If the United Kingdom is in terminal decline, then it seems to be dying from the edges inwards. Northern Ireland, with its sclerotic government and inexorable demographic shift from Protestant to Catholic, metaphorically and politically moves away from the mainland with every year. Scotland’s disasters are well-documented: Devastated by high unemployment, failing educational standards, and catastrophic levels of alcoholism and drug addiction, it is a shell of the country that once produced Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Alexander Fleming, David Hume, and James Clerk Maxwell. Now, even the Krankies look like cultural high points for the country to aim for.
Across the regions, there seems nothing but despair: the North East, that once-proud cradle of shipbuilding, is a land bereft of industry and hope; Lancashire and Yorkshire now only make the headlines because of their football teams and crime. England’s second city is a study of neglect and corruption. Rural counties, such as Cornwall, Devon, Suffolk, and Norfolk, criss-crossed by county lines and shit-filled rivers, see their farmers more regularly protesting on the streets of Whitehall than tilling their increasingly valueless fields. The country they once served looks alien to them. London, the once-beating heart of the country’s wealth, culture, and political power, still has a pulse, but it, too, is both bloated and fragile, overpriced and undernourished, susceptible to a financial heart attack that would see the end of its already furred-up stock exchange.
Perhaps the only way to stop the boats is to make their destination as appealing as a listing sperm whale, rotting off the coast of France. We’re doing our best to achieve this, to make the whole country a Shitlife Theme Park. Philip Larkin was right: we’ve become the “first slum of Europe”, a place governed by “crooks and tarts”. But where Larkin was wrong is in believing that the country’s death would be an accident: no, this death is intended; it is a slow homicide from the outside in, a smothering of the past done out of a sense of self-loathing and shame. Whether you went to Eton College, Reigate Grammar, or Cardiff High School, the inability to care for this nation-state is evident in every act of self-harm.
But what about Wales? Well, of all the parts of the United Kingdom, it is the Principality which has declined the most. Like a patient suffering from dementia, it lurches on, vaguely aware of what it once was, forced to live in old clothes it can no longer fill, bereft of purpose, increasingly made to feel ashamed of its own identity, of becoming a nuisance to all. To refer to Larkin again, Wales is an “old fool”, its days of “thin continuous dreaming”, of having a purpose, now at an end. Why, then, are the Welsh not screaming?
Screaming at what has been done to them by a ruling class that has turned a once-proud land into a failing state. Not a week goes by without an act of self-flagellation being announced. What sane country would reject building a nuclear power station, with all the jobs that would bring, because it could result in some minority language speakers leaving? That would be Wales. What sane country would claim that many of its most historic buildings are racist? That would be Wales. What sane country would insult the majority of its population by, effectively, calling them racist? That would be Wales.
Such ludicrous initiatives would be almost tolerable if the country was luxuriating in a state of fiscal and cultural prosperity. The reality is, inevitably, the opposite, and so such publicity-grabbing ideas are self-indulgent acts of policy onanism enacted by the overeducated and underworked. By any measure, Wales is in decline. … Read it all in The Critic
