The sun has already set on the nation they call Great Britain
- Neither Asia nor the rest of the world needs British input to right itself. Instead, people nowadays debate whether it is a failed or failing state
When your own house is on fire, would you ignore your own very real existential crisis and instead, keep lecturing how someone else should run his own household?
Do British lawmakers really think they matter to the world? This week they issued a report that describes Taiwan as “an independent country” for the first time. Published by the cross-party British House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, it coincided with British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s visit to Beijing.
The report repeats the same claim, even the vocabulary, of Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and her secessionist Democratic Progressive Party that the island “is already an independent country under the name Republic of China”.
It also criticises the Chinese Communist Party – note the nomenclature – but not China or Beijing, for threatening peace in the region.
Two Chinas? Presumably that’s not the position of the Conservative government of Rishi Sunak. Otherwise Beijing wouldn’t have received Cleverly, but would have recalled its own ambassador.
Still, do Cleverly and his boss Sunak want to have the report published – to play a kind of “good cop, bad cop” routine with Beijing? Or do they actually not want it released, but are powerless to stop it? Either way, it means the current British government has neither credibility nor durability. When’s the next election?
Somehow, British politicians don’t seem to realise the rest of the world doesn’t care what they think, because for most of us, the debate is whether Great Britain is a failed or failing state, and whether it now qualifies as “a basket case”.
I just read that more than 100 schools across England have been ordered to shut down because their buildings and classrooms are at risk of collapse from crumbling concrete. Many hospitals under the National Health Service (NHS) – once Britain’s pride and joy and the closest thing Britons have had to a civic religion – now have fewer beds per person than Mexico or Colombia, according to new research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The number of NHS patients who died while waiting for treatment doubled last year to more than 120,000, from five years ago. In other words, the British public health service is now comparable to some middle-income countries in the developing world.
India’s GDP has surpassed Britain’s this year. The UK economy is stagnant and will remain so for some years going forward; productivity is at its nadir.
So, how should foreigners classify the UK? I didn’t invent the international debate about its being a failed or failing state, or a basket case?
You can read it in the mainstream American and UK press. One report in The New York Times said Britain “is economically stagnant, socially fragmented and politically adrift”, and that Brexit has cut the country “down to size”. Another reports that “Britain is undergoing a full-blown identity crisis”, “a hollowed-out country” on the road to a “controlled suicide”.
The Wall Street Journal wonders how long Britain can keep its capital markets going when its economy “looks like a basket case”. Scottish journalist and author Neal Ascherson has asked his readers to imagine their country being in a permanent “state of political purgatory”.
UK security minister breaks with convention to ‘meet Taiwanese minister’
Former prime minister Gordon Brown has warned Britain could become “a failed state” without reform. In June, The Guardian ran a full editorial on “broken Britain”.
A commentator in The Telegraph recently urged young Britons – whether they are single or starting a family – to leave the country to seek greener pastures. He was responding to a study according to which, unlike their parents, young Britons joining the workforce today will pay a lot more tax over the course of their career and never make it back from retirement pensions and entitlements, even if they live to a ripe old age.
But the British ruling class is oblivious to their collapsing state, and still think they need to intervene to make sure the world rights itself. The sun has long set on Britain. It’s a long cold night ahead.
