The Abject Misery of the UK
The Abject Misery of the UK
To make sense of today's election, you need to understand the British penchant for feeling crummy.
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British people hate happiness. You will not understand this country or its politics unless you first understand the deep vein of misery that runs through absolutely everything we do. We wallow in it. It’s why we eat that slop; it’s why we live in such ugly houses. The prevailing opinion on this island is that the absolute best and most wonderful time in our entire history was when all our major population centers were being bombed by the Luftwaffe. Most of all, though, we love to be disappointed.
Every time spring limps into a grey and tepid summer, we’re secretly thrilled. Finally! Something to complain about! And this understanding should help to explain why there’s no institution more fundamentally British than the crap winter theme park. Every year, somewhere in this country, there’s another fiasco. The promotional materials promised an enchanted forest full of leaping reindeer, ice skating on a frozen lake, full-size polar bears, a little gingerbread market with warm lights among the snowy roofs—so you cram your family into the car and trundle off to some muddy field near an industrial estate in Buckinghamshire, and you tell yourself it’s because it would be nice to experience a bit of magic, just for once, but then you arrive, and it turns out the enchanted forest is a few half-dead saplings strung with fairy lights, the ice-skating rink is a square of white plastic, the winter market charges £6 for a styrofoam cup of hot chocolate, and the sole reindeer is skinny and shivering in its cage, pacing and pacing through the mud churned with deer shit and a few flecks of straw, looking at you with the rolling, haunted eyes of an animal that doesn’t understand why it’s not already dead. This happens every year, but we keep going to these things. We hunger for it. The misery; the baffled tantrums of our children. We feed on their tears.
Which is why these grand failures are slowly colonizing the rest of the year. This year, Glasgow made international news with a Willy Wonka “Chocolate Experience,” which promised all the usual wonder and enchantment but actually consisted of a basically empty warehouse decorated with some AI-generated posters and staffed by actors who’d memorized fifteen pages of AI-generated nonsense. A few summers ago, a London council spent £6 million on an artificial hill in Hyde Park, which was supposed to be a big shaggy mass of trees and wildflowers, rising miraculously out of the ground, with incredible views of the city from the top. I went. The actual hill was a pile of scaffolding covered in green fabric and dead grass, with views of a building site. It was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. I left feeling secretly very pleased.
Maybe this is a coping strategy, a way of dealing with our long post-imperial decline, but I’m not so sure. Nearly a century ago, when the British Empire was at its widest, when our cities were prosperous and still unbombed, when our industry flooded the markets and our navies ruled the waves—back then, Evelyn Waugh could end a book on the savagery and squalor of the rest of the world with a nightmarish scene in a London restaurant. If you want savagery and squalor, he writes, “Why go abroad? See England first. Just watch London knock spots off the Dark Continent.” I think we’ve just always been like this. Something in the greyness of this island. The ground is wet and the soil is dark: it’s great for plants, various forms of duckweed and moss; it makes you want to be a plant yourself. When the Romans came here two thousand years ago, they discovered that the Britons spent most of their time wallowing in swamps. Herodian: “Most of Britain is marshland because it is flooded by the continual ocean tides. The barbarians usually swim in these swamps or run along in them, submerged up to the waist. Of course, they are practically naked and do not mind the mud because they are unfamiliar with the use of clothing.” Cassius Dio: “They can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship; for they plunge into the swamps and exist there for many days with only their heads above water.” Nothing’s changed. We don’t mind being cold or hungry, we love it in fact, just so long as we’re also up to our necks in filth.
Anyway, over the past decade and a half, we have done everything in our power to turn Britain into a country-sized version of the miserable seasonal theme park. You probably know the headline news. Back in 2008, British GDP per capita was roughly equal with the United States; now it’s barely half. We have the worst-performing economy in the G7. In other European countries, even the ones that aren’t doing so well, productivity has still grown, but in the UK it’s flatlined: we’re working, but all that toil isn’t getting us anywhere. What all this actually looks like is a country slowly overwhelmed by its own grot. Most towns in Britain haven’t seen any kind of prosperity since the Blair years. Crap public sculpture, paid for by the Millennium Fund, built to celebrate some local industry that no longer exists. Some lingering shopping center built from green glass and shiny brick, which was very modern back in 1998 but is now mostly inhabited by junkies. Everything is like this. The hospitals are still open, but they can’t always reliably treat the sick: Nearly 300 people are dying needlessly every week because of overcrowding in emergency wards. We still have schools, police, social workers, all the institutions of a civilized society, but none of them have the resources to actually do their jobs. So they make cosmetic interventions while our children stab each other to death. The UK currently has two steelworks, but both are shutting down their blast furnaces. When that happens, Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, will be the only country in the G20 without the ability to produce its own steel from raw materials. Meanwhile, pretty much every river in England is polluted with vast quantities of human shit. We sold off the water utilities to private firms and now they’re going bust; dumping the sewage is cheaper than treating it. In 2023, the privatized water companies poured raw sewage into our waterways nearly 1,300 times a day.
It’s only in the last few years that the rest of the world has started to understand just how badly we’re doing. Friends in other countries started asking if I was ok, if I was surviving out there. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be pitied by a Belgian? I think they imagined my country was experiencing some kind of social collapse. Desperation, riots, breakdown of all order… But it wasn’t. In America, where things aren’t nearly so bad, a big chunk of the population has gone half-feral. Armed and lunatic, channeling some bullshit they read online into acts of random violence. But we’ve not gone feral. There’s been no large-scale civil unrest. Everywhere you go, people are calmly, quietly getting on with their lives, buying sandwiches, taking the bus. There’s a TV show called Gogglebox where you watch other people watching TV; it’s very popular. Our political debates are about banning dog breeds and the definition of the word “woman.” We pretend everything’s normal, while every day we get a little bit poorer. Why would we start acting out? This is exactly what we wanted all along.
Since 2010, every general election—and there have been a lot of them—has ended up delivering a Conservative-led government. Much of what’s happened to this country is a direct product of the Tory fixation on various forms of austerity: the large-scale destruction of our civic infrastructure on the understanding that you can make a country richer by making the people who actually live in it poor. Critics on the left tend to see austerity as a form of class warfare. Disciplining labor, reducing its share, so capital can realize greater profits. As always, critics on the left vastly overestimate the rationality of capital. In 2010, when the Conservatives took power, corporate profits were in a significant slump at 10.1%. The current figure is 9.6%. Nobody’s making any money from this. Nobody actually benefits. It’s just our limitless appetite for suffering and misery, expressed as an economic policy.
But the Tories’ time is finally up. There’s a general election happening today, and unless there’s some kind of miracle, they’re going to suffer one of the biggest defeats in Western political history. They’re currently on track to lose more than 200 seats in Parliament; the smart MPs are all standing down instead of having to suffer the indignity of being voted out. But it’s not because there’s any particular enthusiasm for the Labour Party. Keir Starmer, the bland, businesslike leader who looks like a piece of ham that’s been plumped up with water injections, is promising a lot and nothing at all at the same time. He will halt the decline, he will stop this island slowly sinking into the sea, he will beat back the rot rising out of the swamps that used to be our home, he will make the economy grow again. He will also do it without reversing any of the recent Conservative budgets, and while maintaining strict limits on state spending. He’ll get his chance, but I don’t think it’s because anyone’s genuinely optimistic that he can pull it off. If voters have turned on the Tories, it’s because the party has finally become so ramshackle, so crawling with loonies and losers, that nobody could possibly expect anything from them any more. Now it’s Labour’s turn to disappoint us.
Sam Kriss writes from London. Read more at Numb at the Lodge.
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Being British, and having spent the last 14 years living in three other countries, I don't recognize this penchant of the British for being any more miserable or fed up with the state of their country than citizens of those other countries. It's true that the years of austerity under the Conservatives and Brexit have had extremely negative effects on public services and the economy respectively, but the state of the election discussions currently going on in France and the US suggest that we're not the only ones with major problems. In addition, the very superficial caricature of Starmer completely misses any analysis of the man himself and what he might actually be capable of achieving despite the current state of the economy. People just need to compare what he has achieved over the last 30 years, as well as how he has achieved, to the records of the last 5 Conservative prime ministers to see that there is reason for hope that something good may be coming - even if the author of this piece will be disappointed by the prospect of something positive.
Some elements of truth in this article but the author really should get some counselling. It is cheap to publish such a skewed version of British life.
I have my own critical views of my native country but would never weave the lives of normal citizens into a review of institutional failure.