UK unravels: Tears, turmoil, and tensions rise - Simon Lincoln Reader
Key topics:
UK’s economic crisis sparks IMF bailout fears and welfare reform chaos
Emotional scenes in Parliament mirror SA's past political unraveling
Liberal-left consensus blamed for deep national decline in UK and SA
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On Tuesday 23 September 2008, Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang convened a press conference. She looked buggered, hungover and depressed.
She didn’t break out into fluent Russian − as she was sometimes known to do − but instead read from a prepared statement. As the time for questions from the assembled neared, she started crying.
Those tears were not for the victims of state ineptitude, or even the unconscious woman whose watch she allegedly pocketed while working at a hospital in Botswana. They were for her boss, Thabo Mbeki − who’d been sacked by his party on the previous weekend and was set to officially resign the following day.
17 years later and we had roughly the same thing in different circumstances on Wednesday at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the House of Commons.
I don’t watch PMQs to learn anything anymore. Too much lying, you see. Instead I watch in the hope a brawl breaks out, or a fatwa is issued.
Contrary to much of the UK, I don’t expect any fight to be initiated by any one of the six or seven Members for Gaza. It will more likely come from a college-educated woman with a bowl haircut who wears chunky jewellery and boasts that one of her previous jobs was head of stakeholder relations compliance for a planning firm that specialised in project management data analysis.
That means the Liberal Democrats − the most deranged political party in the world − whom a large number of expat South Africans sheepishly support. Or from Ed Davey himself, a medium-priced children’s entertainer moonlighting as the party’s leader, who will stand up with steam emerging from his large ears: “Mr. Speaker,” he’ll say, “recently the chief executive of our very own party sent out an instruction that we are banned from intimidating individuals or groups possessed of gender critical views − like J.K Rowling. I find this is completely unacceptable. I am here today to tell this chief executive that I am going to come to his house and I am going to shoot him in his face.”
Most awesome of spectacles
This week has been bad for the UK, worse than last week, which itself was worse than the previous mark. The UK is broke, and the Treasury guys are privately preparing for the most awesome of spectacles: an opening line to the International Monetary Fund.
Read more:
The Prime Minister has been advised that it’s actually best to self-adopt conditions of a bailout before the fact, so he seized welfare reform in the hope that his side of the House had just the smallest capacity, alongside its loathing, for just the most elementary bullet points of economics.
That didn’t happen. Instead those people, some the inheritors of liberal-left boomerism, actually want more welfare. So Tuesday was very bad for the Prime Minister, now forced into humiliating twists and bends before a full-blown U-turn − and then came Wednesday.
Keir Starmer was clearly bothered, but as he spoke, it became impossible not to notice the sight of his Chancellor seated behind to his right. Rachel Reeves, or Rachel from Accounts, looked − like Manto 17 years ago − shagged out, the product of a four-day bender in the Canaries. Her misery visibly worsened, and her chin began to wobble. Then her bottom lip quivered and soon after that, tears from each eye rolled the length of her face. Following the event, she ran out of the chamber with her sister, also an MP.
Immediately we were told it was because she’d had an argument with the Speaker of the House, Lindsay Hoyle. Then we were told it was because of lack of sleep − she’d been up the entire night before dealing with the fallout of her leader’s reform U-turn. But this was all nonsense: during the questions, Starmer had been asked by the Leader of the Opposition whether he could guarantee her job. He didn’t respond.
More terminal
As there was in SA 2008, there is plenty to cry about in the UK 2025, but there is something much more terminal here. Privately, Reeves desires to turn the UK into a Scandinavian country where the state is 95% of all life.
Places like Norway succeeded in doing this because of advantageous conditions, namely a population of five million, and a clearer national identity − plus a healthy stack of cash. But it would be impossible to accomplish with a population of ~70 million and national identity barely on life support − the result of decades of self-harm. The chronic detachment contained in just this mad idea alone diminishes any other sound judgement she may possess.
In both the UK and SA, we are nearing the end of a decades-long liberal-left consensus that should never have been tolerated for as long as it has, whose extensions − like the parasite of a praying mantis when placed in water − range from fatal corruption to fatal bureaucracy respectively, then ultimately revert to the shared principle: the people we appoint to office do not possess the right sets of priorities because they do not possess the right sets of loyalties.
A fight − a massive, shrieking barney − is no longer one way to end this doom loop, but it may be the only way. Bolt the doors and serve neat brandy, wait for nature to take its course. After one week, unlock and wade through the wreckage, collecting what may be interesting or useful. Probably won’t be much.
*Simon Lincoln Reader grew up in Cape Town before moving to Johannesburg in 2001, where he was an energy entrepreneur until 2014. In South Africa, he wrote a weekly column for Business Day, then later Biznews.com. Today he is a partner at a London-based litigation funder, a trustee of an educational charity, and a member of the advisory board of the Free Speech Union of South Africa. He travels frequently between California, the UK, and South Africa. All on his green passport.
This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission