Mark J

A shock is coming. A big one. It will not be shocking to you or me, but it will shake the politicians to their core because they're operating on a certain presumption of state capacity they have always taken for granted. For a long time, there's been a surprising amount of resilience in the system, so things have continued to function even when badly degraded. But a crunch time is coming. The national grid is looking ever more precarious. The armed forces are in a not-so-slow motion collapse. Inflation is rising, debt is rising, and the real economy is quietly imploding. Public morale is in the gutter. But there's a reason our prat of a prime minister is tinkering around the edges, and it's because in his pollyanna world, all is well. He's oblivious. He looks at his parliamentary colleagues and believes that things can only get better, and are in good hands. Unlike Starmer, he does not speak of fixing the fundamentals because he has no concept of what the fundamentals even are, let alone how badly broken they are. Starmer was unable to fix the foundations because doing so would have meant reversing every current operating assumption, which neither he nor his party were willing to do. Burnham, though, doesn't even think about what keeps the lights on, or what protects the nation. To him, it's all just one of those automatic certainties that just happens. I don't even get the impression he knows what government is for beyond being an all purpose welfare dispensary - to which all other concerns are subordinate. This is the only explanation for his chirpy optimism. That's why the looming collapse will catch him completely by surprise. There are no market indicators or warning signals in Burnham's world. He thinks that going around being a nice guy is all that it takes to govern, and the nicer you are, the better things get. His world is not our world. There is no intellectual or technical depth to the man. What you see really is all you get. I don't know what form the shock will take, or even when it arrives. I just see the national resilience sand timer running out fast. When that moment arrives Burnham will like Hitler, commanding panzer battalions that no longer exist into action. Maybe it'll be civil unrest. Maybe it'll be the national grid falling over. Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe it'll be a complete financial collapse. All we know for certain is that such a national cataclysm will happen because the competence to prevent it no longer exists, and the politicians are not alert to the possibilities. There are no adults in the room. We're on our own.