There’s something strangely inevitable happening in Britain. Now, a majority of Brits think Brexit was…a mistake. Brexit’s turned into Bregret, as they’re beginning to call it. In that, there are some profound lessons for a world turning, foolishly, desperately to the far right for salvation. How does it end? Just ask Britain.
Right about now, Britain’s something like the English-speaking world’s Austria or Poland. It’s a far right nation, in which nothing exists, or is allowed to exist, but xenophobia, spite, hate, and lunacy, and if you think I go too far, don’t worry, I’m about to demonstrate it to you. It’s so far right that compared to a nation like Canada, it’s off the scale. It’s now so much further right than America — with the exception of obvious issues like guns — that it’s not even in the same league. How does that experiment end? What happens when a nation goes from flirting with the extreme right, to wedding itself to it?
Britain wedded itself to the extreme right, and I mean that literally — because Trump was temporary. But Brexit? Brexit is forever. Britain’s now trapped in a marriage made in hell — and sadly for it, there’s no way out. Don’t worry, I’m going to demonstrate that, too.
It’s not so hard to see why Brits are being consumed by Bregret. Right now, the number’s at 56 percent, and it’ll only grow. Why? Because the country is in meltdown. Utter and complete meltdown, and I don’t say that lightly, and it’s not my opinion. Take it from former PM Gordon Brown, who’s watched his prediction of Britain becoming a “failing state” play out, or from the current Chancellor, who speaks of the NHS in a state of “collapse,” and then grins, shrugs, and walks away.
But I want to actually explain this all to you. Let me begin with a little personal story. When I was a kid, my parents would take me back to the “third world.” And there, I remember being struck by a certain thing which confused me. “Dad,” I asked, “Why do people have to call buses or rickshaws to go to the hospital?” I couldn’t understand it. He replied, looking at me sadly, tenderly, “Because some countries, son, are too poor to afford ambulances.” It had never occurred to me. The parts of the year I spent in the rich West had made me think — assume — that every society would have ambulances. I’d never thought that, well, maybe you couldn’t have ambulances. Because you were poor.
And yet this, shockingly, is where Britain is today. Again, it’s not my opinion. “The ambulance service is in meltdown” — that’s what the head of the ambulance drivers’ union herself says. She says it for a reason that’ll leave your head spinning.
“Ambulance crews could not respond to almost one in four 999 calls last month — the most ever. Ambulance officers warned that patients were dying every day directly because of the delays since the service could no longer perform its role as a ‘safety net’ for people needing urgent medical help.“
Think about that. One in four times someone calls an ambulance in Britain now…it doesn’t come. It just…never arrives. I’ve raised this example before, because this is the catastrophic failure of one of the most basic public goods a society can have. And you can read plenty of stories about how this plays out in real life — they’re incredible, people literally dying because they can’t just get an ambulance. In a rich country?
Even in America, you can get an ambulance. It might cost you, but, hey, it’ll show up. And you might have to spend a small fortune, but at least grandma won’t die. I highly doubt there’s another rich country where 25% of the time, ambulances don’t show up. But if something as basic as ambulances are failing…what about everything else?
The reason I highlight this example is simple. Brits can’t get ambulances for a very simple reason, that nobody much wants to admit, even though everyone sane understands, yet can’t say it loud, for reasons I’ll come to shortly. Brexit. What happened after Brexit? A huge, huge exodus of labour. Skilled labour — doctors, nurses, paramedics, engineers, lawyers, bankers, just go down the list. It’s not even accurate to say that they left en masse — it’s more accurate to say that they were forced out. By a nation that had turned so xenophobic, many of them found it difficult to stay, legally, and even if they could, the atmosphere was now one of “us” versus “them.” It had gotten so bad that Europeans were scapegoated every day in the British media, right out in the open, by figures like Nigel Farage and so forth — would you want to live in a society like that, if you were a doctor or engineer or lawyer? One that loudly told you how much it didn’t want you around, because you were the problem?
So huge numbers of people were forced out of Brexit Britain, as nationalism turned to xenophobia proper. Social mores had changed, you see. Where once Britain was gentle and accepting — now there was, quite literally, a “hostile environment.” Towards whom? Towards anyone who wasn’t “really” British — even if they’d lived there for most of their adult lives. Stories, again, abound.
That left Britain with a very, very big problem. Labour shortages. The world was already going into crisis, because of a Terrible Trio: the pandemic, the mega-scale impacts of climate change arriving, and the consequent economic slowdown. But now Britain, thanks to Brexit, had made things that much worse. Brexit had serious, severe effects on trade — like it was always going to. Brits shrugged these off — they were abstract, for a while, anyways. And then prices began to go through the roof — even more so than everywhere else.
Add to that labour shortages — and you have a portrait of a society growing poorer at light-speed, more like an emerging market than a rich nation. Today, it’s probably more accurate to say that Britain’s the Argentina of the rich world — a formerly rich nation on the way to becoming shockingly poor — than it is to say it’s anything like its peers. What do I mean by that?
Today, Britain’s economy is the worst performing in the rich world, not just by a little ways, but by a shocking margin. The UK is one of just three economies the OECD predicts to shrink in 2023. The other two are Germany, because of its exposure to Russian energy and, LOL, Russia. That’s…horrendous. Why? Because, well, Britain’s already plunged into dire poverty, before this slowdown — and it’s going to finish the job. The average American has $5K in their bank account — not a lot, until you consider that the average Brit has just $570. Now imagine a nation already that poor entering a recession — plus skyrocketing prices. What does that foretell? A tsunami of bankruptcies sweeping the nation, homelessness, bad debts, financial ruin on a cinematic scale.
That’s just the present, though. The future? It’s so, so much worse than Brits understand. Britain’s probably going to have a BrexGreat Depression. Because, like I said — like everyone warned — Brexit is forever. What do I mean by that? Can’t it be reversed? Nope — at least not easily, and even then, the damage will be permanent. Let me explain, because few people seem to understand this point.
You’d think that right about now, understanding that a majority of Brits Bregret Brexit (sorry about that), the opposition — because after all, the conservatives caused this mess, and they’re still in power — would seize the moment. You’d be completely wrong. Instead, the head of the opposition, Kier Starmer, is out there trying to…out-Trump the Tories. If that sounds desperate, awful, funny, and tragic, that’s because, well, it is.
His latest campaign? To attack immigrants as the cause of Britain’s woes. Let me say it again. The head of the opposition’s latest campaign is to attack immigrants as the cause of Britain’s woes.
That’s not just shameful, it’s — and I don’t say this lightly — goddamned, head-poundingly, achingly idiotic. But don’t take it from me.
Remember how Brits can’t get ambulances because Brexit-style xenophobia drove all those hated “foreigners” — the very ones who drove the ambulances — out of the country? That’s a theme. The CBI — Britain’s biggest business group, it’s Chamber of Commerce, basically — begged the government to rethink it’s xenophobia, because, wait for it, its members need workers, and they can’t find them.
Tony Danker called on politicians to be ‘practical’ about immigration at the CBI’s conference in Birmingham. His speech comes as many firms struggle to recruit staff. He urged leaders to ‘be honest with people’ over the country’s ‘vast’ labour shortages, adding ‘we don’t have the people we need nor do we have the productivity.’
So there’s the entire business community, begging politicians, please, let people in, we don’t have enough workers. Look around! People can’t even get ambulances! We can’t find people to drive trucks, pick fruit, staff tills, and so on. Please — be practical. AKA: not fanatical. And British politics’s response? Go eff yourself. From both sides. It’s absolutely mind-blowing.
Let me put that to you another way.
Both sides of British politics are now so far right that even Big Business is begging them to come back to their senses a little bit. When you’re too far right for Big Business…something’s gone very wrong, because you’re off the scale. And when you’re supposed to be the left, the center, and you’re further right than Big Business…you need to ask yourself whose side you’re really on.
Keir Starmer playing mini-demagogue is a particularly shameful moment for Britain. George Orwell, who used to live in his neighborhood, would be disgusted. Because Starmer’s trying to, like I said, out-Trump the conservatives. First, it was Europeans who were scapegoats, then it was refugees, and today? That circle’s expanded to include immigrants. All of them. Meanwhile, people can’t get ambulances because there aren’t enough drivers.
Lord help a country this foolish.
But all of that speaks to just why Brexit is forever. You see, Starmer’s out there playing mini-demagogue — the head of the opposition — because British politics have now changed. Now the fanatics control the debate, the institutions, the power center. Starmer’s repeating this repellent line, this Big Lie, that immigrants are Britain’s problem — the precise opposite of the truth, which is that Britain has “vast labour shortages” — precisely because he has to pander to the fanatics now. They run everything. The BBC, the newspapers, the political parties, and so on. Whatever moderate center there was has been completely eviscerated.
Meanwhile, the current PM, Rishi Sunak, tried, last week, to float a better Brexit deal, than Boris Johnson’s catastrophic one, which is the hardest Brexit possible, really, full of red tape, raising barriers, stopping trade and movement dead in their tracks. Sunak’s approach was a “Swiss” style deal. Good idea? Sure. Better, at least, than Johnson’s Folly. But it was quickly shot down — by his own party’s fanatical wing, which still wield the balance of power. Sunak is a Good Boy — he means well. But he’s weak. Far too weak to take on the fanatics in his own party, who aren’t deviating an inch from their goal, which is…wait, what is it? To destroy Britain? Mission accomplished, I guess.
Brexit is forever. The majority of Brits may regret it — but they don’t matter anymore. Now, politics has changed, to reflect a very different society. A xenophobic one. One where nationalism curdled into something much more like militant spite and open hatred. Now, both sides of British politics are made of Trumpism.
If you think I exaggerate, then let’s stop and think about it. Can you imagine Joe Biden saying to America that “we need to wean the country off its immigration dependency?” That’s what Starmer said, and it’s the entire point of Brexit, to which both sides of British politics are now hostage. LOL, it’s absurd to even think such a thing. Biden knows — and every sane American does too — that kicking out all those foreign doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers, restaurateurs, entrepreneurs — that’d crater the economy overnight. Just like Brexit did.
In fact, even the American right isn’t this militant. It’s violent and foolish, sure, but when it comes to issues like immigration, it’s mostly smoke and mirrors. It talks a big game, but it doesn’t do that much. Even during the Trump years, for all the abuses of power — and there were many, and I’ll be the first to remind everyone of the concentration camps — America didn’t simply kick millions of people out of the country, snarling in rage and spite, to the point that there weren’t enough people left to drive ambulances and be doctors and staff tills and so forth. But Britain actually did.
It actually did that.
Think about what it means when the head of the Labour Party is to the right of the American President — not just a little bit, but to the far, extreme right. Biden’s out there building chip factories and planning to make America an exporter of clean energy, setting up decades of prosperity for it and the world — Kier Starmer’s out there demonizing immigrants. Just like the conservatives did to begin with to make Brexit happen.
So now both sides of a country’s politics are so far right that their only agenda for the future — any of it, all of it — is demonization and hate. That’s it — nothing else — just that. No chip factories, no we’re-going-to-export-clean-energy, no, like Canada, hey, we need millions of people to run these hospitals and universities and build the industries of tomorrow, welcome. Nothing. The only plan both sides have is just… demonizing the very people you need.
Would you describe that country as far right? Wouldn’t it be only fair? You see, even though a majority of Brits regret Brexit, there’s no sign, really, that they’ve learned anything yet. That you can’t have a modern society this way. Through hate and spite and demonization. That you need things like immigration and investment to have modern standards of living. That you become a poor country, this way, trying to kick everyone you think is beneath you off your island, so you can have it all to yourself. Sure, by all means, have it — but who’s going to drive the ambulances?
No modern society is an island. Every one which has tried that route has failed, from Weimar Germany to modern day Japan. Modernity is about exchange, interchange, interconnection, the flow of ideas, people, talent, capital, labour, the freedom for those things to combine and recombine in ways that lead to greater possibilities. Whether those possibilities are two people falling in love, or starting a business, or sending their kid to university, or driving an ambulance together, even though one’s British, and the other one’s not.
Brexit is forever. Both sides of British politics are now so far right that they’re off the charts compared to the rest of the rich world — more like xenophobic, nationalist parties in Poland or Hungary. You’d think Kier Starmer would be proposing a better deal with Europe, but no, he’s — how shocking is this? — ruled it out. Why? Because he’s too busy demonizing immigrants. Telling Big Lies, instead of speaking Greater Truths. When both sides of politics are this far right, what future does a nation have?
There will be a time when Britain negotiates a better deal with Europe. That time, sadly, is very, very far away. First, the conservatives have to lose power. Then, Labour has to come to power. Then, Labour has to lose power again, because it’s now a demagogic party, too, which, again, has no agenda or plan beyond demonization and hate, either, certainly not renegotiating with Europe. That puts us at…ten years…if not longer.
This decade will shatter Britain. Living standards are going to plummet even faster and further than they already have. What few public services are left will be gutted and destroyed. 25% of ambulances not arriving will go up to 50% or more. Economists like me used to warn that Brexit was austerity by any other name, because that’s what happens as nations get poorer — their public purses shrink — and that’s already begun.
Brits, meanwhile, are stretched to the limit, unable to afford their basic bills, skating shakily right on an icy cliff edge of ruin. A very large number of them will be financially ruined. All this — public services gone, plummeting living standards, widespread bankruptcy — is what it means for a nation to become poor. Britain’s learning that the hard way — and yet, still not fast enough.
That means the rest of us should. Want to be poor? Go right ahead. Turn that flirtation with the far right into a white wedding. Join Britain in the ranks of the newly imploded, failed states of the world. Enjoy the at-least-a-decade-or-two it takes to get anywhere back to where you once were, and those scars? They’re there forever. Go right ahead. Put a ring on it. Tell the far right how much you love it. After all, doesn’t it coo seductively at you: hate everyone else, and love only me, because only I’m here for you?
Umair
November 2022
