England is eyeroll island, where nothing quite works

Empty shelves in the fruit and vegetable aisles of a Tesco supermarket in England. Picture: Getty Images.

There are not enough tomatoes and not enough cucumbers and it is all because of Brexit. Or maybe it isn’t. Who knows? Farmers and supermarket bosses say it might be but hard Brexiteers like Sir Desmond Swayne say otherwise and, come on, have those guys ever been wrong?

Sure, most countries in the EU don’t seem to have our tomato rationing, or cabinet ministers telling them to eat turnips, but I actually think they might be right. It’s not because of Brexit. It goes deeper. It’s because this is Britain, and nothing bloody works.

Is it normal, for example, for it to take almost four weeks for somebody to fix your washing machine? I don’t want to be overly solipsistic here – national decline through the microcosm of my washing machine – but four weeks? This feels new.

Or take the manhole just around the corner from here that gushed water for almost the whole of February. Like a fire hose, drenching the road right down the hill. At first, you barely notice. Oh well, wet street. Feet up on the bicycle. After a week, though, after two, it starts to nag at you. How long would it have taken my terrace of houses to use the amount of water gushing out of there every day? Maybe a year?

Nothing works. Sorry, hyperbole. Everything works. We do not live in, say, South Sudan, which the United Nations reckons has the worst quality of life in the world, and where getting your washing machine fixed – I’m guessing, but I expect safely – must take simply ages. Yet because things still work a bit, I am starting to wonder if we are becoming far too accepting of nothing working terribly well.

Take the police. Are there still police? Must be. Otherwise who would be arresting all those other police? But what else are they up to? Jenni Russell wrote in The Times last week about plummeting convictions or even charges for violent assault, burglary and rape. It’s in the air – you knew – but it’s still a shock to see it written down. Online fraud, similarly, seems to have been all but decriminalised. Forget feeling a mug for getting hacked, these days you might feel one for not joining the fun and hacking somebody else.

Courts are chaos, too. Just before Christmas, the Law Society highlighted the largest backlog in decades, worsened by the way the courts themselves are literally falling apart. “The walls are falling in, tiles falling off, the roof leaks. Last year sewage came up into the cells,” reported one solicitor of a London magistrates’ court. Although if it’s sewage we’re talking about, then how nice that some of it is at least going somewhere other than straight into our rivers and seas.

Ambulances line up at The Royal London Hospital in London. Picture: Getty Images.

Or we could talk about the hold-ups at our borders, if indeed you’ve managed to navigate record hold-ups in getting a passport first. Or the four months you’ll wait to book a driving test. Or the lack of teachers, or the lack of prison spaces, or the many dysfunctions of the NHS. If it’s statistics you want, I’d point you towards the Institute for Government’s last public services performance tracker, published last week. If you’re not big on stats, though, just take it from me that all the graphs either slope dramatically up or down, depending on which is the bad one.

“Ah,” some say, “but you should have seen the 1970s! Why, it took us a year and a half just to get the trade unions to connect a nationalised phone line to our rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank!” Yep, sounds grim. Well done you for pulling through. The difference today, though, is that it’s not all about the public sector. Because it wasn’t the Ministry of Washing Machines I was struggling with, was it? It is privatised firms that are flooding our seas with sewage and our streets. The chaos transcends, and if the public makes a huge distinction between losing a morning on hold to a) their broadband provider or b) their local GP then I’d be frankly surprised. Everything is just a big old pain in the neck.

You don’t get here suddenly. When, though, to make a fuss? Think back to the mad toilet paper famine of 2020. It was ludicrous and we knew it. Nobody was going to march on parliament over toilet paper and there will never be, I am confident in predicting, a toilet paper revolution. Yet there we all were anyway, genuinely fretting about how we were going to wipe our bums.

Fast forward to the end of the pandemic and we had the petrol shortages; eerily similar despite being far more serious. I remember a friend texting me after she’d bribed the local garage checkout woman to text her when a tanker came in. “Huh,” I thought, starting the car. “This is just the sort of country we are now.”

We won’t riot over cucumbers, either. I think? I mean, please don’t. We’d be a global laughing stock. Even more than we already are. Is there not something terrible, though, in the way it makes you feel? Not outrage. More an eyeroll: “Oh, now this”. And the grim thing is that, once this sets in, all the statistics and facts in the world won’t really make a difference.

How long did it take to get a washing machine fixed in 2012? No idea. We blank these things out, like trauma. But it didn’t feel like this. Maybe every cause you might try to pin this on – from Brexit, to the government, to fuel prices, to Vladimir Putin, to cut-throat supermarkets, to our decadent vegetable entitlement – will always squirm away and dissolve into nothing, because it’s not any of them, it’s all of them.

Because it’s us. Because it’s how we feel now and what we’ve come to expect. Because something has changed. Because, like last week’s fresh veg, we’re on the turn.

The Times