Brexit may mean return to 1970s and Stale Britannia

There are signs Britain is about to reverse decades of progress and become the sick man of Europe again.

The results of a garbage collectors’ strike in London during the 1970s. Picture: Getty Images

While the hands on the clock tick remorselessly toward March 29, when Brexit is due, they seem to tick backward, too. Britain’s great leap into a glorious future is instead dragging us back to the less glorious elements of our past.

Brexit is turning the nation into retro Britain — and not in some pleasant bake-off and bunting way. Each day brings news that sparks an uneasy sense of deja vu.

We hear that almost a thousand police officers from England and Scotland are to begin training for deployment in Northern Ireland in case a hard border causes trouble; here rise the spectres of petrol bombs and old enmities. We are told there is to be a public information campaign with the government telling us of the need to prepare for no deal; shades of “Keep Calm and Carry On’’.

The vaguely shambolic air hanging over last-minute contingency planning is reminiscent of the chaotic 1970s. “Crisis, what crisis?” went the tabloid headline in 1979, capturing James Callaghan’s head-in-the-sand administration.

Our government seems equally unequal to the situation we face. With just 81 days to go, Monday sees the very first rehearsal for Operation Brock, a proposal to use Manston airfield in Kent as an “HGV holding facility” to ease congestion on the roads to Channel ports. Local councils have indicated that this “temporary” arrangement will last years, the garden of England becoming its lorry park until at least 2023.

A UK Border Force cutter berths at Ramsgate Harbour on December 30. The harbour may have to take ferries and cargo ships in the event of a hard Brexit. Picture: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Meanwhile, dredgers are out in Ramsgate harbour to ready it for ferries and cargo ships in the event of no deal.

In preparing for this Dover Mk II the government has awarded a £13.8 million contract ($24.7m) to Seaborne Freight, a ferry operator that thus far has operated no ferries (note to self: register Foges Ferries with Companies House asap).

In a detail which surely confirms that we British have taken our love of satire too far, it was also revealed last week that the company winning this multi-million-pound contract might have borrowed its terms and conditions blurb from a takeaway food service. It is all so back-of-a-fag-packet, so amateur, so reminiscent of the time decades ago when this once-great nation was reduced to an international joke.

Brexiteers wished to restore something of the grandeur and global reach of our past; instead their project creates echoes of past failures.

Those who cried we must “get our country back” had a particular country in mind. They wanted to resurrect a nation of imperial clout or at least post-imperial influence, where the thickly carpeted corridors in Whitehall were the most powerful on the planet.

They wanted the land of Rule Britannia, but in the eyes of the world there was a different British past too. Let us call it Stale Britannia.

Scenes of temporary ruin: A man walks past a pile of rubbish in London as waste collectors were on strike for a pay rise in 1979. Picture: Maurice Hibberd/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Rubbish piled up near Leicester Square in London, also in 1979. Picture: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This was the land where nothing worked, where the fabric of our cities creaked, where the infrastructure was held together by sticky tape, where the food was rubbish and the outlook narrow. Stale Britannia lived off its reputation as a grand power because its present wasn’t up to much. Stale Britannia reached its nadir in the chaos of the 1970s, the decade of piled-up rubbish, three-day weeks and a sense of permanent emergency.

Not a time of prosperity: London shoppers compete for bargains in 1976. Picture: News Corp

Now the dusty air of Stale Britannia creeps back over our nation. It is there in the rather melancholy sight of Dutch dredgers in Ramsgate harbour. It creeps, too, over the industries that drive the British economy, threatening to rub out decades of progress and modernisation.

The air of Stale Britannia air wafts around our ivory towers.

In recent decades Britain’s universities have built a powerful international reputation, contributing £21 billion a year to our economy and incalculable value to our soft power. This reputation has been burnished by research talent that flocks here from around the world.

Yet today the number of EU postgraduate students enrolling at Russell Group institutions is tumbling. More than £1 billion of funding for research into cancer and climate change is under threat once the European funding taps are turned off, with no guarantee that our government will stump up the money instead.

Eight years ago researchers at Manchester University won the Nobel prize for their work on graphene; now its vice-chancellor warns that a no-deal Brexit would be a “serious setback” for such work. Back the clock ticks to a less vibrant, less successful higher education sector.

The air of Stale Britannia rubs upon the window panes of the glittering citadels of the City (London’s financial district). Three decades ago Margaret Thatcher’s Big Bang deregulated and turbocharged the Square Mile, opening the doors to international finance.

Margaret Thatcher and the Labour prime minister she defeated, James Callaghan, at a memorial service in London for victims of 9/11. Picture: AFP

Now the banks and brokerages look overseas again. EY’s Brexit Tracker has found that more than a third of UK financial services companies have openly considered or confirmed relocating operations to Europe. Deutsche Bank has moved a large part of its euro-clearing activity to Frankfurt, Bank of America its research analysts to Paris.

UBS, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have suggested they will shift thousands of staff out of the UK if we leave the EU with no deal. Back the clock ticks to a time when the City was not the centre of the financial world.

Four decades ago the UK car industry was on its knees, sniggered at by the Germans and French for low productivity, endless strikes and British Leyland — the epitome of Stale Britannia.

Its turnaround into a global success story was remarkable. Now the overseas investment that pumped life into the industry is threatened if we leave with no deal.

Nissan warns there will be “serious implications” for its Sunderland plant (employing 7000). Toyota has said it will temporarily close its Derbyshire plant (employing 2600), and hints at longer-term rupture.

Before Christmas Jaguar Land Rover moved 2000 staff at its Castle Bromwich plant to a three-day week. Ford says it will take “whatever action is needed” to protect its business. Honda warns that a no-deal Brexit will cost it tens of millions. Back the clock ticks to less confident and prosperous times.

I am not one to scorn those who yearn for our past, far from it. I long for aspects of lost Britain: men in hats; conductors on buses; children glued to space hoppers not smartphones; hostess trolleys and glace-cherried cocktails; endless English summers.

I love and revere our past — and anything that could expand Britain’s power and influence to the levels we enjoyed decades ago would get my wholehearted support.

But turning our backs on established trade partnerships, creating layers of ugly bureaucracy for international investment, denying the world as it is today won’t achieve it.

In hoping to resurrect the glories of Britain’s past, this saga has only revived a gloomy sense of Britain on the decline.

The Times