Like most other governments, Her Majesty’s injected so much cash into benefits, interest-free loans, debt forgiveness, tax deferments, and infrastructure projects that early on in the give-away free-for-all the public lost track of the difference between “billion” and “trillion.” All very well, save that the funds for these frenetic expenditures were borrowed. When in turn central banks across the world gobbled up sovereign debt and overloaded their balance sheets with government bonds through quantitative easing—QE7, QE8, etcetera, though governors stopped bothering to number the buying binges after QE12—the money was effectively conjured from thin air. Kay didn’t understand this alchemy one bit, and often got angry with her husband for being such a bore about it. “Well, in a way all money is made up, is it not? I mean, money is an idea, a conceit. And I know you’ve explained it to me repeatedly, but I still haven’t a clue what it means to ‘monetize the debt.’”
“They don’t want you to understand it,” Cyril said miserably.
It was difficult to discern whether Cyril had grown habitually glum due to advancing age or to the gloom that had freighted the whole country ever since the likes of Trafalgar and Leicester Squares grew hushed and deserted as the moon—a gloom that had never entirely lifted, even throughout the cathartic exuberance over being allowed once and for all to actually leave your own home.
“You’re not usually such a conspiracy theorist,” Kay said.
“It’s not a conspiracy,” Cyril said, and he looked as if he could barely keep his head up. “It’s worse than that. It’s incompetence. Malfeasance on an incomprehensible scale, and all over the world at the same time.”
“Please tell me you’re not listening to that Shriver woman. She’s a hysteric. And so annoyingly smug, as if she wants civilization to collapse, just so she can be proved right. I can’t bear the sound of her voice.” There was indeed an annoying American import—another one of those Yankee anglophiles who wouldn’t go back where she came from—who kept claiming on Radio 4 that some book of hers had predicted the whole debacle now supposedly well underway. A handful of deluded groupies regarded the hyperventilating loon as a modern-day Nostradamus. But apparently the lady’s stupid novel, The Madrigal or something, which Kay had zero interest in reading, made no mention of any pandemic, and the self-promotional author was obviously just trying to flog more copies with her irresponsible alarmism.
Throughout the 2020s, governments spent money like there was no tomorrow, but with all this pump-pump-pumping something didn’t quite work. Collectively, these unrelenting rescue packages, tax holidays, universal-income experiments, and industry bailouts recalled the commonplace experience of inflating a bicycle tyre whose tube, unbeknownst to you, has a small hole in it. So you can depress the handle of the floor pump over and over, but the tyre never quite gets resiliently firm, and the moment you give the project a rest because surely that’s sufficient, the tyre starts gradually to go soft again. Under pressure, too, small holes become larger holes, until eventually you frantically push and pull and push and pull, and the tyre sits flat on the pavement.
Kay didn’t understand quantitative easing, but she did understand when the cost of Marmite—even more beloved as national metaphor than as spread on toast—doubled, then tripled. Although their NHS pensions were inflation-adjusted, official inflation rates from the Office of National Statistics grievously lagged reality on the street, and in due course the once-generous direct deposits barely covered the food bill. Then they didn’t cover the food bill. Without abetting their income with private pensions, they’d be going hungry. But the markets, long anaemic, were sliding to worse than anaemic, and the Wilkinsons’ pension pots were shrinking, too. To make matters worse, the elimination of cash had facilitated negative interest rates, meant to force “hoarders”—formerly known as “savers,” who could no longer irately empty a bank account and flounce off with stacks of notes in a sack—to spend their selfish stash and so juice the economy. A hundred quid on the first of the month by the last became ninety-nine.
In the end, it was all a waste. The saving, the balancing of their portfolios, the penny-pinching and buying toothpaste on offer—all that painstaking preparation for an independent old age, the better to burden neither family nor the state. The couple had done everything right. They hadn’t blown their assets prematurely on extravagant holidays or—as the tabloids had claimed the gaga elderly would all splash out on when foolishly allowed access to their own retirement funds—Lamborghinis. They’d bought their house at a provident time and paid off the mortgage. They’d both worked well past the point at which they might have comfortably retired. Besides their hard-earned pensions, neither had drawn on the public purse; to the contrary, they’d paid sizable tax bills without complaint. They’d put aside as much as possible for the rainy day presently gathering into a monsoon, yet increasingly their monthly income could barely purchase a tin of Baxters butternut squash soup and a packet of builder’s tea. Even that long-term care insurance: the company went bust, so all those hefty premiums had bought them no more security than anyone else enjoyed—meaning none. Kay and Cyril Wilkinson discovered for themselves that there was only one thing worse than being very, very old: being very, very old and broke.
* * *
Frail but all there, both Kay and Cyril were proving remarkably long-lived. If, as news presenters compulsively observed, extended life expectancy was a stroke of great good fortune for everyone, enduring into their late nineties made the couple luckier than most. But were they lucky? As matters unfolded, this question was not as easy to answer as all that.
When Cyril turned one hundred years old on the twenty-second of January 2039, no one from the royal family sent a birthday card. That might have been because Buckingham Palace, along with all the other royal residences like Windsor Castle, was by then occupied by “asylum seekers” from a wide range of nationalities. For history, alas, does not instruct problems to politely wait their turn, even in a country with a reputation for revering the queue. Thus, on top of a Western-wide financial implosion that made the Great Depression seem like a pet death, the tide of tourists-for-life now rolling up from the global south made Europe’s “migration crisis” of 2015 seem like a school field trip. Accurate numbers were impossible to come by, and anyone who claimed to know even roughly how many migrants had stormed the continent by foot, lorry, plane, and boat clearly had a political agenda. Leftists claimed that only a few million had breached the continent’s borders, whilst much-demonized nativists were equally certain that the total well exceeded a billion souls. Just as they’d thrown up their hands when trying to keep track of “billions” versus “trillions” in government spending, most of the public settled on “a lot.”
Many Britons who could afford to be charitable donated clothing, disposable nappies, bags of penne, and jars of pesto to support the incomers. The most considerable hostility to the influx was amongst first- and second-generation immigrants, sometimes from the very countries this more recent wave had fled. Having made it across the English Channel in time, Pakistanis, Afghans, Hindus, and Nigerians all demanded that the UK pull up the drawbridge. Yet the “drawbridge” in this instance was a useless figure of speech, and unless Britain was willing to come to the unacceptable conclusion that the unending flotilla of boats from France and Belgium was a military matter—in Turkey, troops had been ordered to shoot migrants on sight—policy decisions were nugatory. Besides, British bureaucracy was one of the last casualties of the onslaught, so that for the first few years every incomer was duly registered for a pittance of a weekly stipend, provided housing until there wasn’t any, assigned a taxpayer-financed lawyer, strictly instructed not to work, and allowed to appeal denied asylum claims up to seven times. Any threat of deportation was empty bluster. Rather than remove the asylum seekers, it would have been cheaper and more logistically feasible to evacuate the English.
Meanwhile, the NHS, whose budget had so ballooned that the standing joke about Britain havi
ng become “a health service with a country attached” was no longer funny, was so inundated that doctors reminisced nostalgically about the coronavirus pandemic, when they’d naively had no idea what the word “overwhelmed” really meant.
“Being hospitable is the least we can do,” Cyril maintained early in the surge, then predicted to soon subside. “Climate change is largely the West’s fault. We’re reaping what we sowed, so we’ll simply have to move over and make room.”
“Sorry,” Kay said. “Europe, North America, and Australia have reduced fossil fuel emissions to practically nothing. Pounding one more nail in our economic coffin, we’ve bent over backwards to reach carbon neutrality by 2050—another one of those distant years that was never supposed to actually arrive, and now it’s right round the corner. Meanwhile, China, India, and Southeast Asia have been churning out emissions to beat the band—”
“You can’t blame poorer nations for wanting, and deserving, a Western lifestyle, bab.”
“You’ve got to be joking!” Kay exploded. “We’re living on mouldy toast. What ‘Western lifestyle’?”
“If the UK weren’t a massive improvement on their wretched circumstances, these benighted refugees would never attempt the perilous journey across the Channel.” Even in these early days, Cyril’s soothing liberal platitudes had begun to assume the demented singsong of a nursery rhyme.
“I’m not convinced it is all climate change,” Kay grumbled. “Or even primarily climate change. Africa and the Middle East are mostly desert, and they’ve always been desert. Those climates were abysmal even when I was a little girl. There’ve always been droughts there, and crop failures, locusts, and famines, because it’s not a part of the world that’s ever been equipped to sustain billions of people!”
“You sound as if you’ve been poisoned by the podcasts of that bitter lunatic Calvin Piper. I don’t say this about many people, but that demographer is evil.”
“I concede the codger is unsavoury, but he may have a point. As for this knee-jerk mea culpa of yours, which means we’re supposed to just sit here whilst our country is overrun—”
“Watch your language!” Cyril said.
“What am I supposed to say? ‘Whilst our country attracts an unusual number of visitors’?”
“All right. That’s better.”
“What is our fault is curing all the diseases that once kept population growth in those parts under control.”
“Enough! You’re a nurse. What’s got into you?”
“I’ll tell you what’s got into me. Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are encampments and no-go areas. You can’t walk along the South Bank for all the families huddled in blankets with cups out. And it’s not only here. In Paris, they’re all along the Seine, on the bridges, around the Eiffel Tower and clumped around the pyramid of the Louvre—whose panes they’ve all smashed. In Italy, they’ve set up tents in the Roman ruins and turned the Coliseum into a homeless shelter. There’s hardly a solvent government in Europe aside from Sweden, and Sweden only barely, because they have more visitors per capita than anybody. Even you and I can barely afford one miserable sausage between us. What’s this country supposed to do with them all?”
“You don’t talk about ‘them’ as if they’re real people,” Cyril admonished.
“They’re real as sin! But just because they’re ‘people’ doesn’t mean I’m required to like having them here!”
“I’m ashamed of you. I’ve never known you to be so selfish.” Cyril had always been one of those types—why was it always men?—who was big-hearted in relation to strangers, but often pitiless with people he knew.
“Biologically, we have to be selfish to survive,” Kay said. “Blindly altruistic cultures would die out. And what’s the purpose of a country if not to protect its people? To put the interest of citizens above the interest of outsiders? Otherwise citizenship is meaningless. If the rights of inhabitants are put on a par with the rights of everyone else in the world, there is no country.”
“The purpose of a country,” Cyril said, eyes narrowed, “especially this country, is to preserve a set of values. To which the beggar-thy-neighbour policies you’re advocating are anathema.”
“So to save Britain—which according to you means rescuing our sucker values—we have to destroy it.”
“I would rather die with integrity than thrive as a savage.”
Kay arose from the table so quickly that her chair fell backwards. “You are barking! That’s the kind of empty armchair aphorism which . . . which . . . which is fatuous, and amounts to a kind of preening. What’s going on right now all over Europe is real, not a page torn from a book of lofty political philosophy, and your response is to flatter yourself. Because we’re both over a hundred bleeding years old, and it’s getting dangerous out there!”
“Understandably. Many of these asylum seekers are desperate, and they’ll do anything to feed their children.”
“Uh-huh. And what if they thumped me over the head? To feed their children?”
“I would be sorry,” Cyril said with elaborate condescension, “but I would still be able to contextualize your misfortune.”
“I ask you: is there any limit? In your mind, is there any limit to the number of visitors this country should let in—five million, ten million, fifty million? Or is it all the-more-the-merrier to you?”
“The numbers have been grossly exaggerated,” Cyril said coldly. “I cannot emphasize my concern strongly enough. I fear you’ve been contaminated by ugly, bigoted propaganda, and that’s what’s dangerous.”
* * *
Cyril was quite right about the rise of prejudice. To the horror of most Britons, who in truth had always cared more for fairness and decency than for disciplined supermarket lines, vigilante groups multiplied. From fishing vessels, these ruffians took pot-shots at overloaded dinghies in the Channel. They beat up the undefended with cricket bats and set fire to tented encampments. When not explaining why the sudden deluge of migration was all the audience’s fault, the BBC spent the abundance of its coverage of “The Great Flood” bewailing these hideous far-right attacks in ghastly detail. What few minutes remained to Newsnight thereafter were lavished on poignant stories of individual suffering and persecution amongst the new arrivals. They were gay, from countries where homosexuality was illegal. They were transgender and denied transition surgery. They were fleeing mandatory conscription, or they’d dared voice opposition to totalitarian regimes and had narrowly survived attempts on their lives. They had escaped from endless, vicious territorial wars. Most commonly, of course, they had trekked from villages that had no water and no food, having often lost family members to starvation and poor health care. The portraits were unfailingly sympathetic, and every single one of the supplicants the corporation interviewed seemed deserving of what any human being should rightly expect: safety, sustenance, and shelter. Obviously, anyone who argued that these lovely people should be turned away was a monster.
Unencumbered by this high regard for civility amongst the British mainstream, in the end the newcomers had the advantage over the violent outliers on the home team, first due to the ruthlessness of their determination to find “a better life,” and soon due to their sheer numbers—whatever those were, as the Home Office had long ago stopped even pretending to keep track, and the Home Secretary had abandoned her cabinet post and absconded, it was rumoured, to the Hebrides. For despite repeated reports that the surge had peaked, massive caravans of pedestrians, bicycles, burrows, camels, jalopies, and overloaded coaches continued to form to Europe’s south, stretching for miles into the distance in drone footage.
Further contributing to the festivities, the anti-climate-change Extinction Rebellion, once so popular amongst affluent young white Britons, had merged with the antinomian No Lives Matter movement to become “Extinction!” full stop. Gathering a fearsome strength, the faction urged a pagan embrace of the very apocalypse that the original eco-activists had aimed to prevent. Regarding themselves as
sharing common cause with the asylum seekers, these young people weren’t pummelling immigrants or torching encampments. They were smashing anything that smacked of a hoary old civilization that had had its day, and the targets of their arson were larger than tents—like the Houses of Parliament. According to Simon and Hayley, the Wilkinsons’ now-teenage great-grandchildren had joined the anarchists and were out marauding across London all night long. The UK having bred the disaffected punk scene, it made sense that the country would also give birth to an antisocial movement far less decorative and middle-class (for Britain no longer had a middle class), which quickly spread to the continent. Once the restoration of Notre Dame was finally completed for a second time, within a fortnight a rabble of young white Frenchmen in Extinction! T-shirts burnt the cathedral to cinders.
* * *
“We’ve no need for six bedrooms. In a way it’s fair.” Cyril’s stock social justice had grown lacklustre, and he pitched the platitudes in a mocking minor key.
“I’m sick of you telling me I have to learn to share, like some toddler,” Kay whispered hoarsely. “I hate having these people in our house.”
They were holed up in the loft, to which the homeowners had been banished by a good thirty visitors who had co-opted the rooms below.
“At least Simon tried to evict them,” Kay added.
“Bab, it’s hard for us to get our heads round it, but Simon is seventy-five. The display of loyalty was terribly touching, but banging on the door and making empty threats about ringing the police—what police?—simply put him at risk. Even most of the adults downstairs are less than half his age. He’s lucky they merely laughed at him. It could have been much worse.”
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