politically and culturally. None of these approaches works, and history has already proven that. After all, it’s been six long years since Brexit, and all the approaches above — lying to the nation, trying to bully the world, Truss’s radical libertarian utopianism — have been tried, and every single one has failed. Yet this merry-go-round keeps on going. After Truss is gone, the wheel of fortune will spin again, and Brits — or at least the Conservative Party — will be asked to choose from between these options, yet again, as if history and reason don’t matter, and never did. Britain is caught in this merry-go-round of doom for a reason. There is no way to solve the problem. What problem is that? Britain is now a permanently poorer country. All that’s left is to politically divide up the pain. Now. You might think I exaggerate. I’ve dwelled on the logic because I think most people — and especially Brits — don’t understand how simple but fatal the root problem is here. But let me give you some examples. Britain is now in absolutely ruinous state, and I’m not kidding. Call an ambulance, and you might wait…hours. Maybe a day, by which time, if you actually needed one, you have a pretty good chance of being dead. The once-mighty NHS can now barely serve patients — everybody jokes about not being able to see their doctor for weeks, and the wait time for some operations and serious procedures can be…years. Meanwhile, public libraries have been turned into “warm banks” around the nation. What’s a warm bank, you might ask? It’s a place where people can huddle and stay warm, because they can’t afford to pay their bills. Britain’s living standards are cratering. The data, which are retrospective, and take time to be gathered, won’t show it for a year or three. But when they do, they’ll reveal what’s all too obvious to see: a plunge downward into Dickensian living conditions for many. People rationing electricity, heat, gas, water. Elderly people using electric blankets because they can’t afford to radiators running, school kids shivering in the cold, pensioners spending the day at “warm banks,” everyday moms desperately turning to food banks. Britain’s new poverty is all the adjectives you can throw at it: Victorian, backwards, Dickensian, dystopian, and more. Now. The strange thing — the surreal thing — is that Brits don’t make the connection. Not yet. Sure, many now regret their choice to leave the EU, and think Brexit was a mistake. But not enough fully make the link. Between this new Dickensian poverty, which is spreading at light-speed, and becoming a poorer country. But this is what becoming a poorer country is. What it means. It has consequences at the everyday level, at the level of people’s lived experience. It’s not just some kind of abstraction, and we economists were never just speaking theoretically when we warned that Britain would get poor, fast, because of Brexit. How much poorer has Brexit made Britain? Here are some statistics. Trade has plunged. Britain’s own OBR says that: “The UK therefore appears to have become a less trade intensive economy, with trade as a share of GDP falling 12 per cent since 2019, two and a half times more than in any other G7 country.” There are tons of estimate like that — the precise amounts don’t really matter. The point is that Britain created a self-inflicted economic catastrophe, and now it’s paying the price. It is having an economic heart-attack, and when economies have those, there are political consequences, too — then the decline has to be managed, or at least attempted to be managed, in some form, and that leads to the various flavors of folly I’ve described above, from Big Lies to Grand Social Experiments, to try to stem the bleeding. But that’s like putting band aids on a gunshot wound, as a random person recently said on the BBC, which is precisely the right way to to put it. Nobody and nothing much can staunch the bleeding. The decision’s been made, and now the price must be paid.All that’s left is the politics of that bad decision. Who will pay the price? Where? In what form? For how long? This is what Britain is really arguing over: who will pay for the ruinous consequences of Brexit, only it doesn’t know it yet. So one PM comes along and say, hey, these people should pay, and then they’re booted out, and another comes along, and says, no, this group should pay. The problem is that of course nobody wants to pay the price for Brexit — and so the revolving door of PMs goes on and on, because this is a problem that can’t be solved, unless you can really find a social group happy and willing and eager to live in poverty forever, never enjoying the same living standards they once did. Do you see the link between economics and politics? How to sum that up? Well, Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England pointed out that “in 2016 the British economy was 90 per cent the size of Germany’s. Now it is less than 70 per cent.” That might sound like an abstraction, but when economies stagnate like this, the results, in everyday people’s lives, are poverty, of precisely the kinds that are now growing in Britain. The link couldn’t be more glaringly obvious. The job of a politician, after a bad decision like this has been made, one as catastrophic as Brexit, then becomes basically doling out the pain — a political task, of who’s weakest, least able to resist it, most silent and voiceless, and so forth. But the problem is that when the pain is as great as Brexit — a disaster affecting an entire economy — no politician can find a way to ration it all and still stay in office for long. Not even someone with the charisma of a Boris Johnson, not the tepid technocracy of a Theresa May, not the Grand Social Experiments of a Liz Truss. No politician can survive having to dole out that much pain, pain on the scale of a Brexit, because there simply aren’t enough people willing, really, to accept it, even if they don’t understand what caused it — and so people grow weary and discontented and upset, after a time, and demand a change. And on and on it goes. Let me make that even clearer. You’re Britain. You made this foolish mistake and chose Brexit. Now your economy is much, much smaller, and it’s still shrinking. Yet people want to enjoy the same living standards as before — nobody wants to get poor — but they can’t, because, well, that’s what a country getting poor means. Perhaps, because you’ve lied to them about the “sunlit uplands,” they even expect higher living standards. What do you do? You have only bad choices. One, you can borrow money, and give people the same living standards as before, but only at the price of higher debt — and if you do that, the markets will punish you, and demand higher interest on that debt, and your credibility with them will erode, too. Two, you can cut — return to austerity economics, and slash everything from aid for mind-bogglingly large heating and electricity bills to shutter schools and hospitals. But people are already on the brink. Three, you can cut taxes, which leaves people with a little more in their pockets, but at the price of less public services. And that’s it. Those are the options. There aren’t any other ones. Well, I lie — you’re a politician. So you can, four, lie to people, and tell them that the above isn’t the case, and just do nothing. You can five, really lie to people, and tell them that you’re going to go out there and bully the world, or rip it all up, same difference, and they should cheer you on, and that’s how you will get things moving again. But those are just ways to evade the problem. Now. Let me distill that menu of options. These are your choices, if you’re in the mess that Britain made for itself. Borrowing. Austerity. Tax cuts. Big Lies. And Grand Experiments. Those are your only choices. That’s it. And those aren’t choices in the sense that they’re going to solve the fundamental problem of becoming a poorer country — they’re choices about how to manage the decline to being one. In other words, none of the choices you have are going to make you as prosperous as you were before — you’re just choosing between who gets the pain, and how much of it. Choose borrowing? Great, the middle class lives like it did for a while — until their mortgages soar, which is already happening. Austerity? Great, the middle and working class suffer, while the rich grow rich, reaping the rewards of privatization. Tax cuts? Excellent, the richest benefit most, while the average person still can’t pay their bills, and now has less public services to depend on. Big Lies? Wonderful — great for your political career, but they only leave the problem festering. Or how about a Grand Social Experiment, ripping it all up? Go for it — but do you really know what you’re doing there, Lenin? Do you see my point yet? These are all the choices there are. All of them. There are no other choices beyond these. None. And so the only thing a politician can do is choose from this menu. Would you want to? Who would even take a job like that? Only a charlatan, a knave, or a fanatic — which is precisely why that’s where Britain’s ended up. On a merry go round of doom, where a charlatan jumps on the horse, and then gets pushed off, only for a demagogue to take their place, who gets shoved off, only for a fanatic to proudly jump on. And on and on it goes. Nobody can manage it. A shock like Brexit? The sudden, sharp plunge into poverty it was always going to create? The fact that Brits would never again enjoy the same living standards, unless of course you think that a trade deal with Indiana or Rwanda was going to make up for the loss of the EU? Nobody can manage a shock that huge, of that magnitude. It can’t be done. The economic transformation to becoming a much poorer country has many consequences — from actual, widespread falls in living standards, to a political merry-go-round of futility and doom, in which nobody can solve an impossible problem, which is undoing a fatal decision, and restoring the nation’s fortunes again. All that politicians can do is dole out the pain, ration it between this social group or that one, bicker over whether their constituency suffers more than the others. And that’s if they’re decent people — if they’re not, they will just resort to telling the lie that the plight the nation finds itself in does’t really exist. And people, desperate, bewildered, will probably want to believe them. Now. What do we learn from all that? Don’t be so stupid, I imagine, is the chief lesson. The American midterms are coming up, and Americans being Americans, are leaning Republican, because they’re concerned about the economy. And yet all they have to do is look at Britain, and see what a ruinous mistake that’d be. The same is true around the globe. Europeans make fun of Britain for being so foolish — and yet European nations are swinging to neofascism in droves, from Sweden to Italy. What Europeans should learn is that scapegoating doesn’t work. The British were goaded into scapegoating Europeans for their woes, and now Europeans are turning to neofascists who scapegoat all kinds of groups for theirs. It will end the same way for Europe as it has for Britain — in tears — if the path of scapegoating is followed, because you only end up with bad choices above in the end, having failed to do anything positive. I know that’s an inelegant and crude way to put the lesson. Don’t be as painfully stupid as Britain. But at this juncture, what else can really be said? In Britain to point out this link — that this is what Brexit is, from poverty to political musical-chairs-of-doom — is still to say something verboten, because even now, talking about Brexit is taboo. We should all learn something. When we give ourselves over to fanatics, to lunatics, to demagogues — who tell us the answer to our problem is that we just don’t hate enough — well, we are the ones being made fools of. We will have to pay the price in the end, just as Britain is now, because all hate has ever done in this world isruin nations through the folly of self-inflicted catastrophe. Hate doesn’t build, create, unite, evolve, grow, lead. It just sits there, a keening emptiness, and poisons all it touches. Umair October 2022
Populous city centers are in fact what you want if you care about ecology. Suburban sprawl and highway systems are incredibly inefficient energy wise. I like my space so can't say I'm a fan of cities but I can't deny that resources are much better used when people live on top of one another.
If you think you have to have a large population, yes. But it's an illusion of economizing if in reality you're overdrawing the hinterlands, especially if those hinterlands are part of some other city's ecological requirements, too.
well, gotta play the hands we're dealt with. We won't be genociding people for ecology anytime soon and pop growth is self regulating as education spreads and resources are squeezed. I'm not sure I understand the hinterlands argument. Is a hermit that never travels to town more energy efficient than a city dweller? Sure. The reality is suburban folk gotta drive to where work is until remote work becomes the norm, trash's gotta be collected house by house, heating per home unit is worse, no public transport, infra projects need to cover giant distances, etc...
It's true, the society we've created has certain requirements for its inhabitants that are built in and nearly unavoidable. Like driving which you mentioned. Thanks to fossil fuels we can "cheaply" separate home from work to distances impossible to walk in time. We've trapped ourselves. Another way to look at the problems is through thermodynamics imo, esp. law #2. You touched on it when you mentioned the hermit. "Entropy. You can't win. You can't break even. You can't even quit the game."
You could have said the same thing about the non-west coalition you were harping about yesterday. How are Iran and Russia doing?
Is it? Russia and Iran are top producers of oil and have no intention whatsoever of moving to renewables, they also like their big cities and are currently mobilizing one of the biggest land forces on vehicles that get less than 1mpg and wreaking destruction that will pump millions of tons of C02 to regbuild.
Ricter, thank you for this excellent article. We have half of the country incapable of understanding elementary things. These people are still in awe of European socialism. They dream to build the same in the US. Look at Europe and learn a bit! And no, it is not Putin to blame. European bureaucracy is suffocating everything. Vote Republican, vote against socialism!