On Thursday evening, Rishi Sunak found himself locked out of 10 Downing Street along with Dutch PM Mark Rutte after a photo-op. The opposition promptly leveraged the embarrassing moment as a political metaphor for a beleaguered Sunak, who is dogged by inheritance and inadequacies. The metaphor also reflects the systemic stasis gripping the UK -- and indeed other advanced countries.
Imagine this: the Prime Minister of a G7 nation with a GDP of $3 trillion standing with colleagues around a pothole. On November 17, the official handle of the UK Prime Minister on X posted a picture of the PM in Firth Moor. The post announced an allocation of £8 billion to fix potholes and declared, “Following today’s announcement, this could be the last photo of a politician pointing at a pothole.” Sunak reposted it, asserting, “I reserve the right to point at any remaining potholes.”
The potholes in governance elsewhere are resulting in human suffering. According to data published by the UK’s House of Commons, the waiting list for hospital treatment rose to a record of nearly 7.8 million in September 2023. The NHS says the wait time for non-urgent, consultant-led treatments could be as long as 18 weeks. Fact: the 18-week target has not been met since 2016. It is not just healthcare, schools have been disrupted too. Last week, 231 UK schools were listed as affected by the use of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete.
Attention, however, is not on what haunts people, but on another leadership contest. The trigger: the stop the boats strategy. This week, the immigration minister jumped the boat between the signing of a new agreement with Rwanda and its passage in parliament. The UK has spent £240 million without a single person deported to Rwanda. Details matter. Boat crossings have spiralled from 299 in 2018 to 29090 in 2023. Brexit lacks a returns agreement on channel crossings.
The erstwhile empire is by no means the only domain facing crises. The Euro zone is headed for a recession. The EU expects growth to slide to 1.2 percent, a decline from the historic average of 2.5 percent by 2027. Philip Lane, chief economist at the European Central Bank, spells it out: “Many countries, where they were in the 1990s, they’re behind that now. There’s not been progress -- there has been regress... Over time, reforms have been cancelled -- this is an avoidable own goal.”
The consequence of economic stagnation is manifest. Europe is wracked by strikes across the zone. Unionised workers in France went on strike in March and in October. This Thursday, German train drivers went on a last-minute strike, the fourth this year. Strikes at airports -- in Italy, France, Belgium and Greece -- disrupted travel and wrecked holiday plans of Europeans. Such is the regularity of strikes that publications such as Time Out put out advisories for travellers. The dates to watch out for are: December 10, 12, 15-17, 19, 22-31.
Economics influences politics. Countries which once colonised geographies for natural resources -- and wooed workers from Africa and elsewhere -- are hotspots of anti-immigration riots. Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden inducted guest worker programmes to build their economies. Germany deployed the Gastarbeiter programme to draw over 2 million workers mostly from Turkey, Morocco and Tunisia to rebuild its post-war economy. France similarly attracted waves of workers from North Africa and even placed them under surveillance in later years.
Europe’s decline is founded on the strategy of wishful thinking. It depended on NATO for its defence and outsourced economic growth to China. The Euro zone economy faces structural issues -- its productivity is plummeting, its population is shrinking. Like the US, it needs migrants; but the
countries have turned into laboratories of anti-migration politics. The far right has crafted a constituency of protestors who are taking to the streets in France, Sweden, Ireland, Germany and Amsterdam against immigration. The influence is visible in the reign of Victor Orban in Hungary, the election of Giorgia Meloni in Italy and Robert Fico in Slovakia. The Netherlands once colonised domains from Guyana to Taiwan -- it ceded Manhattan to the British for the Indonesian Island of Run in the Treaty of Breda. It then depended on guest workers to grow the economy. The Dutch recently voted for far right leader Geert Wilders.
Across the Atlantic, in the US, the economy is still holding up but politics is descending into chaos. The US evangelises human rights globally, but at home politics has wrenched away the rights of women over their body. Its healthcare system is in shambles. The US has lost 106,842 lives to drug overdose over a year, with seven of every ten to opioids. Till December 6, the US has witnessed 633 mass shootings this year. The largest exporter of arms has explicit rules on usage for countries, but at home gun violence has claimed over 40,167 lives. Leadership matters, but as of now it seems a battle of septuagenarians, Biden v Trump II -- an NBC poll reveals 70 per cent of the respondents don’t want Joe Biden and 60 per cent do not want Donald Trump.
The third world imagery streaming from first world countries is stark. It illuminates why the idea of rule-based democratic world order is floundering.
Shankkar Aiyar is the author of The Gated Republic, Aadhaar: A Biometric History of India’s 12 Digit Revolution, and Accidental India. (shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com)
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