This isn't about Brexit...It's about Britain

                           

Image provided by the New Statesman.

Where do we begin?

American writer Henry James once wrote that 'an Englishman's never so natural as when he's holding his tongue.' Now it's time for me, an apologetically English man, to stop holding his tongue and give his genuine thoughts about his beloved country. There's just one problem, how can one talk about the current state of Britain without mentioning the spectre that haunts it? The spectre of Brexit; the spectre of uncertainty.

I think we deserve a break from talking about Brexit. Well maybe we don't deserve one, we did kind of bring this on ourselves but we certainly could use a break. We are facing a lot of problems in this country which many would attribute to our leaving of the European Union but in this piece I will attempt to argue that Brexit is an exacerbating symptom rather than a root cause of our woes. This blog is a first attempt at muddling through the questions: What is going wrong for us right now? Why are we so divided and angry and miserable as a country? Whilst talking as little as possible about Brexit, okay I'll stop writing that godforsaken word now...Wait, let me just get it out of my system. Brexit! Brexit! Brexit! Okay, I'm done. Shall we begin?

Whose Britain is it Anyway?

Anyone familiar with British history can tell you that demographically, Britain is a melting pot of various genetic backgrounds. Having been settled (sometimes peacefully, sometime forcefully) by various more prominent civilisations than us throughout the ancient and medieval eras. For the great conquerors of western Europe, anybody who's anybody has done a bit of murdering and pillaging on the British isles, sorry Napoleon. In hindsight, this rather violent history was something of a boon to Britain's development, ever existing on the fringes of scientific and cultural progress in the world. 

Britain eventually did have its time in the sun, the rise and fall of the British Empire. In many ways it was great and in many ways it was terrible. We played a large role in the transatlantic slave trade but were also one of the first empires to abolish slavery. A bright idea we had for turning a quick profit is now a deep and festering wound across the ocean, creating deeply rooted societal problems that are still being felt today in the USA. We brought the world closer together through our networks of trade and our building of infrastructure in countries we colonised. Let's not be under any illusions though, we did this for our own benefit and inadvertently impoverished millions of people, causing deadly and ruinous famines throughout India for decades. Turns out, you can't eat railroads. Britain's political stability in the face of multiple waves of revolutions in Europe throughout the 19th Century is a testament to the strength of British democracy, the roots of which date back to the Magna Carta. Britain was the greatest naval power in the world, beating off invasion from the Napoleonic French empire which had abandoned democracy. Britain also raised a formidable air-force, being off invasion from the Nazi German Reich which usurped democracy. However, Britain's military might also saw countless moments of brutality and cruelty toward weaker peoples. During the Boer war, we invented the concentration camp. Britain fostered some of the greatest minds in the world, artists and scientists who paved the way toward the modern society the world knows today. But what of the countless great minds that were ignored and passed over in Britain because they didn't belong to someone with a penis?

So British history was a mixed bag, we did some good things and we did some really fucked up things. We exploited the most vulnerable human beings on the planet, that was our thing, that was what made the British empire the giant that it was. I am so proud to be born into a much humbler Britain, a Britain that is no longer a real world power, no longer afraid to laugh at ourselves. Many people would not agree with me. Many people cheered when we killed Argentinians during the Falklands war like we were stepping back into our former glory. Many people were proud of our involvement with the US-led "War on Terror" like we were bringing justice and civilisation back to the world, like the good old days. Whenever talking to my friends from Germany and Austria about the history of their countries, I always commend their parents' generation for their humility in facing up to the sins committed by their forebears and really learning from the mistakes that their predecessors made. In Britain, we haven't learnt from our mistakes. We are taught that we were the "good guys" in history and that the world owes us, not the other way around. No wonder we are so easily convinced that people from outside the UK don't deserve to live here.

                                         

The Boer War: Mainly women, children and old men in concentration camps. 160,000 Boers and 130,000 Africans were held in British concentration camps. 28,000 Boer women and children died in the concentration camps, of which 22,000 were children under 16 years of age.

More than 14,000 Africans died in 66 separate concentration camps set up by the British. Children like Abraham Carel Wessels (pictured above) were some of the lucky who survived.

What does it mean to be British? What people do these islands belong to? What constitutes indigenous Britonhood? Does it even matter? Don't we owe something to the rest of the world to make up for all the suffering we have caused? Have we caused more harm as a nation than good? I don't claim to have the answers here but I do hope to shed some light on how divided and confused the narrative is on how we got to where we are today. No one really agrees, is it any surprise that we have divided opinions on where it is that our nation should go next?

Unequal Britain
Although we Britons like to complain about the economy, our island with its meagre agriculture and manufacturing still boasts number 6 in the world's largest economies; behind France, Germany, Japan, China and the United States. How can this be possible when we don't really make anything? One word, London. My beloved home city is a global powerhouse in professional services, particularly banking and insurance. Eurostat, the official data agency of the European Union reveals that London is the richest area in Northern Europe. However, Eurostat also revealed that of the 10 poorest places in Northern Europe, 9 are in the UK. How is it that we are host to the richest area in Europe whilst also having 90% of the poorest areas? Well the sad truth is that people outside the big city don't really get much of a say. They're not adequately represented and they feel increasingly disenfranchised when our politicians say that the national economy is flourishing in spite of the fact that local economies in the west and northern parts of the UK are suffering. Local governments don't wield any real power to change things and are simply struggling to ensure there are enough jobs to go around. The centralisation of wealth and the centralisation of power are inextricably linked. No surprises there.


                         

Source: Office for National Statistics 2011 - Since then the centralisation of wealth has only increased!

Looking at the country as a whole, we can see that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Of course, some disparity is to be expected between rich and poor but the levels of disparity are extreme; the richest 10% of the population has about 22x as much income as the poorest 10%. There is a sharp increase in wages between the second richest 10% and richest 10% from an average of £62,000 to a whopping £109,000 average. It gets more extreme in the case of the top 1% of earners in the UK who have an average income of £253,927! In terms of overall wealth, a study funded by Credit Suisse found that the richest 1% in the UK owns 29x more than the poorest 20%. In Britain, the higher up the ladder you are, the more your wallet seems to disproportionately balloon, why? One word, oligarchy. Britain has, arguably for my entire lifetime, been an oligarchy. Set up with the express interest of keeping those who are the richest on top. This is rooted in our approach toward taxation, in our approach toward education and in our approach toward social class.

More graphs and unbiased facts relating to the UK's inequality crisis can be found in this handy video, very informative and no ideological fluff. Good Stuff 10/10.

Growing up, I have been in an interesting position in terms of UK class because I have spent time with people from both middle and working class backgrounds and all I can say is that they have very little respect for one-another unless they have class-diverse social circles (like me). I think it's this separation that makes us so uncompassionate as a society, we really do not identify with the other half, we no longer have the same goals, we see our country through and entirely different lens and we are taught to distrust one another. It's a problem that won't be overcome in a single generation and will perhaps always exist on some level. The most sickening part of it is that on some level, some Britons really think people deserve what they get in life. When they walk past the injustice of someone who has been evicted from their home and forced to live on the street, many of whom have disabilities or mental illnesses, they stick up their noses and assume it was all down to their poor life choices and that this tramp probably deserves to be sleeping rough tonight. Even those who do feel sorry for the poorest don't dwell on it, they are too distracted by themselves. How do I look today? Why did my colleague get a raise when I didn't? What new thing will I be consuming today? What new product will make me happy?

Indifference to the homeless: Ignoring them is the only way we can go about our lives without being overwhelmed by the reality that these poor people have to endure every waking moment.

Depressed Britain

I want to put a warning here to skip this section if this is too much, I totally understand if some people are not in a place to think about some of these topics I am about to discuss. For those who are okay with talking about mental health issues please read on with an open mind.

We are in a time of crisis when it comes to the number of people now suffering from mental health issues. 1 in 4 people in the UK will experience some kind of mental health problem each year. 1 in 5 will experience suicidal thoughts while about 7% will experience self-harm or make an attempt to end their own lives this year. Think about your classrooms, your offices. If that room has more than 20 people, the odds are that at least one of those people you share a room with every day is hurting themselves or may be on the verge of ending it all. Suicide is contagious. If someone kills themselves in a community, the chances of other attempts increases significantly. Celebrity deaths often produce a similar spike. When I was 16 years old, my father took his own life and just this year my uncle did so as well. It is my belief that particularly among men in the UK, suicide is a looming danger that we MUST get better at spotting before it happens so that these tortured people can get the support that they need. I'm going to write a full blog-post on mental health at some point in the near future to discuss my thoughts further.

Obviously there are a wide range of reasons for mental health issues but I believe that our national situation is made worse by three key factors.
1) Like in the United States, we are obsessed with professional achievement, material possessions, and status symbols. This obsession makes the majority of us feel inadequate because we are told that we ought to aspire to an unrealistic depiction of happiness. For the few of us that get there are left feeling empty in the light of their own achievements. They have put aside human connection and replaced it with an obsession with the self. Jim Carrey, a middle aged man who has suffered with mental illness throughout his life said this: "I’ve often said that I wished people could realise all their dreams of wealth and fame so they could see that it’s not where you’ll find your sense of completion [...] I can tell you from experience, the effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is."
2) Particularly in Britain, the admirable value that many of us share in not making a fuss and never letting them see us bleed is a potentially harmful one. Not only does it prevent those of us who are suffering from speaking out about our problems, it also closes the minds of the people who are meant to be supportive. The immediate British response to someone breaking down into tears is not compassion, it's awkward discomfort. "Keep calm and carry on" was a useful motto for us when we were being bombed but we ought to replace it in 2018 with "It's okay not to be okay, it's okay to ask for help."
3) Our National Health Service is being squeezed by vicious financial cuts which is reducing the quality and coverage of our public health services. Young people are particularly endangered by cuts to the NHS with regard to a weak system of support for mental health.

On another note, I would argue that British romantics are a dying breed and that is having a negative impact on the average mental health. We live in a hook-up culture which is fine and fun for those involved but are they really happy at the end of the day compared to someone with a partner who truly understands and loves them? Deep down, we all just want to be loved but I think Brits in general find it harder to express this yearning. We are a deeply frustrated people who are having less sex over the past few years and are turning more and more to alternative methods for satisfying our desires. But the death of romanticism is more than just about how we find our partners, it's about our sense of optimism that the world is on our side. I believe that at least sub-consciously, we are closing ourselves off, behind our creature comforts, we are afraid to engage with the world at large.

The only words I can find to describe my feelings about it all are this paraphrasing of an enraged news anchor who is so sick of it all that all he wants to do is speak his bloody mind: We know things are bad, worse than bad! They're crazy, it's like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house and slowly the world that we're living in is getting smaller and all we say is please at least leave us alone in our living rooms let me have my Netflix and my Youtube and my Pornhub and I won't say anything; just leave us alone. Well I'm not going to leave you alone! I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest, I don't want you to riot, I don't want you to write to your MP because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the pollution and the corruption and the surveillance and the people sleeping on the street. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad! You've got to say, we are human beings GOD DAMN IT! OUR LIVES HAVE VALUE!

The late great Peter Finch delivering the "mad as hell" speech in the award winning 1976 satire, network: only a year before Finch's death, you can see the fire of his performance raging against the dying of the light.

Brexit Britain
I have to come clean, being sick of hearing about Brexit on the news isn't the main reason I've been staying off the topic. The main reason is that I'm not confident enough to discuss it at a detailed enough level to write something that's a worthwhile read for you guys. When the referendum was first called by David (irresponsible, shortsighted, self-serving) Cameron a few years ago I was furious. I said "I don't really understand the pros and cons of our membership with the EU and I'm a politics student for Christ's sake! How can we expect the average person to decide?" In the end, the referendum became more about our anger at the establishment than it did about what we think of the European Union. What folly.

One of my closest friends is a solicitor whose work over the last year and a half has been predominantly advising companies and politicians on the knitty gritty details of Brexit, how leaving the EU is likely to affect the economy and how fucked we are to the highest degree of specificity. He believes that because of the legal complexities of Brexit, the process of leaving has handed more power to the technocrats, the irony being that many voted to leave the EU in order to take power away from the highly educated few.

I love my country and I will continue to love it even when we leave the EU, I still believe that this wave of isolationism that the west has been suffering in recent years is merely a speed-bump on the road to an inevitable global union. I'd be happy to argue that case in a later blog...

                           

If I may be allowed to conclude with a little preaching...
First step in solving any problem is recognising there is one. Britain is deeply divided. We are not doing right by the most vulnerable members of our society. We're not aspiring to be better, we're taking what we thought was the easy way out, there is no easy way out. Sacrifices have to be made by those who hold all the wealth and power or society will become so unhealthy and hateful that it will collapse and we will all be worse-off if that happens. We must confront the sins of our past and our present in order to clearly define our future, our leaders must put their money where their mouths are and inspire rationalism, tolerance, and compassion for our fellow humans. As the world faces the unfaltering onset of irreversible climate change, we will either be the leaders of a new generation of human responsibility or we will be the stubborn ingrates, too proud to let go of our petty differences. It's up to us to decide which.

Image provided by the International New York Times.