The Longest Night

This week: look, I am also bored of writing about Britain being broken, but it is, isn’t it? Sorry. Also: a map of Europe’s megalopolis-es; and why is The Traitors so compelling?

I’m not a religious man, but I’ve always loved Christmas. At least part of this is no doubt down to having been a mildly spoilt only child, who could pretty much guarantee Christmas morning would bring the good shit; but as adulthood has ground on, it’s become more, not less, important to me. It helps provide a shape to the year, and gives us a moment when we actually bother to reach out to the old friends or family members we spend the rest of the time just feeling guilty for not calling. 

Another reason I like it, of course, is because in recent years it’s expanded from being a couple of back-to-back holidays, to being a sort of extended national break, running from roughly 20th December to 3rd January. Not everyone gets to benefit from this, I know; but for those who do it feels healthy, to have a week or two where we stop and recharge and take a breath before diving into the next thing.¹

This year, though, there are rather more things closing than ideally should be. The annual exodus from London feels like it’s begun several days earlier than normal: this is surely at least partly because there’s no guarantee travel will be possible later, and if you see a train going where you want it to at this point then the rational thing is just to board it and worry about the details later. 

Then there’s the news that Thurrock council in Essex has effectively declared bankruptcy. There are specific reasons for this – an investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed that terrible investment policies had left them them with a half a billion pound black hole – but there are always specific reasons for these things, and this is the fourth English council to go bust recently, following Northamptonshire, Croydon and Slough. There’s no obvious pattern here in terms of either the types of place these cover, or who’s in political control: it just feels like, after a decade of swingeing cuts, councils are running on vapours; and if, thus far, it’s only the badly run ones that are hitting rock bottom, it’d be optimistic in the extreme to just assume things will stay that way. 

(A sidenote: Thurrock’s leader, Tory Mark Coxshall, put out a statement which included the lines, “They can also be reassured that under my leadership we have started to grip our situation and have a clear sight of what needs to be done. The section 114 notice is a clear indication we are on the road to recovery.” This feels like an extraordinary thing to say under the circumstances, like the officers on the Titanic asking everyone to applaud them for how well the evacuation is going.)

And then there’s the NHS, which we all stayed in our homes for months on end to protect during the pandemic, but which the government is allowing to crash because it doesn’t want to give nurses an inflationary pay rise. For weeks, the internet has been awash with genuinely frightening stories of all-night waits for ambulances, or paramedics hearing urgent calls but being helpless to act because they’re still in a queue to get another, equally urgent patient into hospital. There are some genuinely disgusting newspaper splashes out there today, asking how striking ambulance drivers will live with themselves if their industrial action leads to death. If those same newspapers had spent the last few years asking the same of the government, we might not be in this mess. 

One question about all this is why the public aren’t angrier. Okay, the polls suggest that they’ve had enough of this government, and do blame it for many of these problems – but still, the level of anger feels more like tutting than like something proportional to the slow motion collapse of vast swathes of the British state. 

My suspicion is that most people simply don’t spend their lives thinking about this stuff. Hospitals are, like the airports which saw a sudden increase in queuing times after Brexit, something which most of us don’t interact with very often. Even those who have bad experiences may see them as bad luck, rather than a systemic problem; by the time it’s clear it’s the latter, the issue has been around long enough for it to have become part of the wallpaper, just The Way Things Are rather than something we can blame on a specific policy or government. The public are the proverbial boiled frog.

Which is not a very cheerful note to be going into Christmas with. 

It could be less cheery, though, because things are probably going to get worse. Other councils are wobbling; the worst of winter, with its traditional annual health crisis, is still to come. And on Tuesday, Aslef announced plans for a 24 hour strike on 5th January. Since this falls between two 48 hour RMT walk outs already planned for 3rd-4th and 6th-7th January, this will effectively wipe out the British railways for an entire five day period which, while perhaps not entirely unprecedented, also doesn’t feel massively precedented.

In 2010 the Tories came to power under the slogan “We can’t go on like this”. If only we had.