By STEVEN DOWNES
If you live in an old country, it can be easy to succumb to a narrative of decline. The state withers. The charlatans take over. You give up on progress, to some extent, and simply pray that this particular chapter of British nonsense will come to an end. It will. Rishi Sunak, the fifth, and presumably final, Conservative Prime Minister of the era, faces an election later this year, which he will almost certainly lose. But Britain cannot move on from the Tories without properly facing up to the harm that they have caused
If you’re not familiar with The New Yorker, you really should be. The magazine has been a go-to source of the best in global journalism and fiction for almost a century.
I don’t subscribe to the automatic notion that “the Americans do it better”, quite the opposite. But as an example and up-holder of the principles of good journalism, and fine writing, The New Yorker has been a constant reference point.
After all, what’s not to like about a magazine that publishes Truman Capote or Roald Dahl, Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, Alice Munro and Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, Philip Roth, JD Salinger, James Thurber and John Updike?
There’s an admirable class and cleverness to everything it does. The New Yorker just looks smart. An article from the end of 2022 by Jill Lepore, a full-time academic and a full-time New Yorker writer, called Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?, about the author of the Slow Horses series of books, was like reading a Le Carré novel in its own right.
And for us Brits, with our biased and partial press and broadcasters (yes, it’s the best free press money can buy), The New Yorker offers a useful perspective, and outside-looking-in objectivity.
Which is why I commend to you a piece published this week, by British-born, London-based New Yorker staff writer Sam Knight. A sample of Knight’s essay, What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done To Britain? is at the top of this page.
In Britain, “ordinary people” have all become fed-up and disillusioned (but only sometimes angry) with the political classes for the sheer damage that they have inflicted on us all. Politicians of all parties. Knight’s article manages to crystalise Britons’ subdued rage, and many of the reasons that lie behind it.
Knight’s not old enough to have experienced the full horrors of Thatcherism as it happened, but in focusing on the years since 2010, he has captured some of the impact of what 40 years of NeoCon governments have done to this once proud, kind, welcoming and prosperous country. The charlatans have truly taken over.
One stat he includes almost sums it all up: since 2011, NHS prescriptions for antidepressants in England have doubled.
These observations are surely right, but I worry that they obscure two basic truths about Britain’s experience since 2010. The first is that the country has suffered grievously. These have been years of loss and waste. The U.K. has yet to recover from the financial crisis that began in 2008. According to one estimate, the average worker is now fourteen thousand pounds worse off per year than if earnings had continued to rise at pre-crisis rates—it is the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars. “Nobody who’s alive and working in the British economy today has ever seen anything like this,” Torsten Bell, the chief executive of the Resolution Foundation, which published the analysis, told the BBC last year. “This is what failure looks like.”
Thatcher, Blair, Cameron, Johnson, Truss, Farage, Starmer, Sunak.
Barwell, Ottaway, Reed, Philp, Newman, Ali, Perry, as well as Negrini, Lacey and Kerswell.
“This is what failure looks like.”
Well-sourced: Knight interviewed ex-MPs, ministers, Chancellors and the former Governor of the Bank of England
They have all conned us. They promise much, they offer initiative after policy change. They deliver little, except acts that cause massive harm. And yes, Knight writes about austerity and Brexit in his essay, too.
He also gives as an example the government-commissioned work of Michael Marmot, a renowned epidemiologist, who in 2008, when Gordon Brown was Prime Minister, was asked to come up with ways to reduce England’s health inequalities.
“Marmot made suggestions in six policy areas, including better access to child care, walking and cycling programs, social-security reforms, and measures to improve people’s sense of agency at work,” Knight writes. Marmot presented his report to the in-coming Tory-LibDem coalition in 2010. They accepted his findings. “I thought, Wow, this is great,” Marmot told Knight. “The problem was they then didn’t do it.”
And then Knight delivers this blow straight to his (British) readers’ solar plexus: “Ten years later, Marmot led a follow-up study, in which he documented stalling life expectancy, particularly among women in England’s poorest communities—and widening inequalities. ‘For men and women everywhere the time spent in poor health is increasing,’ he wrote…
“According to Marmot, the UK’s health performance since 2010, which includes rising infant mortality, slowing growth in children, and the return of rickets, makes it an outlier among comparable European nations. ‘The damage to the nation’s health need not have happened,’ Marmot concluded in 2020. He told me, ‘It was a political choice’.”
There’s a long weekend coming up. Do yourself a favour and set aside half-an-hour and go away to read What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done To Britain?
Then think about it the next time someone asks you for your vote.
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ROTTEN BOROUGH AWARDS: In January 2024, Croydon was named among the country’s rottenest boroughs for a SEVENTH successive year in the annual round-up of civic cock-ups in Private Eye magazine
Here’s a quote from said article:
“In many ways, the two momentous decisions of this period—what came to be known as austerity and Brexit—are now widely accepted as events that happened, rather than as choices that were made. Starmer’s Labour Party does not seek to reverse them.”
Let that be a lesson to us all
C’mon Arfur. That’s like giving away the punchline of a very involved joke.
So where do we go? I have no confidence in either Labour or the Conservatives, no confidence in the Lib Dems, I consider the Reform Party to be worse. The Greens are largely a party of protest, though they could amount to something. I have been a member of the Labour Party twice in my life, but found it run by cliques interested mainly in themselves and their pet projects. Unless good people join the political parties en masse I do not see a way out.
Thirteen years of Blair/Brown followed by thirteen years of various Tories. A pattern emerging?
Much of the reason that people have continued to vote Conservative is that Labour always turn out to be worse, but after 15+ years of each Tory Government there are sufficient new voters who don’t know any better (but think themselves cleverer than their elders) who vote Labour out of ignorant “Magic Money Tree” idealism.
The whole reason in 1979 that Thatcher got in and stayed in until Blair’s 1997 PR deluge was due to memories of the 1970’s Labour’s 1976 IMF bailout from bankruptcy and 1978-9 “Winter of Discontent” where rubbish was piled high in the streets and supermarket refrigerator trucks were requisitioned to store the unburied dead.
When I went to University immediately after that 1974-79 Labour Government, I had to commute 15 miles each way to/from my Mum’s flat every day in sardine-packed trains, because the Halls of Residence (and parts of the Canteen and Sports facilities) were deemed “Unfit For Human Habitation”. After 14 years of this Government, my kids’ University facilities are like 5-star hotels by comparison.
But you probably weren’t even born then! Or don’t care.
Our problem now is that both our major Parties are clearly puppets of outside forces intent on our Country’s destruction, else why would they systematically waste an 80-seat majority doing the opposite of what their (especially “Red Wall”) voters wanted?
The charlatans took over long ago, Ron.
The New Yorker?? Come on IC – everyone knows it’s a left-leaning publication, on the other side of the Atlantic whose glory days are long gone. Mind you, thanks to IC, I have just read Knight’s piece on Jeremy Corbyn and it was a brilliant, literate article, remarkably balanced and informative. I think we can work out though that he, Knight, shares his employer’s political views.
Bet you didn’t know Bill Fairclough lives not far from Croydon. So, if you are interested in fact based espionage and ungentlemanly officers and spies, try reading Beyond Enkription. It is an enthralling unadulterated fact based autobiographical spy thriller and a super read as long as you don’t expect John le Carré’s delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots.
What is interesting is that this book is apparently mandatory reading in some countries’ intelligence agencies’ induction programs. Why? Maybe because the book has been heralded by those who should know as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. Maybe because Bill Fairclough (the author) deviously dissects unusual topics, for example, by using real situations relating to how much agents are kept in the dark by their spy-masters and (surprisingly) vice versa.
The action is set in 1974 about a real British accountant who worked in Coopers & Lybrand (now PwC) in London, Nassau, Miami and Port au Prince. Simultaneously he unwittingly worked for MI6. In later books (when employed by Citicorp and Barclays) he knowingly worked for not only British Intelligence but also the CIA.
It’s a must read for espionage cognoscenti but do read some of the latest news articles in TheBurlingtonFiles website before plunging into Beyond Enkription. You’ll soon be immersed in a whole new world which you won’t want to exit.
Are you actually “Bill Fairclough”, Jim, but under deep cover?
A conservative estimate of 150,000 deaths from “welfare reform” ie benefit sanctions, cuts to public services for the disabled and the general effects of austerity, since 2010. Not from Covid. The DWP being investigated by the UN Torture Committee.
If you don’t believe me read the Disability News Service.
Who is going to be the Monster Raving Loony Party candidate in Croydon? Now THAT is a party worth voting for. Why not? Looking at that south London hellhole, it has nothing to lose.
The last Loony defected to the Tories. Of course!