I found one article about British economics – if that is the accurate word – particularly à propos. Published by the Independent, the title is, “U.K. is most corrupt country in the world, says Mafia expert Roberto Saviano.”
The link is here: (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/roberto-saviano-britain-corrupt-mafia-hay-festival-a7054851.html).
The article is worth quoting:
“‘It’s not the bureaucracy, it’s not the police, it’s not the politics but what is corrupt is the financial capital. 90% of the owners of capital in London have their headquarters offshore. Jersey and the Caymans are the access gates to criminal capital in Europe and the U.K. is the country that allows it. That is why it is important, why it is so crucial for me to be here today, and to talk to you, because I want to tell you, this is about you, this is about your life, this is about your government.’ Prime minister David Cameron [previously revealed to be the beneficiary of an offshore trust established by his father, in revelations contained in the Panama Papers] faced growing calls for the U.K. to reform the offshore tax havens operating on its own Crown Dependencies and Overseas Territories, as Britain hosted an Anti-Corruption Summit earlier this month. Mr Saviano also weighed in on the EU referendum debate, arguing a vote to leave would make the U.K. even more exposed to organised crime. He said: ‘Leaving the EU means allowing this to take place. It means allowing the Qatari societies, the Mexican cartels, the Russian Mafia to gain even more power, and HSBC has paid £2 billion Euros in fines to the U.S. government, because it confessed that it had laundered money coming from the cartels and the Iranian companies. We have proof, we have evidence.’”
England resembles the Italy that Gore Vidal described in the 1970s: “between capitalism and socialism, you got the worst of both.” Not coincidentally, this was an era in which Italy was prey to low-level guerrilla war, the Anni di Piombo, the years of lead, with factions facing off that represented, on one hand, the Red Brigades, and on the other, ex-Fascists.
Like the U.K., Italy never fit neatly into the EU, and was not one of the founding members. And as in the U.K., the standards of living across different regions are stunning. Northern Italians often tell a joke: when Garibaldi united Italy, he really divided Africa. They’re riffing on a genuine phenomenon: northern cities resemble Switzerland; southern ones resemble Algeria.
The clash between the first world and the third, is a good metaphor for the London housing market. Vice Media, an online magazine, reported on April 13, 2017, in an article by Andy Jones, that, “Every Flat in a New South London Development Has Been Sold to Foreign Investors.”
According to the article:
“When the Heygate Estate was demolished there were promises of social housing and a ‘community feel,’ but it’s all fallen through… many tenants were forcibly evicted from their homes, given compensation at less than 40% of the market value. In its place, Londoners were promised a shiny new development that would provide affordable, accessible homes for key workers desperate to get on the property ladder… as the remaining home owners clung on until 2013, Southwark Council cut off heating and switched off the lifts, leaving tenants – council tax payers – stranded. Those residents who owned their own properties were served compulsory purchase notices for insultingly low sums… Sales of these properties began in Singapore on the 11th April 2014, with flash brochures and slick marketing conferences. Not a single unit was for sale in London at this time… Transparency International, a not-for-profit organisation which exposes global corruption, state in their 2017 report ‘Faulty Towers’ that the number of South Gardens units sold abroad is 51 out of 51 properties, as per Land Registry documents… Not only are all of the buyers of the new South Gardens foreign investors; from the 51 bought so far, many appear to be offshore – untraceable and untaxable… A 2016 survey of the Metropolitan Police found that over half of police officers didn’t live in London, the main reason for this being affordability. The same applies to nurses, teachers, paramedics and anyone else who is stuck in a rental trap.”
In this context, the EU — with its safe homeowners, accountable officials, and clean streets — starts to resemble the piñata at a birthday party: a lot of people took a crack at it, because they thought it might be fun to see it burst. This brand of schadenfreude recalls a Biblical admonition: “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” — Ecclesiastes 7:4.
The truth is, despite its glorious history, England has more in common with Italy or Greece today, than it does with Holland or Germany. Despite the bravado that accompanied it, the Brexit vote was a gesture of despair. It was a vote to escape, by any means necessary, the current state of affairs. This society has forfeited self-respect, but retained the primal drive for self-preservation. It is drifting, and desperate to reach terra firma at all cost. The violence of its struggle, is like that of a drowning man.
Faith in a stable, much less a just settlement, has not survived revelations about MPs’ expenses; bailouts of the banks; the collapse of the economy, or the radical austerity imposed on us, which has prompted overwhelming disenchantment; the cynicism of the Murdoch papers; the mismanagement that fuelled Eurozone debts; and finally, Blair’s commitment to the Iraq war, which revealed that, by trying to serve as a bridge between the Old World and the New, England had simply come uncoupled from both.
Following the London riots at a distance of five years, the Brexit vote was obviously linked to them, much like Jeremy Corbyn’s election to head Labour. The riots in the summer of 2011 became a Rorschach blot for an entire culture, and so the commentary about those few weeks was as frenzied as the riots themselves. There were a number of crises compressed into one brief period, and by karmic debt or cosmic transfer, they were magnified by their coincidence.
It is impossible to exaggerate the extent to which every crisis is seized here as a moral lesson, a teaching moment, for the masses. Everything comes under the moral lens, almost as methodically as it might have done in the Victorian era. This can easily slide into melodrama, rather than introspection.
As Blur sang, twenty years ago, in “Modern Life is Rubbish,” “The voyeur lives next to the exhibitionist.”
Treating every encounter, every debate, every quandary, as an opportunity to exercise one’s judgment on one’s fellow creatures, is apt to create a society that is touchy, neurotic, shallow, and point-scoring. This is what judgment is: a performance category.
As in any performance, when things go wrong, and sets break down, and lights flicker, and cues are missed, there is a kind of backlash that has to do with a double dose of disappointment: not only at the fact that things aren’t working, but at the fact that they are seen not to be working. The performance is interrupted; and our suspension of disbelief is shown up for the wishful delusion that it is. This is why children get so angry when you interrupt a game of “pretend.”
There is always an audience; and therefore, there are always commentators to tell the folks in the cheap seats what’s happening, and to offer the performers their reviews, alternately rapturous and scathing.
This is the drama of the Brittles, as opposed to the British.
The commentators have become the standard-bearers, and thus, the focus of the performance, disputing the occupation of the theatre, by way of being popular tribunes. This is the way that the media works in a fascist country: each local hero screaming at the top of his lungs. As in some unraveling surrealist set piece, the audience has joined the spectacle.
Shmuley Boteach, an American rabbi who spent ten years at Oxford, offered his own reaction to the tenor of British life, in terms of the comeuppance visited upon the Murdoch media empire, in an article in The Jerusalem Post on July 18, 2011, titled, “In the Belly of the Tabloid Beast.”
He observed:
“Britain has been going down a tabloid sewer for years. And the strange thing about the national obsession with tabloid corruption is that there has been no national soul-searching among the populace. Yes, editors and journalists may have behaved criminally and must be held accountable. But they were feeding a public insatiable for scandal. The British people have a formidable history, but over the past few decades public cynicism has become a defining characteristic. When the tabloids employed extreme ‘gotcha’ journalism, conducting sting operations to prove politicians and celebrities were financially and sexually corrupt, the people bought millions of copies and licked their chops. It was all based on the ridiculous belief that if you bring someone else down, you automatically lift yourself up, the bizarre feel good factor of watching the mighty fall.”
Writing in The Daily Beast, on Jul 22, 2011, Booker Prize novelist Howard Jacobson observed:
“We British have a robust view of human nature. Frailty doesn’t surprise us. But here are characters in the national drama we haven’t seen before… How can there be such shadowy ascendancy in a world otherwise so brightly lit? Has power changed its modus operandi while we weren’t watching and repositioned itself in media and PR? What is this “rich set”—itself a gross anomaly at a time of enforced austerity in Britain—which Cameron and Rebekah Brooks are said to inhabit in the Cotswolds, alongside television presenters, rock stars, and public relations men? When did Chipping Norton become the seat of national influence and power, and when did such people occupy it? Television trivialized popular culture and the tabloids vulgarized it still further, adding a splash of false glamour to a national sex life which had previously rejoiced in its provinciality, feeding envy under the guise of that mawkish morality to which the British have always been addicted. No surprise, then, that having slipped the moorings of a common reality it slipped the moorings of a common decency as well. If the leading actors of this tragic-farce appear not to know what they have done wrong, that is because they have communed for too long with their own creations.”
For a point of contrast, on to a website called libcom.org. In an article about the riots titled, “London burns – causes and consequences of the riots – an anarchist perspective”, the writers observe unsentimentally that, “What happened in London and spread elsewhere was not some idealised glorious proletarian uprising, but the very real explosion of anger that occurs when years of poverty, police repression, and racism finally reach bursting point.”
Meanwhile, in a story published on August 11, 2011, Reuters reported, “Foreigners stay calm and carry on in London riots.” The article, by Peter Gaff, reads:
“‘Bloody foreigners…’ someone tweeted when word circulated that Turkish and Kurdish people were gathering on the streets of east London to defend their shops and cafés from looters. ’…They come to our country and protect our neighborhoods and communities.’ From a Polish shop assistant photographed jumping out of her burning building to a Malaysian student filmed being robbed after he was beaten, many of the headline-grabbing victims of London’s riots were foreigners. That should be little surprise. These days most Londoners are in fact foreigners. According to figures from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, more than half of the city’s residents — 52.5% — were born outside the U.K.… London’s newest big group of migrants are workers from the former Communist countries that joined the European Union in the last decade. Britain was the only major EU country to grant immediate right to work to all citizens of new EU countries when the bloc added 10 mainly East European members in 2003. Poles, now about a half-a-million strong, have become the largest community of non-British citizens in the U.K. Unlike migrants from further afield, they find it easier to come and go with the rises and falls in the job market. Some have already gone back home because of Britain’s economic slump since 2008. Ela Sobolewska, a reporter for the Polish-language newspaper Dziennik Polski, said some of her friends were talking about the riots as the final straw.”
The Daily Mail, ever in alarmist mode, published an article by Dominic Sandbrook on June 17, 2011, that bewailed:
“Just imagine living in a Britain in which the state had broken down completely. You would see mobs rampaging through the streets and fires burning in the capital city. You would see governments rise and fall; you would see taxes rise and social services cut. You would see faceless European bankers flying in to take over Britain’s economy, and you would see thousands of people take to the barricades, blazing with outrage at their betrayal by the political classes. This may sound like the stuff of science fiction. But it is precisely what is happening right now in Greece… a chilling lesson in the dangers of European federalism, financial indiscipline and economic hubris. Ten years ago, Greece joined the euro, abandoning its traditional drachma and signing up to a currency union dominated by the Germans and the French. For decades, Greece had lagged well behind its new partners in living standards and development. But now, benefiting from low interest rates, the Greek government borrowed massively to fund their social programmes. In order to stick within the eurozone’s monetary guidelines, the Greeks shamelessly and consistently lied about their levels of debt, bribing banks to hide their transactions. Like their counterparts in Ireland, Portugal and Spain, they used the cover of the euro to spend and spend, defying the dictates of economic reason. But when the credit crunch hit Europe at the end of the last decade, the true scale of the disaster became apparent. Greece, it emerged, had not merely been running annual deficits of at least 14%, its overall public debt was an estimated 130% of GDP. These are truly staggering figures, making even Britain’s debt — about 76% of GDP when Gordon Brown left office — look puny by comparison… On the orders of the European elite, the Greeks have been forced to slash public services, cut pensions, hike taxes and deflate their economy… there is a good chance the euro itself will not survive… Meanwhile, here in Britain, our economic recovery remains desperately fragile.”
While John F. Burns, the London Bureau Chief of The New York Times, in an article published on July 23, 2011, titled “Rude Britannia,” recorded that:
“Coming home after half a lifetime as a foreign correspondent to an assignment in London, my first job at home since I was a teenage brick-carrier on a Thames-side building site… I was far from alone, I knew, in lamenting the eroded sensibilities and courtesies, the coarsening of life in the public sphere… Prime Minister David Cameron, snared in the scandal by his links to Murdoch executives and editors, pointed in that direction when he accompanied his mea culpa in Parliament on Wednesday with an appeal for the Labour opposition to turn to the ‘issues that people really care about,’ including large-scale unemployment and resetting the country’s deeply debt-strapped economy. But others have seen a far deeper malaise in the revelations… it has been left to the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, to suggest that the scandal has revealed something much broader, by depicting what has happened as a symptom of a wholesale corruption of values in Britain’s public and private life… the banking crash of 2008, the furore over fraudulent parliamentary expenses in 2009 and the tabloid scandal — have been rooted in a culture that engendered a ‘shirking of basic responsibility’ from ‘top to bottom’ in British life, that ‘sends the message that anything goes, that right and wrong don’t matter, that we can all be in it for ourselves as long as we can get away with it.’ ‘What,’ he said, ‘is a young person, just starting out in life, trying to do the right thing, supposed to think when he sees a politician fiddling the expenses system, a banker raking off millions without deserving it, or a press baron abusing the trust of ordinary people?’ … The collapse of standards in the public education system, once among the world’s best, has precipitated an epidemic of antisocial behavior among urban youth. The decline of manufacturing industries has fostered soaring unemployment and, among many, a lifelong welfare dependency …a man who had a season in Downing Street over the past year as one of Mr. Cameron’s advisers surveyed the turmoil of The News of the World scandal and offered a revealing conclusion. Britain, he said, resembled more than anything, a ‘post-communist society’ — unhinged from the old verities, and not yet in sight of anything enduring to replace them.”
The class system, channelling a centripetal momentum, organised whole swathes of society into categories based on work; and as long as an individual did the work assigned to him or her, reasonably cheerfully, this society remained astonishingly resilient.
The class system may not have been politically correct, but here there is a silver lining: it was never based on corruption. It was a way of structuring the economy, and its legitimacy no doubt dated back to the feudal system, which remained at the root of its peculiar evolution.
The accumulation of great wealth, by a select few, for centuries, was not only legal, it was the backbone of British society. The elite, then, was tasked with a job, which was running the country. This was not necessarily a self-serving fiction to mask exploitative practices. And it did not fudge the nature of accountability. It provided the membership of the establishment that directed England’s institutional core.
People always fight to preserve their own advantages. But if they do so in the open, the fight is fair; and as many writers have noted, class war, at its core, is the engine of politics. The difference between then, and now, is that the power money buys today is invisible, unaccountable, and opaque. This is both novel and sinister.
Moreover, incubating radical disparities in quality of life, within one country, is apt to generate a centrifugal force that becomes terminal. Scotland, Northern Ireland and London are all manoeuvring to reject Brexit and remain in the EU, which has made the elimination of radical disparities in wealth a more credible goal. Hence, the U.K.’s departure from the European Union will dislodge the keystone in the arch over all our heads: the United Kingdom.
Theresa May could end up as the Protector of the Rump state of England: Lillibet’s Lilliput, in much the same way that Gianfranco Fini presided over a party for the promotion of that mythical state of “Padania,” that is, the rump of Italy that adheres to the main body of Europe, amputated from the peninsula that lies in the Mediterranean like a needle in a compass, the only stretch of terra firma in what Jean Cocteau called “the only continent that is liquid.”