Why Britain’s (Severely) Underestimating British Collapse
Post-Brexit Britain’s Collapse Is So Extreme, It’s Genuinely Unprecedented
I know I’ve discussed it a bit recently, but it needs discussing. In this little essay, I want to tie up some of the loose threads, with a simple observation. The scale and speed of British collapse is staggering. I mean that. Watching Britain turn into what it is now — the first rich European country to become a failed state, which in itself is mind-boggling — is to witness something historic.
My job as an economist is to pore over numbers, and think about what they mean. And then explain them to people. In that job, to witness the kinds of numbers that are coming out of contemporary Britain is something that leaves me speechless. I feel like a paleontologist witnessing a mass extinction or an astronomer close up to a supernova. Events like this are that infrequent, that uncommon, and that…big. We have never seen anything happen to a developed country like what’s happening to Britain.
Or, of course, to put it more accurately, what Britain’s done to itself, but I’ll come back to that.
In my profession, we try not to speak hyperbolically. And yet there are times when only superlatives and warnings at maximum level will suffice. Not for “alarmism’s” sake — that’s an American word, the Brits call it “scaremongering” — but for reality’s. You see, we don’t see things like this. They’re not supposed to happen, and they’ve never happened before. Watching Britain collapse is to see something singular in contemporary history. Collapse, on a scale and at a speed that is quite literally off the charts.
Now. Let me prove my case to you, because we should all be chilled to the bone by Britain’s example. Can a modern society really become…a failed state? Can a developed nation really turn into…Argentina? Can it wreck its economy and its society in one fell swoop? In less than a decade, causing a collapse, a literal one, as in the implosion of living standards?
The answers to all those questions before Britain did this to itself were: hmm, maybe, but nobody’s sure. You see, America never had modernity, really. It never had an NHS and a BBC and so forth. America collapsed — but from a nation that had never reached modernity, yet hoped to, to one that was never going to, and would stay stuck in decline and dysfunction, like crumbling Rome.
Britain’s different. It had…everything. I mean that. It had everything that a modern society could wish for, and then some. It used to be the envy of the world. Until a decade ago — just ten years — the NHS was the world’s best healthcare system. Not according to me, but according to international rankings. The BBC was widely acknowledged to be its finest broadcaster, developing many of the world’s finest cultural brands and training its best directors and actors alike. I could go on and on. Britain worked. It was an example of what a modern society could be. The NHS had taught Europe — Europe — that universal scale public goods were possible. The BBC had taught the world what art and culture meant. Its universities produced some of the world’s finest intellectuals, from Amartya Sen to Stephen Hawking, and by and large, its people were some of the most prosperous on earth, in history, period, full stop, admired and liked for being funny, gentle, warm, and wise.
That was just ten years ago. Ten years. One decade.
Now that I’ve set the stage, let’s take stock of where Britain really is. This is the part where we talk about how hard and fast a society can collapse — the utterly shocking, chilling story that Britain teaches the world. Yes, you can lose it all, everything, in one decade. Proof positive: British collapse.
Right about now, Britain’s own finer minds have estimated that there have been 25,000 excess deaths because…the NHS has collapsed. It doesn’t work anymore. You can’t get an ambulance, you can’t get a doctor’s appointment, and if you do, well, you’re the lucky one. Those 25,000 excess deaths have happened “since the summer.” The summer ended on September 23rd. It’s been 15 weeks. In other words, there have been 25,000 excess deaths — because of social collapse — in 15 weeks.
Not any other reason. Not natural disaster, not Godforsaken calamity, not a giant swarm of meteors. They happened because Brits can’t get healthcare. But those are abstract numbers, and my job, like I said, is to make them real. So let me make them brutally real. 25,000 people dead in fifteen weeks is about 1600 per week. 3000 people died on 9/11, which is the greatest contemporary tragedy that the developed world has experienced, full stop. 1600 per week times two is more than died on 9/11.
Britain is having a 9/11 every two weeks.
Let me say that again, so it registers this time. Think of the agony of 9/11 for a moment. Really remember it, the horror, the suffering, the death.
Britain is having a 9/11 every two weeks.
Is that hitting home? It doesn’t seem to be, sadly, for Brits. They seem altogether far less concerned than they should be. Think of how 9/11 changed America — overnight. Brits aren’t experiencing like the same level of…what’s the word I’m looking for…am I allowed to say…alarm? But if your society was having a 9/11 every two weeks, wouldn’t you be horrified? Chilled to the bone? Wouldn’t you feel something?
Britain’s leaders appear not to, and we’ll come back to them in a moment, after I continue making this real for you.
We have never seen anything like this happen. Never. Ever. Period. Full stop. To a developed country? Even a middle income one, like, say, I don’t know, Slovakia or Malaysia. We have never seen anything like a 9/11 happening every two weeks to a developed country.
I need to say that again, too, because sentences like this — they don’t register the first time around. They’re that grave and contain that much in them.
We have never seen anything — anything — like a 9/11 happening every two weeks to a developed country. Never. Not even close, in fact. Let’s consider some events that are considered the developed world’s great tragedies. Hurricane Katrina took about 2,000 lives. It happened once. It didn’t happen every two weeks. Many people will remember Hurricane Sandy, from 2012. It killed less than 200 people, and that still ranks as a grave disaster.
This is the off-the-charts scale of British collapse. Like I said, it’s off the charts. That means that it’s singular. We literally have no comparisons for the sheer scale of what is happening in Britain. The greatest natural disasters in modern history don’t come close. The greatest terror attacks don’t approach it. British collapse — even on the simplest kinds of indicators, excess deaths — is like a supernova happening, something we have never seen before happen to a developed country. We simply have no reference point for it whatsoever. To call it a statistical outlier would be making a mockery of statistics.
Let me try to give you some sense of just how far off the charts of anything, really, considered remotely normal, all this really is.
25,000 people in fifteen weeks. A year has 52 weeks. That’s more than 100,000 excess deaths that are on track to happen by the end of this year in Britain. I can give you a comparison for things that have killed that many people, but the moment, I do, you’ll be so frightened, you’ll immediately accuse me of having gone too far. And yet…numbers and numbers, even when we’re doing the ugly of math of reducing human lives to them. What else killed 100,000 people? Well, the bomb that fell on Hiroshima did. This is the kind of event we’re talking about. Chernobyl’s estimates vary, but they’re in the hundreds of thousands. This is the kind of event, again, we’re talking about.
The only other comparison of death at this scale that can really be offered is Covid deaths, during the pandemic’s absolute peak. But then? Societies were in a completely different place. Locked down. At a standstill. This was a once in a century event. Covid wasn’t something that that the world did to itself. At least not in the sense that Britain inflicted collapse on itself. Perhaps, too, you could consider something like HIV/AIDS, although that happened over a much longer time period.
But that’s about it. Those are the only events in contemporary history, outside war, which produce….absolutely shocking numbers…like this. That’s why they are absolutely shocking numbers, to those of whose job it is to keep abreast of of them — because, again, it’s like watching something that violates the laws of nature happen, like a huge hole form in the earth, and a country just…fall in. Jump in.
Perhaps the best way to understand what’s happening to Britain is that it appears to be a society at war. With itself. I don’t really mean that metaphorically. What else kills a hundred thousand people a year? Like we’ve discussed, only nuclear bombs, nuclear accidents, or pandemics — but this isn’t any of those. This was a choice, and the only one of those that’s a choice falls into the category of war. Britain appears to be experiencing something so extreme that it can only really be likened to a war by any other name — which is why the the casualties are beginning to mount, horrifically, to numbers that are staggering.
Let me add one more example before we go further, because the war one will drive some people crazy. The greatest natural disaster in modern history was the tsunami of 2004. It killed more than 200,000 people. That was largely because they were in poor countries, which didn’t have warning systems. A hundred thousand excess deaths by the end of the year in Britain? We are approaching the order of magnitude of the greatest natural disaster in modern history…for the entire world. This is the kind of calamity that’s needed to contextualize, properly, what Britain’s done to itself.
And yet the story hardly ends there. One social indicator that we can use to try and see the stunning, jaw-dropping scale and speed of British collapse is excess deaths.
But another such indicator isn’t about public health, but something we’re all intimately familiar with — the economy. I discussed this one recently, but this let’s go into it a little more deeply. Britain’s economy is about to be 11% smaller than it would’ve been if Brexit hadn’t happened. Not my opinion, not anyone’s “opinion,” but a formal estimate by someone whose job it is to make such calculations. And those calculations are hardly dubious ones — Britain’s economy cratering into oblivion can be seen in everything from a decrepit Oxford St to boarded up high streets to plummeting real incomes.
How much is 11%? How much was 25,000 people dying who shouldn’t have? Just as before, let’s use history to contextualize. Nothing in modern history comes close, and I mean nothing. The Great Recession of 2008 hit the world economy by 5% or so. That was the biggest one.
Again, don’t take it from me, take it from the World Bank.
The world economy has experienced four global recessions over the past seven decades: in 1975, 1982, 1991, and 2009. During each of these episodes, annual real per capita global gross domestic product contracted, and this contraction was accompanied by weakening of other key indicators of global economic activity. The global recessions were highly synchronized internationally, with severe economic and financial disruptions in many countries around the world. The 2009 global recession, set off by the global financial crisis, was by far the deepest and most synchronized of the four recessions.
Let me summarize that. The Great Recession of 2008, a slowdown of 5% of world GDP, was the biggest global recession in modern history.
Britain’s experiencing an economic contraction of twice that scale. The only point of comparison, really, is the Great Depression. That’s the only time, really, that the world’s GDP has fallen by double digits. Individual countries have experienced spells of double-digit economic contraction — but when they have, we’ve called those some of the most severe crises in modern history. Argentina, for example, saw growth fall by 10% during its currency crises — that sort of event.
To hit a double digit scale economic contraction? Again, off the charts. It’s the kind of thing we see during, for example, civil wars in poor countries — like Lebanon’s. In fact, there’s a formal model of such a thing: “during civil war the annual growth rate is reduced by 2.2 percent.” In other words, five or so years of such a thing and you get to double digit contraction territory — which is about how long it’s been since Brits voted for Brexit. That’s not a clever remark or a coincidence, it’s an explanation.
So let me say this one again, too, and then contextualize it. To hit double digit scales of economic contraction is off the charts.
Consider, let’s say, Russia. Guess how much its economy shrank last year — as the entire world ostracized it, banned it, shut down its access to financial networks, sanctioned it. 8.5% — Less than Britain’s will, thanks to Brexit.
That is how hard it is to hit double-digit levels of economic contraction. It’s that…impossible. “Unusual” or “infrequent” — words like those don’t really say what’s happening to Britain accurately at all. It’s more accurate to have to say something provokes cries of hyperbole, but is nonetheless factual, like: even Russia’s economy is shrinking less after being sanctioned by most of the world than Britain’s will from Brexit…because double digit economic contractions are an order of magnitude that we only see in the most severe kinds of social collapse, from literal failed states having mega-currency and debt crises to the Great Depression. Those are the only points of comparison there are.
By now, your head’s probably spinning. What’s the point, even, of telling you all this, you might be wondering, a little angrily, especially if you’re British? The point is very simple. These are the facts. And you should know them. If you’re British, something historically singular is happening to your history, and your society made it happen. We have never seen social collapse happen this fast, at this shocking scale, and the comparisons we have to reach for are so grave and shocking as to provoke ridicule — they seem absurd, and yet.…well…facts are facts.
A hundred thousand people dead for no reason isn’t a joke, and isn’t even a natural disaster, it’s on the order of a war or the greatest natural that have hit the modern world, all of it, and yet that’s the scale we need to grasp if we’re to discuss Britain accurately. Mind-boggling. Alarmed? Disturbed? Forget it — I don’t know if we even have a word for what you should feel watching a developed society implode at off-the-charts levels of speed and scale, because, well, it’s never happened before.
If you’re not British, the reason for telling you all this is even simpler. You had better learn something. Brits wanted to backwards, in time, to an imaginary nostalgic, driven into a nationalistic frenzy which soon became ugly xenophobia and hate — the kind that’s still keeping the left, LOL, the left, from hiring doctors and nurses to save those future tens of thousands of dead Brits. You had better learn something. This is where it ends. The road of nationalism, hubris, Big Lies, the ones the lunatics around the world now tell — Brittania Uber Alles, Sweden for the Swedes, Make America Great Again, whatever flavour they come in.
This is where the road ends, lesson one, small one. But the big one? It’s possible. For it to happen, this fast, at this shocking, unbelievable scale, which the mind can hardly grasp, which only history’s great calamities can really contextualize. Just a decade ago, Britain was still the envy of the world. And today? It is something history books will teach — as an example of how fast even a developed, wealthy, secure, stable country can not just lose it all, but how much there is to really lose, and how hard it is, then, to teach what has been lost at all, because by then, all that’s left is the lie, sneering at truth, stamping like a boot on the face of history.
The reason I’m teaching you all this? So that you know. And remember. And think about it. That’s what Orwell would have wanted, I imagine. He had to write novels to issue his warnings, because stories, really, are the only way that the human mind can comprehend sheer impossible, stupid, incredible tragedy at this scale, like the one that Britain has made of itself. Not numbers. They don’t suffice. But they are, at least, perhaps, a meagre beginning, because, well, if nobody learns from this story, as Brits have yet to do — did it ever really happen at all?
Umair
January 2023