Everyone is talking about the problem. It’s just dawned on us that nobody is going to do anything about it.

A U.K. mood change

Chris Johns

Hemingway suggested bankruptcy is something that happens gradually at first and then all of a sudden. It’s a verbal description of a non-linear process, one that sees nothing much happen for a while and then catastrophe hits. Indeed, one version of all this is called catastrophe theory.

Many in the U.K. wonder if we have reached our point of bankruptcy. Not the financial sort - the U.K. is still solvent, but does face something of a liquidity problem.

Not the economic bankruptcy that is captured in dry statistics that tell a story of how far behind we are falling our neighbours. Increasingly, that’s more a matter of Britons simply travelling to countries like France, Germany, Ireland, Canada and Australia, and returning home with stories about how things seem so much better elsewhere.

It’s the sort of bankruptcy best described by the daily stories about how yet another part of the NHS has fallen over. Trains that don’t run at all, let alone on time. A railway system so dysfunctional that nobody knows who owns it. Ukraine’s railways have better efficiency stats than Britain’s.