What even the mighty German Luftwaffe could not achieve during the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940, an electrical substation in humble Hayes, west London, effectively managed yesterday: the closure of the skies over west London.
The explosion and subsequent fire at the substation shut down Heathrow, Britain’s gateway to the world and one of the world’s busiest airport hubs, a crossroad for travellers from all over the globe. As yet another symbol of ‘Broken Britain’, it doesn’t get more poignant than that.
It is not just a massive inconvenience for airline passengers, though it is certainly that. It is a global embarrassment for Britain, making headlines around the world damaging to our reputation.
Almost a quarter of a million passengers use the airport each day, flying on dozens of carriers to more than 230 destinations. You’d think we’d take good care of such a symbolic national asset, which earns the country billions every year.
Yet it turns out Heathrow was entirely dependent on this one old and creaking substation for its electricity. It had no other direct access to the National Grid, nor was there any adequate standby source of power. The explosion and fire appear to have disabled the back-up generator too. As an example of how not to plan and protect critical infrastructure it is truly world class.
We don’t yet know for sure if it was an accident or sabotage. But, accident or sabotage (and the latter looks increasingly unlikely), the lesson of Heathrow is the same: our critical infrastructure is in no shape to handle either. We are more vulnerable than we should be to our own mistakes and to those who would do us harm.
The erosion of our ability to do things well gathered pace under the 14 years of Conservative Party rule. The perception became widespread that, from intercity trains to potholes in the street, ‘nothing in Britain works’. Labour, quite rightly, made much of this in opposition. But there is no sign, now it’s in power, that it can do any better than the Tories.
Heathrow joins a long list of national embarrassments. But HS2 remains the poster child for a nation that can’t do big infrastructure. Conceived many years ago as a £33billion investment to connect London by high-speed train with the two most vibrant cities of the North (Manchester and Leeds), it will now cost closer to £100billion and go no further than Birmingham, which hardly seems worth the trouble. Oh, and it won’t be in service until the 2030s.
London’s Crossrail opened in 2022, three years late and £3.5billion over budget which, in today’s Broken Britain, counts as almost on time and on budget.
The fate of the Lower Thames Crossing is more typical. So far that’s gobbled up £800million of public funds in planning procedures alone. First mooted in 2009 – yes, 16 years ago – not a single shovel has yet hit the ground. Originally costed at £6billion, it’s budget has spiralled to £9billion – and more likely there will be no change from £14billion.
The Broken Britain charge sheet is long. Water companies in this environmentally-friendly age still discharge sewage into our rivers and sea shores in record amounts while paying their investors record dividends. Not much is ever done about it.
Politicians have presided over mass net migration for years (peaking recently at close to one million in one year) – yet we cannot build anything like enough homes for those already here, never mind the influx of newcomers.
Left to the tender mercies of London’s worst-ever, anti-car mayor, Sadiq Khan, the capital has become the most congested city in Europe, with parts of it in almost permanent gridlock. International investors tell me it is deterring them from setting up shop in London.
But it is not just infrastructure. No Brit can surely still harbour any illusions that the NHS is somehow the ‘envy of the world’. Other countries mainly study our health system to find out how not to do it.
We spend far more on the NHS than we’ve ever done before – a multi-billion-pound increase since the pandemic – yet waiting lists are at record levels (over 7million), A&E departments are so overwhelmed ambulances can queue for hours to deliver their patients and overall NHS productivity has plummeted by 20 per cent.
Yet even the sad state of the NHS is not the most notorious example of Broken Britain. That belongs to the fact that over 5million adults of working age – 13 per cent of the total – now live on out-of-work benefits.
Until that is properly addressed (and it wasn’t in last week’s government attempts at welfare reform), politicians can talk all they want about more economic growth. It won’t happen as long as the lost tax revenues and extra welfare spending incurred by this massive and growing army of welfare state recipients continues to drag the economy down.
Today, as a nation, we pay much more for a lot less, or even nothing – which might be the best description for Broken Britain, since it’s true not just for health and welfare but defence, police and most infrastructure investment too.
There’s a simple reason for all this: government now tries to do too much. And when it tries to do too much it ends up doing most things badly and nothing very well.
Big Government is very much back in fashion, the Thatcher-Reagan Revolution of the 1980s now in relentless retreat, as much under Right-wing as Left-wing governments.
Boris Johnson was every bit as much a Big Government PM as Gordon Brown or Keir Starmer. Donald Trump, for all the publicity surrounding Elon Musk’s supposed chain-sawing of federal spending, is a Big Government President. During his second term, annual federal budget deficits and the US national debt will continue to balloon, as they did in his first term.
Big Government is now ensconced in our national culture. Whenever there’s a problem, our default position is to demand ‘the Government must do something’.
BBC interviewers (as well as those on Sky, ITV and Channel 4 – but above all the BBC) are programmed to ask questions which demand, or at the very least imply, the need for more government spending, more state intervention.
It is the broadcasters’ universal solution to all our ills. I can’t remember when one of them last gently suggested the Government should perhaps spend a little less or even get out of the way to improve matters.
We have only ourselves to blame. Studio audiences whoop with delight whenever a politician promises to spend more, as if it was coming from their personal bank account when, in reality, it will come from the audiences’ bank accounts.
Despite all the evidence that therein lies madness, we persist in awarding multi-billion budgets to ministers (from the likes of Chris Grayling under the Tories to Angela Rayner today) you wouldn’t trust to run the proverbial whelk stall.
Until we come to our senses and insist government concentrates above all on doing what only government can do – and doing it well – perhaps we should not be surprised that a small substation can close the world’s most famous airport.
