Who wants to save the UK?
Four sensible suggestions
THE STORY SO FAR: By late 2026, Britain was in crisis. Keir Starmer’s government had become so deeply unpopular that it posed an active and ongoing threat to public order. The Prime Minister couldn’t wobble his big gormless head in public without spontaneous lynch mobs forming in his vicinity. It wasn’t even clear exactly what he’d done wrong. People said he didn’t have any ideas. They said he didn’t care what people thought. But he’d had the idea of banning smoking in smoking areas, and when people said they didn’t like that idea he had the idea of not doing it. People didn’t like the idea of children watching online porn, so he’d had the idea of making everyone show a government ID before they could read the word ‘fuck’ on their phones. People were unhappy about immigration, so he’d given a speech about how immigration was actually bad, and then when some other people were unhappy about the speech he immediately walked it back. He had given people everything they wanted and they still couldn’t stand him. It was a mystery. Maybe they were upset about the rain, which had fallen in a grey wash over Britain for more than three hundred uninterrupted days, waterlogging the fields, backing up the sewers, slowly soaking through roofs and into people’s homes, until there wasn’t a patch of dry carpet in the entire country, until all the paintings in the Tate had gone streaky, until all the old incunabula in the British Library had dissolved into mush, until absolutely everyone from the bankers to the tramps was walking around in the faint whiff of damp and mildew. But surely people knew better than to blame him for the weather?
Whatever it was, the country was on the edge of something very dangerous. It looked like the next election would be a cataclysm, and rather than hand power over to the maniacs of the right and the imbeciles of the left, the Starmer government bravely decided that the only way to protect British democracy was to trim off all the inefficiencies and radically streamline it for the twenty-first century. Parliament was closed for good; the Palace of Westminster, with its leaking roofs and grotty corridors and general squalid disrepair, was sold off to the Qatar Investment Authority to be turned into a hotel called The Churchill. People were still free to form political parties if they wanted, but there wasn’t much point since nobody would be voting for any of them. Instead, the fate of the country would be chosen through a more familiar mechanism, more in keeping with the lifestyles and experiences of the UK public, and less tainted by the failures of the past: a glossy BBC competition show fronted by Claudia Winkleman.
Theme music. CLAUDIA WINKLEMAN hobbles out to tepid applause. The studio roof is leaking; here and there small dribbles of stagnant rainwater gently moisten the AUDIENCE, and frankly CLAUDIA doesn’t look fantastic either. These days her fringe covers half her nose. Mascara stripes the puffy cheeks of a waterlogged corpse. Exhausted monotone through her introduction. Twelve weeks ago, we started searching for ordinary Brits with brilliant, non-ideological solutions to help drag the country out of its economic, social, and meteorological doldrums. Tonight, it’s the final of Who Wants to Save the UK?, and there can only be one winner. We’ve already said goodbye to fan favourites like Andy (‘Just hang the lot of them’), Claire (‘Just make everything in the shops free’), and Dmitri (‘Just liberalise the planning system’), and now only four hopeful saviours remain. One of them will be granted total dictatorial power for three years. The other three will have to flee the country before they turn up on the proscription lists. That last bit’s a joke. Nobody in the AUDIENCE laughs.
She introduces the JUDGES. Lights spin and land on MARY BEARD, JEREMY CLARKSON, and KEIR STARMER, who’s about to resign his elected position for a permanent sinecure on reality TV. As soon as the spotlight falls on KEIR a collective howl of rage bursts out of the AUDIENCE. Out their seats, frothing like animals, scrabbling against the walls of KEIR’s bulletproof acrylic box, desperate to claw out his eyes. Hiss of tear gas. Small yelps of pain as the producers activate some of the more frenzied assailants’ shock collars. Riot police on horseback charge into the studio and stand around bellowing. Through all this KEIR winces the faint wince of a man who’s just found a hair in his salad. On with the show.
You know our finalists already. They are, in descending order of social status, HAMZA HARAMZADA, RORY FITZWEATHER-REGRETTABLE, FUCHSIA WALLOP, and SAM KRISS.
Mass deportations for the elderly
The first brilliant idea to save the UK comes from HAMZA HARAMZADA a 26-year-old finance lawyer from London. Pink shirt, shiny shoes, shiny forehead. A shiny smoothness everywhere about the man, the gloss of a CGI model awkwardly inserted into reality. He wants to send your granny to a war zone.
There is a dangerous population in this country. They are not like you and me. They don’t work. They don’t contribute to public finances. They hold views that many people consider totally foreign and incompatible with a democratic society, and their numbers are growing. I’m talking, of course, about old people. The old age dependency ratio, the ratio of retirement-age to working-age adults, is nearly a third; in 1960 it was only 18%. The share of the population that pay more in taxes than they collect in benefits is now under 50%. Over the Channel in France, the average retiree now earns more from their pension than the average worker from their salary, and we’re not far behind. The triple lock essentially guarantees that pensions will always grow faster than wages, as an increasingly narrow population of workers are forced to support an increasingly bloated population of idle old codgers. Every other problem in Britain is downstream of this issue. It’s why the government can’t fund decent services for working people. It’s why you can’t find a decent home to live in. It’s why the NHS is overstretched. Who gets ill? Not me. I’ve never been sick in my life. It’s them.
This is also why the social fabric of this country is falling apart. Since this problem first started emerging in the late twentieth century, every successive British government has tried to solve it by importing young people to make up the balance. Care workers, to look after the elderly and incontinent Brits, but also a constant flow of migrant labour in general, as many people as it takes to artificially overheat the economy so the state pensions keep getting paid. We’re living through the results of that now. But it didn’t even solve the problem. What will happen to these new arrivals in a few short decades? They’ll get old, and start collecting pensions themselves. There has to be another way.
I’m not suggesting that this country should abandon the promises it made to its older people. But we need to honour them in a cost-effective way. Instead of trying to arbitrage the international labour market by importing care workers, we could look after our elderly for a fraction of the current cost simply by deporting them all to the Third World.
Here is my vision. Right now, our former colonial subjects in Myanmar, who we all cherish, are undergoing a tragic civil war. They also have miles of gorgeous tropical beachfront, particularly in Rakhine State and Tanintharyi Division, that are almost totally undeveloped, and mostly under the control of local ethnic militia. It should be very easy to convince the Arakan Army or the Mon National Liberation Front, in return for some token recognition or military assistance, to cede a suitable patch of land for us. We’re building a retirement community. We can get Quinlan Terry to design it. I’m picturing Georgian-style townhouses, red phone boxes, old-fashioned pubs on every corner, family butchers, flags and bunting everywhere, and everything clean and tidy, a perfect metropolis-sized recreation of the lost Britain of long ago, but enjoying the balmy warmth of the Bay of Bengal. A haven from the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the average wage in Myanmar is under £3,000 a year; our new city will provide tens of thousands of good, well-paying jobs for local residents while drastically cutting costs for the British taxpayer.
But the benefits to Britain won’t just be financial. Yes, we’ll be able to drastically cut taxes once all the old people have been shipped off abroad, and yes, the sudden glut of properties on the market will massively reduce the cost of living. Most of all, though, we will reap the benefits of no longer being an old, grey, declining nation. This will be a young country again. The median age will drop from around 40 to about 32, which will make us younger than any time since 1960. Full of vigour, provocative new ideas. You’ll feel it walking down the street, the energy in the air. No more mawkish nostalgia. No more swollen red faces on Question Time. Our culture and politics will no longer be held hostage to the whims of an overinflated cohort of sentimental fogies. Maybe you can defer your deportation as long as you keep working, but frankly maybe you can’t. Maybe we’ll have secret police fanning through the shires, dragging your elderly relatives out of the hidden room you’ve built for them and marching them onto a one-way flight to the genocide zones. You won’t miss them really. You’ll be amazed at how little you’ll miss them once they’re gone.
Become the 29th state of India
The second contestant is 63-year-old RORY FITZWEATHER-REGRETTABLE, who used to write pop-history books and now mostly reviews overpriced hotels for airline magazines. Everything about the man is rumpled; shirt, jacket, corduroys, hair, smile. It’s a disguise. Something cold and glinting beneath. He wants to make sure Brexit really does mean Brexit.