BE READY … FOR THE BLEEDING OBVIOUS

The British government, in its infinite wisdom and with all the urgency of a man discovering that the kettle has been left on, has launched something called the Be Ready campaign. One imagines the Cabinet Office, that citadel of quiet despair, stirring itself at last from its customary torpor to issue a solemn directive: the citizenry must now prepare for emergencies. Not the emergencies of the past—those vulgar, noisy affairs involving bombs or actual fighting—but the more refined modern variety: a power cut, a spot of bad weather, or the internet going on the blink for an afternoon. In other words, Tuesday.

The website, beready.campaign.gov.uk, is a masterpiece of the bureaucratic sublime. It instructs the householder to assemble a modest hoard of non-perishable food, bottled water, and the sort of batteries that have not been manufactured since the last Labour government. One is to manage, if the lights go out, for a heroic three days. Three days! The same period, one notes, that the average British family already spends waiting for a plumber, a GP appointment, or a coherent statement from any minister on any subject whatever. The campaign’s great innovation is to suggest that this familiar national condition might, on occasion, be caused by something other than incompetence.

There is a checklist, of course. There is always a checklist. Sign up for the Priority Services Register, so that the water company can more efficiently fail to notice you when the pipes freeze. Keep a torch. Keep a radio that does not require the grid. Keep a sense of humour, though that last item is nowhere listed, perhaps because the authors of the document have never encountered one. The whole enterprise is framed as a bold alignment with our European neighbours—France, Ireland, the Netherlands—where, we are told, such advice is simply part of everyday life. One pictures the sturdy Dutchman, upon rising, checking his emergency tinned beans before cycling to work through the carefully managed floods. The Frenchman, between strikes, topping up his mineral water. The Irishman, ever practical, ensuring the whiskey is within reach. Britain, late to the party as usual, now arrives waving a laminated sheet and a slightly apologetic expression.

What is being prepared for, exactly? Severe weather, cyber attacks, the temporary interruption of essential services. In short, the ordinary weather of modern existence. The government, having spent years ensuring that the electricity grid is a delicate tissue of good intentions and Chinese components, the water companies are private monopolies with the civic instincts of a pirate, and the digital infrastructure is one ransomware note away from silence, now turns to the public and says, with perfect gravity: you might want to have some biscuits in the cupboard. It is rather like a man who has spent the evening sawing through the legs of the dining table and then, as it collapses, advising the guests that they should perhaps remain seated in a braced position.

The satire, as it always inevitably does, writes itself, which is fortunate, because the campaign’s authors appear to have been too busy drafting checklists to notice the comedy of their own position. A nation that cannot reliably keep the trains running, the hospitals staffed, or the prisons unoccupied by the same faces is now earnestly instructing its citizens on the finer points of household continuity planning. Be ready, the government says. Ready for what? For the government itself, one suspects. For the slow, polite, thoroughly documented failure of systems that were once supposed to work without the citizen having to keep emergency rations against their collapse.

The campaign is to last three years. Three years of gentle reminders, social-media posts, radio advertisements aimed at the particularly vulnerable (families with young children, the elderly, people who use food banks—groups the state has already done so much to enlarge). One can already hear the advertisements in the mind’s ear: a reassuring voice explaining that, should the lights fail, one need not panic, provided one has followed the checklist. Panic, after all, is the exclusive prerogative of officialdom. The rest of us are merely to be ready.

There is a touching faith here in the power of advice. The British public, long accustomed to being told that everything is under control right up until the moment it is not, is now invited to participate in its own resilience. Stock the cupboard. Sign the form. Volunteer, if you must. The state, having largely retreated from the business of actually providing resilience, will content itself with distributing leaflets about it. It is the administrative equivalent of a doctor who, upon diagnosing a patient with a broken leg, hands him a pamphlet on the importance of walking carefully.

One detects, beneath the cheerful practicality, a faint note of Cold War nostalgia. There was a time when the government issued Protect and Survive booklets advising the populace on how to paint the windows white and hide under the stairs while the world ended. Those documents at least possessed a certain tragic grandeur. The current effort is more modest: hide under the stairs with a tin of beans and a wind-up radio tuned to whatever remains of the BBC, waiting for the power to return or the next ministerial statement, whichever is the less probable. The nuclear winter has been replaced by the possibility of a slightly longer than usual Tuesday afternoon.

And so the campaign rolls out, a three-year exercise in stating the obvious with the full apparatus of the modern state. Households will be encouraged. Charities will be consulted. Advertising will be placed. Somewhere in Whitehall a junior official will be promoted for having thought of the Priority Services Register. Meanwhile the rest of us, in the time-honoured British fashion, will continue as before: slightly damp, mildly inconvenienced, and, when the lights eventually flicker, reaching not for the official checklist, but for the nearest bottle of something stronger than water.

THE CAPTCHA OF CIVILISATION

The modern world, we are solemnly informed, is a triumph of convenience. One has only to observe the average citizen attempting to withdraw twenty pounds or purchase a cheese sandwich to appreciate the full magnificence of this claim. Where once a simple transaction required little more than a human being, a scrap of paper and a mutual understanding that the paper represented something of value, the same modest ambition now demands a small digital opera of passwords last recalled in a previous geological epoch, authentication codes that arrive precisely after the app has locked itself in a fit of pique, and a captcha contest in which one must identify every blurred bicycle with the solemnity of a wartime aircraft spotter. The chatbot, when finally summoned, assures one that it understands one’s frustration. 

It does not, of course. Understanding is not among its subroutines. Polite dismissal is. Buying lunch once involved the exchange of money for food in the presence of another person. That arrangement, though primitive, possessed a certain clarity. Today the same modest hunger frequently requires a stable Wi-Fi signal, a QR code that expired forty-seven seconds earlier, two-factor authentication, and a telephone whose battery has declined to one per cent while an algorithm decides whether one’s face is sufficiently human to be allowed to pay for its own sandwich. The face, it should be noted, belongs to the same person who has been wearing it without incident for several decades. The algorithm remains unconvinced. Progress, we are told, consists in submitting to this ritual of self-doubt before one may eat.

There was a time when losing one’s keys resulted in the inconvenience of being locked out of one’s house. The modern equivalent is more refined. One may now be locked out of one’s own telephone because a password has been forgotten or because the device, after prolonged and intimate acquaintance with its owner’s physiognomy, has developed doubts about the authenticity of the face presented to it. The telephone, having been granted the power to recognise its master, exercises that power with the capriciousness of a minor deity. The owner is left standing in the street, staring at a darkened screen, contemplating the philosophical implications of being rejected by a piece of glass and aluminium that contains, among other things, photographs of his children and the only record of his bank balance.

Navigation, once a matter of asking a stranger for directions and receiving an answer of greater or lesser accuracy, has been replaced by the blue dot. One stares at this blue dot until the signal expires, at which point one discovers that one has no idea which way is north. The satellite navigation system, for its part, would like to know one’s precise location for the rest of eternity in exchange for the privilege of being occasionally wrong. The stranger in the street has been rendered obsolete; the algorithm has not yet learned manners. Customer service has undergone a similar elevation. Where once there stood a person capable of answering a specific question, there now exists a vast FAQ delivered by a robot that has never seen the product in question. The exchange concludes with the inevitable inquiry, “Was this helpful?”, followed by a survey about the survey concerning the standard of customer service. The queue, in the old days, contained human beings. The chatbot contains a script and an almost supernatural incapacity to address the particular. 

One is left with the sensation of having been processed rather than assisted. We have traded paper maps for telephones that require a signal, paper tickets for applications that crash at the precise moment one reaches the barrier, and paper books for subscriptions that evaporate the instant a company “updates its terms.” Meanwhile the countryside is steadily paved with data centres so that an algorithm may generate an image of a cat wearing a tiny hat. One continues, nevertheless, to receive hosepipe bans after four consecutive sunny days, even as those same data centres consume water with the enthusiasm of a desert caravan. The irony is not lost on the algorithm, for the simple reason that the algorithm does not notice irony.

Friendship itself has been quietly reorganised. Social life now consists largely of a group chat in which no one has suggested the pub since March. The elderly, wishing merely to consult a doctor, require an adult child, a login credential and a working knowledge of information technology. Banks close their doors. General practitioners retreat behind applications. Parking, menus, council tax, pensions and the electricity bill all demand another code, another verification, another demonstration that one is not a robot attempting to settle one’s own heating account. The cumulative effect is a population that is less free, more thoroughly tracked, constantly interrupted, and still late because the parking application has crashed for want of a reliable signal in the street.

And yet, after all this, one may take comfort in the knowledge that one correctly identified the online traffic lights in a captcha grid and thereby proved, to the satisfaction of an unseen machine, that one is human. Progress, apparently, consists in repeatedly establishing this elementary fact to entities that themselves possess no humanity at all. Clive James might have observed that civilisation advances by increasing the number of things one must prove before one is permitted to live. On present evidence, he would not have been far wrong.

NOT IN MY NAME, ROLY-POLY

There comes a moment in the life of any self-respecting nation when its leaders, having exhausted the usual repertoire of excuses for incompetence, discover that nothing quite concentrates the public mind like the prospect of sending other people’s sons to be blown to pieces. Britain appears to have reached that moment with the quiet efficiency of a man discovering a forgotten bottle of sherry and deciding it will do for breakfast. 

The decision, we are told in the more elevated tones of Whitehall, has already been taken somewhere in the digestive tract of the British establishment: direct conflict with Russia is on the cards. The only remaining task is to frighten the rest of us into regarding this as either a jolly good idea or, at the very least, the sort of weather one simply has to put up with.

It is the old march to 1914, only this time the brass bands have been replaced by solemn briefings and the recruiting posters feature fewer moustaches and more PowerPoint slides. Then, as now, a surprising number of those who once called themselves the left will discover an unexpected fondness for the national colours. Patriotism, it turns out, is the last refuge of the progressive who has run out of progressive things to say. 

They will go along to get along, muttering about solidarity while the generals, the arms manufacturers and the perennial products of Eton prepare to play their favourite game: the one in which young men from the housing estates and the schemes are invited to demonstrate their civic virtue by becoming pawns.

These young men, it must be conceded, have been admirably prepared for the role. Looking out from their estates upon a future that consists largely of the absence of one, they present the authorities with a ready supply of willing volunteers—or, if willingness proves insufficient, of young men who can be persuaded that refusal is somehow unpatriotic. Conscription, whether formal or the softer kind that arrives by way of economic desperation and relentless messaging, has always relied on this convenient coincidence of hopelessness and hierarchy. The system that has created far more problems than it could ever solve now finds itself in need of a war to keep the lid on. 

Eduardo Galeano put it with characteristic economy: the marketplace of fear requires a steady supply of monsters. Putin’s Russia has been cast in the role with all the subtlety of a pantomime villain. Once upon a time parents warned naughty children that the bogeyman would come; now the same service is performed by politicians who assure us the Russians are coming unless we do as we are told.

The enemy without, of course, is useful chiefly for the control it offers within. It is not Moscow that truly keeps the establishment awake at night so much as the low, persistent murmur of domestic discontent. War fever has the great advantage of turning that murmur into a more manageable roar of martial enthusiasm. 

We have been here before. They lied to us about Yugoslavia. They lied to us about Iraq. They lied to us about Libya. They lied to us about Syria. The pattern is so consistent that one begins to suspect it is less a series of unfortunate errors than a governing principle. To believe the current version of events requires a capacity for selective amnesia that would be impressive in a goldfish.

Siegfried Sassoon, who knew something about the difference between the recruiting office and the trench, described war as the hell where youth and laughter go. The observation has not aged. The fight that matters now is the one that prevents the youth of this generation from being packed off into the same hell that claimed the youth of his. 

Conscription—whether by legal instrument or by the quieter coercion of narrative and necessity—is the mechanism by which that packing is achieved. It takes young men who have already been short-changed by the economy and invites them to settle the remaining debt with their lives. The generals will speak of duty; the manufacturers will speak of readiness; the politicians will speak of inevitability. The young men themselves will be expected to speak very little at all.

There is a certain dry comedy in watching a political class that can scarcely organise a reliable train service suddenly discover the moral clarity required for continental war. The comedy, however, is of the sort that ends with someone else paying the bill. Never again is not a slogan for the history books; it is a practical instruction for the present. 

The young men on the estates and the schemes have already been offered a future of no future. They should not be asked to improve upon that offer by dying for it.