Convenience Big Store: Are we heading for a 1970s-style meltdown?

31 August, 2021

In the headlines

Taliban zealots posed with a British bobby's helmet and an American state trooper's hat at the police training HQ in Kabul yesterday, showing they are in command of the country western powers have abandoned. It's "war's bitter end", says The Independent's front page. Police scuffled with protestors this morning as officials dragged Geronimo the alpaca from his Gloucestershire farmyard home to be put down, ending hopes of a stay of execution. Defra has denied planning to tax disposable nappies as part of the fight against single-use plastics. "The story is much like a bulging nappy," one raging government insider told the Mail – "full of s***".

Comment of the day

A Tory poster in the run-up to the 1979 election. Chris Ware/Keystone/Getty Images

Are we heading for a 1970s-style meltdown?

Britain is at a turning point, says Liam Halligan in The Daily Telegraph, with frightening echoes of the 1970s. Inflation is rising, government debt spiralling. Shelves are empty and workers backed by "stroppy trade unions" are demanding higher wages. It's worth remembering where all this led last time: the Winter of Discontent, when soaring prices, rampant strike action and the breakdown of vital public services sparked a radical political reset. The difference is, Labour was in charge last time and the reset was embodied by Margaret Thatcher. But it should remind Boris Johnson just how quickly the political and economic tide can shift, and the electorate's patience can snap.

Unions aren't so militant or powerful now, but throughout the pandemic the increasingly strident teaching and medical unions have pushed to "dictate" government policy. The UK's biggest union, Unite, has just elected the "preferred choice of Labour's Trotskyist fringe". Most worrying, the budget deficit this Conservative government is running makes the Labour ministers of the 1970s look like "paragons of virtue". There's no sign the PM understands the need to get public finances under control. Instead, the Tory top brass have convinced themselves they can carry on printing cash indefinitely. Covid made this profligacy inevitable. Post-lockdown, it has to stop.

A clandestine mission to save Afghan lives

President Biden pledged to get Americans and their Afghan allies out of a crumbling Kabul, say Bing West and Paul Wolfowitz in The Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, his self-imposed deadline means many of those to whom he made that promise will be left to the tender mercies of the Taliban after evacuation flights end. To make amends, Biden should authorise "clandestine exfiltrations", lending "manpower, money and congressional buy-in" to the off-the-books rescue operations already under way. Dozens of US veterans have volunteered to rescue their trapped countrymen and the Afghans who fought with them. Frustrated "that our own government didn't do this," one volunteer told ABC News, "we did what we should do, as Americans".

Gripping accounts are emerging of the "Pineapple Express", an entirely unofficial rescue operation that has saved more than 500 at-risk Afghans by spiriting them into Kabul airport. A network of volunteers around the world use GPS to plan routes in real time, often involving sewers or Taliban-held streets, guiding field operatives in Kabul via the encrypted messaging app Signal. There will be many who still need saving weeks and months from now, despite these heroic volunteer efforts. "The president needs to do more to keep his word."

Inside politics

The word in Whitehall is that the Department for International Trade has the code name "Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V", because it copies and pastes existing trade arrangements into new post-Brexit deals.

Life

An "apocalyptic" hailstorm hit Dolce & Gabbana's men's fashion show in Venice last night, says Luke Leitch in Vogue, forcing the celebrity-packed audience to flee as hailstones the size of golf balls fell from the sky. "I felt like the last woman on the Titanic," said reality TV star Kris Jenner. Her daughter, Kourtney Kardashian, was less worried: "I happened to have an umbrella." At the women's show the previous evening, 400 of the world's super-rich watched celebrity offspring parade the catwalk, including Christian Bale's daughter Emmeline and Heidi Klum's lookalike 17-year-old daughter Leni.

Tomorrow's world

A Glasgow club is trialling a system that generates energy from the body heat of its sweaty customers. Power will be stored in 150-metre boreholes beneath the venue, SWG3, and can be used when required. The project is part of preparations for the COP26 climate summit, which will take place in Glasgow in November. It should save 120 tonnes of CO₂ a year.

On the money

The price of wool is now so low that farmers are burning it, says The Times. It's worth as little as 20p-30p a kilo, which doesn't cover the cost of shearing. Hundreds of thousands of tonnes are going to waste.

Snapshot

On the way out

Leaded petrol, which the UN says has been eradicated after Algeria stopped using it in July. Toxic lead was added to petrol from the 1920s until the 1970s to make engines run better, says the BBC, despite it being linked to strokes, heart disease, cancer and brain development in children.

Snapshot answer

It's the remains of a bronze battering ram once attached to a Roman trireme and used to smash into enemy vessels. It was found this summer off the western coast of Sicily, site of the battle of Egadi in 241BC, when the Romans defeated the Carthaginians (whose empire spanned what is now North Africa), according to Italian news agency Ansa. Archaeologists say the Carthaginian battering rams were inferior to those of the Romans, which bear a still-legible inscription saying they were first-rate.