It’s not just the ‘Remainers’ whingeing Britain really is broken – The Australian Financial Review

Pothole repairs are at their lowest level in five years. Britains biggest municipal council, Birmingham, went bust a few weeks ago. The backlog in processing asylum claims is so great that would-be migrants are being housed on barges.

The air traffic control system went down for more than a day on the back of a single error. Shoplifting is at epidemic proportions.

The train system is beset by strikes, and ambitions for a major new high-speed line are watered down again and again, while the costs blow out. The water companies are discharging raw effluent into seas and rivers. The flagship offshore wind industry seems to be running out of puff.

In recent opinion polls, 58 per cent of respondents agreed that Britain is broken, and 76 per cent said it was becoming an appreciably worse place to live.

Britons, notoriously, love a good moan. Complaints about things getting worse are often made with an almost delighted relish. The sense that the country is in long-term decline, ever since the end of empire, is an almost unshakeable item of faith.

So its not surprising that confirmation bias abounds. Choosing from the menu above, every gloomy Briton is an assiduous compiler of their own catalogue of woe.

There has been a recent shift, though. In the early years after the Brexit referendum in mid-2016, the most enthusiastic doomsayers were Remainers people who had voted to stay in the EU, and subsequently seized upon any and every shred of evidence which might suggest that Brexit had been a calamitous mistake.

Former prime minister Boris Johnson, the most ardent of Leavers, waged a relentless one-man war against these doomsters and gloomsters, as he often called them. His argument was that Brexit was a great opportunity for Britains rejuvenation, if only the British people were up for embracing it.

With his departure, though, this buccaneering Brexiteer bravado has all but evaporated. Now, its the right-wing press in which youll find some of the gloomiest inventories of everything thats wrong with Britain.

Britain is in a state of distress more profound than our leaders are capable of addressing, says one recent headline in the Tories in-house newspaper The Daily Telegraph. Labour and the Tories have joined forces to condemn Britain to national failure, reads another. Britain isnt in managed decline: the country is about to fall off a cliff. On it goes.

My hunch is that the gloom now gripping the British right probably stems from the widespread expectation that the Conservatives will lose government next year. They have little to show for 13 years in power, and now they face a spell under Labour. For a Tory, that is pretty depressing.

But the left has precious little cause for levity either. Infrastructure is run down, and public services are struggling, but taxes are already at a record high and government borrowing is maxed out and costly.

That leaves Labour with little ability to drive a new political or economic agenda. Whats more, there is also little will: the public is concerned with the soaring cost of living, not seized with a desire to embrace any new progressive vision or policies.

The aftershocks of Britains big Brexit rupture, magnified by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war, are only just beginning to settle. Some commentators hope that this will restore Britains lost sense of proportion and pragmatism. Lets hope so, because the alternative is a potential descent into pessimism and paralysis.

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It's not just the 'Remainers' whingeing Britain really is broken - The Australian Financial Review