The Arse-End of Empire at the Arse-End of the World

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Britain no longer feels invulnerable. This is a coming together of global unsettlement in the face of ecological collapse and the unhappy realisation of the everyday hardship and dysfunction of life in a (differently) collapsing Britain. People do still try to resurrect some old refrains. Fifth largest economy in the world (not any more) – often reframed as fifth richest society (nothing like). But people have lost their belief in Britain’s ability to be cushioned against the troubles of the world.

The attempt to ‘make Britain great again’ came forty years before Trump, a refrain of the Thatcher years and sewn into that government’s toxic concoction of petty nationalism, enforced scarcity, union-busting and reinvigorated racism. We might reflect, with hindsight, on what that project of resurrecting ‘greatness’ set in motion. For all the talk about aspiration, and the reams of analysis devoted to understanding the Thatcherite hegemonic project, perhaps in the end it is the training to tolerate hardship that stands as Thatcherism’s longest shadow.

Liz Truss tripping over her own feet as she awkwardly stumbles into the royal funeral flicks a switch in global consciousness. More even than Boris, Truss reflected the world’s view of us. Delusional to the point of inducing pity, a spectacle that would be funny if it were not so very dangerous. When empires finally die, it will be farcical. 

But the farce is not in the personalities involved. The sticking plaster of an imposed Sunak does little to dispel the sense of decline and unfolding chaos. The put-on seriousness of Jeremy Hunt (who must be more surprised than anyone to be feted as a person competent in anything) announces the necessity to push down living standards more and more sharply than ever before – and, on the whole, the national response from all sides has been little more than technical. The renewed militancy across the labour movement is constrained by anti-union laws that outlaw ‘political disputes’, leaving union spokespeople struggling to explain their sectoral claims without straying into any more general analysis of Britain’s malaise, lest the law is used to immobilise their union and its funds.

The jokes about nothing working are already decades old and internationally known. British plumbing? Ha ha ha. Transport? Dental health? Queues and bureaucracy and every system large and small. Britain has been known for a practised inefficiency. For a while, it was possible to sneer at the unsightly urgency of, say, Americans. Or the humourless smooth running of German institutions and businesses. For a lot of years, Britain spun out the role of aristocratic decline, genteel but down-at-heel, but since 2008 there has been an escalation in the depth and reach of decline. This is not about some fiction of status on the world stage. It is about the grim deprivation that features in so many, too many, unremarked lives.

I have to admit that 2022 was energising. What next, what next? For a moment, it did seem that we were witnessing the implosion of the political class. And it still feels as if no-one wants the reins of power. There is a weak continuation of electoralism, but without much content. Austerity is revamped with the Tory defence going no further than the assertion that it is Putin not Truss who is to blame.

It can be quite hard to think of a politics that does not revolve around versions of messaging. Even traditions which foreground the science of socialism tend towards a belief in the power of well-expressed reason. We think, most of the time, that we are engaging our enemies on the terrain of ideas and that our task is to win hearts, minds and arguments. This, we believe, is how political consciousness works and we rely on the weight of our explanatory narrative to carry our politics. Most of all, we act as if being able to explain how bad things happened makes us seem the most likely candidates for making something better happen next.

The observation that critique is not the same thing as vision or rebuilding has become banal. But I wonder if this moment, when the arse-end of empire comes fully into view, demands a reassessment of our collective political habits. In particular, the implied sequencing of ideas, communication and organisation – with critique of the ugliness of the world leading to political speech to persuade others of the unethical basis of this ugliness leading, we hope, to the altered consciousness that brings people to us. And then? Well, amass the numbers and victory will follow. Isn’t that secretly what we hope and believe?

Do not mistake this for an argument to return to civil discourse or a rebuilding of the public sphere or any form of return to some lost former state of grace. In light of what we understand about the pervasive scepticism of our time, we might need to consider the challenges of building any politics in the face of such widespread distrust and scepticism. The simultaneous opening of the public square and fragmenting of collective bonds creates spiralling questions in response to all and any attempts to shape what people think.

We grasp that someone or something is trying to cheat us. How could we not? But it is quite hard to discern the alliances of the powerful in a house on fire.

When former powers collapse, it is a slow-motion affair. 

We all laugh, with a gallows humour, about the shit in the sea off Britain’s beaches. One highly visible outcome of Brexit has been the ability of British water companies to pump untreated sewage directly into the seas off the coast.

There are warnings of planned power cuts to regulate the energy supplies through the winter. There is some outcry, a little, mainly from predictable quarters. Mainly the breakneck speed of ‘events’ in British political life takes up everyone’s attention. There is insufficient bandwidth for people to consider too much what might happen next, because the energies required to process and survive what is happening right now leave us depleted.

I think this, too, is a tactic of power.

However, this cultivated inattention may no longer be sustainable. The over-focus on the spectacle of collapse risks a non-understanding of the machinery of collapse and how this particular moment and mode of collapse impacts on our lives. 

At the risk of stating the painfully obvious, the performance of political life is not necessarily in sync with the fragmentation of infrastructure. Some of what occurs as the arse-end of empire is revealed does not pass through the ‘public square’ or the ‘battle of ideas’ at all. 

Perhaps the incompetence of the political class is a cause for ridicule and entertainment. Perhaps the theatre of political life revolves around the critiques and promises of some better machinery of distribution and administration.

But what is collapsing around us is beyond any time-limited policy battle. What is in motion is the reckoning of decades of slower decline, neglect and an unavoidable fall from dominance. Perhaps this is a reckoning with national structures which could not be sustained except from a position of dominance (and I know various important interventions have made the case that public infrastructure in Britain is another spoil of coloniality, reflecting the injection of stolen resources and wealth).

Perhaps because belatedly, there is considerable energy put into uncovering the colonial underpinning of the welfare state and pretty much all aspects of the social wage as it has existed in Britain. Although unarguable as an insight, my sense is that we are still feeling our way through the implications of this (until recently repressed) knowledge. The claims of both the electoral and the street left in Britain have revolved around the assertion that there is enough for all and it is class theft that causes our pain, not any limit of resources. 

Worlding our understanding of British welfarism unsettles that framing, beyond repair I suspect. We learn, rightly, that the social wage is funded via the legacy and continuation of colonial violence. Alongside this, welfarism has been motored by the parallel narratives of entitlement (cradle to grave) and national family (pride of Britain). The publicly owned and/or administered infrastructure of everyday life has been the ground on which the terms of belonging are played out. The National Health Service has held a talismanic role in this melding of symbolism and material practice, for obvious reasons, but we might consider whether the celebration of a socialised health service is also a cipher for something more. Perhaps not quite a celebration of the role of state, but certainly an acceptance that some greater authority must be in place to administer this scale of collective resources. Bordering has operated as the violent and deadly mechanism by which access to social goods and to a wider terrain of the means of life are rationed, but, simultaneously, there has been a roundabout embrace of state-administered infrastructure. The odd doublethink of (post?)imperial consciousness has been characterised by this tension between exclusion and mutuality, between collectivism and exceptionalism, between ideas of togetherness and the celebration of ourselves alone.

To understand the arse-end of empire, we must shift our gaze away from the spectacle of representation. We must think a little less about what is said or how it is said. And a little more about the collapsing infrastructure of places where the cumulative impact of asset-stripping makes it difficult to maintain what is needed to sustain life.

The drip drip drip of hardship is a hegemonic technique. Disciplining bodies and ensuring that much of our lives are spent trying to survive, to look after our loved ones, to fix and mend and make do, to juggle bills and keep things afloat. Making everyday life hard is a way of ‘shaping the debate’. It is a way of making sure that most people do not have the time or energy to pay too much attention to the details of corruption or dishonesty or theft from above. But it is also a way of breaking our spirits just enough to pass as consent. Years of arguing for our rights as a common good, with the quiet assumption that economic growth is good for us all, have muted our memory of the role of enforced hardship as a technique of domination. 

But, in yet another painful irony, enforced hardship as a technique of government has been familiar across colonised spaces. We know too well that colonial powers operated through extreme violence, undertaking torture, rape, mutilation, murder and genocide in the name of civilisation, progress or just plain profit.

But also the impossibility of ease, the rationing of all human comforts. The wilful squeezing of living standards is also a kind of hegemonic project. Hardship also shapes political consciousness and not necessarily as resistance, whatever we may wish. Official neglect and institutional collapse force people into time-hungry processes to preserve life. The extensive efforts needed to chase down the right medication or to queue to access the necessary service or to identify the next gatekeeper in attempts to navigate what remains of public services and/or avoid the punitive sanctions of failing to follow systems which operate erratically as they collapse all remake political consciousness. Exhaustion can limit our horizons or attention to the powerful. Critique feels like an inappropriate register to gather people being broken by life.

Much of the world understands all too well what is happening in Britain. Some have traced these steps themselves in earlier times. Others have waited generations for this promised revenge, and now dare not speak too soon in case the chance is lost.

Life in the former imperial metropolis reveals an accelerating collapse, with social relations being remade on the hoof and, sometimes, in scary ways. This moment for Britain – the moment when life gets much harder very quickly, when institutional forms erode to near disappearance and when few political formations seem close to being fit for the purpose of bringing us together or illuminating the place we are in (I hold off judgement on whether the heartening resurgence of trade unions can instigate this last need) – is dangerous but unspectacular. And in the grey grind of trying to make do and survive, monsters can and do appear.

There is a temptation to try to end with a flourish, isn’t there? Denunciation is always good copy. If there is denunciation needed, surely we are among those to be denounced. Any defence of access to the social goods being stripped away runs so close to a defence of things ‘as they were’. Perhaps the small gains of welfare and healthcare and employment regulation grappled from the grasping hands of the British ruling class through struggle and (let us say it quietly) a very brief experiment with social democracy are tainted as exclusionary benefits delimited by nation. In a parallel to the paradox of claims made on stolen land, there is a question about any defence of social goods eroded or at risk as a result of imperial collapse. Surely those benefits were never legitimately ‘ours’ in the first place. Or, at least, not ours alone. The world does not see our pain, they see our comeuppance. 

I don’t want to overplay it. Most people in Britain will eat, just a bit less, cutting nutritional corners. People have been learning to do this since the 2008 crash, so not a new emergency. Everyone shares making do and mend stories, putting on their extra jumpers, with baked potatoes in their pockets and hot water bottles on their feet. Some of the old and vulnerable die every winter, so nothing to write home about as we all get a bit colder. Public services have been stretched for fifteen years, gradually slicing out provision until only the bare bones (or less) survive across all essential services. Healthworkers issue stark warnings about the imminent collapse of the health service and the place of this concocted crisis in the service of moving to some or other variety of private insurance model of healthcare provision. Ambulances do not arrive. The elderly lie on the floor screaming with pain for hours, hoping paramedics will arrive sometime. Teachers fill their desk drawers with snacks, hoping to sneak enough calories to hungry children for everyone to get through the day. The old and the young and the displaced and the unlucky will keep on dying and we will keep on acting as if such deaths are accidental. 

I have nothing else to say. It is arse. But it is the end.

Gargi Bhattacharyya lives and works in London and is the author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018) and We, The Heartbroken (Hajar Press, 2023). A new book on the futures of racial capitalism will be out with Polity this year.