Picture this. It is 2052. A young woman sits alone in her high-rise home. Corrosive rain lashes her only window. That window, designed like the porthole on a ship, is sealed tight against the elements. It is smeared with the grimy residue of toxic fumes.

Air-cabs whizz past, just a few inches from the glass, but there is no chance of a collision. Their velocities and trajectories are calculated to the millimetre and the microsecond. These vehicles are all self-driven: Uber gave up on human drivers decades ago. 

The temperature in her tiny apartment is approaching forty degrees, but she cannot afford to run the air-conditioning. It is stifling.

In the distance, massive chimneys belch out clouds of choking smoke. The grey streets below are already a few feet deep in rainwater. They stretch out as far as the eye can see. It’s at least fifteen years since this view was last troubled by the city’s final remaining patches of green. This is England, in early Spring. The nation is resigned to its fate. The planet is way past caring.

Her room is furnished with a single reclining armchair, which can also stretch out to serve as a bed. A cubicle in the corner services her sanitary needs. Kitchen facilities are built into the opposite wall. 

She rarely leaves the apartment: food and other essential goods are delivered by drone. She works from a virtual terminal. The efficiency of its operational interface is enhanced by implants in her skull.

The entire wall in front of her comprises a multimedia 3D screen. The images flick past at the speed of thought. They alternate between erotic melodramas, juvenile fantasies, superhero adventures, garish advertisements, serial killer shockumentaries, car porn, and ultra-violent video games. There are no news stations. They are no longer considered socially beneficial, commercially viable or politically convenient. 

Each time she switches between channels on the screen, her brain’s synapses experience a rush of dopamine. Like most such digital users, she does so many times each minute. The avatars of Zuckerspace trace grotesque patterns across her imagination’s retina. Welcome to the marvels of the mega-multi-metaverse.

In the rare moments she allows herself pause to reflect on her situation, she likes to imagine herself something of an amateur historian. Though it is almost impossible to access the records of the disastrous third decade of the century, her parents had on many occasions recounted to her the tales of how they had lived their lives through those times. Their words are engraved upon her memory. She guards those stories closely like the most precious of gems. She doesn’t know if she will ever have the opportunity to pass them on. But she knows when it all went wrong. 

It remains a well-known fact that things really started to fall apart during the early 2020s. There was the climate crisis, of course, and the pandemic, and the resurgence of armed conflict across the industrialized world. There were, inevitably, the corrupt and incompetent governments to blame too. It was a period of media convergence, a process which saw an unprecedented concentration of the ownership of sources of public knowledge and information. It was also the era of what some later chroniclers would come to call the apotheosis of the ignoramus.

Few of the parvenu vulgarians of that age were much worse than a British politician called Nadine Dorries. In September 2021, she had been appointed by her country’s Prime Minister into her role as the UK’s Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport – known as the Culture Secretary for short. She was described at that time by a former editor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper as ‘the most conspicuously uncultured holder of her office since its creation’. 

The judgment of history would not differ so wildly from that of the present day. There are not many outside the inner circles in the upper echelons of her own party who would judge her more sympathetically. She has not generally enjoyed the admiration of her contemporaries.

Nadine Dorries has always given the impression of being outstandingly anti-intellectual, even in the context of a government led by a man who spouts gibberish about cartoon pigs and who appears to think that an ability to quote Latin clichés represents the height of cerebral prowess – a government whose perspective was once famously epitomized by the declaration of one of its most senior members that ‘the people of this country have had enough of experts’. 

This is an administration whose former head of ethics received a police fine in April 2022 for having attended an unlawful government party during lockdown – and one whose chief henchman (the monstrous anachronism known as Jacob Rees-Mogg) this month asserted that his Prime Minister had not lied to parliament about attending such parties, but had instead simply been given the ‘wrong information’ about the illicit social gatherings in which he had taken part. That Prime Minister last week received a police fine for breaking lockdown rules – as did both his Chancellor and his wife.

This is a government whose Chancellor's own multimillionaire wife (the wife of the chief minister responsible for the UK’s fiscal policy) admitted this month that she held non-domiciled status in order to avoid paying British taxes on her overseas wealth. This took place in the same week that caps on domestic energy prices were raised, and tax rises imposed by her husband hit the pay packets of ordinary workers already reeling from increases in the cost of living not seen for decades.

It is a government whose energy strategy, published earlier this month, performed a volte-face on its previous commitments to renewable power production, under pressure from its own backbench parliamentarians’ ill-informed prejudices against affordable onshore wind farms. It is a gang of lowbrow louts who appear to consider the electorate a bunch of imbeciles. Theirs is a pig-headed arrogance born out of a mind-numbing degree of hubris, ignorance and stupidity. They are often characterized in what remains of the free media as a bunch of clowns.

The Prime Minister himself rose to fame on the back of a series of mildly amusing appearances on a TV news quiz a quarter of a century ago. Ms. Dorries has also had something of a checkered history in the world of light entertainment. In 2012, she was suspended from her own parliamentary party for taking an unauthorized leave of absence to appear on a reality show filmed in the Australian jungle – a location from which she was swiftly exiled by the viewers’ votes. Two years later, she managed to accrue no money whatsoever for her nominated charity on a celebrity edition of a popular game show, but nevertheless pocketed the £3,800 ($4,956) appearance fee for herself. In an administration of philistines and fools, she rules the roost as the queen of the yahoos.

In February, Nadine Dorries visited Saudi Arabia; in March, her boss Mr. Johnson also did so. In between those two PR coups, the Saudi regime provoked international outrage when it chose to execute 81 of its prisoners in a single day.

Ms. Dorries has meanwhile demonstrated her penchant for rabble-rousing rhetoric, like a cut-price, trumped-up version of Margaret Thatcher – and has lately turned her sights on those institutions of British broadcasting considered most hostile to her own party’s interests. In January, she announced that the level of the national broadcaster’s funding would be frozen for the next two years, and that, when that corporation’s current licensing arrangement expires at the end of 2027, it would not be renewed. As the Daily Mail’s headline put it – with undisguised glee – the Culture Secretary had proclaimed that ‘it’s over for the BBC’. 

In doing so, Ms. Dorries did not endear herself to those traditionalists within her own party, who – although often incensed by what they condemn as its political bias – nevertheless relish that corporation’s output of nature, cultural and entertainment programming. Her stance would however certainly have pleased the Prime Minister, who has in recent years turned against the broadcasting organization which first spawned him and then spurned him. Like Donald Trump, there seems something simultaneously Oedipal and Machiavellian in the prodigal Mr. Johnson’s animosity towards those media platforms which provided the momentum for his elevation to high office.

Dorries went on to suggest that the corporation might follow a subscription model like that fostered by such commercial providers as the multinational streaming giant Netflix. Earlier this month, she made the same observation about Britain’s Channel 4, while announcing her plans for its privatization. Channel 4 is a state-owned, terrestrial, public-service broadcaster, with a reputation for controversial and incisive documentary filmmaking and for investing in the production of critically and popularly successful cinema. Its sale would doubtless garner much-needed funds, while blunting a particular thorn in the government’s side.

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Yet, despite the Culture Secretary’s insistence, the example of Netflix is neither particularly pertinent nor helpful here. Netflix offers entertainment content certainly, including some original drama and documentary releases, alongside shows bought from other programme-makers, but it does not provide the range of programming offered by national broadcasters: global news and sports coverage; original current affairs and educational content; governmental, political and charity broadcasts; serious social, cultural and scientific documentaries; topical debates and talk shows. Most significantly, it offers no live broadcasting at all. It doesn’t even make its own game shows.

In fact, in addition to providing free online access to current broadcast content, the UK’s public broadcasters already collaborate on a Netflix-style streaming service called BritBox, one which offers an extensive archive of entertainment programming alongside some exclusive new content. However, this platform attracts only around 730,000 UK subscribers – or about three percent of the number of households which hold TV licenses. It neither offers the revenues necessary to sustain the country’s terrestrial broadcasters nor provides the range of content essential to their audiences. Having lost £61 million ($79.56 million) last year, the platform is currently in the process of restructuring and rebranding. 

Disney Plus has six times the number of UK subscribers drawn to BritBox; Netflix has nearly twenty times that number. Such online subscription services provide their viewers with precisely what they want, and what they know. They do little to enlarge or to challenge their perspectives. Their algorithms offer us more of what we like, more of the same old familiar junk. They entertain and comfort us, but they do little to inform or educate. They don’t want to disturb their audiences, nor – perish the thought – force them to think.

Two decades ago, the growth of satellite and cable channels in the UK resulted in significant reductions in the quality of commercial programming, because individual channels’ budgets dwindled, as a finite source of advertising revenues suddenly had to be divided between more and more different TV companies. In the intervening years, large portions of those funds have drifted from television towards Google and Facebook. At the same time, subscription services have emerged, in attempts to maintain decent income streams for small-screen productions. The resulting financial windfall afforded a wealth of higher calibre programming for their well-heeled audiences: quality content for those who could pay for it. But, since then, this model has become a victim of its own success.

In recent times, these subscription services have proliferated, their growth and spread exponentially accelerated by a renewed demand for heart-warming home entertainment prompted by the Covid-19 crisis. This has resulted in diminishing returns for the audiences of those services. Each content producer wants to become a content provider, as they bid to exploit the perceived value of their media properties and franchises. 

It used, for example, to be the case that a viewer could get all the Star Trek and Star Wars content they might want directly from Netflix. These days, though, they would also have to subscribe to Disney, Paramount and Prime to access all their favourite shows. Today’s science fiction fans can expect to get a lot fewer CGI bangs for their bucks. 

Last month it was reported that, in the face of escalating competition, Netflix’s share price had dropped more than fifty per cent down from its November high. This is because the market has been flooded with a host of digital publishers, even as that market’s spending power has radically shrunk.

Nadine Dorries’s plans will do nothing to boost the UK’s TV industries or to enhance the value that viewers get for their money. Indeed, her policies will simply exacerbate the country’s ongoing cost-of-living crisis. In effect, people will have to start paying for services which they’ve previously received for free. It may therefore seem rather hard to understand why she would want to do this. 

One reason might simply be a taste for retribution. Like the premier to whom she relentlessly pledges her allegiance, she seems to know how to bear a grudge.

At the end of January, Boris Johnson had faced parliament to respond to the initial findings of a government inquiry which had observed that the blurred lines of leadership in Downing Street had created a culture of poor professional conduct. This had led to repeated breaches of his own administration’s social distancing rules during times of national lockdown. On that occasion, the Prime Minister had rashly hit back against calls for his resignation by claiming that the Leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition had been complicit in a decision not to bring criminal charges against a notorious pedophile. Mr. Johnson had made this allegation against the advice of his senior aides. They had counselled against him saying so because it was entirely false.

Later that day, this concern was put to Nadine Dorries by a Channel 4 reporter: ‘Boris Johnson said something that was untrue. He misled the house today.’ In a performance that seemed fantastically inept even by her own standards, Ms. Dorries had maintained that she didn’t ‘know the details’ but that ‘the Prime Minister tells the truth’. The following week, she gave an even more extraordinarily awkward interview to a BBC journalist, in which she refused to say whether she had spoken with the Prime Minister in the previous 24 hours or what they had spoken about.

It appears that she believes that a demonstration of desperate loyalty, combined with a stubborn refusal to accept hard facts, and a tendency to repeat her own version of reality until an interviewer grows bored and goes away, should be sufficient to compensate for her own stupendously incoherent ignorance. 

This is, after all, a fallback strategy which has somehow, for years, sustained the course of her political career. Hers, some might say, is the unquestioning sycophancy of a dull lackey who has achieved her position only through a culture of cronyism prevalent across an administration characterized by dishonesty and rank inanity. She is one of the bluntest of the remarkably blunt instruments in Mr. Johnson’s toolbox of a team.

And so, she has chosen now to turn her wrath against broadcasters less than supportive of her professional prestige. Ms. Dorries might however be warned that if she declares war on every British news organization that has made her look stupid, she may end up fighting her battles on a lot of different fronts.

In seeking to undermine the ethos of diversity which underpins public service broadcasting, Nadine Dorries, and the government she serves, have been clear in their intention to silence any voices which they deem to oppose their own conservative values. Their mantra of privatization and commercialization seems determined to ensure that right-wing monied interests allied to their own positions rule the country’s airwaves. 

The control of Britain’s broadcast media has in this way begun to shift into the hands of like-minded associates of its government. The emphasis of their programming moves away from news, current affairs, live debate, and investigative journalism, and towards the pleasures of populist entertainment. This diminishing of the potential of the denizens of the so-called Fourth Estate to question and challenge executive, legislative and judicial powers may threaten to undermine the foundations of British democracy itself. 

We do not have to approve the editorial stance of a media organization to appreciate that progressive democracy is kept alive by the coexistence in the public sphere of a variety of contrasting political perspectives. But, with fewer forces left to check the decisions of an increasingly erratic administration, the kinds of environmental, economic, social, and public health crises which have plagued the UK through the start of the 2020s might look set to become more common.

Under these conditions, the options for the fate of this nation are coming to appear somewhat limited. Indeed, things are starting to look distinctly dystopian – if, that is, we manage to avoid a fully blown apocalypse before the year is out.

So, finally, then, we might once more scroll forward thirty years – back to April 2052 again. The figure we have identified as the embodiment of the nation’s future still sits and waits in her tiny cell. Outside, the storms of global catastrophe continue to rage. She has little idea of the world beyond her window: no news penetrates the shell of her contracted world. 

She flicks between the channels, the multiple platforms of social media and escapist entertainment to which she – like everyone else – subscribes, and to which she, in doing so, must devote a large part of her meagre income. They all seem somehow the same. 

She flips from the new series of Young Sarek to reruns of The Wookie Diaries. Her last few credits click down to zero, none left for this evening’s meal. She sighs, uninterested. It would only be standard rations, after all. Gruel and water, watery gruel. Nothing like the TV dinners her immersive screen likes to advertise. Ah, well: she wasn’t very hungry anyway.

This is the last of England. The steaming rain batters upon the windowpane like a thought nagging at the back of her mind.

‘You dimwit, Dorries’, she hisses, through clenched teeth. ‘All this is down to you’.