Britain’s Descent Into All-Out Class War

After Brexit, Britain’s a Society at War — With Itself

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Q: Is there anything that poor old Britain can do to save itself?

Good question. Tough question. To answer it well, first we have to talk about the situation Britain’s really now in. And the only way that can really be described — well, let me come to that, in just a second. Let’s begin with just the facts, so we’re all on the same page, the one called “reality.”

How dire is Britain’s state of crisis? It’s…staggering. I really mean that. And I don’t think that even Brits really fully grasp just how numbingly, shockingly much of a crisis they’re in.

If I share with you some of the stats of British collapse, your jaw will — I all but guarantee it — drop.

The latest workforce survey by the Department for Education (DfE) found that 40,000 teachers resigned from state schools last year.

Forty…thousand. Teachers. Quit. How many is that, in proportion? That’s almost 10%. Almost 10% of Britain’s teachers quit…just last year.

I want you to really stop and think about that number. To the economist in me? That is a cataclysmic number. You don’t get numbers worse than that. It’s the kind of number we see in genuinely cataclysmic situations — natural disasters, utter catastrophes, wars. 10% of teachers quitting in a single year? Teaching is supposed to be one of a modern society’s most stable and secure professions — the closest thing there is left, or one of them, to a job for life. When economists like me see numbers like this? Our hearts start to pound, and yours should too, because something is explosively wrong here.

To put that another way, 10% a year gives you a decade before you don’t have any teachers left. These are genuine statistics of social collapse. I use the term British collapse, I hope you understand, through an example like this, for a reason. It’s not to scare you or for hyperbole’s sake. The crisis is that dire. The facts, the numbers, the statistics, are almost impossibly bad. We should never, ever see this happen to a rich, modern country — and when it does, it’s stopping being one, obviously. Imagine what other kind of event it’d take for 10% of teachers to quit in a single year — to cause an exodus like that — and you get some sense of how astonishingly badly and fast Britain’s crumbling. 

We economists call that “human capital flight,” on a mass, shocking scale, and we don’t see it, usually, outside genuine social emergencies, which make people flee in despair and fear.

But it’s not just teachers. 

2-in-5 junior doctors plan to leave the NHS once they’re offered another job, while 79 per cent “often think about leaving the NHS.”

Now, “junior doctors,” in the British system, are all those below the most senior rank — so… most of them. About half of Britain’s doctors plan to quit? And 80%…basically…can’t wait for the day they can? Again, these are incredibly, shocking, utterly spectacular numbers. Numbers of absolute crisis. That we don’t see outside genuine social emergency. Think of what it’d take to make half the doctors in a society want to quit for good. What else would do it? War? Famine? Sectarian violence? You have to reach for outlandish scenarios, like cataclysms, to really parallel what’s happening in Britain.

How do you have a functioning society where half the doctors plan to quit, and 10% of the teachers are quitting a year? Think about that for a second. Really stop and think about it, especially if you’re British, but even if you’re not, because this is what happens when you choose a certain path, but I’ll come back to that. 

For now, just reflect. 

The answer is: you don’t have a modern society anymore. That is what “collapse” is, in a formal, technical sense — moving down the ladder of development and modernity, and that is what’s happening to Britain, but in a sense that’s become genuinely frightening now, at least to the economist in me. What do you do without doctors and teachers, exactly? This is where Britain actually is. It has to begin asking questions this…surreal…dire. It is going backwards faster and harder than any society of its peers in modern history.