Strange Days: Dreaming Britain II
Three more architectural sketches for a country without direction. Envisioning does not equal endorsement…
We’re beginning to see the shape of the Conservative Party’s response to Brexit. It’s not a coherent plan yet — well, as we know, no one actually had one of those — but it has a definite direction. George Osborne proposes to cut corporation tax, to the predictable dismay of EU leaders. Andrea Leadsom has in the past suggested that small employers should be almost entirely unregulated. Theresa May is no fan of red tape either, particularly when it comes to deporting people. Once Article 50 is activated, it seems fair to assume that a Tory government will begin removing safeguards and worker’s rights in quest of a fluid employment marketplace, while lowering taxes on business and rejecting environmental protections as burdensom. The right’s vision of Britain is of gleaming glass and steel cities filled with a neo-Victorian society of managers and workers all striving to create capitalist prosperity, while a countryside of rubicund famers and loyal peasants, hardy fisher folk and wealthy landowners live out a dream of Tolkien’s shire, freed at last from the twin horrors of wind farm sickness and immigration.
It’s not just inequitable and absurd, it’s also unimaginative. It is conservative in name as well as in origin, and vanishingly unachievable: it’s a pastiche, not a prospect. But at the moment it has few serious challenges. Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party, locked in internal struggle, are still speaking in negation: an end to austerity, and more recently and more quietly, to immigration.
Following on from my first two attempts [1, 2] to move forward from a Brexit vote — from which I still believe we should retreat — here are some more dreams of Britain, plausible and not; desirable and terrible.
I. Wet Britain
We’ve got rain. We’ve always had that. We’re famous for it. And that’s a huge asset which we waste. More than that, we’re an island nation, historically both a naval power and a mercantilist one. So let’s be what we are. Let’s power our nation with hydroelectric, wave and offshore wind; let’s farm fish under the turbines. Let’s expand our coastguard and retask our navy, and have the best sterwarded fish stocks in the world. Let’s become experts in the cleaning of water, in desalination, and in removing the vast quantity of plastic that floats in our oceans — and let’s turn around and become experts in using it to make things. Non-plastic waste we pick up along the way can be used to generate power. From our bizarre retreat from the EU, let’s make an island that faces outward.
Let’s take a fresh look at how we handle flood plains and agriculture so that our rivers don’t flood. Let’s look at flood defenses, erosion, trophic cascades. Let’s design our society around the science and practice of water. It’s about to become the single most important factor in the world anyway. We’ll have to come to a new understanding of agricultural practice — we’ll end up looking at urban farming as well as rural, and imposing change on an industry which has set habits, but again, that’s probably got to happen now without EU farming subsidies.
And let’s export it — why not? When we’re no longer losing fresh water and we’re not in drought, there are places that need it. We could transport it as icebergs or in slow-moving but perfectly effective airships. Hell, while we’re at it, let’s take down the Thames Flood Barrier and let the House of Commons sink. It’s going to cost billions and take years to refit anyway — and arguably having our parliament gather in the halls of the old British Empire is psychologically unhelpful for our MPs. We could send them to meet around the country so they’re closer to the constituents they represent, and create the world’s most remarkable tourist attraction: the drowning of our history to make way for a future beyond it.
Imagine, instead of grey London, blue-green London, a storm-tossed northern Venice rising on hills from a floodplain, the lower houses and the Thames valley constructed on stilts. Imagine that our coastline was once again the habitat of dolphins, seals, whales and basking sharks, that our rivers were drinkable and full of trout, otters, salmon, and birds. Imagine roads and railways raised on pilings connecting villages and towns which might become islands on the high tide or in heavy rain. Imagine a vibrantly alive country with a better diet, a happier mood, no fear of drought, new farms and new jobs, new attitudes, and a strange but familiar new face.
2. The Arbiter Nation
People talk about British Fair Play. We don’t always exhibit it, but it is at least proverbial. So let’s be the arbiters of fair dealing. Let’s establish Britain as the home of prudence. Let’s regulate our markets sensibly and define terms of engagement that actually work. Let’s become the Ratings nation — let’s Kite Mark finance and credit worthiness. Why should Moody’s or S&P get to decide what’s worth what? It’s not as if they did a bang up job with Sub Prime. Let’s withdraw from NATO while we’re at it, be the country that arbitrates interstate disputes. We’d maintain some sort of nuclear deterrent, some ability to deploy forces around the world but not to invade: armed election monitors, say. Let’s learn the lessons of our disastrous Iraq adventure and be the people you call when you need administrators who will be fair and be known to be fair. Let’s create a country that has real moral authority, that dominates jurisprudence — a surprising amount of international and individual non-UK law is based on British concepts and thinking. Let’s create our own ideal electoral system and export it. Let’s refund and reconstruct the BBC to be our soft power flagship of honesty and critical thinking, and become again the international gold standard of news reporting, evidence-based journalism and policy. In the referendum and in other nations facing hard choices, bullshit has become a plague. Let’s burn it out.
At the same time, we’ll have to reshape our internal mechanics — we’ll need a new criminal justice system premised on restorative justice and healing. We’ll need a massive societal effort towards the reintegration and resocialisation of criminals. We may even have to medicalise our evidentiary process and take a new view on criminality as a product of mental maladjustment, probably as a consequence of deinidividuation. We’ll want low crime rates and lower recidivism rates, and a radical new theory of psychgenic violence and societally induced trauma presenting as pseudo-sociopathic behaviour.
The US pioneered the notion of full-spectrum dominance as a tactical and strategic doctrine, but completely failed to recognise that it requires for success a moral component which may actually be incompatible with the notion of dominance. Let’s supply the lack.
… Or of course we could go the opposite way…
3. The New British Hegemony
All right: we just left Europe to be the Empire again. That’s what it comes down to. So let’s do it. That’s what you want, let’s get serious. We’ll need considerably beefed up armed forces and we’ll need to be aware that our children will die overseas. Still okay with it? I’m not, but let’s keep going. We’ll need to muster more boots on the ground than we presently can, but that’s not a problem: Europe is in the grip of a refugee crisis, after all, and the climate and demographic situation around the world means that is actually likely to get worse, not better. Let’s recruit. We can do something akin to the French Foreign Legion: serve for a given number of years and earn your citizenship and a fresh start. Take oath to the precepts of the British Hegemony — and live by them or get booted out. We’ll start with some bits of the poles and we’ll move on to any state that looks a bit wobbly. We’ll put colonial administrators in and get expertise as we go. It’s illegal, of course, but we don’t really care, do we? We’ll get an expanding resource base, a battle-hardened military, and — supposing we can pull of the pacification and integration of our subject populations — new lands to visit and rule. We’ll also get a terrible reputation internationally for a while, but power smoothes these things over and honestly I don’t know how the modern tolerant world would really deal with a radically expansionist Britain. I think there’d be a lot of absolute bewilderment. Andrea Leadsom claims we can be the greatest nation on Earth. Perhaps this is what she has in mind.
