Is Britain becoming a third world country?

 

I think Daniel Hannan's take on Britain is rather romanticised. He talks about coming to Britain from Peru when he was aged seven. A name like Hannan, doesn't sound very Peruvian to me. His mother, a Scot, worked in the British embassy in Lima.

Now, Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, the Conservative peer aged 53, went to Winchester, Marlborough College and Oriel College Oxford. He says in those days Britain was a high trust society - people obeyed the laws and paid their taxes. It was a country where you didn't need private security guards and you could get into a taxi, confidant, that you wouldn't be mugged. He says Britain now faces an epidemic of shoplifting and filthy streets. Hannan thinks Britain is turning into a third world country. If it is, then I wonder who is responsible for that?

When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, before Hannan was born, I don't remember hearing about food banks, and pawnbrokers' shops, were something that old timers used to reminisce about. Apart from the odd tramp, we never heard of rough sleepers and scroungers, as most people were in work and had access to housing. I also don't remember seeing beggars on the streets. We didn't have call centres, bots or self-service checkouts and most people seemed to be competent and knew what they were doing. You didn't become a tradesman after a six months’ apprenticeship at the school of motoring, and Britain wasn't full of cowboys, Bengal Lancers, and rogue tradesmen. A qualified electrician once told me that he'd met many so-called electricians on the job, who couldn't even splice a piece of wire properly. Employment was easy to obtain and so was affordable rented housing. Gun deaths and stabbings were also a rarity. Most working people were also members of trades unions. There was also nothing called student debt because those who went to university got full maintenance grants. There was also legal aid.

For me, the rot set in when Margaret Thatcher got elected the UK Prime Minister in 1979 and formed a Conservative government. Her Tory government pursued pro-rich policies. Maggie had been nicknamed "Thatcher the Milk Snatcher' because she'd taken free school milk off school kids. The Tories used the slogan 'Labour isn't working' because there was 1.5 million people out of work. By 1983, there was twice that number of people out of work under a Tory government. We also saw massive deindustrialization and the loss of many industries as Britain became less a manufacturing country and more a service-based economy. Many jobs were exported overseas where labour was cheaper.

I don't think parts of northern England have ever really recovered from the loss of those heavy manufacturing industries. Many young kids today work in supermarkets or in hospitality for places like Wetherspoon's or work as part of the gig economy, in precarious low-paid employment. Thatcherism and Maggie's loathing for organised labour, paved the way for the gig economy and flexible working. Thatcher's two favourite trade unionist were two scabs called Roy Lynk and Frank Chappel.

A major aim of Neoliberalism was to destroy organized labour. The pioneers of Neoliberalism drew a conclusion that has shaped our age: that a modern economy cannot exist with an organized working-class. Atomisation and the destruction of Labour's bargaining power, was the essence of the entire project. The smart arses at J.P Morgan Chase, like Blythe Masters, who gave us Credit Default Swaps (CDS) and Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDO), that led to the 2008 financial crisis which almost brought down the capitalist financial system, believe that for Neoliberalism to survive, democracy must fade. We all know what happened after 2008. Capitalist debts were socialised and corporate profits were privatised. It was socialism for the rich and the free market for the rest of us.