Wolf Tickets
Wolf Tickets
Have you heard the one about the Soviet potato farmer?
A Soviet Commissar visits a state-owned potato farm. At the gate, a farmer greets him.
"Comrade!" gushes the farmer. "We have so many potatoes! If we piled them on top of each other, they would reach all the way to God."
Stunned by the farmer's excitable claims, the commissar cuts back: "Comrade, that is most welcome news. But this is the glorious Soviet Union. There is no God."
"Exactly," says the farmer. "And there are no potatoes."
What sets the banana republic apart is the prevailing assumption nothing will work as intended. Great Britain is not yet a basket case. But we do a rather good impression of a failing state.
Nothing quite symbolises our triumph of style over substance, quite like our prime minister.
Slick Rishi amassed hundreds of millions playing with other people's money. And yet, he's incapable of looking out the window and checking the weather.
In yesterday's rain-sodden address, Sunak announced an election set for the fourth of July. He’s twenty points behind in the polls.
The setting mirrored a spoof romance, with the bumbling British protagonist pleading for a second chance through a rain-speckled window. The mood music was sickly and inscrutable. Off camera, some joker blasted out the musical equivalent of a diabetic coma: D:Ream's Things Can Only Get Better.'
The ambition for things to get better is a bar so low it's a carpet. A favoured genre of meme here centres on the dysfunction and general farce of a country with 'Great' in its name. That lofty adjective edges perilously close to hilarity, akin to those countries prefixed by 'People's Democratic Republic'. The excitable kind with an AK-47 printed on its flag.
Call the doctor's surgery at 8 a.m. An automated voice will reveal you are number 49 in the queue. When you eventually wade through, a soft-centred receptionist assures you in therapeutic tones that there're no appointments left today. Sorry.
Book a same-day train ticket from London to Newcastle. Without a hint of contrition, the train company demands £786.80. That's a week or two in warmer, healthier, saner Sevilla or three hours and eleven minutes on a train in Great Britain.
House prices and rents are akin to the board game Monopoly, in which your coked-up crypto-addled mate has lined up hotels on Mayfair.
Go to the supermarket. Olive oil, a civilising elixir which once threatened to heave the primitive British palate out of the Mesolithic era, is prohibitively expensive. If modern Britain were a film scene, it would be that of Ray Liotta in Goodfellas: Fuck you. Pay me.
This all-encompassing one-footed waltz feels like the finale of a political satire. Since the 1980s, we've parodied America. We've nailed the social pathology but not the prosperity. Essentially, Great Britain is an advertising agency with a nuclear submarine.
This election pits two tribes against each other. One tribe pines for 1997. The other yearns for 1979.
For a sizeable swathe of the population, everything is awful, and nothing will ever change. And thank God for that.
Here, a natural law dictates that anyone under 45 who dares suggest things could be better is to be consumed by a radioactive flood of sadistic nostalgia. The mere whiff of dissent conjures through the pavement a battalion of nostalgians who lament the end of Polio.
"You don't remember the Seventies!" warn those who yearn for the Seventies. 'Bodies uncollected! Rubbish piled up in the streets!'. In that fateful decade, striking union workers allowed garbage to pile up in the streets. To this hazy memory, the rest of us are serfs to economic juju.
Whenever I point out that a first-time buyer in London must save for 31 years just for a house deposit, a familiar chorus of denial debunks the theory of free will. 'You waste your money on flat whites and trips to Rome!' goes the wearisome riposte.
During the 1970s, that prelapsarian idyll when rubbish piled in the streets, when adults caned children at random, and when Bullseye was on the telly, the average house cost four times the average wage. Today, it's twelve to one.
To point out mathematical reality invokes spasms of uniquely British nostalgia. It's a negative nostalgia which glories in just how bad everything was.
Churchill was right. The British people are the only people who like to be told how bad things are, who like to be told the worst. Memory-mongers paint postcards of perfect penury. Back then, children didn't talk back. There were no phones or elbows on the table. Back then, that famed sense of community slapped any ribbon of dissent out of those who dared dream bigger than the suffocating confines of community life. The past is a foreign country in which children could count their ribs but they was happy.
Such nostalgia serves two purposes. The first indulges one's triumph over wistfully disfigured adversity. The other bleaches the parlous state of modern Britain with a mop soaked in a very British version of nostalgie de la boue. Nostalgia, truth be told, is a polite form of dementia.
This curious strain of thought stems from a bygone time when Brits prided themselves on their servility. Admittedly, there's a lot to say for the stiff upper lip. Working hard without self-pity or complaint is a sound personal policy.
But such advice works when—and only when—there's a reward for one's efforts.
Such an inflated currency finds precious little purchase amongst the young and youngish. Despite doing exactly what they were told to do, for too many, the promises of meritocracy amount to mere wolf tickets.
And yet, Sunak still sings from the same mildewed hymn sheet: Work hard and get on in life.
His problem? Most of us have spent the last fourteen years of Conservative government trying and failing to do just that.
Depressing. I liked the comment in the British press on Sunak's rain-soaked announcement: "things can only get wetter."
The other way to open this is to discuss the lifespan of lettuce versus the lifespan of recent prime ministers. Although I suppose Sunak is more of a potato than a lettuce