BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Shattered Nation
By Danny Dorling
Published by Verso Books, 2023 rrp £16.99
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Halfway through this excellent outline of the decline of the UK, and dismantling of the post-war settlement and consensus politics, the author says ‘the right can only win through divide and rule, by telling a series of very different stories to different groups of people and hoping they don’t notice the growing inconsistencies’. This tactic works very well when the media is controlled by super-rich chums of the political classes (you could say the latter work for the former). The ‘mainstream left’ abandoned Labour when the party threatened to become a working opposition, or, ‘lord help us’, viable socialistically inclined government. Dorling details how the ‘red wall’ is a media-created myth and how non-voting was a greater factor in the last elections than dislike of Labour per se.
THE DISEMPOWERED RIOTING AND EATING ITSELF
Today, with Labour in a safe pair of hands – witness recent social media ‘outing’ of Starmer’s cosying up to the likes of the Murdochs – it is hard to see ‘business as usual’ failing the Tory party, despite how awful they are. Those who see this and despair, regarding Starmer as ‘Thatcher’s grandchild’, spawn of Blair, tell me they can’t vote Labour at the next election. I have had numerous conversations along these lines at Bookbuster. Despite the obvious fact that in a marginal constituency such as Hastings & Rother, only gritting your teeth and voting a marginally lesser evil (Labour) can defeat the darker forces of Tory domination, it seems to me a real likelihood that Labour will lose yet again, with a few alternative options on the ballot getting a few more votes to no avail. The establishment laughs all the way to the Commons.
However, as Dorling points out, and illustrates in detail, Britain is ‘shattered’, a broken nation. He regards the current, and rising, inequality as making us a failed state. It seems inconceivable that the degree of cognitive dissonance on the part of large parts of the electorate can hold out in the face of events. Whilst we are not, say, France, nonetheless, surely the worm must turn? It is hard, after years of austerity, Brexit, the pandemic, the high-handed public castration of Corbyn, not to cynically believe that, no, England cannot ‘turn the world upside down’ and institute egalitarian measures to address our multiple crises. Or, that if we do see civil unrest, it will be a toxic combination of the disempowered rioting and eating itself, accompanied by an inexorable rise of the far right.
THATCHERISM AND BLAIRISM AS VERY EFFECTIVE BATTLES AGAINST THE POOREST
This crisis is measured from a statistical ‘peak’, which the author pinpoints around 1974. ‘…on balance it was a good time, a time of Britain becoming less arrogant and more inclusive’.
He is clear-eyed about various inequalities that persisted even then, or that were addressed later (and are all assailed by the ‘anti-woke’ backlash), but a number of markers do appear to line up to ‘our best times’ being half a century ago. That peak was due to the rise of a welfare state, and a political philosophy that spurned the diametrically opposed extremes of ‘soviet’ ‘freedom-from’ and Yankee ‘freedom-to’ instead seeking a balance that allowed opportunity and innovation whilst at the same time ensuring a strong and functional safety net. Whilst the right paint the strikes and union militancy of the early ‘70s as the cause of our woes, Dorling presents a more balanced view, seeing them, instead, as also being a function of workers seeking to protect post-war gains from erosion under neo-capitalist assault. This view sees Thatcherism and Blairism as very effective battles against the poorest in our society, and today as a final assault in that war to ‘free’ the globalised economy at any cost.
‘THE NEW SQUALOR’
Thus, the book gives clear and detailed analyses of the various ways in which greed, globalism, and a self-perpetuating cycle of growing inequality and destruction of our social matrix has shattered our nation. Examples include the way in which highly corrupt ‘academies’ have swept up so much of our state-sector schooling so quickly (close to 80% are now in private, and profiteering, hands); the way in which PFI, an initiative launched by John Major, but embraced by Labour under Blair, has eviscerated public finances for short-term growth; the ways in which ‘the cradle-to-grave UK welfare state has been substantially dismantled’ and turned into a vindictive system of torture (we now have ‘twice as many food banks in the UK as there are McDonald’s outlets’, we are seeing ‘the return of rickets’, and a massive rise in stress-related physical and mental illness); the way our housing crises are exacerbated by greed, a spiralling cost of living and increased ‘precarity’ (‘the new squalor’), a refusal by government to bring back controls stripped away under Thatcher, leading us to a plummeting median prosperity (by some measures we are now below Greece and only matched in inequality and poverty by Bulgaria or Estonia)…
‘A DIFFERENT WORLD IS NOT JUST POSSIBLE, IT ALREADY EXISTS IN EUROPE’
Amongst the cures, though all require time, are mass nationalisation of core services, and a return to a regulated financial sector and stopping up the massive leak of wealth through tax evasion and foreign ownership, as ‘the very rich hoard property, money and services’, thus ‘reversing out of Thatcherism’. Dorling notes, for example, that ‘the highest water quality and lowest sewerage discharge in the UK is in Scotland, where the national water company is state owned’. He also details how other European countries have successfully addressed similar housing crises to ours, despite Tory claims it can’t be done or is too expensive.
Here is what Dorling has to say about our dystopian future: ‘A different world is not just possible, it already exists in Europe. Much of what appears impossible to us is already happening elsewhere’, ‘what is missing is the political will to change, and the understanding that change has happened elsewhere successfully’. Wake from your slumber and rise!
Shattered Nation is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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