We must pull ourselves out of our current malaise if we are to say we can live, and live well
This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Perhaps it’s because a young Charles Dickens took the minutes of my church’s Vestry meetings, or perhaps because our government, sitting Scrooge-like in its offices, has gifted its people with eye-watering tax hikes for Christmas, but I feel the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come knocking at the door.
Follow this ghost as it takes us to two winter holiday destinations: Venice and Dubai. Across the Alps we fly with our ghost, to the canals of Venice. As Wordsworth put it in his poem “On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic”:
Once did She hold the gorgeous east in fee;
And was the safeguard of the west: the worth
Of Venice did not fall below her birth,
Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.
Beautiful, shimmering, romantic — dead. She was once a regional superpower, with an empire that dotted the Eastern Mediterranean. By 1330 Venice was three times the size of London. She was at the forefront of the global economy for centuries and now … her carcass, the feast of tourists.
Venice didn’t have to end up a decaying museum. A series of bad decisions took her there. Decisions to nationalise its trading fleet, to tax its traders, to create a golden elite which was impossible to break into — all of these played a part, as did the republic resting on its laurels and not realising it needed to move fast as new worlds were discovered and technology developed.
And now we hear the ghost whisper: Britain, this could be your future: a museum, where the only way we make money is when richer, more dynamic people from abroad come and take photographs of themselves in front of structures built by Britons who once knew how to thrive. How long will it be before some Wordsworth of the future pens lines like this about us?
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reached its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is passed away.
And now we are whisked away, across the Mediterranean Sea, across the wastes of desert, until we come to glittering Dubai. Vibrant, fast-paced, rich. In 50 years it has grown from a fishing village of 40,000 to a metropolis of over 3.3 million people. The scope and pace of its building means that fully one fifth of all the cranes in the world are working in Dubai.
Dubai’s metro was built in four years; London’s Crossrail took well over a decade
For two decades Britain has refused to make a decision either way on whether to expand Heathrow Airport. Dubai International Airport expanded, in just 18 months, from 60 million to 90 million passengers — and now they’re building a whole new airport, which will be able to handle 160 million passengers.
Dubai metro was finished in under four years — within budget. London’s Crossrail took well over a decade, was massively over budget, and isn’t fully finished. HS2 is … well, the less said the better.
And the Ghost of Christmas Future starts whispering in our ear. This too is a vision of what you — and we — might become. Grow fast, grow rich, leave our torpor behind. But what do we leave behind with it?
It’s easy to build very quickly and efficiently if you don’t have to worry about the safety of your workers. Dubai operates in that labour grey zone where workers have their passports taken away and basic freedoms removed for the duration of what would once have been called “indentured service”.
No property rights, no employment rights, no income tax: the world is good if you are rich. Hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens are perfectly content to enjoy that life.
The ghost points across the smiling faces in the gleaming malls. This is one of the possible futures Britain has as well. We flatter ourselves if we think we could not allow an authoritarian regime to forget our ancient rights and liberties, to use and abuse temporary workers from poorer nations to get work done at a speed we tell ourselves we would not tolerate for our compatriots.
The ghost whispers, if Britain remains sclerotic, if it offers its young people nothing but failed housing targets and growthless wages, what is the chance that the next generation will look approvingly at countries like Dubai?
The ghost brings us home. If we don’t pull out of our current course soon, we will make the Venetian transformation from superpower to historic venue in a depressingly short space of time.
If we do pull out of it, we could very easily find ourselves in a dystopian alternative where everything runs well, but we have sold those liberties which are our birthright.
But in the Christmas Carol none of the ghosts’ fictions came true. Scrooge changed, and changed for good. If within our democratic system we are able to bring ourselves back from the brink, we might be able, in a fiercely competitive and increasingly hostile world, to say that we can live and live well.
To live, and live well? May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us, every one!
