Collapse and Insurgency

Late Britain is collapsing.

It does feel like everything is falling apart, doesn’t it? But that’s not new. Some people I know set up something called the Institute for Collapsonomics in 2010 or so, and it felt like good timing back then. Their working definition was:

collapsonomics, n.

1. The study of economic and state systems at the edge of their normal social and economic function, including preventative measures to avoid destructive feedback loops and vicious cycles.

If we needed a metaphor for our times, the crisis of the USS Gerald R. Ford is it. The headline reads: “A U.S. strike on Iran faces a toilet crisis aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford with too few working bathrooms for 4,600 sailors, 45 minute lines, and a system that cannot be fixed at sea.”

Some of the details are exquisite. The idea of a “system that can’t be fixed at sea” is pure dystopian poetry. The revelation that the ship’s poorly designed toilet system means that the plumbing of all the ship’s toilets is configured so that if one toilet is blocked, the whole system suffers the same fate, is like some kind of lavatorial-based Message from God Above. A sort of Dirty Protest against the Trump regime from the Heavens.

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier has the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), and the ability to carry up to 90 aircraft, including the Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, Boeing EA-18G Growler, Grumman C-2 Greyhound, Northrop Grumman E-2 Hawkeye, Lockheed Martin F-35C Lightning II, Sikorsky SH-60 Seahawk helicopters. But you can’t flush the loo.

How seriously should anyone take a country which can’t provide working toilets on a $13.3 billion aircraft carrier?

Not very.

But then, the whole mission the ship is being sent on is to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability, which they claimed to have already achieved:

Trump in 2025: ‘Iran’s key nuclear facilities have been completely obliterated.’

The Trump Admin., less than a year later: ‘Iran is a week away from nuclear bomb-making material.’

Happy Endings

Elsewhere, things aren’t going smoothly.

As the House of Windsor begins to collapse before us, desperate measures are being made to isolate the second son of Queen Elizabeth II from the Monarchy as if he is someone who just turned up uninvited, and nobody really knows.

In place of an actual republican movement, we have Andrew Lownie and Graham Smith.

As Lownie wrote about the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (‘We’ve been paying for happy endings for Andrew for years’: the inside story of a royal disgrace):

“Andrew still can’t see what the problem is. He thinks he’s been hard done by. He’s obsessed with other details – whether he can take his horses up to Norfolk, who’s going to get the dogs, where he’s going to park his car. It’s a sort of disassociation.”

There’s a lot of it about.

Now, late but fabulously, Peter Mandelson has been dragged into the affair.

As Paul Johnson, formerly Deputy Editor of the Guardian put it: “One day you’re telling an FT reporter to ‘fuck off’ when asked about your relationship with billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. And then you’re in the back of a police car flanked by detectives.”

The former Ambassador has been arrested for ‘suspicion of Misconduct in Public Office' which has a magnificent British understatement to it. In other countries they’d call it sleaze.

Absurdism is everywhere and disassociation, while dangerous, is a rational response.

Euphemisms like ‘Misconduct in Public Office’ sit alongside others like ‘the cost of living crisis’. This week, Andrew’s older brother, King Charles III delivered his King's speech about "cost of living challenges" while sitting on a golden throne, wearing a crown covered in huge jewels.

The feeling of collapse is everywhere.

The former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has been hospitalised after a suicide attempt. This comes shortly after Norwegian authorities opened a criminal investigation into his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

In an interview with Reform’s head of preparing for government, Danny Kruger [On Preparing For Government And Making 'A Mess Of It']: claims there is potential for a civil war in Britain. Kruger used to write speeches for David Cameron. The idea that this new grotesque version of the Right has leapt out of the shadows is absurd. They’ve been gestating in the pages of the tabloid media and think-tanks and back-room pubs for decades, ready for this.

This week, Reform declared it would set up a UK Deportation Command to “deport up to 288,000 annually”; a British version of ICE. As former UN Special Advisor Steve Chalke put it: “The idea of the mass deportation of neighbours & friends, teachers, NHS staff & partners is of a govt declaring war on its own people, economy & public services.”

Elsewhere, Daniel Taylor, a member of Kent County Council who was elected last year as a Reform UK candidate, was jailed. He appeared at Margate Magistrates’ Court on Friday for sentencing, having been held in custody after breaching his bail conditions. According to the prosecution’s case, Taylor had threatened to “hunt [his wife] like prey and kill her”, telling her he would “put you in the boot and set fire to the car”.

In Bath, Tim Nott, the chair of the Bath branch of Reform UK has explained why he has been pictured wearing the uniform of the military wing of the Nazi Party.

In Manchester, Reform UK’s Campaign Manager for the Gorton and Denton By-Election, Adam Mitula, has been suspended because of Holocaust Denial and Antisemitism.

According to the Byline Times: Matt Goodwin, “Reform UK’s candidate in the Gorton & Denton by-election has sat on the advisory panel of the Free Speech Union, which is chaired by Lord Toby Young, a Conservative peer who Byline Times can reveal is in a formal business partnership with the senior editor of Aporia Magazine – the front publication for a reconstituted Nazi eugenics foundation.”

Reform's Matt Goodwin Advises Conservative Peer Linked to Relaunched Nazi Race Science Platform – Byline Times

And yet, polling by You Gov shows that, if a General Election was held tomorrow, Reform would win 285 seats.

Collapse is everywhere, but what about Insurgency?

Randy Andy and Mandy

You could say that a victory in Gorton and Denton for the Greens Hannah Spencer, would be a major defeat for Reform, and you could say that unprecedented victories for the SNP and Plaid and the Greens in the Senedd and at Holyrood could point towards accelerating the Constitutional Crisis that we’re pretending isn’t happening.

I suppose we’re just about to find out just how ingrained what Nairn used to call “helpless crown-worship”?

In The House of Windsor (1981) Nairn wrote:

“…the country has not advanced out of this old feudal rhapsody. The ‘serious’ bourgeois Sunday papers lead their bloodshot cousins into new levels of hysteria. Given the opportunity Labour councillors slobber over the Regal fingers and the Dynastic feet. Huge crowds and street fêtes in Jubilee year testified to the continuing popularity of monarchy.”

It seems as if yesterday that ‘Andy and Fergie’ were the sort of Temu version of ‘Charles and Di’ and that every other year was marked by a birth, a death, a wedding, or a Jubilee. A Union was held together by bunting and cheap merchandise.

Now the 1980s seems a long time ago, as does Blair and Mandelson’s inglorious ‘New Labour, New Britain’. Perhaps, after all Things Can Only Get Better?