Tradition And the Can't Do Attitude.

A common site in Britain is the derelict factory, or the factory now being used to house 'small businesses', or else the noddy houses or community centres gracing what was once producer's land.

It is another commonplace to hear the recitals from the liturgy of failure, that battle-cry of the defeated.
They talk of 'traditional' industries that went bust in the 60s, 70s, even the 80s in the case of state-looted mausoliums.
They all talk of the loss of this work as inevitable, as a 'historical process', as something that was bound to happen as 'we' realign our activities into the illusory 'post-industrial' economy(whatever the hell that is).

The fact is that most of these businesses fought valiantly to stay;but they were the first to be betrayed.
As it is for the law-abiding public today, so it was for the elite of world business, gathered in this nation, then.
They perished in the slaughter of virtue that this represented, and we that are left are living in a debt-fuelled fantasy world of shoddy goods made elsewhere by people for whom hard work is not something to fear.
No matter how much our leaders try to gloss things over, without industry we are charity cases without even the graciousness to admit it.

And what of society?
A people that used to work, to produce, are now expert at playing both sides of any rotten system,buying their prime's worth of happy house living to die in poverty, zero-sum cynicism where even our worldly effects won't outlast us, seeking ways to trick money out of any situation, like a gut digesting itself in a freak case of uncontrollable gastric juices.
And the productive that remain are regarded as fair game, the human sacrifice to bring comfort when the world begins to peek into this disgusting lair, this septic isle.