Country in a crisis

WHEN a Polish friend set out by train from Cambridge to Edinburgh, he was astonished to be told, after completing 40 km of the journey, that no trains were going further north because of bad weather. Coming from a country where very cold weather in winter is normal, he was incredulous at the discovery that weather was bringing the rail network to a halt.

Sadly, in the months since the railway accident at Hatfield, north of London, we have become accustomed to an inadequate service as repairs and maintenance that should have been carried out on a rolling programme are tackled in crisis mode. Now we have been told by the Strategic Rail Authority that investment of o 60 billions over 10 years will be needed to modernise the railway system.

There has been another recent announcement that general practitioners - family doctors - who agree to continue working until the age of 65 will receive a "loyalty bonus" of o10,000, in an attempt to alleviate a scarcity. I have written recently

(January 14 ) about an injection of a large sum of money to help schools - one of a number of measures designed to cope with a serious shortage of teachers. The country suffers also from a dearth of police officers.

A report this month by the Chief Inspector of Prisons castigates the Prison Service for failure to tackle appalling conditions in Birmingham Prison, conditions which were severely criticised in 1998 and which have apparently got worse.

Each day there seem to be new examples of things that are going seriously wrong in Britain, and commentators in other countries are writing increasingly critically about our problems. On the current foot and mouth epidemic, for example, the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung described England as an "island of sick animals".

A writer in the Sydney Morning Herald declared after a two-week stay in England that "nothing in the damned country works". The Wall Street Journal described Britain as once more the sick man of Europe, where agriculture and the public services are in a state of near collapse, with the National Health Service "on life support", the railways and the "archaic" London underground grinding to a halt and schools in crisis.

It is not necessary to be an unperceptive optimist to argue that some of the comments and criticisms are extreme. Nevertheless, any

moderately perceptive observer is bound to recognise that many things are badly wrong. What is in some ways worse, we are reaching a position where we often expect things to go wrong.

The underlying cause of the United Kingdom's problems, it seems to me, is the fact that we have deep confusion about the principles by which we wish to operate our society.

The Wall Street Journal put its finger on it, commenting that Britain had not decided whether it wanted to be "a European-style welfare state, with government ensuring decent social services for all" or a "U.S.-style bastion of capitalism" with low taxes and private sector services of high quality.

For many years we have failed to invest adequately in our public services and infrastructure. Indeed, under Margaret Thatcher, public service was a dirty word, and the present Labour Government, either through belief or through fear of losing public support by taking a different view, has essentially put most of its emphasis on the private rather than the public sector, though there are signs that this may be changing as Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, specifically praises the dedication of people working in the public service.

Our politicians over the years have in effect encouraged us to believe that we can enjoy high-quality services without paying for them. Now that a succession of crises has demonstrated that many of the services are run down and inadequate, the politicians are still fearful of facing the electorate with the implications. Of the main political parties, only the Liberal Democrats, who have just finished their spring conference, have specifically declared that they will increase income tax to pay for educational improvements - and the party's showing in the opinion polls has been deteriorating.

If, however, we are going to do anything more than wring our collective hands at the preposterous failures which are now such a depressing feature of British life - and the incompetence which allows them to occur - we are going to have to face some serious ideological and philosophical issues. Patrice Claude, writing in the French newspaper Le Monde, commented that one never hears debates about ethics or morals in Britain, only about saving money, adding that it is no wonder the place is falling apart. It is an uncomfortable, but not wholly unfair, observation.

BILL KIRKMAN

The author is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. E-mail him at wpk1000@cam.ac.uk

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