Britain's Chernobyl?

How bad will the fallout be?

The Labour Government’s immediate collapse in popularity, so soon after the election, is not entirely easy to explain. They weren’t hugely popular to start with, and they’ve seemingly come into power without any plans, while their deeply uninspiring leader seems to have no vision of how he sees the country. With the economy heading towards trouble, it feels like a 1970s-style crisis, but with lots of additional problems we didn’t have in the 70s. But the rapid loss of faith, around the time of the Southport riots, might suggest something deeper to do with public faith in institutions, in particular with politicians, police and the courts.

Not real footage, obviously. From the television series Chernobyl

This sense of suspicion about the system, and the people who run it, has perhaps only intensified these past two weeks, dominated by the delayed political fall-out over the authorities’ response to grooming gangs.

This was a state failure so momentous that one comparison being made is with Chernobyl, the catastrophic nuclear meltdown which exposed the deep rot inside the Soviet Union. This was a theme taken up this week on the Morgoth substack, the author of which wrote:

‘The immediate cause of the Chernobyl disaster was using graphite instead of boron for the tips of the rods that moderated the core. It was graphite instead of boron to reduce costs. The middle management of the USSR was under severe pressure to trade off safety to reduce costs because the USSR was economically strained due to ideological concerns. Within the system itself, both the employees at the power plant and the managerial bureaucrats were reluctant to acknowledge the calamity, and a game of “hot-potato” began, with each level of the system desperately trying to avoid accountability.

‘Later, at the top level, the USSR lied to the West German Government about the degree of radiation escaping, which meant the Germans sent robots whose circuits immediately melted upon contact with the outflow. This resulted in Soviet men being deployed upon the plant’s roof as “meat robots” to clean away graphite that wasn’t officially supposed to be there.