The Great British Reading List
My take is that a ruling class developed in the UK from the time of Blair&#x27;s election through to the 2016 referendum. These were folks in my demographic, born in the 1970&#x27;s, state educated (up to and including postgraduate Oxbridge) and exposed to the first waves of always on media. They watched Gulf War 1 on CNN and they probably went on marches against Gulf War 2, but forgot about it more or less immediately after all the bombs had dropped. In general the live in large cities, many in London or Bristol or Oxford or Manchester or Leeds or Edinburgh. Fewer in Liverpool or Cardiff or Belfast or Glasgow though.<p>This class bought into the vision of a united europe because it brought direct benefits for them. They could get cheap goods &amp; services and they could earn loads in the City. They also like the idea and practice of a united europe because it insulated them from the reality of the UK in terms of the actuality of the infrastructure, civil institutions and democratic structures. This allowed folks to disengage from the process of smashing up local government and the civil service, instead the action was in Westminster and Brussels - and with the commission.<p>The processes above meant that the wheal of the UK population has to live with disfunctional services. Local transportation is greatly reduced from historic levels (no buses), the health service is strained to look after a dumbell demographic (old brits who consume healtcare but don&#x27;t pay, young migrants who consume healthcare but don&#x27;t pay), no social housing, reduced social care, bad jobs and terrible schools. On the other hand the elite (me) have private healthcare (virtually unheard of when I was a kid) million pound houses, teslas etc etc.<p>The referendum was a response to the disaster of 2011-&gt;14 in Greece culminating with the UK&#x27;s veto being ignored - I don&#x27;t think that the UK gov expected to end up running a referendum but it was like political gravity once that happened and they were dragged into it. This opened up the truth of the national divide that has opened up and the schism between the haves and the don&#x27;t haves.<p>All of this is remarkably similar to the Trumpian schism in the USA, but the difference is that Johnson is not Trump. His key sin (of the week) is that he hosted a Christmas quiz on Zoom last year, apparently having had too much booze. And Johnson will be gone soon and adult supervision of the Tory party will resume, probably in opposition. I don&#x27;t see any other post referendum figure looming behind Johnson to take the mantle of populism and if Johnson was ever going to do that then surely his moment has passed. In any case whenever he&#x27;s been pushed to make a policy choice it&#x27;s generally been quite unpopular and fundamentally progressive - for example sticking 1% on tax to pay for more health care.<p>So - if the UK political establishment can get it&#x27;s act together there is a chance to move forward, we are not faced with the horror of Trump 2024. If it doesn&#x27;t then the UK will drift downwards like a leaf on the wind and eventually there will be another crisis. This will come because there is a rarely discussed dynamic of the UK&#x27;s integration with the EU which is that the UK ran a gigantic trade deficit with the EU (Germany in particular) due to the Euro&#x27;s devaluation vs. the DM. Johnson has not fixed this and in fact has made it worse because of not putting tariffs on EU imports. He can&#x27;t because of the pandemic and the failure of the UK (and global) logistic infrastructure, but one of the things that&#x27;s coming is the moment that the UK government decides that it either will do this, or has to do this. The has to may come with a balance of payments crisis and a Turkish Lira style run on Sterling, so I see how the balance of trade is sorted as the litmus test for the future of the UK. If the government gets it right I see the UK developing as a Singapore on Thames, if it gets it wrong then I think not so much.<p>Anyway, I will be nearly dead by then along with the rest of the Blairite scum who have got us to here and are now so angry on Twitter about what they think they didn&#x27;t do.