Allow me to introduce you to the ruinous, tragicomic state of Britain circa 2021. This week, the Health Secretary was caught…on video…breaking his own lockdown rules…to have an affair…with his key aide…who was married, by the way…and whose brother had won a lucrative Covid contract from the NHS…which said Health Secretary is also busy selling off to American hedge funds…so soon, Brits will pay American prices for healthcare…while there’s a third wave of Covid’s Delta variant breaking loose.

Did you get all that?

Now, put aside for a moment that the Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, is a man that nobody should have an affair with. He gives off creepy vibes like a stalker at midnight, only he wears a suit. You don’t even need to consider how weirdly creepy like a Stepford Man or a Manchurian Plutocrat Matt Hancock is…you don’t need to consider how astoundingly ass-grabbingly sleazy the video is…no, just the raw facts are mind-boggling enough. After all, Hancock appears to have been quite possibly breaking the law, which is what his own lockdown rules were about, but I guess they don’t matter if you’re the Health Secretary, and you need to grab your aide’s ass. Not only that, but he apparently knew the video was coming out, and used that time to tell his wife, who he had given Covid to, that he was leaving her. He woke his kids in the night to tell them he was moving out. What the?

Ah, but we’re barely just beginning.

The next day, the Metropolitan Police (aka “the Met”) announced that they were going to arrest. Who? Matt Hancock? The aide’s brother? Nope. Environmental activists. They were going to raid…wait for it…art centres.

That’s because these environmental activists, Extinction Rebellion, stage elaborate, dramatic, artistic protests. Here, check out a few pictures. Tell me that’s not aesthetically impressive — whatever your particular politics might be. Now, Londoners, some of them, anyways, find Extinction Rebellion annoying. Oh no, how annoying. To have to care about the planet. At any rate, it’s hardly the stuff of serious crime.

At this point, you might be asking: wait, what? Why were the Police wasting their time raiding art centres? Instead of the Health Secretary who broke his own lockdown rules?

After all, the rest of the nation had to follow those rules. People didn’t see their loved ones for months. Parents died without children ever saying goodbye. And the doctors who witnessed all this, handled it, treated it? They’re quitting in droves, because, well, who wants to work for an assh*le like that?

But I digress. Why are the police raiding art centres…while the Health Secretary was getting off scot-free? Sorry — did I forget to mention that part? That’s right. While Matt Hancock has now resigned, Boris defended him, instead of saying, “That’s a serious offense.”

What on earth is going here?

Wait, let me give you one final example. While all is going on, right under Brit’s noses, the NHS is being sold off to American hedge funds. Has anyone told Brits that Americans get medical bills like this one — for three million dollars? Channel 4, too — one of the world’s finest broadcasters — is being privatised. It was something unique and beautiful and cool — a public indie broadcaster which took big, bold risks, tasked with making the highest quality, most original stuff around. You probably don’t know it if you’re American, but Channel 4 has made some of your favourite shows and actors and directors. Meanwhile, a new channel — “GB News” — has been set up, with a little help from pals and billionaires — and it’s more rancid and conservative than Fox News.

These are seismic, irreversible shifts in Britain’s cultural and institutional landscape. No more NHS — a once indispensable part of modern British life. Sure, it might still be there — as a paid phone line or app or something. But not as a social system. No more Channel 4 — liberal, open, uncompromising, critical, artistic — instead, the dun, mindless propaganda of florid, angry, red-faced old conservative men, ranting about how much they hate the people they hate on “GB News.”

All these are examples as clear as day. That, dear reader, modern-day Britain is the world’s newest failing state. You can’t see it more clearly than the examples above. Let me sum up more formally what happened here. One of the nation’s senior politicians broke his own rules — while the police are wasting their time, and everyone’s money, going after artsy, harmless environmental protestors…who are now classed as “terrorists.”

Let’s count how many levels and features of failed states are present in this one tiny example alone — and then we’ll zoom out to the others. The rule of law has ceased to function. Elites operate according to one set of rules, and everyone else, another. The public good has stopped mattering, and private interests — like making out with your aide during a lockdown everyone else is supposed to follow — is all that counts. The little people don’t matter anymore — maybe they never did. Most of them don’t seem to care at all, in fact. Hence, basic public institutions are being subverted and perverted for nakedly, openly authoritarian ends.

Yes, authoritarian ones. What else do you call it when environmental protesters in art centres are being “raided”…by heavily armed police…because they’re classed as “terrorists”? That’s happening because the ultra-conservative government doesn’t want any dissent. It doesn’t want any unrest. It doesn’t much like the idea of caring about anything that isn’t money, power, sex, or fame. Like, say, the planet, democracy, the future, each other. It doesn’t want people to be intelligent, thoughtful, sane, optimistic, forward-looking.

It doesn’t want the rule of law to function at all — it’s abusing public institutions for not just openly political ends, but ones corrosive and inimical to democracy, like free expression and association.

So environmental protesters can’t hang out at art centres to try and save the planet. But if you’re the Health Secretary, apparently, you’re free to…freely associate…with anyone you like…even during lockdown. Because you have power. To abuse the system. While everyone else just has to submit to your abusive, absolute power.

Get all that? You should. You should think about it carefully. Nothing shows failed states more clearly than the juxtapositions of elites and ordinary people — especially ones who dissent, care, try to change the system.

In this case, we have an alarming, bizarre, juxtaposition so extreme, it takes on comical proportions. Art centres being raided, because freedom of expression is now so severely curtailed caring about the environment is “terrorism” — for ordinary people — while for elites, no rules apply at all, and you can cheat on your wife at the office during lockdown. Laugh or cry? You tell me, I guess.

In failing states — truly failing ones — elites do something strange and perverse. They rub it in. They flaunt it. The absoluteness of their power. That they don’t have to follow the rules, because the rules are for the little people, marks, rubes, suckers. They openly break the very rules they’ve made.

Why do they do that? For three reasons. One, to demonstrate their power really is absolute. Two, to build authoritarian cults of personality. And three, because they can.

Remember how the aide’s brother has a lucrative NHS Covid contract? He’s just one of a long string of examples. The same Health Secretary awarded another lucrative Covid contract to…who, a company run by doctors?…a non-profit?…no, the guy that ran his pub.

The corruption isn’t even hidden in plain sight anymore. No, it’s not hidden at all. Like, for example, “GB News,” more conservative than Fox, magically arising, while Channel 4, which made people think critically, is sold off to the lowest bidder. Or like selling off the NHS to American hedge funds, who are quite happy watching Americans die because they can’t get basic medicine like insulin, which costs ten times or as much in America as it does in Canada, life openly sacrificed — or should I say taken? — for the sake of even more money for a tiny malicious, ultra rich few.

When elites reach that point — not even bothering to hide the corruption, but doing the very opposite, which is flaunting it — a society is crossing a dark, grim, and dangerous threshold. Everything is changing. Elites only flaunt how badly they can break the rules when they know they can get away with it, and that means that a) social norms are corroding b) the rule of law has no teeth b) politics doesn’t work anymore c) you’re not living in much of a democracy and d) people have been demoralised and dispirited so much that nothing seems to matter anymore, and today’s latest depredation is met with shrugs of “what else did you expect?”

That, my friends, is a failed state.

How did Britain get here?

Let me give you another story of what happened this week. Kids are literally going to be made to sing a song at school that goes: “Strong Britain, Great Nation!”

Go ahead and giggle. That’s pretty…North Korean. Kim Jong Un would be proud. Shall we put them in stadiums and have them do synchronised billboard-holding next? But you know who else would be proud? Donald Trump.

Because Britain’s kids are going to be made to sing about Making Britain Great Again. LOL.

That’s another example of subverting and perverting many things. Institutions — schools. Social norms — what kids should say and think. These things shouldn’t be part of the British government’s insane nationalistic crusade to Make Britain Great Again. But they are — and that’s how Britain became a failing state.

You know part of the story by now. 2008, financial crisis. 2010, austerity begins. 2015, people have plunged into poverty, and, desperate, bewildered, they buy the stupid, stupid nationalistic myth — “Those Europeans are responsible for our woes! Get them!!” Gentle, wise, friendly Europeans became scapegoats for the catastrophic mistakes a string of conservative governments made — the worst in modern history, reducing Britain to something like a neo Weimar Republic, dysfunctional, bereft, sinking into poverty and despair and ruin, florid with the rage and vitriol which usually accompanies such implosions.

Bang. Cue Brexit. And since then, well, Britain has simply fallen apart. No, that’s too kind. It’s been put through the shredder. Brexit’s caused some of Britain’s key exports to collapse in ways totally unseen — ever — in a modern, rich society. As in, simply stop dead. Fish, farming, dairy, cars — all these are industries which are simply now dying. And yet the fishermen and farmer and assembly line worker — these are the people who voted for Brexit, and still do, because they still back the conservatives so heavily, by a two to one ratio, that Britain’s future looks even more ultra-conservative, authoritarian, regressive — read, backwards, foolish, hateful, corrupt, malign, and broken — than it is now.

Think about it for a second. You’re some farmer or fisherman. Along come a bunch of malign elites, and tell you Europeans are to blame for your sinking income — not the incredibly dumb mistakes, like austerity, those very elites have made. Confused, afraid, you buy the myth. You’d think you’d come to your senses when you were literally losing the farm. But that’s not happened, nor happening, in Britain. Instead, the average Brit is more committed to backing the very agents of his own ruin — conservative elites — than ever.

So of course Britain’s conservative elites think they can flout the rules, flaunt it, and get away with it. They can. They have a pretty good measure of how deluded and broken in the mind and spirit the average Brit is now. They don’t even care about the fact that they scapegoated the wrong people — they still back conservatives, who led them off Brexit’s cliff edge. So why would they hold those very same elites accountable for much, much smaller things — mere seeming peccadilloes, like affairs, or garden-variety corruption, or the abuse of everyday power?

Britain’s elites have the measure of the average Brit, and it’s about the height of a slug. They know that the average person is still fervid with nationalism, that the fever of hate and venom and spite which began to poison Britain around 2015 or so hasn’t broken. And so, with a bit of clever misdirection — or just time — they can get away with anything.

And they do.

Why would people who won’t hold you accountable for wrecking their lives, jobs, livelihoods, communities, towns, politics, democracy, futures…hold you accountable for raiding art centres, for selling their healthcare system, for brainwashing their children with North Korean chants?

Of course they won’t.

Britain’s conservative elites understand this all perfectly. Sadly, it’s Britain’s liberals and social democrats who don’t. Britain is a nation gripped by a terrible fever. No, not (just) Covid. Nationalism. And nationalism is proceeding in Britain just the way it always does. The fever doesn’t break. It develops. Into the organ failures of authoritarianism and fascism. Those happen when public institutions are abused for repressive, regressive political ends. Like, say, the police raiding art centres because the government doesn’t like environmental protestors and calls them “terrorists” now — that’s the real crime now, not corruption, cronyism, incompetence, letting your country have one of the highest Covid death rates in the world, breaking your society, shredding your economy. All that stuff? Not just perfectly OK in Britain today — that’s what the people want.

So, naturally, conservative elites are giving it to them. Of course, they’re the ones who fed Brits the lies that they should want all this in the first place. But really — who’s foolish enough, apart from Americans, to believe that liberation lies in their own self-destruction? Remember how the NHS and Channel 4 are being privatised. For what? For purely political ends, for money and power’s sake.

Nationalism, authoritarianism, fascism. It’s a sequence as old as time — Athens fell victim to it, and so did Rome, in the end. Why should modern-day Britain be any different, or better, than those far older and enduring societies?

Umair
June 2021