16. On Decline and Fall.

Dearly Beloved,

When I visited London in November 2021, I was reminded of the decline and fall of Rome. We viewed the house we had sold there three years ago and found it was in a terrible state. An attempt at modification seemed to have failed and it was not clear if bad practice had endangered its stability or if the buyer had simply run out of money. There were “no admittance” safely warning signs on the front door, the windows and entrances at the back were boarded up and the back garden was full of rubbish, some of which looked although it had come from people discarding rubbish over the garden wall. No work was going on.

We traveled on the Piccadilly line on the London underground where, despite the advice on social distancing during the pandemic, the intervals between trains were longer than I remember and consequently the carriages were crammed with people having to stand and that was the same for each tube journey we took. Many seats were worn out and needed replacing. On certain stretches of the track there was an ear piercing screeching because the track needed adjusting. At Goldhawk Road tube station a signal at the end of the platform was covered in plastic bin bags as if the signal had finally failed but no one could summon up the energy or resources to remove it and covering it in bin bags was just a simpler solution. My wife visited a Westfield shopping centre to discover queues for the toilets because six out of seven of the units were out of order. It reminded me of that old trope about the USA, “private affluence and public squalor”.

Then yesterday I read a long article written by the Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, complaining about the long period of financial austerity that was threatening the condition of the public transport system in London. He said that cuts of £1 billion had been made to the network over the past five years. The reason for these cuts seem to be political. Few areas of London voted for the present government and most Londoners voted to remain in the EU, both anathemas for the present government.

In other parts of the UK the government has actively pursued a policy of giving financial support to areas, constituencies, where there are MPs who are members of its own party. This is a rather dire departure from the rule that, whatever arguments take place between political parties prior to elections, governments in a democracy should rule for the benefit of the entire population and not just for its own supporters. Otherwise this is mere tribalism, and it is divisive. It undermines the key principle of the undivided nature of our country. The USA has suffered a similar problem, and so divided has it become, that people have started to undermine the checks and balances that stabilise the political system in an attempt to ensure that their party stays in power.

It is possible that these divisions are happening at similar times in the US and the UK because both countries' governments have failed to deal with the consequence of de-industrialisation that started 50 years ago, and that has led to the sort of resentments upon which right wing governments thrive, just as the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany thrived on the resentments caused by the Versailles Treaty which ended the first World War and which they claimed was discriminatory and unfair to Germany.

These are long term problems and are the result of failures by all governments which have ruled in the past fifty years. Are we witnessing the start of a process of decline and fall on Western societies just as Rome fell because of incompetent rule, mismanagement and political division?

Peace,

Paul

Completed: 18 November 2021


Photo: Paul Munton.

A signal light swathed in black plastic at Goldhawk Road tube station in London. A symbol of the decline of the capital of the UK.


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