The UK founders in choppy waters

Until quite recently, most people in the United Kingdom tended to be fairly upbeat about their collective future. It was taken for granted that, somehow or other, they would overcome the difficulties that kept arising as they had done so often in the past, but today they appear to be even gloomier than they or their parents were back in the “winter of discontent” of late 1978 and early 1979 that preceded the arrival of Margaret Thatcher.

The economy, hamstrung by sky-high energy prices resulting from a fanatical attachment to “net zero” policies designed to help save the planet from overheating, a phenomenon to which the UK’s contribution would be miniscule even if it devoted itself wholeheartedly to increasing carbon emissions, is in a very bad shape, years of neglect have left the Armed Forces unable to perform many routine tasks, let alone go to war with a competent foreign enemy, and headlong demographic change has brought with it the threat of large-scale communal violence.

Naturally enough, the two parties that, between them, have ruled the UK for the best part of a century are getting blamed for this state of affairs. Less than two years ago, the Conservatives, then led by Rishi Sunak, were booted out of office. Now it is the turn of Labour, which has just suffered what Barack Obama would describe as an almighty “shellacking” in a host of municipal elections, losing about 1,500 seats in local councils plus control of the Welsh Senedd, and also doing badly in Scotland.

Taking their place are the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage on what is assumed to be the right of the ideological spectrum and the Greens, a smaller outfit, on what is now the left. Whether either has much of an idea about what would have to be done to refloat the United Kingdom is an open question, what with Reform standing for little more than a wishy-washy variant of nationalism and the Greens for what many see as a toxic mixture of Islamism, anti-Semitism disguised as hatred for Israel, ecological zealotry and a strong desire to squeeze the rich who pay a large share of the taxes governments depend on.

Unfortunately for a great many people, the UK has reached a point similar to the one Argentina arrived at several years ago, when it became clear that more of the same would only make a disastrous situation even worse. In a desperate effort to restore his fortunes, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who is clinging to Number 10 by his fingernails and those Labour heavyweights who still support him say they will do their best to solve “the cost of living crisis” by putting more money in people’s pockets, but even left-leaning economists know this would have baleful consequences. Like most other Western countries, including Argentina and the United States, the UK has been living beyond its means for far too long. If the government refuses to balance the books, the dreaded markets will do the job for it.

In any event, though economic hard times – by the standards prevailing in relatively rich countries – are making people unhappy, the main reason why the Tories and Labour are in bad odour with the electorate is their failure to slow, let alone put an end to the tidal wave of immigration, much of it illegal, of young men from mainly Middle Eastern and African countries that is flooding the islands and forming sectarian enclaves in a growing number of major cities.

In many constituencies, Labour continues to depend on the Muslim vote but fears that the Greens could deprive them of it, so it cannot do much more than promise to “smash the people-smuggling gangs” in the hope that voters will be satisfied with such macho rhetoric. Starmer also insists that what he calls international law prevents his government from sending home even convicted rapists and other criminals, let alone the individuals who claim to be bona fide refugees fleeing persecution who are immediately housed by the government in expensive hotels. For a similar reason, he says he cannot permit the remnants of the Royal Navy to do what it would take to turn back the small boats that, day after day, cross the English Channel to bring in new cohorts of people escaping the horrors of France.

Many in Labour blame Starmer for the mess they are in. They think that a more charismatic, less lawyerly leader would enable them to convince voters that they are what the UK needs, but while Starmer, a man much given to self-pity, may deserve the insults people are flinging at him, the party’s woes cannot be attributed to the failings of any single person, no matter how unattractive he may be. Labour is in deep trouble in large measure because several decades ago it parted company with the working class it once represented to become the chosen vehicle of state employees, professionals of one kind or another, progressive academics, university students and the like. This ensured them the support of much of the media but cost them that of what, until then, had been their natural clientele, which is why “red walls” in various parts of the country were surmounted first by Boris Johnson and, after he was ousted, by Farage.

Politics in much of the Western world has become a battle between allegedly left-wing “elites” of a technocratic bent that have long managed things and the rest, people who for understandable reasons resent being openly despised and think governments should give priority to their interests. In traditional terms, the would-be aristocrats of the “elites” belong to the right and their plebeian foes to the left, but the former have decreed that their moral superiority over the unwashed entitles them to wear the progressive mantle. For a long while, this trick worked well enough, but in the UK and other parts of Europe, this is no longer the case.

To the almost hysterical alarm of those still in power who believe that fascist lynch-mobs are at the gates, the entrenched “elites” are seeing their supremacy slipping away. According to Starmer, if Farage gains power he would take his country down “a very dark path.” His counterparts in Germany, France, Spain and Scandinavia, where as in the UK upstart parties are on the march, share his misgivings, but they are most unlikely to regain the trust of the many people who feel they have been betrayed.