COVID-19 brought to light an unacknowledged but widely recognised truth – the Western model of government is incompetent and unwilling to look beyond a limited ideological window. “The dreadful fact which has burst, uninvited, into the salons of right-minded discourse, shattering the Overton window. It’s the fact that failure in the face of COVID-19 was bipartisan. It was universal. It was unanimous. The so-called ‘Trump administration’ failed. The media-industrial complex failed. The conservative media apparatus, its purported counterweight, has likewise failed. The FDA: failed. The experts, failed. The circus of American politics? Failed. And the apparatus behind it, which does the alleged work of governance, has also failed. That ‘the whole machine has failed’ is irrefutable reality”[1].

The British state is in the grip of a tangled web of sectoral interests and ideological contestation within its technocracy. “Tensions have emerged between a liberal, managerialist civil service and a series of governments with a populist veneer in their legislative programmes”[1]. Inaction is winning out in these battles, as the stalemates over immigration, policing and economic policy show. The UK is homeostatic, its governing class content to rule over stagnation and mediocrity.

Accusations of bullying would be attendant on serious misconduct, relating to personal insults and harassment, persistent acts of demonstrable aggression and potential physical threats. Unless you’re an unpopular or controversial government minister, in which case bullying equates to being terse and impatient, demanding work be done on time and, at its most serious, raising your hand to interrupt someone speaking. Such are the conclusions of Adam Tolley’s investigation into the Dominic Raab bullying claims. And at the end of it, Raab wasn’t a bully. He was rude, and the action of suggesting that a civil servant may have broken the Civil Service Code was interpreted as a threatening action (although this wasn’t the intention).

The title may be hyperbolic, and there is no doubt that very few in the UK experience anything like the poverty of developing countries, but its existing governance and political structures present a key form of third worldism: a byzantine, fragmented set of actors and institutions competing against each other and creating self-referential rules and procedures. Modern Britain is an archipelago of disparate bureaucracies and levels. Infrastructure projects and economic planning must now be strained through a variety of organisations, from local enterprise partnerships and council plenaries to planning bodies, representative organisations, lobby groups and charities.

Looming global recession has encouraged a typical response of returning to normal, whether that be in the form austerity measures to keep national debt-to-GDP at “reasonable levels” and increasing interest rates to control inflation or introducing pro-growth measures to reduce cyclical turbulence. Similarly to the 2008 crisis, a prescribed toolkit is being used with similar expectations of potential success. However, there appears to be little questioning of the assumptions which suggest the global economy (and advanced economies in particular) can return to historical growth levels (including the meagre growth of the 2010s).

The Bank of England’s announcement of a recession in the last quarter of 2022 and the next in 2023 has been met with suspense rather than disbelief. It was more an inevitability considering inflationary pressure, a weakened labour market and tepid growth post-pandemic. But compared to 2008, the last recession in the UK which was met with bank runs, a debt crisis and the devaluation of assets (mainly housing), this recession is more an example of exasperation. The years leading up to 2008 had seen consistent growth levels and upward real wages[1], while the years leading up to 2022 had seen minimal growth, real wage stagnation and an asset price boom which did not filter down to the general populace through taxation or distributive allocation. This recession then is a continuation of the norm, of misallocated and unproductive capital expenditure (exacerbated by years of quantitative easing) and the reduction of wages as a ratio of profit or value.

Only hours after one of the dumbest debacles ever witnessed and the talk of coups, insurrection and the rise of fascism is already hot among the twitter blue checks[1] and media[2]. This apparently signals the fragility and/or destruction of democratic norms, all because a bunch of morons stormed a building with the most inept security arrangements, threw some papers, trashed some offices and took selfies. If this is the end of democracy then these rioters were already hitting a corpse. But of course this isn’t the end of democracy, which is little more than hot air thrown around by the press corps and politicians. Instead it’s the continuation of the same dynamics of 2020 and before.

Biden’s victory has sent people into an idolatrous frenzy, signalling for many the end of the aberration of Trump and a turning point against all forms of nascent national populism. Where the media returns as the unchallenged arbiter of the national discourse. This pathetic liberal imagination will last well into the first months of the Biden presidency as anti-Trump activists and legacy institutions hope to herald the removal of not just Trump but his supporters, apparatchiks and ideology. How long it lasts beyond that is questionable, as the rigours of having nearly the half country view you as an existential threat to their way of life combined with the asymmetric coalition of voters and activists undergirding Biden’s victory spell a turbulent governance as his supporters (in the media, protests, donor groups, etc.) bay for blood and his opponents in the Congress gridlock and delay.

An interesting article published in Zeit Online presents a full map of European electoral decisions analysing the most recent European election results across EU member states, ranging from municipal to national elections[1]. This map presents the full gamut of European fragmentation, split not just regionally but also non-contiguously as populist political parties that come from multiple ideological angles are able to win in different electoral swaths. The transformation of Lega Nord from a separatist party to a generic Italian populist party that is able to (partially) govern Italy and from there question EU edicts and attempt to create new European factions is a primary example of this European fragmentation brought about by populist parties.

Brexit was already a vapid, pointless event, shorn as it was of any meaning by the continued centralisation of power by the government and having its significance removed by the complete lack of a unifying narrative that tied Brexit to any larger structure of meaning or context. However since the vote these tendencies have been further exacerbated by the increasing separation of Brexit’s constituent elements, culture and economics. Brexit as a cultural malaise can be seen as the direct driver of Leave voters at the time of the referendum, superseding economic imperatives and allowing for economic narratives that emphasise such nonsense as free trade and market openness to infest the background positions of Brexit.