J G Ballard on London and the United Kingdom

One of the most prescient observers on London and the UK was the late J G Ballard who pointed to what he regarded as the state of crisis that 'England' was heading for, terming it in The Spectator and spiritually and culturally impoverished land.

One of his best essays in the New Statesman was written in 2005just before the General Election Now parliament is just another hypermarket . Ballard wrote devastatingly,

'Britain's per capita income is one of the lowest in western Europe. Without the largely foreign-owned City of London the whole country would be a suburb of Longbridge, retraining as an offshore call-centre servicing the Chinese super-economy.

What really kept me away from the polling booth was the sense that the rate of political change has been slowing since the early 1990s'.

A decayed monarchy-a "Ruritarian Charade- and the atrophied class system where the old middle class had been reduced to 'three button suited proles' working as corporate clones had reduced it to the scrapheap of history.

Ballard warned of Britain's obsession with a re-presented past which increasingly meant nothing, a point reinforced by Professor John Gray who saw that neoliberalism, flows of hot money from Saudi Arabia and China had created an unsustainable form of debt fuelled consumerism.

None of these changes could be tackled by the present political system, however, even if the will was there. I would like to see the Labour Party lead a full-scale assault on the English class system, which still amazes visitors to this country, but I know it will never happen.

Outside heritage London - not just Bloomsbury and St Paul's, but all those areas of the city dominated by a dinner-party culture - there are vast forgotten terrains where the greatest force for enlightenment is the nearest Ikea.

Out on the London perimeter, in the motorway towns and retail parks that are the real Britain today, everything is ruled by consumerism. The cash till and the Pin preside.

Consumerism defines people's lives, but, like sex with prostitutes, it demands special skills from the customer and there is no money-back guarantee.

The huge vacuum this creates may soon implode. The monarchy, the Church and politics have all faltered. The British monarchy is an afterthought of central Europe, the tale of a dysfunctional German family that destroyed itself in the supreme effort of trying to be English.

The Church of England has long been secularising itself from within, and even atheism is now tolerated of its bishops.

As for parliament and the ballot box, I fear that politics can no longer bring about the radical changes this country needs. It's surprising that this happened so quickly.

After I came to England in 1946 I found the professional middle class completely stunned by the huge changes brought in by the Attlee government - nationalisation, the health service, a crash programme of house-building, decent living standards for all.

The new barbarians were at the gates. Later, Harold Wilson at least made an effort to move Britain on from the radio-valve age, and refused to join the Vietnam tragedy. Margaret Thatcher, in her turn, challenged the outer limits of ideology and change, leaving Blair with little to do except sweep up after the storm.

But now politics has lost its will, and may even have reached its close, absorbed into consumerism and public relations. Perhaps elections and the ballot box are little more than a folkloric ritual, along with parliament itself.

Like university lecturers and psychiatrists, politicians may incidentally do some good, but their real loyalty is to themselves and their profession. The chief function of election campaigns is to convince us that politics and politicians are still important.

Real power has gone, migrating to the shopping malls and hypermarkets where we make the important decisions in our lives. Consumerism controls everything, and the ballot box defers to the cash counter.

The only escape from all this is probably out-and-out madness, and I expect the number of supermarket shootings and meaningless crimes to increase dramatically in the coming years. If anywhere, the future seems to lie with competing systems of psychopathology.

Gordon Brown gave the task of controlling inflation to the Bank of England, and perhaps our politicians should surrender more of their roles to better-qualified agencies.

Perhaps UK plc would thrive if assigned to the two companies that will decide our planet's future - Microsoft and the Disney Corporation. Tony Blair would at last feel completely at home.