The far right likes to claim that Britain’s broken. To fix it, we need to go back to those glory days of empire, when black and brown people hadn’t been invented, when the working class was satisfactorily impoverished, when the world paid due homage to Britain’s et cetera and spectacularly so forth. As it still should.

Q: Is Britain really broken? 

A: Having spent 14 consecutive years as a Conservative Party plaything, it’s got a few dings and chips–they’re hard on their toys–but if you go online and buy a used country, you have to expect that. 

You’ll notice that when I said “14 consecutive years” that left out Margaret Thatcher, who not only carved her initials into her desk but into a lot of other people’s as well. The thing is, her term wasn’t part of that consecutive run, plus I didn’t live here then, so I wasn’t taking notes. I also left out Tony Blair because he was from the Labour Party, not the Conservatives, so he’d mess up my neat organizational strategy. If we’re being fair, though, which we’re clearly not, both belong on the list.

But back to our question: No, Britain’s not broken. It starts, even in the cold, and it’ll get you where you need to go. And back. Without a tow truck. Mostly. See above, though, for dings and chips. 

Still, it’s always more fun to write about what goes wrong than what goes right. Think about it. If nothing ever went wrong, you’d wipe out literature, comedy, and journalism. Sure, you’d still have shoe sizes and carrot sticks, but as a general rule keeping a focus on the negative is culturally uplifting. So if I focus on the negative bits from the news, it’s because it’s good for us. I’m keeping the culture alive.

Translation: the country isn’t ready for the scrapheap, but it could use some serious repair. Which it doesn’t seem to be getting. And the people who yell that it’s broken will only break more pieces. 

Any questions before I go on?

 

Sewage

England lives with the joys of privatized water companies, thanks to Maggie Thatcher. And not just privatized, but lightly regulated, because regulation is bad for us. You know: red tape, government stranglehold, all that stuff. So the water companies were going to more or less regulate themselves. 

How’s that worked? Well, last year England’s rivers and seas were the proud recipients ofthe  raw sewage on 291,492 occasions.

Would we prefer cooked sewage? 

I don’t care if we’re doing a lot of Q and A today, I’m not answering that question. I only used the phrase because when you write about sewage releases you somehow have to add “raw.” Always. It’s the same thing with death. In Britain, if you’re going to say someone died, you have to add “sadly.” Maybe that hints at a culture where people need repeated instruction on how to feel about a death. Or maybe it’s so listeners won’t think the speaker’s gloating. I dont’ know. I’m an outsider here. All I can do is report. I can’t even come close to explaining.

In the interest of accuracy, though, I should add that this applies to newscasters. I can’t swear that it applies to all normal humans or to AI.

But back to raw sewage: Emergency dumping is allowed after (or maybe that’s during, or both) storms or heavy rain, but last year was a dry one, and parts of the country were in a full-on drought. Still dump sewage the water companies did.

All of this is a slow moving scandal, the kind that rolls on from year to year  causing outrage but not much change. Company execs get their bonuses in addition to their salaries. The government bans bonuses. The water companies call the money something else and it still ends up in executive pockets. That’s change that changes nothing. Stockholders make money. The companies rack up huge debts. People pay more for their water. 

Public calls to re-nationalize the companies get massive support and the government blushes becomingly and explains how difficult it would be to do that. Shareholders would have to be compensated. Debts would have to be paid off. Right-wing newspapers would have to be placated. Money would have to be invested in infrastructure, which has been ignored since the Bronze (or possibly Victorian, or Thatcherite) Age, and hey, it would all cost money. Better to stick with the devil we know, raw sewage and all.

Besides, nationalization isn’t a good look with the outfit we’re wearing today.

 

The rightwing fringe

How fares Britain’s rightwing fringe?

Oddly, thank you. First off, it’s not clear whether it’s the fringe or the rug at this point. It has a gift for unraveling things, so before long it’s hard to tell which one we’re looking at. Second, it’s fighting with itself. 

And here I used to think only the left did that. Thanks, guys, you restore my faith in humanity.

What am I talking about? The US-based Conservative Political Action Conference decided to hold a replica event in Britain. That makes a kind of sense. The US is full of replicas: an Eiffel Tower in Tennessee; another one in Texas; a third one in Michigan; three more in other states but I get  bored easily so let’s move on. A Parthenon in Tennessee. Venice’s Grand Canal in Nevada and London Bridge (real–dismantled, reassembled, and complete with water that’s not from the Thames and therefore may lack the verisimilitude of raw sewage) in Arizona. 

The last two attractions–both water-based–are in the desert. You know about deserts: places defined by a lack of water. But we don’t let either geography or reality get in our way back in my original home country. 

So if the US is a country that has no problem with replicas, why not make a model of a political conference that has a kind of logic (however batty) in the context in its native country and assemble it in a country where it has no roots or history?

And while we’re at it, why not ask that country’s shortest-serving prime minister, also known as Liz Truss, to host it? 

Why was she the shortest-serving? Because she crashed the economy in just 45 days and was once chased off stage by a picture of a head of lettuce. * 

And while we’re at it,  why shouldn’t she announce the replica event not in Britain, where it will be assembled, but in Texas? 

What’s the point of the conference? By way of a spokesperson, Truss has promised that she’ll be “bringing together conservatives from all parties” so she can save “woke” Britain from “terminal decline.” 

I don’t usually use quotation marks if I’m only borrowing a word or two–they’re pricey, those quotation marks, and there’ve been problems importing them ever since the Straits of Hormuz closed–but I want to make it clear that I’m not saying this stuff to make fun of her. She does that on her own. And to do her justice, Truss does know a fair bit about terminal decline. 

To date, both the old-guard Conservative Party and the fringier Reform UK have vocally made no plans to attend. So much for bringing all parties together. 

That won’t stop Truss. If she has to, she’ll hold the conference alone and represent that full spectrum of rightwing thought. 

“What I’m working on now is how do we build the infrastructure,” she said. “How do we build the equivalent of a Maga movement–a Mega movement. Make England great again.”

Notice the wording there, because it matters. That’s England. Meaning she doesn’t expect Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland–all part of the country she so briefly governed–to be great again. 

Were they once great? 

Dunno. You’ll have to ask Liz, who’ll probably tell you that MEGA works but MESNIWGA doesn’t have the same ring. She probably won’t tell you she just forgot about them.

You might also ask how many votes that slogan’s going to get her in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. But do not look at the lettuce behind the curtain. 

*

That mention (missed it? it was a few paragraphs back) of US politics gives me an excuse to talk more about US politics, which are quickly outrunning satire and landing deep inside the realm of nightmare and hallucination. But first, the opposite of a disclaimer: This comes from a reputable source, the New York Times. 

They not only didn’t run it on April Fool’s Day, the Independent reprinted it. On April 4.  So whatever practical jokes or hallucinations are involved, they’re not mine and they’re not the newspapers’.

Gregg Phillips is the head of the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Authority (FEMA to its friends) and a Trump backer. The office he heads has more than 1,000 employees, a budget of nearly $300 million, and a central role in FEMA’s job of responding to hurricanes, earthquakes, fires, and other disasters. He’s appeared on podcasts and social media talking about assorted conspiracy theories and using what’s described as violent language about Joe Biden. 

These days that barely gets you a mention, but what did get him a headline or two was when he went on a podcast and said that–let’s quote the Times here–“on two occasions, he had somehow found himself being moved, by forces beyond his control, dozens of miles from two different starting points in Georgia.

“‘Teleporting is no fun,’ he said.” 

Fun or not, he described it as a miracle performed by god. 

Are there miracles performed by other-than-god? I wouldn’t have thought so, but what do I know? 

Either way, the forces took him to a Waffle House–a 24-hour-a-day restaurant–in Rome, Georgia. And there was me thinking miracles had some sort of point to them. You know, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, not leading the well-fed to a breakfast that I can only assume he had to pay for himself since god, like the late queen, doesn’t carry money. 

But that’s me making assumptions again. 

The Times, with the journalistic equivalent of a straight face, interviewed Waffle House staff and customers.

Let’s quote the Times again. They do this better than I can: One server “said she was once punched in the face by a customer. She saw someone overdose in the bathroom. One night, a man took all the steak knives and threatened the staff with them.

“But she has never seen anyone teleport to the place. ‘I’ve seen it all . . . but I’ve never seen that.’”

And the customers? One said, “I can say I’ve been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House. Don’t know how I got there. But I was there.”

When you stop laughing, give a moment’s thought to the context here: what the Times calls “a growing trend among high-profile American conservatives to assert the physical presence of beings from the spiritual realm, or from provinces that are often reserved for science fiction novelists.”

If you have an umbrella, keep it close at hand, friends. It’s getting crazy out there.

 

But let’s go back to Britain . . .

for a different type of surreal politics. Britain’s electoral system creates a space for something called paper candidates–candidates whose names are on the ballot but who don’t campaign and don’t expect their party to campaign for them. They also don’t expect to win.

What’s the point? To quote a Green Party website, having a certain number of candidates makes the party “eligible to have a Party election broadcast on prime time television and to guarantee coverage in Regional broadcast news items.”

But this isn’t about the Greens, it’s about Reform UK, on the opposite end of the spectrum. Reform has been calling people who signed up to get email updates, asking if they’d be paper candidates. People they know so little about that they left messages for members of other parties and, most embarrassingly, for a Guardian journalist. The Guardian‘s on the other end of the political spectrum and guaranteed to (a) laugh its ass off and then (b) go public with the invitation.

Usually, the Guardian explained as it went public, parties ask “their own known members to stand without doing any campaigning – rather than approaching unknown members of the public through phone calls.”

The five main parties contending in the upcoming local elections–Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats, Reform, and the Greens–are unusually close, meaning it’s not out of the question for a paper candidate to win. And to wake up the morning after the votes are counted with something considerably worse than a hangover.

——————-

* Why was I going on about lettuce when I wrote about Liz Truss? As’ Liz’s grasp on power became visibly shakier, some genius of a journalist set a live-cam on a head of lettuce wearing a blond wig to see if it would outlast Truss. It did. I don’t know if she even eats salad anymore.