Notes from an Unserious Country
In Great Britain, Nimbys are a protected and celebrated species.
After spending the Summer in countries that refuse to take themselves too seriously, I’m back in the one-footed waltz known as Great Britain.
Though Britain takes itself seriously, this is not a serious country. Nothing works, and yet only a minority notices. That is a comforting sign. Basket cases that descend into Argentinian-style dysfunction confirm their leprous status only when the majority expects things to not work. We’re a year or two from that. Dysfunction still exasperates and surprises the many. Admittedly, I like to think I’m ahead of the herd on this one.
For illustration, this is a standard-issue house in Walthamstow, London. Estate agents used to call this area ‘up and coming,’ a charming euphemism for the kind of place in which a street-level amateur surgeon would remove your liver en route to the supermarket and auction it off on the dark web.
This humble home is on sale for £1.4 million, or £8,100 per month for 25 years. That’s after you plonk down the minimum deposit of £140,000 on the table. The average salary here is just over £30,000 a year. Just how long can insanity reign?
It's no secret why this obscenity goes on. In Great Britain, building anything is practically illegal.
This week, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a ‘rethink’ of HS2, the beleaguered high-speed rail project. Beset with budgeting problems and besieged by nimby campaigners, it’s cost £50 billion so far.
The original blueprint linked London in the south, to cities in the Midlands and the north of England. Back in 2021, ministers junked the eastern leg to Leeds in the north.
Like civil war surgeons, ministers amputated one chunk only to lop off another chunk later on. To the delight of Nimbys—the Not in My Backyard posse—everywhere, Sunak is eager to scrap the leg between Birmingham in the Midlands, and Manchester in the north.
To thicken the folly, the government now suggests a grand project meant to link our major cities doesn’t need to link our major cities. Nor must it begin in London proper. They’re swapping the original terminus station, Euston in central London, for Old Oak Common some six miles—another train—and half an hour—away.
That alone illustrates perfectly the short-term thinking beggaring this nation. The nation that built the railways. Great Britain is a hedge fund masquerading as a country.
The Times newspaper revealed the absurdity of this seedy situation.
Passengers from London to Birmingham would see daylight for just seven minutes of their 45-minute journey.
Why? Opposition from genteel Conservative MPs in the Chilterns forced the original plans back to the drawing board. Developers must tunnel beneath the Birkenstocked feet of those who, with respect, are enjoying the Sunday afternoon of their lives.
Such craven pandering to militant Nimbys heaped runaway bills onto the original budget.
Here in Great Britain, Nimbys are a protected, even celebrated species. In The Telegraph, the ‘queen of the Nimbys’ boasts of her work in blocking 37,000 houses in her spare time.
“In 2021, Ms Pearson founded the Community Planning Alliance, a group of over 700 grassroots campaigns fighting to preserve urban and rural green spaces,” it reads.
“‘We oppose anything from 40 houses at the edge of the village to a garden town of 20,000 homes,’” she said.
“‘It’s not just housing, people are fighting against incinerators, roads, airports, pylons – anything in the planning system that people think is bad for the environment or foisted on communities without properly being thought through.’”
They weaponize every play in the book. By wielding ‘environmental and noise concerns,’ Nimbys smother desperately needed homes and infrastructure into cot death. On HS2, they’ve tacked on 25 miles of tunnels, and 12 miles of viaducts, and forced large stretches into hidden cuttings.
Despite these rather generous, hideously expensive, and time-consuming accommodations, the Nimbys remain opposed.
If you try to build anything in this country, you’ll meet firm, halitotic, and mustard-trousered opposition.
As a young journalist, I cut my teeth in a local newspaper serving one of the most prosperous counties in Great Britain. If anyone mentioned building anything, the phones would buzz all morning. The same conversation would play out:
“Yes, I understand we need more housing in this country, Christopher. I do. I really do. The young people are leaving in their droves, Christopher. But the problem, you see—Christopher—is that particular plot of land is unsuitable for development. It’s actually home to a rather delicate bat colony.”
Parenthetically, the repetitious use of my name was intentional. Hostage negotiators employ the same tactic to build rapport and prevent a few slit throats.
Perhaps that place was home to every chiropterologist—a big word for one who studies bats—in the country.
I kid you not. In Monmouthshire, if you stand before a mirror and chant ‘housing development!’ seven times, a Nimby pops through the mirror and starts waffling on about the common pipistrelle bat. Then he asks you: Does this rag smell like ether?
At least the secular purgatory in which we find ourselves has that Slavic sense of humour.
Back in 2016, a majority voted to leave the European Union. In 2019, they elected Boris Johnson in an epoch-smashing landslide to get Brexit done and ‘level up’ the divide between the prosperous south and the leprous north. For a few months, it felt as if something had changed. But the British unconscious mind, which is naturally Nimbyish, soon took over.
Ironically, the vote for Britain to leave the European Union was a vote to make Britain more like a socially democratic European country. That is, countries where things work and where they take good schools, decent jobs, and high-speed rail for granted.
What could be more totemic to the ‘levelling-up’ cause than linking north and south with high-speed rail? What could be more totemic of British decline than the refusal to complete this job?
Within two years, Boris was gone and those millions who voted for a populist prime minister ended up with Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt—the very opposite of what most had in mind. The pair hail from the deluded wing of the Conservative party which thinks parroting self-help slogans will magic American-style wealth and prosperity.
Reader, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that ‘Jeremy Hunt’ is rhyming slang for a potent epithet sadly unprintable even at linguistically laissez-faire publications such as this one.
In this sad palimpsest of America, we will get what we’re given, which is the square root of fuck all.
I struggle with the idea that one of the world's richest countries is incapable of high-speed rail, buyable homes, decent schools, and a thriving middle class.
In truth, this country is a retirement home. If you’re young or youngish, you’d be better off elsewhere. But dare mention this and you’re accused of envy. Reader, noticing your house is on fire, and preferring it to not be on fire, isn’t envy.
Oh, well. I’m applying for asylum in Paris. Anyone under 45 should do the same. Just don’t bring your anti-smoking nonsense with you.
I felt that I had my money's worth at "one-footed waltz." As a stand-alone, as a descriptor of my abilities on the dance floor, and as a metaphor for both our countries.
Politicians sure love their high speed rail. California has spent a few billion on a high speed line between somewhere north of LA to the middle of the state. I don't think that any of is has actually been built yet.