We live in an age of deep incongruity. On the one hand, our public life is increasingly characterised by hubristic claims to be able to subject every facet of creation itself to our will – to master ‘artificial intelligence’ and create sentience; to defeat disease; to manage and control the climate; to transcend biology; to cheat death. On the other, what we experience in our daily lives, as we encounter the world around us, is palpable decline and deterioration – a feeling that civilisation itself is becoming tattered and frayed.
We manage to ignore this odd mismatch between grandiosity and neglect most of the time. But there are moments when the border between the two starts to dissolve and we are able to glimpse some seepage. One such occasion took place for me the other day on a visit to the town centre of Birkenhead, near where I grew up.
How to best describe Birkenhead? It has always been a place with a rough, gritty, seedy streak to it – presumably even when, long ago, it had jobs (it was once a big shipbuilding centre and has a vast, now largely desolate, dockland). I have never known a trip there not to have a feeling of edginess to it; even when I was a teenager with a part-time job at a shop in the main shopping precinct, it felt to me like a place tinged with unease – imbued with an undercurrent of unexpressed malevolence that felt as though it might at any moment erupt into baleful life.
In fairness to it, Birkenhead has some justification for its air of seething resentment. Since the 1960s, when the port began to enter into precipitous decline, it has simply not had jobs worthy of the name – it had an unemployment rate well above 50% by the early 1990s. And although it has some ‘posh bits’ around the outskirts, it must now surely rank, at least statistically, among the worst places in the country in which to live. The North End is one of only five out of 32,844 Lower-Layer Super Output Areas in England to have been ranked in the bottom 100 ‘most deprived neighbourhoods’ in the country for the last 20 years. And other areas of the town, such as Bidston, New Ferry and Rock Ferry, are not in a much better position. As is always the case in down-at-heel places, there are still signs of life here and there, and still plenty of people who ‘burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why’. But it is by and large a hard, mean town filled with hard, mean inhabitants.
At the same time, however, Birkenhead has also always been a place soaked in cultural memories of a time when the average British town felt prosperous, secure, hopeful and confident. Its main park, the first publicly funded civic park in the world, built in 1847, was the inspiration for Central Park in New York and is still impressive. The town is dotted here and there with architectural jewels – the central library; the Williamson art gallery; Hamilton Square (a stunning Georgian square that looks as though it has been plucked out of Edinburgh or Bath); the elegant Town Hall. And there is a strange grandeur to a drive around its grid of wide streets, which nowadays have a bleak aspect (a kind of Detroit or St. Louis in miniature) but still manage to convey the impression that this was once ‘somewhere’.
In short, Birkenhead is in the throes of deep and long-term decline that seems impossible to arrest, but it somehow manages to evoke in the visitor the sense that England was once a country that behaved as though it had a future. It is a place, that is, where people used to have civic pride, and acted on it in the built environment – a place where, for all its current deprivation, a better past can still be glimpsed, if one squints very hard and knows exactly where to look.
This makes the sense of deterioration which permeates the town all the sadder. It is one thing to go to a place that is impoverished and nasty. But it is quite another to go to a place that was once patently not impoverished and nasty, and yet now is. And the impoverishment and nastiness is getting worse. Birkenhead has never been entirely safe – I’ve seen people glassed and/or bottled there on nights out on several occasions, back in the ‘good old days’ – but it is now the type of town where the local police feel the need to put posters like this up on the main entrance to the shopping malls:
And there is a hard edge even to a mid-morning stroll up the high street. In the aforementioned ‘good old days’, drug use was acknowledged and widespread, but covert. Now, it is in the open. A man was standing in a fugue state outside Boots as I walked past, high as a kite on something – the woman he was with, slightly more awake, managed to summon the energy to call a smartly-dressed man a “cunt”, apparently at random, as he scurried by. (This indeed caused him to scurry considerably faster.) Further on, a crackhead was striding up and down muttering to himself and endeavouring to make eye contact with people around him. A friend, who I met later on, described how he had recently come across somebody shooting up in a toilet cubicle in a nearby bakery; on being roused from his nod by the staff and told he couldn’t do this in their customer facilities the man wiped his bleary eyes and then remarked, crossly, “Where do you expect me to do it?”
The main drag on this particular day was not so much threatening, though, as depressing – a place where the human smile (never mind the ‘please’ or the ‘thank you’) is an endangered species; where people stagger or shuffle rather than walk; where every colour seems to meet the eye after having passed through a haze of grey; where faces seem prematurely aged and withered. The trappings of British urban consumer commercial life, such as it is, were just about clinging on – Superdrug, Costa, B&M, Waterstones, Next, JD Sport, The Works – as though to connect Birkenhead umbilically to the weakening pulse of the national economy. But there were empty units everywhere; I overheard an elderly woman remark to her partner, pointing towards one end of the high street, that “there aren’t even no charity shops up that way no more”.
Also in evidence, as is the case across much of Merseyside, was a generalised acceptance of low-level criminality that one (still, so far) doesn’t encounter around much of the rest of the country. More or less the first conversation I heard, waiting in the queue to be served at a Tesco Express, was a knowledgeable discussion between a staff member and customer regarding the ins-and-outs of identifying a batch of counterfeit £20 notes known to be ‘doing the rounds’. They might for all the world have been chatting about the weekend’s football. There is a sense that crime is a fact of life, a bit like the weather, and which it would be as useless to try to eliminate as would be an attempt to stop the rain from falling; the best that one can do is the equivalent of buying a decent umbrella so as to mitigate its effects.
This was confirmed to me as I ducked into – God help me – the large local branch of Primark. Here, I discovered an innovation. Birkenhead, like the rest of the country, is experiencing a spike in shoplifting. But many of its town centre shops have embraced the march of self-service checkouts – which are annoying and stress-inducing to use, but which have the advantage of not having to have national insurance paid on their behalf or being entitled to an ever-ascending minimum wage. How is one to reconcile the need to prevent and deter theft and the imperative to keep staff costs down? It turns out the answer is to install security gates at the checkouts which literally will not let you leave the area without scanning a barcode on your receipt to evidence your purchase. You are, in other words, in Primark in Birkenhead in 2024 (I assume other branches deploy the same technology) presumptively a thief; it is for you to prove otherwise.
It was impossible not to notice the sheer strangeness of the juxtaposition between the experience of actually being in Primark in Birkenhead and the gargantuan wall displays in the shop itself, which everywhere trumpeted the company’s commitment to the well-being of nothing less than the actual planet:
This, I later learned, stems from a rebrand which Primark recently embarked on, through which it is trying to improve its image through greenwashing and warm fuzzies:
From its website:
We are working towards a better planet. That means helping to reduce fashion waste by making clothes that last longer and can be recycled, using only cotton that’s organic, recycled or sourced through our Primark Sustainable Cotton Programme, and cutting out single-use plastic.
We will work with our suppliers to halve our carbon footprint, using greener energy sources and helping bring back nature with more regenerative farming practices, less water and less chemicals.
We are working to improve the lives of the people who make our clothes. That’s why we’re pursuing a living wage for the workers in our supply chain and creating opportunities for women across our supply chain.
And we will do all of this whilst staying affordable. Because we want everyone to be in on change, so no one is left behind.
Using our scale and low prices for good.
Towards a better planet that is affordable for all.
In this, though, to be scrupulously fair, Primark is only following current trends, wherein ‘the planet’ is presented as something that is simultaneously threatened by the very existence of human beings, while at the same time being something that is conceived as a field of improvement – something to make ‘better’. Never mind that ‘the planet’ proper will still be here billions of years after we are gone and that we are about as relevant to its ongoing existence as a few grains of sands being blown about on a beach. The phrase has become a kind of catch-all term for human existence – what is ‘good for the planet’ essentially meaning ‘nice things that give us a warm glow’ and what is ‘bad for the planet’ meaning anything which one ought to be ashamed of (the exact nature of the source of shame fluctuating from moment to moment). A quick Google search reveals it being used by other fashion retailers such as River Island and Shein, and in the context of construction, fitting out and refurbishment, beverages, flat-pack furniture, retail banking and flooring. You can even find out how to communicate science for a ‘better planet’ with an MSc at one of the nation’s leading universities. Naturally, politicians love the expression, and Eurocrats yet more so – a few years back we were treated to a trial balloon for the slogan ‘make the planet great again’ (it didn’t catch on).
There is something almost frighteningly perverse about a society which contains places in it that look like the North End of Birkenhead and yet whose elites can barely shut up about their asinine commitments to making the planet better. Britain is, manifestly and with alarming rapidity, declining. The rapidity is not evenly distributed, and there are big islands of bourgeois security (many of them not more than 15 minutes’ drive from Birkenhead town centre) where it is still possible to have a wonderful time sipping expensive IPAs in hipster pubs that serve food that includes ingredients like kale.
But in every respect one can think of – in terms of its economy, education system, physical infrastructure, birth rate, public health, crime rate and standard of living – the country is getting worse. We do not seem, collectively or individually, to have any ideas whatsoever about how to stop this decline, let alone reverse it, nor the wherewithal to put such ideas into effect. At times, it seems like we can barely tie our own shoe laces anymore. And yet we have the gall to describe ourselves as working to improve the planet as such. What does one say about such a country as this?
When I was a child, I used to page through an old copy of an Arthur Rackham-illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables (1912), with an introduction by G.K. Chesterton, that sat on my parents’ bookshelf. The closing paragraph has always stuck with me. It reads as follows:
Man, in his simpler states, always felt that he himself was something too mysterious to be drawn. But the legend he carved… was everywhere the same; and whether fables began with Æsop or began with Adam, whether they were German and mediæval as Reynard the Fox, or as French and Renaissance as La Fontaine, the upshot is everywhere essentially the same: that superiority is always insolent, because it is always accidental; that pride goes before a fall; and that there is such a thing as being too clever by half. You will not find any other legend but this written upon the rocks by any hand of man. There is every type and time of fable: but there is only one moral to the fable; because there is only one moral to everything. [Emphases added]
This is a statement sure to outrage any anthropologist, classicist or comparative religionist. But we are, have no doubt, currently living out its essential message, and seeing its truth unfurl before us in real time. A society can for some time be ruled by a class of people who tell themselves that they are making the ‘planet’ better while the day-to-day, ‘lived experience’ of ordinary people in that society gets worse and worse. But it cannot go on that way indefinitely. Eventually, the only moral to everything will reassert itself, pride will be followed by a fall, and the insolence of the superior will be revealed – probably painfully.
It is to be hoped that this will happen through the ballot box. But I don’t take it as a racing certainty. At the moment, the gambit which everybody in our chattering classes seems to be banking on is that, by some miracle, making ‘the planet’ better will also make life better on Birkenhead high street, through vastly improved productivity achieved with AI; through green jobs, cheap energy, etc.; through a promised end to the bugbears of mainstream middle-class culture circa 2024; and through a rehashed, souped-up, activist State. I don’t know that there are many normal people who really believe any of this, least of all the population of Birkenhead. But when even this desperate fantasy is demonstrated to be false there is going to be a crisis – and a confrontation. And one suspects that the subsequent demonstration of Chesterton’s truism – that there is such a thing as being too clever by half – is not going to be at all pretty. In this respect at least, though, the people of Birkenhead are well-prepared. They’ve been living through a slow-motion crisis for generations.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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86% of those who took part voted for left wing parties. 14% voted Reform. Anyone who is still voting Tory is either not a conservative or hopelessly deluded.
Then there is the Harrogate Agenda, and whatever else. In 2022 the government’s behavioural scientists discovered that the people were more pliable than they expected – like sheep. I fear that campaigns like this are not only a waste of time but give a false impression that something can be done. It says, ‘Don’t vote!’ but many did not vote. Are things better as a result? If we want better government we will need a better populace.
Anyone who supports the idea of “Not in my name” basically supports the idea of. smaller state.
Some of them know it, and some of them just haven’t realised it yet.
The latter have yet to discover that you can’t rely on getting wise, intelligent, selfless leaders. You might miraculously get one from time to time, for a bit. But as a general rule you will get self-serving midwit grifters. So the only solution is to shrink the state and have absolute minimal need for political leaders.
Indeed. Sadly none of the mainstream parties are standing on that platform – turkeys not voting for Christmas.
This solution started out with Maggie Thatcher. And after 45 years of shrinking the state in a row, it’s widely acknowledged that all the remaining public and privatized services have become both massively worse and massively more expensive and Deadweight Ed and Chaos Keir are in the process of selling our bodies and souls to an international cartel of “green technology” billionaires and pharma companies, we being the last commodity the state controls which hasn’t been privatized yet.
Shrinking the state has proven to be a massive, f***ing disaster and more of it won’t help, in the same way more COVID boosters won’t suddenly lead to Zero COVID wonderland.
Shrinking the state is not just about privatisation, which has been only a partial success, but about reducing the involvement of the state in our lives. We have too many laws and regulations. I think the state should get out of healthcare and education.
Shrinking the state is not just about privatisation, which has been only a partial success, but about reducing the involvement of the state in our lives. We have too many laws and regulations. I think the state should get out of healthcare and education.
When it’s not about privatisation, why aren’t you calling for anything specific except more privatisation? A lesson which should have been learnt from COVID is that so-called private entities are much freer wrt to discriminating against customers they don’t like for any reaons than the state.
Privatizing the NHS in its present state will lead to the exact NHS we have, just free from any requirements of fair and equal treatement outside of discrimination because of protected characteristics named in the Equality Act. In extremely simplified form, this will mean no more hip replacement or cataract surgery for smokers because “it’s not cost effective” as they’re going to die too early to profit from it, anyway. And this will extend to all so-called “elective procedures” of today: The same kind of would-politicans while then be able to use them absolutely freely to further whatever political goals they happen to have.
Banks are supposedly private. Yet. people get debanked for undesirable political opinions and their only redress is — public oversight which still sort-of works in this sector. When it comes to ‘funky injections’, the regulator has been completely privatized, ie, its bills are paid by the pharmaceutical industry and hence, the presently most profitbable product will invariably become the safest, effectivest and most required one.
One can argue that the NHS is broken by design and should be replaced with a different kind of healthcare system. But be that as it may, the present mess needs to be fixed first. Simply throwing it over a fence so that Virgin, Black Rock, Pfizer, Astra-Zeneca and all the other usual suspects can pick up whatever parts of it they like is not going to improve things.
There’s nothing stopping the state providing health insurance cover for uninsured/uninsurable people.
Discrimination is a tricky one – in theory the market should provide alternatives if there is demand, but if barriers to entry are high and a cartel of providers all behave in the same way for various reasons then it doesn’t work so well. Arguably a lot of the behaviour of private providers is a result of political/regulatory pressure.
The market should provide alternatives because it’s assumed that people operating companies have to care about their customers in order to make money. However, a large company which is profitable can always afford to piss off some minority of its customers. Economies of scale favour oligopolies and people working for a company that’s part of an oligopoly have no particular reason to care for the demands of individual customers as something like “annual revenue is £500 less than what it could have been” simply won’t figure on the balance sheet.
Case in point: I need a new harddisk because one of the two I have is dying. I ordered one from a company named Box (box.co.uk) a fortnight ago which advertises “Free next day delivery” on its website. Reportedly, the item got passed to DHL and then returned for a reason I don’t know. Nobody bothered to tell me about this, because “Why bother?” — this is a £55 transaction really nobody cares about.
The present state is that the company took my money but the people working for it won’t ship the item. I can probably get my money back but – in addition to the waste of time – that’s not going to help me. Granted, I can probably buy the item elsewhere but only as sort-of an act of mercy, ie, due to good luck, manageing to find some people who are willing to ship it, maybe because a throw of the dice went in my favour. That’s an absolutely typical “market performance” I’ve already plentifully encountered elsewhere.
The myth that private companies care for their customers because “competition” forces them to is simply wrong. And hence, the myth that anything can be improved by making it private is, too.
I certainly agree that privatisation doesn’t inevitably lead to better service, but I think its hard for the state to perform BETTER than a private firm because the incentives are trickier to put in place.
This gets me back to the German proverb Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopfe her — The fish stinks from the head. Incentives are really a matter of organization culture and work ethic and that’s ultimatively a matter of what leadership demands and is willing to impose onto itself. The people who were legally partying in Downing Street while the rest of the country was under lockdown attract followers like themselves. Every borough council probably had its own lockdown parties.
People don’t magically become shit just because they’re working for the state and they don’t magically turn into high performers seeking to fullfill their duties to the utmost just because they’re paid by some internet merchant company. It’s by-and-large the same kind of people who are working for public and for private organizations and this mens that, by-and-large, their performance will be identical.
To continue the story from above for illustration: It seems that the company supposed to ship the disk handed it over to DHL. DHL apparently never even made an attempt to deliver but just returned it to the sender. Maybe an error on their part, I don’t know. I’ve had an extensive live chat with some of the customer support guys in the vain attempt to get a disk delivered to me. But I could as well have been talking to a wall. Status of the item was “returning”, script for returning said “apologize to customer and promise refund once the item has returned”. Hence, that was all of the reply I could get from this guy, no matter how often I told him that I didn’t ask for this item to be returned and didn’t want a refund but a disk I had paid for. When I started to become insistent, I got an additional reply “No, we can’t ship out returned items again. We apologize … bla bla bla … wait for your refund”.
It’s hard to imagine that even the most aloof civil servant could have been more intransigent and less interested in whether his employer will end up making a profit or a loss here.
I agree that individuals and their approach to work are very important and make a big difference and that there is a mixture everywhere. But I am sure financial and other incentives (threat of losing your job) do also make a difference. Another issue is staff retention. A friend of mine is a young, very bright and hard working civil servant – exactly the kind of person the civil service should be trying to retain. But he is most likely going to work in the private sector because the money is much better and he has much better leverage there – he wants more flexible working arrangements but there is no flexibility on offer, despite his high value to the department he works for.
Many in the establishment probably regard Parties of that kind as a virus. From their position, they welcome the first past the post system, which offers quite high immunity from infection. Even if you look at the devolved countries (Scotland and Wales) which have partially proportionate systems, it won’t be easy to move away from FPTP.
The idea that MPs should be people from their constituencies elected because of themselves and not because they were running on some party ticked is IMHO principally sound.
Indeed. My MP says he will represent ALL of his constituents but how can he – he was elected on a party platform and will be whipped to vote with his party? He doesn’t represent me.
Apropos your comment a bunch of vain inadequates, who – at present have control over us, but no moral, ethical or logical authority to rule https://www.hughwillbourn.com/post/54-madness-and-the-evaporation-of-authority
However. 13 million people voted leftist (Labour communists and Lib Dum Marxists) and only 10 million voted right ish – Tory and Reform.
Britain could be argued to be a failing, left wing nation. We are done for if those figures keep happening.
The Tories are not right wing – just less left wing than the other Uniparty parties.
We need more direct democracy like Switzerland. We should decide on major issues by referendum.
And, a proportional voting system that had transferable votes in the second round. I suspect that would push voters to really be careful about who they wanted to take power. I suspect that if voters had had that choice at the last GE, there may have been a different outcome.
Has ‘notinmyname’ looked at all possible political systems and worked out which system will work best, both from a representative and pragmatic angle?
I would like to see it.
Is there a merit to start a political party with it’s only remit to change the electoral system to the new system and once that has been achieved to bow out and call new elections based on the new system?
If we want the current political class to change the system it won’t happen. It is not in their interest.