Epictetus - Discourses on Wargaming
Wednesday 18 January 2017
Heart of Darkness
Eyebrows have been raised about my suggestion yesterday that the UK faces a future as a colony. I assume that this is in part because, as it's a wargaming blog, my readers associate colonialism with chaps in red coats and sunhats or blue coats and képis arriving and taking over the country. What I was referring to was instead the economic effects of colonisation whereby the local population is obliged to work for low wages with no rights or political power and all profits are expatriated elsewhere; think Britain as banana republic and you're on the right track.
I would point you to Wallerstein's world-systems theory, which posits that the world tends in the long run to a relatively stable set of relations between core and peripheral states, with both the division of labour and the flow of wealth benefiting those in the core. The UK has, or so it would seem, decided to leave the core and join the periphery; a stupid decision taken by stupid people.
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all too heart, spirit and soul-breakingly true, I suspect.
ReplyDeleteWe are assured that the World is queuing up to trade with us. This means, I gather, that people in foreign lands wish to buy stuff from us, which is good, but I confess I am pushed to think of what it is we still make that we might sell them. Perhaps we could sell some vegetables off the farm here, but then there will be no Poles or Slovaks to pick them. If we still manufactured something (apart from Rolls Royce - pending the enquiry) then that would be handy, but Mrs T put paid to all that. Don't tell me we're going to sell them financial services? - you mean they don't know about us yet?
ReplyDeleteNo, I confess I am stumped. I have been pulled up for my unpatriotic, whingeing attitude concerning this sad period of our history. Well, no - over the years I have had to put up with a good few Conservative governments which I did not vote for, and I was never very happy about that, but it was never noted as a matter of patriotism. All a bit odd.
Perhaps Mr Trump (The Tronald, as he is known here) will see the UK as a possible supply of cheap labour to which to outsource the mainstream US products which are currently manufactured in China or Mexico, but he may go off the idea when he sees what our productivity and work ethic are like.
No, I am going to have to think this over.