Liz Truss’s recent written confession is remarkable for its childlike air. It reminded me of my buck-passing wheedling whenever I was caught doing something naughty aged about eleven; ‘No, I didn’t know what I was doing – but neither did the Treasury, yeah what about the Treasury, eh, mum?’
I can remember when the British disease, being the ‘sick man of Europe’, etc, was a national obsession but mostly of the right and the reactionary. Think of the low-status laughs to be had from Basil Fawlty bemoaning ‘more strikes!’ or Alan Partridge tutting and muttering ‘This country …’
But in the 2020s doominess seems to be the default for everyone, all sides of the political spectrum. The bright-eyed, bushy-tailed persona of our current Prime Minister seems comically inappropriate.
Whenever I sense that this country is going to the dogs, two perhaps overfamiliar and certainly contradictory quotes come to mind.
Perhaps the best we can hope for in this new age of malaise is to hold tight to our loved ones
‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,’ is the contribution of that gloombucket Yeats, who goes on to cheer us all up further by telling us how the ceremony of innocence is drowned, there’s a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, etc. Basically, that’s your lot, time’s up, barbarism incoming, hold on to your hats and your ha’pennies.
‘There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,’ says Adam Smith, who is definitely less of a drama queen. In a way, however, his take is even more alarming. While Yeats’s Second Coming foresees an imminent collapse of social and moral order, and a kind of Mad Max scenario, Smith posits things getting gradually crapper, possibly for centuries.
At least the Yeats/Mad Max scenario is in some ways bracing – after the degringolade, you get to frolic ironically in the looted ruins and wear a fright wig, and perhaps a kilt made out of old hubcaps or something. Smith’s vision is one of an imperceptible tapering-off, and reminds us that war-torn, ramshackle nations like Somalia or Syria are still, technically at least, on some level, functional.
This latter aura of institutional malaise – as Christopher Lasch described it in 1970s America, which Jimmy Carter picked up on with disastrous electoral results – is everywhere in the UK at the moment.
Let’s take a brief but depressing tour of the signs, the big ones and small ones.
We have the police, simultaneously falling over themselves to placate the politically correct while harbouring blatantly obvious serial rapists and abusers in their ranks. (The institutions all round seem nowadays to divide their time between celebrating something and apologising for something, like alcoholics do.) The police are so bad at dealing with a major current missing person case that the family and friends have had to publicly contradict their breeze-shooting theories on Facebook, and bring in a private search team.
We have harrowing tales from A&E, with ambulances not showing up for hours even when drivers and paramedics are not actually on strike, and the impossibility of seeing a GP until April. April 2026, that is.
The rubbishness of the current political class stretches from the SNP inserting a gender gun into its own mouth to the constant squalid low rent/high rent financial scandals in the Conservative party, to the meaningless policy vacuum of Labour.
There are strikes and the lingering cost-of-living crisis, and individuals on all sides and at all grades shirk any responsibility.
Further down the civil service we have the minions of Dominic Raab, supposedly traumatised into despair by being told by him that their work isn’t good enough and they need to do it over again from the start, but this time with all the right spellings and everything.
There is a sense of whole clutches of chickens coming home to roost, from the aftershocks of the lockdowns to the impact of decades of go-with-the-flow policies on industry, education, the economy.
And who will address any of this? We don’t even have a rough beast slouching towards Westminster to be born. Being asked to vote for any of the three main parties at the moment is like being offered the choice of which flesh-eating bug you’d prefer. It’s up to you, but the result will be similar.
It is slightly unfair to blame the Tory party as a whole for the very recent catastrophes. The grass roots, after all, clearly wanted the inexperienced Kemi Badenoch to be prime minister, but thankfully wiser heads in the parliamentary party prevailed and narrowed it down to those political titans, firm-hand-on-the-tiller Truss and everyday billionaire-next-door Sunak, the man who keeps an iron grip on his errant cabinet by simply not being told about anything.
We desperately need political leaders who can guide us out of this mess and inspire our hope and our trust. That is what politicians, at a very basic level, are for. But I’ve looked high and low, left and right, and can’t see anybody of that calibre.
Perhaps the best we can hope for in this new age of malaise is to hold tight to our loved ones and hope that none of us desperately needs the swift aid or even the assistance of the state. There’s another quote, much less familiar but equally dramatic as Yeats’s, that comes to mind, from the painter John Minton – ‘We’re all awash in a sea of blood, and the least we can do is wave to each other’.
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