Everything in Britain is broken

It is rare to find an example of public art which one can applaud, unequivocally, but I think I have found one in London. The educational group Black Blossoms is running a series of lectures as part of the Art on the Underground scheme making the case that – as I had long suspected – photography is racist. This is true of colour photography (can we not find a different name for that!) just as it is for monochrome photography, in which black is the domain of shadows, the dark and what we might call ‘otherness’.

The history of photography is rooted in white supremacy and subjugation, according to Black Blossoms, and it needs decolonising, sharpish. Quite right – and it is the job of all of us to swing the wrecking ball. For example, whenever anybody says to me ‘Say cheese’, I do not cravenly smirk, thus adding to the century and a half of oppression, but shout out: ‘No! I will not be part of your bigotry. There will be no smiles from me until photography is liberated from its racial hatred! How can we smile when so many are being oppressed?’ Indeed, the word ‘cheese’ was not chosen by accident – it is designed to be exclusionary. Black people do not eat cheese at all, I understand, so instructing those posing for a photograph to say this word is akin to being a member of the British National party.

There are of course 50 or 60 stories like this every week – the splurging of public money on programmes to tear down, abolish or rewrite our history for reasons which seem to increase in their lunacy with every day that passes. More than that if you listen to BBC Radio 4. It keeps me occupied, I suppose, tracking them all down. Easy laughs to be had from the manifest idiocies and the perpetual cavilling, chippiness, self-righteousness and outrage to be evoked from the amounts of our money spent on paying people to tell us how ghastly we are. I write about it so often that I kid myself into thinking that if we could stop all this, then the UK might be an OK place to live for a while. But this is a fallacy.

The culture war is important – rather more so than most of our politicians seem to think – because it is totalitarian, perverse and leads to a kind of de-enlightenment, a post-rational society founded on division and hatred. But as I have discovered these past few weeks, it is not the only fundamental problem facing our country, nor possibly the most important one. The real problem is that everything – everything – seems to be broken. Nothing works as it should.

There is a sense in which Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit rocket, which failed to go into orbit and has now delivered its cargo of satellites to a watery grave, is the perfect example of this kind of brokenness. ‘We appear to have an anomaly that has prevented us from reaching orbit,’ Virgin said. ‘We are evaluating the information.’ It sounds like the kind of recorded message you hear when you try to contact a company or institution which has just let you down, together with a request to ring back later when they’re not busy or make your enquiries through their interactive online site.

Last week I described the extravagant lengths to which the NHS went to prevent my wife receiving the treatment she needed for pneumonia and pleurisy. Here was an institution – our most loved, apparently – doing its level best to protect itself, rather than the people who depend upon it. An organisation which self-evidently does not work: it is broken. And everybody can see that it is broken but nobody dares to do anything meaningful about it other than pour more and more money down its gaping maw. I cannot remember a time when the NHS wasn’t in some kind of crisis, nor when the TV news programmes were free of distressed relatives watching their loved ones die in corridors. And yet we seem utterly impotent to do anything about it.

Then there are the trains. My two sons usually come up to stay with us around Christmas but were unable to do so this year because the rail workers were on strike, so whatever dates we chose they either couldn’t get here or couldn’t get back. That, of course, was the whole point of the RMT operation, to ruin the Christmases of as many people as was humanly possible as a means of gaining leverage in their efforts to grab more money. Yet these strikes have been going on since August and the government’s approach has been to wash its hands of the whole business – not our job to negotiate with the unions, etc. And so the paralysis continues.

A more decisive government would either concede to the pay requests, or threaten them all with the sack. And then sack them. But this government finds it more expedient to abdicate its responsibility. I am sure Rishi Sunak and co are technically right when they insist the unions must negotiate with the people who employ them. But in the meantime we have a paralysed rail network, costing the country untold billions of pounds (it was half a billion by the middle of November last year).

I suggested to my sons that they come up later in January. Nope, not possible. Because every weekend this month the East Coast Main Line is undergoing engineering work, thus requiring a bus replacement service which would add five hours to the return journey, which exceeds that allowed for by the quantum of filial love.

 You look at the train services – much as one does at the NHS – and think: you don’t actually want us to use your trains, do you? Everything they do – the engineering works, the strikes, the exorbitant prices, the labyrinthine booking – militates against attracting custom. And yet, once again, nobody really seems to care.