How many more ruins in Great Britain?
How the controlled retreat throughout the twentieth century turned into a galloping rout in the first quarter of the 21st century
In the future, historians will ask, how an empire on whose lands the sun never set still could come to this in a hundred years.
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“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”1
To the question of how an empire on whose lands the sun never set collapsed in a century, the future historians may give the same answer: 'Gradually, then suddenly'.
I decided to write on this topic when I read the following news in the Guardian newspaper on Sunday, August 6th:
Guardian, 6 Ağustos 2023 - At least 57 people fell ill with sickness and diarrhoea after competing in sea swimming events at the World Triathlon Championship Series in Sunderland, health officials confirmed this weekend. An Environment Agency sampling … three days before the event, showed 3,900 E Coli colonies per 100ml (80 times the limit for designated swimming beaches according to a US Government Factsheet).
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Once the dominant world power, Britain did not suddenly become like a third world country with sewage flowing on its beaches. But once one gets to this point, I'm afraid the follow-up may be faster.
In 1926, when The Sun Also Rises was published, the collapse had already begun, but the people were not yet aware of it. The Second World War started before the wounds of the First World War were healed. The United Kingdom appeared among the winners, but the real beneficiaries were the United States and the Soviet Union. After the war, these two were the leading actors in the world theater for 50 years. One of the most striking measures of Britain's diminished power in the new order is the Suez Canal crisis. Egyptian President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956. UK thought that they could send two ships and bring Nasser into line as in the old days, but even in partnership with France and Israel, they had to retreat due to the reaction of the USA and the USSR. In other words, while trying to bring Nasser into line, England itself was aligned into the new world order.
Thatcher years seemed to have brought a revival. The government promised to restore the country's former brilliance by ‘liberalising’ the productive forces through brutal privatisation policies. The actions of a stupid and corrupt military junta also gave Thatcher a chance to show that Britain could still project superior naval power around the world by winning the Falklands war. But one swallow does not make a spring. The decline continued.
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Although the privatisations of Thatcher and later John Major governments seemed to have created a liveliness at first, this was like the flash floods caused by the melting of the glaciers on the mountains. When the glacier fully melted, there is no more water to run and the revival is over. Some privatisation, such as coal mining, was probably correct, but the privatising utilities such as the electricity industry, water utilities, or railways turned out to be disasterous — as we are coming to discover now forty years after Thatcher.
For example, the sewage flow into the International Competition last weekend can be attributed to the 1989 State Water Business privatization decision. At that time, it was promised that private companies would work more efficiently and that they would find their own capital and invest without burdening the state. However, the opposite happened. In spite of water prices increasing 40% above inflation, private companies avoided investing in repairs and renovations. Water collection and treatment network established during the Queen Victoria era, once exemplary to the world, became today’s wreck where untreated wastewater is sent directly to the sea when it rains a little too much.
Railways are another example. The country that invented the railroads is now the country with the most ramschackle trains in Europe today yet with the highest ticket prices. McCartney and Studio (2017) describe how the railroad privatization program that started in the mid-1990s turned out to be a fiasco. Despite the increase in passenger traffic, unit costs kept increasing after privatization and the system became obsolete as long-term investments stopped. The figure below shows the UK leading the way in ticket prices in Europe (Steer-Davies-Gleave, 2016).
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One reason Britain is still considered a significant global power is its ability to wage war. However, even there, problems began to erupt. For example, the British Navy was once the world's most deterrent. In his interview on June 18, 2023, former Navy Commander Lord West evaluates the current British navy as follows:
'The number of ships we have is pathetically low. We do not have enough ships in our territorial waters, exclusive economic zone or to ensure, with our allies, the security of the sea lanes and that is something that is crucial to this country. The danger is we have forgotten that we are a maritime nation.’ (Sunday Mail)
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The cancellation of the 2026 Melbourne Commonwealth Games with impunity last month (and Alberta getting out of the 2020 Commonwealth Games) is another indication of the status of the former Empire.
Then there is Brexit. Historians will explore the role of Brexit in Britain's decline and might be able to identify the factors that forced Brexit, which at the moment is imponderable for me. What I understood from the Brexit incident is that the ruling elites of British society are not able form a single unified prosperous future vision for the country. Stefan Dercon explains this issue of elite consensus requirement very well in his book Development Gambling. I may write about Dercon’s book some other time.
When the American revolutionaries won the Battle of Saratoga against the royal armies in 1777, a student approached Adam Smith, muttering; "Burgoyne is defeated. We're ruined." Smith replied: "My boy, there is a lot of ruin in a nation."
With all the setbacks of the twentieth century and post-Brexit problems, how many ruins are still left in Britain, we shall see.
References
McCartney, S., and J. Stittle. 2017. ''A Very Costly Industry': The cost of Britain's privatised railway', _Critical perspectives on accounting_, 49: 1-17.
Steer-Davies-Gleave. 2016. "Study on the prices and quality of rail passenger services." In, edited by European Commission Directorate General for Mobility and Transport. European Commission Directorate General for Mobility and Transport.
Short Takes
Power Engineering International, 3 Ağustos 2023
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Fusion in fifteen years🙂
Lawrence Livermore Labs achieved net energy gain in a nuclear fusion reaction for the second time since a historic breakthrough in December last year. That experiment briefly achieved what’s known as fusion ignition by generating 3.15 megajoules of energy output after the laser delivered 2.05 megajoules to the target. The numbers for the last test are not disclosed yet.
Fusion success news come one after the other. On 3 August 2023, in what is believed to be a historical first, SHINE Technologies achieved the visible proof with the target chamber of its fusion system submerged under water. They reported clearly visible Cherenkov radiation resulting from deuterium-tritium fusion. Observation of this radiation in a fusion test rig is a world first.
The story for the last 50 years was that fusion was coming in 20 years. This time though the narrative seems to be real🤫. Total investment in the fusion industry reached US$6.21 billion, up from US$4.8 billion in 2022, according to the Fusion Industry Association (FIA). The following figure shows the growth in the number of companies chasing commercial fusion:
Four believe they will deliver power to the grid by 2030, and nineteen by 2035. Eighteen companies predict that their fusion approach will be commercially viable by 2035 and a further thirteen by 2040.
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You Tube
The recommended video this week is by on Xinjiang and Uyghurs by a young Chinese student. I watched some of her other videos on other topics. Generally she stays within the China government narrative but I do not think she is an officer of the Chinese state. In my experience, she is like most Chinese youth these days patriotic but interested in social and political issues. Her commentary is independent and sometimes original.
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Diary
Pascal and Hagi stay out during the day. We take them in when it starts getting dark outside, currently at around 5 pm. We do not lock them into their night cage straightaway and they play free in my office for a couple of hours. When Pascal was the only bird in house and Hagi was still staying at my in-laws’, I could work at my desk with Pascal perching on my shoulder. With the two birds in the room, this is not possible. When Pascal comes to my shoulder, Hagi immediately follows him. This upsets Pascal because he gets jealous and he bites me, presumably because he is jealous that I let Hagi onto my shoulder.
I see this as a temporary phase and hope that in the future the three of us can be together without me being bitten, but right now it's impossible for me to work at my desk while they're at large in the room. So I leave them on their own for a couple of hours while we watch TV and have tea. When left alone, their greatest pleasure is to pick out the pieces of paper I put for them in the recess on the left side of my desk. When I enter the room, they come out to see who is in:
They go into their cage at around 8pm. There is a routine for it and unless we do the routine, they get upset. The routine is very simple, I play on Spotify, Pinhani’s Bilir o Beni, followed by Ender Balkır’s Ruhumda Sızı. Pascal especially likes the first one and try to sing it together with me. In the second one, he is not interested in the vocal part but likes the strings in between. He tries to imitate the cura sounds but does not succeed well. He also tries to chat to me, and Meliz when she is there in the room too. I wrote in another post about Pascal’s vocabulary. He likes having conversations using them. Hagi is usually not interested in joining the talk. Once the second song ends, I say “Good Night” and they both go into the cage; I start Büşra Kayıkçı Playlist on Spotify, turn the lights off and leave the room. They like piano sound. Its tonality does not disturb them.
I open their cage door around nine in the morning. After that, I put a lettuce leaf and half an apple outside in the garden cage. Some days they fly out by themselves, other times I have to chase them out. I slide the door closed after them. They spend the day outside. They have small tubs in the garden where they bathe when the weather is warm. They are usually more playful in the mornings. In the afternoon, they perch and wait.
The room is always a mess in the morning:
It takes me around 20 minutes to clean it. I first take the tray out to the garden and hose it and let it dry in the sun:
Then I start cleaning the room and the cage. Here are my tools. There is an old towel inside the bucket:
In the cage, I wipe the pap that they throw around while eating. It sticks to the wires when dried and needs to be wiped off using a wet cloth, the towel in the bucket. I then change the newspapers with their shit on it.
They watch me when I am doing all this from outside:
I sweep the pieces of paper and mop the floor. The end result is a nice clean room as shown in the following figure:
For the rest of the day, the office is mine.
I am writing these lines now while they are out. It's getting dark, the birds are waiting in front of the door. Soon I will open the door so they can come in. I've come to the end of my shift for today.
The Sun Also Rises (1926). E Hemingway.