Bald & Bankrupt does Britain: First World Economic Decay Up Close in Scotland
Unfortunately Mr. Bald Wrongly Blames "Tory Austerity" for Britain's Decline, yet Decline has been Endemic and Trans-Partisan
For a few years I’ve been a fan, along with 4+ million other subscribers, of YouTuber “Bald and Bankrupt.”
He’s kind of a travel vlogger for depressed and forgotten locations.
His trips to Chernobyl, his visits to little Russian and Eastern European towns you’ve never heard of, are filled with great commentary, wit, a love for humanity, and usually a few insightful observations.
And obviously no one should get their history lessons from YouTube vloggers, but welcome to 2024.
I sent him a note at one point because he repeated the lie that the Gulf of Tonkin was completely fake and staged, which isn’t true. But it’s become an orthodox lie among the leftists who write our history books.
But Mr. Bald’s tours of the Soviet Union, and the rest of the world, are always well-done. He goes places no one would ever think to go, and sees genuinely interesting historical sites and places. He combines this with wit, and just the right amount of commentary and analysis to stay interesting. He also avoids being pigeonholed ideologically, which is to his advantage.
But his genre of video is definitely third world rundown post-industrial wastelands.
So it was a bit tongue-in-cheek for him to tour Britain’s forgotten cities.
And it was sad and terrifying to see what resulted. See it for yourself:
At its core, in the West, I believe this video captures better than any Claremont Institute white paper ever could or would: the actual political problem in the present and how it affects real people, especially as it relates to simple monetary policy and economics.
Driving around America can show you better than any policy paper the chronic problems that are happening. The country has become a very difficult place to get a job, find a good woman, and raise a family.
The most pedestrian of American dreams, the proverbial white picket fence house in the suburb, feels unattainable for most.
Every political system should be evaluated not by how it enriches the billionaires, but by how it empirically affects a working man trying to raise a family.
In his travels, perhaps not that bluntly or ideologically, but Mr. Bald makes that point: these places all have differing economic systems, monetary policies, currencies, markets, industries, but the kind of angst and depression among working folks is endemic worldwide.
The kind of social pressures creating Trump voters out of the collapse of American industry are creating discontent globally. Our unhappy overlords, endlessly prattling on about Electric Vehicles, Solar Panels, and Carbon Emissions, couldn’t care less about the people that Mr. Bald visits and speaks with, the people he humanizes.
And that’s because he avoids all the Potemkin villages of most political capitals, and the touristy locations built up for show.
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You can go to New Orleans’ French Quarter and not realize the abject poverty and incredible crime two blocks outside of the Quarter. You can go to Detroit and have a nice time at Comerica Park and at the Fox Theater, and not experience the actual reality of the city.
In Detroit they consider it a proud governmental program that they successfully tore down entire neighborhoods of homes.
![Detroit Blight Authority Builds Vacant Lots | Marron Institute Detroit Blight Authority Builds Vacant Lots | Marron Institute](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8ef9595-363a-4154-a257-4f2b71f07529_1024x446.jpeg)
The political problem of Detroit’s blight is so enormous that the city and county actually spend millions every year to tear down all the abandoned structures. They then build new condos to try and entice wanna-be urbanites to overlook the crime and social problems, and then try to turn the city’s massive wasted spaces into ‘urban farms’ as if the city’s problems could be solved by growing more cucumbers.
If the economic effects of the modern world’s insane economic policies become a political problem, they will get papered over. The system does not want you to notice its obvious mistakes and errors. This is where Mr. Bald shines: he brings you to these places and takes video of the real people who live in places that have been completely failed by its elites.
His videos are some of the most subversive political messaging possible because it is impossible to watch them and not come away with the conclusion that our current systems, and our current political elites, deserve a massive reckoning.
The actual impact of failed political policies are often hidden from easy review. The system would much rather spend a billion hiding its failures than to spend a million actually fixing systemic problems.
Case in point: the City of Detroit somehow encouraged Ford to rebuild the infamous Michigan Central Train Station for a billion dollars. Ford paid a billion to Detroit to solve a political eyesore that reminded everyone that Detroit is failing and never coming back.
Now one small icon of that permanent decline is hidden behind Ford’s fancy Potemkin Village.
This is due to the hidden power in every system that often has a major stake in preserving the status quo. The power of crime and poverty in assisting and enabling a political class is not often noted, but it is a feature and not a bug of these systems.
Every system should be assessed and gauged by how well it serves an honest middle-class man trying to raise a family. If that system rewards that man, it is good. If that system punishes and grinds that man down, it is bad.
There aren’t good terms or generally-accepted words for these overall trends and concepts yet, this grinding down of workers and working families. We’re all lost in meaningless abstractions, the mental playworld of ideology, economics, politics.
It is easy to lose sight of how these policies and politics practically play out.
This is where Mr. Bald further stands out, by highlighting the collapse of Port Glasgow, Scotland, which is slightly to the west of Glasgow, Scotland.
Glasgow’s most famous citizen, of course, is Scrooge McDuck.
Port Glasgow’s most famous citizen is… a bunch of Labour members of Parliament apparently.
Port Glasgow has been steadily declining in population. It was once a home to ship building, but now its last remaining shipbuilder makes ferries.
There is a visceral reaction to seeing the decline and collapse of Britain, this sentimental and romantic attachment to Empire and the respect it deserved.
Port Glasgow had 20,000 people in 1991.
In 2011, it had about 15,000 residents. So it lost 25% of its population in 20 years.
Just to get the partisan stuff out of the way, Britain has had both parties over this time period in control:
Scotland, for that matter, has always had SNP & Labour in control of its local and Parliament representation.
Port Glasgow is in the Inverclyde region, and as of the last local elections in 2022, has Labour in control. As they were previously in the previous election in 2017. And in 2012. And in 2007. And in 2003. And in 1999. And in 1995. And in 1994. And in 1992.
Since Port Glasgow was bustling with 20k people in 1991, to today when it is in serious struggle, Labour has been in power locally, and from 1997-2009, they were in power across the United Kingdom.
Either a) Labour has a hand in causing these problems, b) a disinterest in fixing them, or c) they cannot be fixed.
So if these problems were going to be fixed by a political process, they would have been by now.
If politics could solve this problem, one would think it would have been solved. Or if it were beneficial to solve the problem, the give-and-take of politics is not the cause of the decline.
If debt spending by party were the problem, if ‘austerity’ were the reason for the problem, then surely it would show the opposite of the following graph:
Governments are not engaged in real ‘austerity’ they just aren’t spending money on the people. Because they don’t need to, they have control over people because they have solid control over people’s minds and ideas. They don’t need to buy you off with bread and circuses because they can buy you off with other abstractions.
Every nation is busy spending a ton of money artificially inflating their currencies in order to fleece their country and enrich their elites.
So this all presents two issues: the practical politics of a situation like this, and the abstract economic questions of the matter.
The practical politics is that as long as the dominant party is in control, it cares not one whit whether you have a happy neighborhood or a thriving community. A cesspool is fine, as long as control is consolidated. The government is not going to subsidize the aesthetics of a region unless it has to.
In addition, on the left, depopulation is a clear priority. Now this might seem counter-intuitive with their general policy of open borders, but those two things work in tandem: bring in the voters you need to mitigate the voters you hate, and then once you have control over a jurisdiction, enact policies to encourage your marauding army to go invade another jurisdiction.
The beauty of this arrangement is that it operates naturally. Left-wing policies don’t work, and people generally desire to move towards places that are run by conservatives. The invading army then arrives, enjoys the place, and enjoys it so much they vote in left-wing politicians to more equitably distribute the well-run finances.
You can see this policy in action in the chart and map below:
On one level, one might say that it’s a good thing because it demonstrates that people vote with their feet and flee left-wing policies.
But that’s only half of the analysis of course: the power structure remains in those left-wing cesspools. They grow, if anything, stronger by the departure of those who were sensitive to money pressure. The policies will grow more stringent in the absence of voters who were upset by enacting failing economic policies.
Depopulation is the other half of the left’s open borders policies. It ensures dispersal of the voting bloc necessary to take power everywhere. If you allowed left-wing people to concentrate in cities, or in just LA and NYC, the uneven distribution would preclude the growth of their power.
Left-wing policies failing their populations is a feature, not a bug, of their agenda.
So, back to Scotland. The political question is really why a dominant political system would stop to bother with developing a place for its own sake.
If a political faction has control over an area, if they are entirely captured, would any government take the time to help their population in need?
A good American example of this is Detroit. Detroit is a failed city. Democrats have been in complete control of Michigan since 2022. Yet Detroit’s future looks the same as it did: bleak. I met with an economist working for the banks in the mid-2000s who said there was nothing stopping Detroit’s collapse and that, in time, it would be a small regional city with 30,000-40,000 people living in it. It’s destined to fail.
The economic question is why anyone would subsidize an area where few want to live, and whether the actual costs make it profitable for a place to be preserved, rehabilitated, etc. - in America it’s, generally speaking, going to cost $150/square foot to rehab an abandoned place. Generally speaking, the construction costs new are about… $150/square foot.
So if everything went right, you could rehab that place for the same price as building something new.
And do people actually want to live there?
Well, for the main part about the dilapidated apartments, Bald is standing roughly at the corner of Robert and Bruce streets in Port Glasgow, near the Clune Park Church, abandoned in 1997.
But quickly on Google Maps, you notice that the 2011 version of the area, and the 2022 version of the area, are very different.
Let’s look eastwards down Robert street from the corner of Robert and Bruce in 2011:
And now in August 2022:
So the property on the left had all its windows broken out sometime between 2011-2022.
The departure of the shipbuilding work was because, they say, the ships got so large they had to go elsewhere.
Even today, there is a 3 year backlog to make LNG container ships. So there’s plenty of demand for shipbuilding work, generally.
But Port Glasgow’s sole remaining shipbuilder, Ferguson Marine, only makes car ferries and tugs.
After a history of delays and disputes, the private owners relinquished control of the company to the Scottish government in 2019. So the government owns the one anchor employer in town, and they’re busy building ferries and delivering them chronically late.
Most LNG container ships are being built in China and South Korea and a few in South Carolina.
This is a city under control of the political power in control of the government, who owns the company that determines the fate of the area. Why isn’t this area thriving?
The consistent argument is that it’s the lack of deficit spending causing these problems.
Yet the consolidation of social and economic power to the cities is part of the issue.
The absolute despondency and depression left to the rural areas, the forgotten places, is part of it as well. There’s a part of the country the elites see and have to defend, and the mid-tier regions that no one bothers to remember. In America, our elites call these places the ‘flyover’ portions of the electorate. I would assume in Britain these are places not serviced by elite-favored high-speed rail.
The absolute disdain and disgust held by elites towards the lesser-thans, the perceived untermensch who are failing communities who ‘deserve to die’ as Kevin Williamson, formerly of National Review, once opined in 2016, or more recently the eugenic glee that Richard Hanania had when he found out about a 10-year old Indiana boy’s suicide after bullying, are representative samples of how the elites feel about the human cattle they oversee.
The elites want a smaller pasture to maintain, so they want to cull the herd.
Scotland is a land in decline. These trends are not inevitable. This is most obviously seen in the nation’s birthrates:
The trend lines basically match those of the United Kingdom:
The declining birthrates, probably a correlation to prosperity and wealth, indicate a society in decline.
Yet the relative prosperity, or lack thereof, of places like Port Glasgow would suggest that there should be higher birthrates there than elsewhere. But that’s unlikely to be the case.
Prosperity is pulling down national birthrates, but conversely, poverty isn’t raising them either.
If elites wanted a different outcome, one would assume they would push policies that promote a different outcome. Instead, they promote policies that reduce the record-low birthrates even further.
This isn’t about austerity. This is managed decline.
We live in nations that are being slowly turned into parks.
Technology does not develop to our benefit. Productivity gains do not raise your wages. This isn’t an accident, it’s the design.
Austerity is the excuse, managed decline is the policy.
You would think that, with fewer children, our societies would be richer than ever. That’s the lie we’ve been sold.
But even without the supposed inconvenience of children around, things are poorer than ever. People are more depressed than ever. Things are worse than ever.
Mr. Bald is looking at the right symptoms but identifying the wrong causes.
Emailed thoughts from a reader:
"This was a good post. I especially liked your punch back on Hanania. Fuck that clown."
Emailed thoughts from a reader:
"Given your points, and since it is clearly managed decline, then the central objective of any person or people is clear, defined and real: survival. Survival itself. This may sound simple, but it's actually, as it hits me, profound."