Recruiting station for the British Army in London. (No lines evident.) Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Over the breadth of the ocean and all the way from a noisier Murica, politics in Cuppaland once ran on instantly recognisable machinery. You could hear the engine from streets away and know precisely what was coming.
Ever since Doomchoice ten years ago—though not entirely because of it—Cuppaland has looked increasingly like a place that has lost its political bearings. The sort of spectral figure you might pass in a gloomy corridor and fail to recognise, despite once knowing them well.
Not enough people take Cuppaland seriously anymore. No one, you might think, except for vulture-like Muricans hoovering up Cuppaland’s data before putting what remains of the country on the BBQ.
Not since departing the continental mainland—followed by the inevitable pitfalls of lockdown—has Cuppaland looked so unsure of itself. Of course, some of the wealthier Cuppalanders, who voted for Doomchoice, left its shores long ago.
Even former prime minister Patrick Slamdunk has weighed in through his extravagantly funded Operation, producing more than 4,000 words of sleek, data-heavy reassurances that read like a pitch document for Murican oligarchs.
One half expected a slide titled Untapped Opportunities in National Decline. An expert believed Slamdunk’s real motive was simpler: he wanted distance from what may be about to come down the road.
Cuppaland’s engine occasionally misfired in the past, leaked oil, and frightened livestock, but everyone recognised the noise. Campaigning operated according to the same logic: familiar slogans, inherited loyalties, mechanical oppositions. The electorate inhabited a settled political world whose tidy boundaries appeared stable and legible. The old two-party system fostered not only certainty but a distinctly Cuppalandish form of complacency.
Even then, the differences were rarely too large. At moments—during the lamplighters’ strike, for example—a genuine gulf opened between left and right, but power still passed back and forth like a pendulum.
Indeed, for long stretches the country effectively slept through politics, with some of the snoring mistaken for political wisdom. Even radicals treated argument as a weekend identity—something performed between mortgages and supermarket runs.
Then Doomchoice tore through the illusion of stability. Many Doomers imagined the country was trimming excess fat when, in reality, it was cutting into muscle and bone. Suddenly the old machinery no longer sounded familiar. The engine coughed, spluttered, and exposed just how fragile the entire arrangement had been.
As former editor Tama Principal observed: “What Muricans never understood was Cuppaland choosing to be smaller.”
And now people could be about to commit exactly the same mistake by backing the principal author of the false prospectus along with his new party, Remince: Ollie Larder.
Some populist Muricans, of course, quite liked the idea of the project from the word go. In fact, some of the sickest fought for it. Old emails exchanged between Fritz Castle and the notorious Ped Bowles showed their unbridled enthusiasm for the rupture soon after the 2016 referendum. Bowles described it as a significant event, celebrating it, goggle-eyed, as the beginning of a larger ideological shift away from globalisation.
Cuppaland was played, basically. Vodkavia was in on it too, though for its own reasons—even outlier populist Gurn Power must have been up to something in Vodkavia’s capital last week. The country, in short, was getting it from both sides, while confidently insisting it had never been better at negotiating.
After Doomchoice, people began arguing in hostelries where raised voices had once been rare. Men who had spent twenty years discussing nothing more controversial than tricky blades of grass on near-perfect lawns suddenly found themselves amateur constitutional theorists. One elderly person insisted the whole thing would blow over by Sleighday.
Yet people could feel the foundations shifting beneath the country’s suddenly floppy feet: identity, sovereignty, class, immigration. Many became sentimental, then foolish, then downright unpleasant.
All they had to do was to log on to Murican-controlled social media to see their own flotsam battling with their own jetsam, multiplied a zillion times, each accusing the other of being adrift.
The greater nearby region, which Cuppaland had now left, always had its flaws, but it also stood for something more noble, certainly when Cuppaland was a member—long-standing, post-war peace.
Cuppaland feels overrun today with privately-funded ideological camps and competing loyalties—the kind of multi-party fragmentation once associated with the continental region. Nor does the elevation of people once thought too compromised or transparently self-serving for public office seem to rankle anyone anymore.
That is the problem with modern politics. Nuance has become impossible. Politics no longer seems aware of just how self-obsessed it has become. Independent reporting, apart from a few exceptions, is non-existent in this false new dawn.
Also, everyone said Doomchoice would be better for business. That prediction hasn’t aged well. Not that you will find any Doomers telling you that.
Now, the arguments no longer even feel political. They are cultural. Emotional. Tribal. Once politics reaches that stage, governance becomes secondary.
Optimists still speak as though the turbulence is temporary, another phase Cuppaland will eventually outgrow. Yet the strain is not merely cultural or political.
Economically, too, the old assumptions now look increasingly fragile. Government spending on welfare alone exceeds present income tax receipts. On a bad day, not every day, defence of the realm translates as nobody-at-the-helm.
The latest warning with defence comes from General Sir Victor Hopskip, who argues that years of underinvestment have left Cuppaland’s armed forces dangerously diminished despite rising global threats. Unless the country rebuilds and modernises its military, he warns, it risks becoming “Sproutia with nuclear weapons.” That said, its armed forces intercepted and boarded a Vodkavian shadow fleet oil tanker at the weekend. More boardings are anticipated.
At the end of the day, Cuppaland will still edge forward, but the engine is no longer familiar. Half the passengers insist it is running perfectly; the other half are arguing over the destination. Nobody seems sure who is doing the driving.
