Britain: Surging Ahead to the Nineteenth Century
The satirical online news website par excellence, The Onion, once published a spin-off book entitled ‘Our Dumb World.’ With stereotypical American brashness, it reduced the planet’s “lesser, conquerable” nations to easily digestible comic soundbites in Dorling Kindersley-style atlas format. “Located directly at the centre of the universe, around which everything else revolves, the nation of France is the sole beacon of life and civilisation in an otherwise empty void.” Fair enough. Canada: "For the United States, see pages 9 - 22." Ouch. And the headline for the UK entry -“Britain: Surging Ahead to the Nineteenth Century.”
As is the case with the best satire, it mirrors real life with unerring accuracy. Britain, indulging in some kind of resurrected sepia-tinged nostalgia for the days of Queen Vic, top hats and shoeless urchins, has now reclaimed its global pre-eminence in purveying eye-watering nineteenth-century levels of inequality and class division. We stick to what we do best. Now get back up that chimney, sweep.
While the richest one per cent of the population hoover up forty per cent of the total wealth, the rest of us downtrodden minions scrabble around for the increasingly scarce crumbs that drop from the top table. ‘So what,’ say so many of us. This is the system we have inherited; like it or lump it.
The NHS Primary Care Trust department I’ve been working in recently announced their intention, via a group e-mail to all staff, to relocate to remote Cornwall - a three-hour drive away from its present base, in which the new department will employ less than half of the number at present. The general reaction in the office, as the (theoretical) axe plunged, was little more than a collective shrug of the shoulders. One of my colleagues announced his feelings in all-too familiar fashion: “Well, if only Gordon Brown and that last lot hadn’t spent all the money then we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we?”
As much as this kind of reaction made me want to head-butt my desk in abject despair, I can only feel that it is inevitable in many ways. Not only because it is a perfectly correct statement, in the same way that, in the context of the global financial crisis, one man pissing in a river adds to a biblical flood is also a perfectly correct statement. But such utterances by bleary-eyed, cash-strapped ordinary folk are also inevitable in terms of the quite awe-inspiring powers of manipulation that the moneyed elite are still capable of wielding, rallying the masses in defence of their own corporate interests.
It is awe-inspiring in the sense that I’m never ceased to be amazed by the level of subservience that is still implicit amongst a shat-upon working and lower-middle class, who continue to wholly subscribe to a system that, in the long run, can only prove to be their undoing. It is awe-inspiring that so many of the downtrodden continue to extol the virtues of the free market neo-liberalism that in the short term brought nice big TVs and cheap holidays, but in the long term only serves to reward an increasingly small number of ludicrously wealthy people at the very top, at the cost of everyone else.
The market is a tool, of sorts, and often a useful one at that. But the worship of this tool is a hollow faith. Far more important than any tool is what you make of it. Many of Britain’s greatest accomplishments stand in complete defiance of the free market: the prohibition of slavery and child labour, the creation of national parks and public forests, the construction of roads, bridges, churches, schools and universities, and, of course, the creation of a national health service. If all that mattered were the unfettered right to buy and sell, tainted food could not be kept off supermarket shelves, toxic waste could be dumped next door to primary schools, and every wealthy family could import an indentured servant or two, paying them with meals instead of money.
The history of the twentieth century was dominated by the struggle against totalitarian systems of state power. The twenty-first will, it seems, be marked by a struggle to curtail excessive corporate power, at least by those prepared to undertake such a daunting venture. The great challenge now facing Britain, and other countries throughout the world, is how to find a proper balance between the efficiency and amorality of the free market. The United States has demonstrated over the past three decades the problems created by swinging too far in one direction, weakening the regulations that safeguard workers, consumers and the environment. An economic system promising freedom has too often become a means of denying it, as the narrow dictates of the market gain precedence over more important and fundamental democratic values.
In the meantime, what we are witnessing in the United Kingdom is the return to a Victorian-era ethos of narrow, over-privileged, eye-wateringly wealthy elites resurrecting their cruelly antiquated, anti-democratic authority over the rest of us proles. The new rich, brim full of the values of old and reasserting a form of born-to-rule style authority, increasingly resemble the plutocrats of the nineteenth century, minus the more admirable aspects of that era such as the belief in philanthropy, benevolence and some degree of kind-heartedness towards those less fortunate. The spark of genuine social democracy in Britain now seems rather brief in a sense of wider history. It gestated during the first world war, broke out after the second, and fizzled out during the 1970s. Social democracy now seems just that – a spark, a spasm, an historical aberration. Don’t get ideas above your station. Look after number one. And didn’t I tell you to get back up that chimney? It’s not going to sweep itself.