https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2026/01/15/laughing-stock/
Among the many negative impacts of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as prime minister is the destruction of the UK’s industrial supply chains alongside its industrial memory. One reason why, for example, the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station – which was supposed to be supplying electricity this year – is still in a construction stage now measured in decades, is that at the start of the project nobody (of working age) in the UK knew how to construct a nuclear power station (the last nuclear power station was Sizewell B, which was built between 1987 and 1995) while most of the supply chain had been allowed to close. In comparison, China, Japan and South Korea – the world leaders in nuclear construction – measure build times in months… Japan’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Unit 6 holding the record for the fastest-built large-scale reactor, of just 39 months (3.25 years).

Nor is it just UK Nuclear power that suffers this predicament. The Starmer government’s pledge to build 300,000 new houses a year has already unravelled for the same reasons – a lack of skilled workers, an atrophied supply chain, and a shortage of credit as banks refuse to take on the risk of construction projects which may never turn a profit. And then, of course, there is the disaster which is HS2 – the failed attempt to build a high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham (which, in any case, makes no sense unless the line continued to Edinburgh).

It is in this light that we have to view the UK government’s latest iteration of jam tomorrow in the shape of a high-speed rail link between Birmingham and Manchester… which Chancellor Reeves says is definitely going to happen – although she seems to be referring to the long-delayed trans-Pennine upgrades connecting England’s northern cities rather than the high-speed link. And since neither Reeves nor her cabinet colleagues have a clue how to build a railway, we can dismiss the announcement as just another example of politicians mouthing empty words.

Thus far, the UK has only managed to construct 68 miles of high-speed rail – HS1 – between London and the Channel Tunnel. In the – not entirely likely – event that the first part of HS2 between London and Birmingham is ever completed, that will add another 140 miles. The additional route from Birmingham to Manchester will add another 88 miles… which would give the UK 296 miles of high-speed rail sometime in the second half of the twenty-first century. In comparison, China will have built 37,000 miles of high-speed rail by 2030… 28,000 miles since 2009 – the year the UK began the process of constructing HS2.

There is a more troubling dimension to this inability to build anything… at least on time and within budget. Not only does the UK lack the workforce and supply chains to construct new projects, but it increasingly lacks the means to maintain existing infrastructure. As the Institute of Civil Engineers reported last year:

“Vital parts of the transport network are ageing badly, the renewable energy revolution is putting the grid under strain and water scarcity is becoming ever more problematic in densely populated regions of the UK.”

While much of our predicament dates back to Thatcher’s economic vandalism in the 1980s, a good deal of the blame rests with the Cameron-Osborne government’s decision to cut spending on public services (including infrastructure) in the years after the 2008 crash – the real world practice of throwing the people under the bus in order to bail out the banks. It is not just engineering and construction jobs that disappear when these kinds of cuts are imposed. Apprenticeship and training schemes also disappear, as does the supply of equipment and materials. So that, more than a decade later, hardly anyone believes a government promise to get anything done anymore… and rightly so.

We are already a laughing stock in the eyes of those Asian states which can still construct and maintain their built environment. As our own infrastructure disintegrates before our eyes, the UK is increasingly unable to respond because decades of bad decisions and under-funding has left us lacking the wherewithal to do so.