Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Britain Page 1 of 9

Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

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On November 25, 2024

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Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

  • In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.[71]
  • In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.[72]
  • In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.[1]
  • In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.[73]
  • In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

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Consequences of the British Election

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On July 5, 2024

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Labor won with a massive majority. In seats:

 

Of course Britain has a first past the post system, so these aren’t nearly the same as the percentage results.

  • Labour Party: 35 percent vote share, 412 seats
  • Conservative Party: 24 percent vote share, 121 seats
  • Liberal Democrats: 12 percent vote share, 71 seats
  • Reform UK: 14 percent vote share, 4 seats
  • Green Party: 7 percent vote share, 4 seats
  • Scottish National Party (SNP): 2 percent vote share, 9 seats
  • Sinn Fein: 0.7 percent vote share, 7 seats
  • Plaid Cymru: 0.7 percent vote share, 4 seats

Labour has a huge MP majority, but received less of the vote than they did in 2017 under Corbyn.

The Reform surge, which at one point looked like it might overtake and pass the conservatives died out, alas. But note that Reform received more votes than the Liberal Democrats but received four seats to their seventy-one and Sinn Fein received 7 seats for .7% of the vote. In first past the post, you want your votes clumped, not spread out. In vote total terms, Reform is now the third party.

It’s also worth noting that almost no one is voting Labour because they like Labour or Keir Starmer:

As with LaPen’s National Rally, Reform may well improve with each election and Labour is vulnerable to a real challenge from the left.

But let’s move to more immediate consequences.

The Conservative austerity policies severely gutted Britain:

  • The grant to local governments dropped 60% from 2010 to 2020. They’re the ones who run most of the government: libraries, fire departments, council housing, roads, public transit and so on.
  • 20% of libraries closed
  • Spending on old people down 35% with one estimate saying this killed 45K people.
  • Inflation adjusted wages are lower than in 2007, and the inflation numbers are certainly lower than reality.
  • Rent and housing costs are way up.
  • Twenty percent less people get cancer treatment on time.
  • The UK now has the highest homelessness rates in the Western world.
  • Gutted universities, one of the few world class industries left in Britain (and one which brings in a lot of foreign currency.)

And so on. Tory rule has been a catastrophe.

But there’s little reason to expect Labour rule to be much better. They voted for many of the bills that caused this catastrophe, and didn’t oppose most of the rest. They still believe in austerity and neoliberalism. It’s likely they’ll increase some taxes, but they’re not likely to use the money to spend much more and fix problems: Britain is serious fiscal condition, and the level of tax raises necessary to deal with that and to allow spending is off the table, especially as to really get money they’d have to tax the city and massively raise taxes on the rich.

They will continue to clamp down on public dissent, and likely use the banking system against protestors, along with locking them up. I’m unsure how they’ll handle strikes, but odds are that Starmer will be unsympathetic to mass strikes and use legislation and the police against them (which is why the big unions should leave Labour and support a new left party.)

In other words, Britain’s decline is not going to halt under Labour and neither is the decline in standards of living for most Britons.

This means that there will be room for Reform and a new left party to surge. While I’m not a fan of right wing social policies, Brits tend to be more left wing economically than Labour but socially conservative, which means Galloway’s “Worker’s Party” is positioned to take advantage, being economically left and socially right on some key issues, such as trans rights.

However Galloway’s party’s social conservatism is a barrier to some left wingers, like Corbyn (who won his seat as an independent) joining.

Whatever the specifics, there is a constituency for an economically left wing party, and Labour’s likely terrible economic performance now that it’s in power leaves an opening.

Generally speaking, as neoliberalism dies, there will be changeovers in dominant parties: either the parties themselves will change, or they will be replaced: this is true in almost every country. If we want a good world, and government which genuinely tries to help ordinary people, we have to work for and hope for the real left to take power.

One good piece of news in this regards is the continued weakening of the Zionist movement, since accusations of anti-semitism have been one of the main weapons used against the left, as they were against Corbyn and as they have been used against the left in France. Making charges of anti-semitism for supporting Palestine identically to excusing genocide (which they are) is necessary, and underway, especially among younger voters.

To summarize, however: nothing much will change immediately or in the next four years because Labour won. They’re still austerity loving neoliberal scum who can’t imagine, let alone institute any of the policies required to turn around Britain’s decline. The medium term trends, however, and the consequences of their failure to govern effectively offer some promise for the future, though by the time someone with sense gets in power it’s going to be nearly impossible to turn Britain around, assuming it’s even the United Kingdom any more. (Scotland should leave, and so should Northern Ireland, and both stand a good chance of doing so.)

Plus ca change, etc…

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The UK’s Housing And Immigration Crisis In Charts

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On July 2, 2024

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Here’s the TLDR: the UK has a housing crisis because it is bringing in way more immigrants than usual and not building way more housing.

(Most of the charts from Simulcrax.)

For a long time Britain was building more housing than it had population increase. This was good, because as anyone who visited England in the 50s or 60s will tell you, it didn’t start with an excess.But starting around 2000AD it increased immigration and didn’t increase how much housing it was building, and after a while that caught up.

The chart only goes till 2019, though. Let’s see what happened afterwards.

 

Wow. That’s pretty ugly, and hey, it happened under the anti-immigrant Conservative party, and after Brexit, which was supposed to reduce immigration. Anyone wonder why Reform is challenging the Conservatives for second party status?

Now let’s be clear: immigration can be good, bad or mixed. If your economy is doing really well, you have low inequality and high wages and not enough workers and an economy which makes most of what you need domestically, then immigration is going to be good: the immigrants will get good jobs, increase demand and the economy will expand. But if you’ve gotten rid of your industry, have high inequality and an economy which is sucking wind then immigration is going to take jobs from natives and keep wages lower. And if you aren’t building enough housing and don’t do something about that, it’s going to raise housing prices, especially at the bottom and middle, which is going to hurt people.

The people it will hurt most, of course, are:

The chart pretty much speaks for itself. Let’s look at one more chart:
Ouch. I mean, it’s not like the situation is good in the US, is it?

Let’s be clear about what’s happening: it’s not that the UK can’t reduce immigration, it can, especially post-Brexit. Like Canada, however, it wants to increase GDP and keep wages low, so it’s bringing in as many people as it can, as deliberate government policy and doing so, without a booming economy, is hurting people who already live in Britain.

You don’t have to be racist or xenophobic to believe, accurately, that too much immigration is bad if there isn’t enough housing and jobs to absorb the immigrants. Problem is, given how people are, they will blame the immigrants and become racist and xenophobic, when the correct response is to hate the government and ruling class.

Britain, having deliberately de-industrialized, especially since Thatcher, can’t absorb this many people without causing extreme harm to people already living in Britain, especially if the government doesn’t move, massively, to social housing. People who want less immigration are correct, the only way to absorb this sort of influx without harm would be an entirely different set of government policies, even then, the immigration surge wouldn’t make sense until the policies take effect.

Unfortunately the only chance of pursuing anything like those policies was to elect Corbyn, and that chance has passed.

The sun always sets, and now it sets on Britain.

Addendum: Stumbled on this after writing the article.

He continues: “According to the Government’s own methodology, we needed to expand the housing stock by around 3.4 million homes over the last decade: 2.2 million to meet existing housing pressures, and 1.2 million to cope with net migration. We increased the number of homes by only 2.1 million.”

So, without immigration, they’d only be down 100,000 over the last twent years, rather than 1.3 million.

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UK’S Reform Party Is Poised To Destroy the Consersvatives, and Deserves To

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On June 24, 2024

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The latest polls show Reform, led by Nigel Farage neck and neck, or slightly ahead of the Tories.

I took some time to read their manifesto and it’s pretty bloody awful.

BUT, and it’s a big but, there’s some stuff Reform is promising that no one else is offering. For example:

  • lower rents through reduced migration
  • free tuition for STEM degrees
  • lifting income tax allowance to £20,000

Farage talks about the housing crisis all the time, and these specific policies are laser-targeted at younger people.

Farage wants to stop all non-essential immigration. Britain is like Canada, there’s vastly more immigration than there is housing being created and rents and house prices have sky-rocketed. (A detailed post on that soon.) Tuition averages about $6,000 pounds a year and young adults tend to be poor and have little income.

He also wants to reduce estate taxes, go all-in on anti-trans policies, get rid of clean energy and so on. He’s still a conservative loon.

But he’s offering what neither Labour nor the Conservatives are, or can.

He has the best chance of breaking the Labour/Conservative duopoly that Britain has seen in generations for the same reason LaPen is surging, Brexit happened & Trump is viable: the status quo sucks for most people and they want radical change. Since radical change to the left was stopped with Corbyn’s defeat and the Starmer’s purge of the left from Labout, it’s now the right’s turn.

Like an animal in a leg-trap who chews its own leg off to escape, people in pain who see their lives getting worse and no hope of improvement will take a chance on something radical. Sometimes, as with Javier in Argentina, that something radical is extremely stupid, but at a certain point people will try anything.

For a lot of people in Britain, as in France and Argentina and America, the risk is worth it.

As with Corbyn, the press is now turning hard against Reform. Any change from the neoliberal status quo will be opposed with their full weight. It worked against Corbyn, but at some point it will stop working.

Reform won’t win the election, but they don’t need to. They need to replace the Tories as the second party, either in this election or the next. Once they are part of the duopoly, power is only a matter of time.

Let us hope the left learns from this and raises its own challenge to Labour, replacing it, because Reform’s policies, overall, are horrid.

Neoliberalism is dying in country after country, who and what replaces it matters.

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Britain’s Bare Produce Shelves

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On March 9, 2023

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The Daily Mail had an article on this, and it’s worth reading.

A dig down in this reveals two main factors (the Daily Mail was pro-Brexit and discounts that factor).

First, increases in energy prices.

Tony Montalbano, a director of Green Acre Salads in Roydon, Essex, typically produces a million kilograms of baby cucumbers a year, but his glasshouses were empty last month.

He delayed growing his crops to avoid rocketing winter fuel bills of up to £500,000 a month. He expects his production to be cut by up to half this year.

‘It’s sad and frustrating but I can’t afford to grow,’ he said. ‘I must make a profit. If I don’t, there’s no point in me going on. Lots of growers are closing their doors and selling up.’

Jack Ward, chief executive of the British Growers Association, added: ‘Up and down the country, we’ve got empty glasshouses. People who would grow two or three crops of cucumbers a year may cut that to just one, because they want to avoid using more expensive energy.’

Eggs are also being rationed as farmers cannot afford the costs of keeping laying hens warm in energy-guzzling sheds.

Second, crop failures due to poor weather (aka. climate change) in Spain and Morocco have had a big effect, as Britain imports a lot from them.

Now, the thing about energy prices is that they have been raised far more than fuel prices have. The UK system has producers of energy, suppliers (the people who run electricity lines and ship fuel to retail customers) and the retail customers of energy.

Let’s take oil:

Unveiling its latest results, Shell said the price of the barrels of oil it sells rose from $62.53 a year ago to $101.42. Gas prices rose from $4.31 to $13.85 per thousand standard cubic feet over the same period.

So, their costs increased about 62%, and they about tripled the prices they charge.

In electricity, there is a price cap. The companies are not allowed to earn more than thirty-five pounds more than they sell the electricity to households. That cap, however, only applies to households, it doesn’t apply to business. So on the business side, they’ve been massively raising prices.

Thus the empty green (glass) houses, which grow far more than just cucumbers. Likewise vertical farms have been hit hard. If you want produce during the non-harvest season you have to buy from other countries or you have to grow in controlled environments. Add in climate fluctuations from climate change and high energy prices making it impossible to make a profit growing produce and you have shortages.

Price increases from Russia, in other words, are only an excuse to raise prices, not the reason for most of the price increase.

The solutions have been discussed even by the mainstream press: either re-nationalize the energy sector or put in a windfall profit tax so they don’t get to keep excess profits. And it’s worth noting that many energy companies did go under due to increased costs when they were regulated to be unable to pass them on. Some companies made way more than their increased costs, while others went under.

In the post-war liberal era private utilities were highly regulated, but a cornerstone of proper regulation was that they would always make a decent profit: enough for proper maintenance, which had to be done (remember all the fires in California because the privately owned utility won’t maintain power lines and poles), and to expand capacity as necessary. Utility stocks were “widow and orphan stocks” because they would make the same every year. Genuine price increases were passed on, but profits could not either rise or fall.

So, if you want to keep them private the best way isn’t so much a windfall tax, which is a response to a crisis, but proper regulation. Or you can just make them public again.

Energy prices in France have risen far less than in Britain for the simple reason that France owns its own generators and grid.

The other obvious factor is that if you have a cap on households for political reasons (they vote) you need a cap on the costs to farmers and to industry. But if you’re going to put all these caps in place, it’s better to just move to proper regulation, and a flat cap makes little sense, it should always be in percentage terms. When prices went up 60%, someone has to pay that. That either means end-users, or it means the government subsidizes. Those subsidies could be broad, if the increase is expected to not last long, or they could be targeted at specific industries and people with low income.

While generally means targeted subsidies are a bad idea, there are specific cases where they make sense, and this is one of them.

Anyway, Britain doesn’t have bare produce shelves “because of Russia” it has bare produce shelves because energy companies gouged the customers they could gouge using Russia as an excuse and because the government refused to step in and ensure prices which allow the “free” market to work properly, because there is no free market and never has been, and it always requires intervention to keep it working.

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The UK Continues Its Decline

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On March 3, 2023

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From the Guardian:

The number of UK children in food poverty has nearly doubled in the last year to almost 4 million, new data shows, ramping up pressure on ministers to expand the provision of free school meals to struggling families.

According to the Food Foundation thinktank, one in five (22%) of households reported skipping meals, going hungry or not eating for a whole day in January, up from 12% at the equivalent point in 2022.

Regular readers will know I’ve written about this often. The UK appears to be in decline to third world status. While the EU is neoliberal, it was better than what UK neoliberals wanted to do by leaving it. The UK has spent the time since Thatcher deliberately de-industrializing, leaving it with little more than the financial industry and a few hi-tech spars remaining. Leaving the EU makes the “City” less valuable: being inside the EU was useful, and now it’s outside.

On top of this, financialization cannibalizes real industry, since financial profits are higher and the highest profits come from taking public goods and privatizing them. This has been done to everything substantial owned by the UK government in 79, when Thatcher took power, from railroads to water and electricity, leaving on the National Health Service. That’s the last big chunk of profits, and then they’re done.

At that point, what does Britain have to offer to the rest of the world other than a corrupt financial center? Little, and that financial center can’t, won’t and doesn’t want to support most of the population, since even if they could, that would defeat the point: the people who run it don’t want to share, they want to be rich.

The Russia mess has also made this worse. There was a lot of Russian money in the UK, and freezing or taking it means no more will come in and it also makes everyone who’s in a non US ally country wary of using London to store money, whether in banks, securities or properties. After all, they could be next.

Brexit done right could have been the start of rebuilding the UK, but that would have required reigning in the City and engaging in industrial policy to provide industries capable of employing Britons, supply domestic British needs rather than importing, and also able to export.

As it is, Britain is done. The political fallout will probably include, within a decade or so, the loss of Northern Ireland and Scotland. At which point the United Kingdom (Scotland and England unified) will be no more, and England will stand alone again.

The Sun does set, it seems.

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The Life & Death Of Queen Elizabeth II

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On September 9, 2022

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Queen Elizabeth II in 1959

I was born in 68, and I remember the middle-aged Elizabeth and the era before the Commonwealth became meaningless. There was a post-war world where people traveled freely & often between the ex-Empire nations, and where economic ties between those nations and Britain were still primary. It came to an end when Britain went into a financial crisis so serious it required IMF intervention and then joined the EU to get a real bailout. Once Britain was in the EU, its focus became European, not ex-Imperial.

It was, in a way, a betrayal of the ex-colonies, but Britain didn’t have much choice. I’ve always found it ironic that British elites are such loyal dogs for the Americans, because the US did everything it could to hasten the fall of the Empire and then to put the boots to Britain. The US understood it was taking over the old Empire in a new form (less direct killing, but the boot was still there), and wanted to make sure Britain not only didn’t get back on its feet, but went from on its knees to on its belly.

It succeeded in this. Leading Brits in the late 40s and 50s knew this was what was happening, but could see no way out, given how relatively powerful the US was (and how Europe and Britain were garrisoned by US troops).

I can’t, offhand, think of a “good” Empire; they’re always bad, though in some places, some relative good can be done. (Hong Kong started out with a population under 1,000, and Chinese fled there. Though the Brits were bastards, they were better than the late Manchu, however.)

From Ireland to India and most parts in between, the British Empire did plenty of evil, as one would expect from the largest Empire to ever exist. (The Mongols come in second, though they had the largest land empire. The US? It’s a bit hard to count. Might be that post-USSR collapse they could be seen as eclipsing the UK.)

Elizabeth ceremonially presided over the dismantling of the British Empire. She worked hard to try and keep the Commonwealth together, but post-70s, even that disintegrated step by step. She died, I would say, mercifully, before the United Kingdom itself (the union of England and Scotland) broke up, and before Northern Ireland was lost. For a person in her position, she seems to have done less harm than one would expect.

The sun set on the British Empire decades ago. Soon, it will set on the UK. Europe is no longer the center of the world, but a collection of satrapies conquered by its old colony, the US.

In the normal order of things, the next Empire would rise in China — but we no longer exist in the “normal order,” but rather the end of a climate which has existed for thousands of years.

Elizabeth is lucky to miss the end of that order as well.

Note: Yesterday’s article was incorrect. A month after publication, the scientists clarified that the Antarctic sea-shelf collapse would not raise the sea level quickly, and that sea level rise (from this collapse) could take a century. I apologize for the error, and thank commenter David for catching it. The article is still up, with the error noted, but will be deleted after a bit. This note will stay.

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As the Sun Sets on the United Kingdom

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On July 18, 2022

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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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