Get ready for rubble
Whether it’s a demolished pub or hundreds of crumbling schools, the UK’s disintegrating infrastructure says a lot about its leaders and its people.
Having been demolished overnight by diggers hired a few days before the building, ahem, ‘burned down’, the sight of the Crooked Inn in ruins elicited anger last month in local people who cherished the ancient public house, even if most of them didn’t use it enough to save it from being sold. Local MPs tried to outdo each other in their fury, with one arguing that the pub should be rebuilt brick by brick.
The pub has disappeared from the news, however, replaced by reports that hundreds of schools will be forced to close just days before the start of the new term. The culprit is the discovery of reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete in many school buildings, which has disintegrated to the point that collapse is imminent and there is a risk to school children and teachers.
Based on the response of government spokespeople to this situation, I have struggled to locate a strength of feeling similar to that dedicated to the Crooked House. The schools minister justifies the chaos that the closures will bring on the basis that “It’s about children’s safety”, which may come as a surprise to those that swam in seas teeming with Escherichia coli this summer, as the same government fails to control the flow of shit in our waterways.
No, the motive for the government’s move to close schools surely has its roots in naked politics: stomach bugs come and go, but pictures of schoolchildren trapped under piles of masonry do not win elections for the government in power at the time.
Which is just as well because the UK is literally falling apart. On the plus side, at least we know there is something that will force the government into taking action: the death of thousands of children. It’s good to know there is a red line somewhere, even if it’s the spatter of infant blood on playground rubble.
‘Action’ is a strong word, of course. Closing a school is a very different thing to rebuilding one. The Labour government’s Building Schools for the Future programme was killed by Michael Gove in 2010, and the current government has had 13 years to invest in the UK’s schools, hospitals, roads and other infrastructure if it wished — years in which the country enjoyed rock-bottom interest rates that would have made the public debt incurred as a result of investment in public infrastructure manageable. Instead, the successive governments of the period from 2010 to date embraced unnecessary austerity and an onanistic Brexit. The result is the mess we see today.
This state of collapse is testing both the famous British love of a queue and the country’s unofficial motto: ‘mustn’t grumble’. Being seven million, five hundred thousand and seven hundredth in a waiting list for treatment on the NHS is enough to stretch anyone’s patience. Hitting one of the estimated 2 million potholes on the UK’s roads more than tests the average driver’s composure, also. Collective karma takes a knock when the RAC calculates there is a near one in three chance of hitting a pothole every time you get in the car.
I am old enough to remember 2022, when the former Prime Minister (but two) (or is it ten?), Boris Johnson, the noted hard-hat fetishist, promised to “build back better” after Covid. The Brexit leave campaigners similarly promised to “take back control” and “Make Britain Great Again.” In light of the sorry state of the country now, the phrase “Made in Britain” seems to be missing two operational qualifiers, however: “to disintegrate.”
Still. Mustn’t grumble. Some have done well out of the collapse in the UK’s infrastructure. You can’t travel a mile in a car with a pothole-damaged wheel without seeing one of JCB’s yellow diggers. A rare UK export success, the company has successfully promoted its expertise in handling rubble across the world to countries where natural disasters create the chaos that basic underfunding and neglect have achieved closer to home.
Speaking of chaos, Boris Johnson was pictured driving a JCB digger through a wall of polystyrene bricks emblazoned with the words “Get Brexit done” in advance of a notably large piece of demolition, the UK’s departure from the European Union, the celebration of home grown neglect and underfunding and it deflection onto an imaginary enemy.
The ubiquity of the company’s diggers means one should rightfully occupy the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square in preference to any number of well-meaning but incomparably mute commentaries on life in the UK that contemporary artists are commissioned to create. JCBs are everywhere in this country. Why shouldn’t one take pride of place at the heart of London, also, a celebration of all that is grating about the country?
Like so much in British life, at this point, we must return to the pub. Specifically, which will get rebuilt first: an old public house of dubious value — or the nation’s schools?
Will it be the Crooked House, a single pub of such limited commercial interest that it was sold, demolished and now lies atomised, in millions of disfigured pieces of masonry that could take millions of man hours to return to its previous mish-mash of acute angles, like some mad Brexity jigsaw? Or will it be the many parts of school campuses essential to our children’s education, such as gyms, school halls and classrooms?
Spoiler alert: Never forget that the government opened casinos before schools after the lockdowns. And, when asked to cost a plan to boost the educational chances of children whose schooling had suffered during Covid, the Government’s own education recovery commissioner suggested £15 billion. He was offered a billion; not much more than was spent on getting people into pubs through the “Eat out to help out” scheme. This speaks volumes for the priorities of the UK’s government and its people alike: our children are doomed to a schooling in draughty portacabins while a commercially unviable tourist attraction captures a drooling nation’s heart.
Ever keen to fashion an opportunity from its own ineptitude, no doubt our government will argue that at least these children will have jobs waiting for them, regardless of their educational shortcomings and in spite of the ‘magic' that AI will work on their career prospects. Someone has to continue to knock shit down, after all — and those JCBs don’t drive themselves!
As Pink Floyd once cried, “We don’t need no education!” But at least The Wall of which they sang was actually standing, not lying in a pile in a playground.
Cheers!
