[britain near bankrupt] and the joy of the soviet union

Seeing as, this Monday morning, we're all into the hat tipping business, let me hat tip the Shrewd Mammal for presenting this:

So now, we implement the “Zimbabwe protocol”.

Hat tip to Guido & the UKLP blog

Aside from bailing out the banks with our money, it appears the government is about to run out of it so what do they do?

• repeal an act that has been in place for over 164 years
• release the Bank of England from it’s reporting obligations
• print more money

Predicted here, reported here, and detailed (??!!) here.

He covers the issue well and it needs no further comment from me, so let me move tangentially and tell you some stories from Russia about the Soviet days.

The people whose stories you'd give the most credence to were the grandparents, many of whom still hankered after the dead weight of the nanny state, on the grounds that everything was nominally free and one didn't have to think for oneself, which left one in a state of infantilization, whilst not delivering on the whole raison d'etre of that state in the first place.

The Eggs

Anyway, I was having lunch at one set of grandparents and the gf was telling me that they used to travel to Moscow overnight on the train to buy food and other goods, including eggs.

"And do you know, James," added the grandmother, "where they were produced in the first place?"

"No."

"Here. Right here." Both of them laughed at the incompetence of the creaky old "welfare' state.

The Denunciation

They wouldn't have dared laugh during Soviet times, as the story of Misha testifies. Misha told a tale of when he was in school. He apparently asked a question about the efficiency of state shops and one or two other choice topics, for which he was put in a spare room, until a local official arrived to "correct" his error.

Misha told me he was held there for four hours and still had to do the homework afterwards, on the lessons he'd missed. His mother did not fare as well.

There was a principle, in Soviet times, of Denunciation and all citizens were exhorted to turn in or officially denounce wrong thinking neighbours, especially teachers. Apparently this lady transgressed, was denounced by the mother of a pupil whom she'd offended and the whole time-wasting paraphernalia of due process got under way.

I understand the whole matter was shelved eventually and the documents were all stamped and filed. As long as the documents are filed, that was everything.

The general goods shop

Even when I arrived in Russia, some years after the Soviet times, things hadn't greatly altered in the state shops but a new type of entrepeneur was starting to open western style chains which were still a bit expensive, comparatively.

This was how it worked. You needed a new lock for your door, say. You took the bus, then tram, to the line of state shops and inside, the numbers of people were surprising in such a suburban corner of the city. The counters ran round three walls of the long, rectangular shop and behind them were maybe five different points, manned by two or three women with little hats, tunics and forbidding grimaces.

A lot has been made of this stereotype and to be fair, would you be smiling if you'd had to put up with customer scowls all day, every day, for little actual pay? So, to get this lock, you had to be savvy and know which queue. I got into the wrong queue and when I eventually made it to the top, was told, summarily, that those locks were "over there", with a wave of the hand.

Well, couldn't you possibly ...? Already she'd turned to the next customer behind me. There was nothing for it but to line up in the other queue. Very quickly, in post-Soviet days, you learnt the expresssion, "Kto poslyedni?" meaning, "Who's last in the line?" Then came the wait yet again.

At the top of the queue [and I've shortened this process for reader consumption], the woman stabbed a finger at the one example of the lock in the locked glass case but it wasn't the one I needed. She shrugged. I realized I had to take this one and as I was near the end of the process, I said, "Da."

She went over to the table behind her and started to fill out a chit, cme back and gave it to me.

"Where do I go?"

She waved in the general direction of the other end of the room and a kind old chap pointed me to the citadel, the glassed in holder of the moneys, the cashier, obscured behind a queue which stretched back to the entrance to the shop. Of course, mathematically, customers from five different points, descending on the one cashier, was always going to create a mega-queue.

It wasn't anyone's job to notice this, let alone comment on it. To report this inefficiency was more than your flat was worth.

So, some hour and twenty minutes after entering the store and with a perverse determination to complete this cursed exercise, I got to the cashier, paid, had the chit torn at one corner and joined the "collect" queue to get the lock.

Eventually I made it to the top again, she took the chit and scrutinized it, then went out the back. I could hear her rummaging round. She came back, if not apologetically, at least with less assertiveness and here was the one redeeming feature of the business. She had no right to have the item on display if it wasn't in stock. Rules are rules. She knew it might be sheeted home to her and as I'd been reasonable and was foreign, she let me have the other lock which was available and was at the same price.

Conclusions

What we had here was a centrally imposed, inflexible system, which a cowed and compliant population had long ago decided wasn't worth the consequences in opposing and instead, an air of resignation pervaded. Nothing was done to reform the system because that would have involved reporting one's misgivings to one's hierarchical superiors and those superiors could see that to their advantage.

People said nothing and kept their own counsel until one chink in the armour appeared in Gorbachev and then the floodgates opened.

Similarly, Brown is running out of money and even the IMF reportedly [don't quote me on this] warned him there was a cap to his assertions to the British people. No one can change the system because everyone is too frightened for his own job, with Christmas coming.

At this stage, people like bloggers and the MSM are still speaking out but look at the American situation where no one is commenting in the MSM on Obama's ineligibility. The expression "knowing which side the bread's buttered on" springs to mind.

Britain is not yet Soviet Russia but we are already at a stage where the sins of the Beloved Leader are officially forgiven and all sorts of excesses and inefficiencies of the centrally organized and mushrooming bureaucracy are lightly passed over, once the MSM and blogosphere have had their say. We're also seeing the beginnings of people being encouraged to grass on neighbours who fail to comply with legislation on, say, wheelie bins.

As in Soviet Russia, the system is bankrupt underneath the facade but unlike Soviet Russia, we are not moving to drop the discredited socialist system but are actually hell-bent on creating a new one.

It's just a question of time, tovarischii.