As the Sun Sets on the United Kingdom

In Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilization, there’s a long chapter on the destruction of the Port of London. Hall doesn’t call it that; he is more impressed by the change from a decaying port which was close to a slum, which was losing importance to a new neighbourhood, headlined by the huge Canary Wharf complex, which is 97 acres with 16 million square feet of indoor space.

The port of London had been the greatest port in the world in the 19th century, but had slipped into decline in the 20th century, especially after WWI and II. The problems seemed intractable and the fact was that London was no longer the center of the world by 1980; it was New York. The Empire was gone, and when Britain joined the EU it abandoned its emphasis on economic and trade ties with the Commonwealth, made up of former members of the Empire like India, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and many more.

I remember the Commonwealth world, if barely, and my parents lived the prime of their lives in it. There was a lot of trade and travel and an entire class of people who moved easily between Commonwealth nations. But Britain, post-WWII had been de-industrializing, and Thatcher’s policies, economically, amounted to a “Fuck it, we’re giving up industry and pivoting entirely to finance.”

I recently saw someone mention the debate in England right now between the policies of Thatcher and Reagan (there wasn’t that much difference) but this is insane.

Thatcherism, Reganism, and indeed, neoliberalism, relied on built-up fat of the land. Thatcher’s big bribe to voters was letting them buy their council housing for below what it was worth. Over the neoliberal period, virtually everything owned by the state was sold off to the private sector: water, power, railroads, and as much administrative outsourcing as possible. Regulations were cut as much as possible, held back by the EU, which while neoliberal, prefers to keep some standards.

Industry was sold off to whoever wanted to buy it, often at fire-sale prices, and most of the purchases were moved overseas to places with cheaper labor.

A huge housing bubble, largely in greater London, was created. Housing bubbles always seem like free money at first, but they don’t create productive assets; what they do is make some people rich, let those who own at the beginning or get in early enough gain unearned wealth, and drive up the costs of living, and thus labor costs. This means that housing bubbles actually make a country less productive.

They’re attractive as hell, at first, and the play has been done often. Turkey under Erdogan ran one, and for about 15 years it looked great and a lot of people were made better off. But Turkey had a lot less fat to burn on the fires of housing speculation than the US, Britain, or Canada and when it ran out Turkey went into an economic tailspin. (There’s more to it than that, of course, but you can’t have housing as your engine of growth forever.)

Now, clearly, Britain was not going to regain its position as the greatest industrial nation, but by financializing and running a long housing bubble, and deliberately selling off all the areas of the state which need to be performed with competence, uniformly and at a low, fixed cost, Britain destroyed most of what it had left.

The port of London is symbolic of this. While London didn’t need it, and certainly wasn’t going to need the kind of mega-port it had been earlier, just giving it up meant the wholesale destruction of a myriad of small shipping, logistics, insurance, chandlery, repair, and shipbuilding companies.

It’s easy to destroy a network like that, but it’s hard to rebuild it. The smart play would have been to plan for a smaller port, but do what they could to keep as much of the network as possible. Mercantile policies similar to what Germany followed (or Northern Italy, until the Euro smashed them) were what was required for Britain to have a prosperous future.

What they did, instead, was throw everything productive on a huge fire, and live off what Brits had created for centuries. It worked for about 30 years, for at least a plurality of Brits, and it made a lot of people rich, but it also impoverished the industrial north and created massive distrust for the establishment, which was later parlayed to sell Brexit, as British decline was correlated so strongly with the period of its membership in the EU. (The EU was not responsible, and its policies made doing the right thing possible — if anyone had wanted to. No one did, but even so, EU laws actually slowed down the burn.)

Britain came out of WWII with a very bad hand. The US wanted to replace them, and they put the boots to Britain, doing what they could to ensure the UK would experience no industrial recovery, and that Britain would remain an American satrapy.

But as bad as that hand was, Thatcherism was a self-inflicted wound. There were alternative policies which wouldn’t have sold the patrimony to have a 30-year party.

Britain is in a position now where there is almost nothing left to throw on the fire. The NHS is next, but that’s about all there is.

Corbyn was the last chance to make a turn, but the British elite united against him, smearing him with lies and Labour party operatives actively worked against his election — to the extent of lying to him about what ads were running and making sure his phone would see ads ordinary people didn’t.

So now, the Brits have a situation where “Great Britain” will likely come to an end: Remember that the United Kingdom is Scotland + England + Northern Ireland, and that Scotland is soon likely to go. I expect Northern Ireland as well, and even Wales is possible in a couple decades.

Those who rule England will still be rich, but they will rule over an impoverished nation. They’ll be able to afford servants and estates again, though, and I suspect they want a return to that “kind of life” more than anything else.

If the British, or the English (or the Scottish, etc.), want a future, they need to do something they’ve so far been unwilling to do: Replace their leadership class wholesale, getting rid of their class of public school-educated politicians and businessmen. Without this, it is not possible for the right things to be done — and even if they got rid of those people, they’ll have to rebuild from very close to nothing.

It seems likely that the sun will set on Britain, as it has on every other great empire.

Hail Britannia, and goodbye.

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