It’s rarely a good idea to extrapolate the specific to the general. It’s a habit beloved of media both traditional and social and it can be quite misleading. In the land of the immediate or the world where only the headline counts, context and history often go missing. Meme, metaphor, malaise. Dial M for mucked up.
Take the Trident missile failure, phutting like a damp November firework before a back garden party, leaving only disappointed children where ooh and aah should be. The system has been tested well over 100 times and only skittered across the lawn on ten occasions.
But I’m going to do some extrapolating anyway because timing is the art of life and Trident coughed at a moment when the state of preparedness of HM Armed Forces is under scrutiny like rarely before. It’s not often defence looks like an election issue – a fact which has allowed politicians to pull all sorts of fast ones – but it might be now.
For Brits, y’see, pride in “our boys” is a matter of historical doctrine. And all of a sudden it’s looking shaky. It’s as though the apex of the national pyramid has suddenly developed a huge crack. I mean, the one bit you actually expect to work and look at it!
And that feeds a narrative that, in this sceptr’d isle, everything is clapped out. Our institutions are no longer trusted, the roads have potholes, the trains are an intermittent and overpriced luxury, the National Air Traffic Services has a breakdown if a single flight is misplotted and nobody wants to go to work anymore.
That we’re very far from alone in all this is hardly the point. A quick trip across the Channel is educational. A slightly longer one across the Atlantic still takes you to a city where people fall into rat-infested sink holes in a country where fentanyl-dazed zombies paw the windows. But we don’t live in Marseille or Naples, New York or San Francisco. We live here.
Going back to context, I wonder if we haven’t been here before. Y’see, if, like me, you still think of the Eighties as three or four years ago, you remember a thing or two. Like the Police, by which I mean the band, kicking off the decade with a number called When the World is Running Down.
And, of course, it was running down. Football stadiums caught fire, as did tube stations. There were 31 major rail crashes. And, when we went to war in the South Atlantic, the RAF had to scavenge bits from museums to render a Vulcan V-bomber from the Sixties serviceable. A splendidly sticky tape and hope adventure that culminated in the world’s longest-ever bombing raid.
Oddly, the Eighties has entered popular memory as the decade of modernisation. That spell when Britain stopped being a post-war country. And, of course, it was. Not least because this litany of disaster spurred overdue reform and investment in a nation of slam-door trains, wooden football stands, ageing infrastructure and underinvested industries in sectors no longer competitive.
The difference between then and now was a once-in-a-generation politician and a country in the mood to change. Now, no such leader looms and the nation has, as lotus-eaters are wont to do, fallen into a dreamy dependence on the state. A habit it learned with astonishing rapidity in the madness of lockdown, demotivated by the stagnation and austerity of the financial crisis and now under the yoke and whip of onerous tax burdens.
But to all things a season. And more than occasionally I wonder if the season in which we find ourselves is the one, where, like a snake we are sloughing the last of something started in the Eighties. The last itchy skin of post-war solutions.
They are in the big and the small. In the usefulness of aircraft carriers, the utility of Europe as an entity for the moderating hand of mutual prosperity, in whether NATO is, to borrow from Macron, “brain dead” and whether America will continue to keep it alive.
In whether the BBC can be trusted now it no longer wears a dinner jacket, in whether the NHS can still be indulged now that we protect it rather than vice versa, in a demographic dependent on immigration for youth and cheap labour and in whether we can continue discarding old industries like steel, power generation and car manufacture. Or in university being a panacea. And, going back to Trident, in whether Britain can continue to strut and fret its hour on the stage or whether, nearly eighty years after our last great military part, we’re finally too tired to remember the lines.
Back in the Eighties, we were led from the wilderness. This time we look like we’re going into it.
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