When I left England in 1996, I had no e-mail address and no cellular phone, Tony Blair was yet to become prime minister, and Manchester United had just won the English premiership with youngsters Paul Scholes, David Beckham and Gary Neville.
Eleven years on, a Japanese diplomat in Tehran warned me London had become expensive and a British diplomat assured me there was a wider variety of food in supermarkets. Both were right.
Renting a one-bedroom flat in central London can easily be $1600 a month, and my municipality tax is another $200. A pretty average curry is $100 for two, and a Lebanese breakfast in Edgware Road can top $50.
Britain is unquestionably more affluent. The average income is £1800 ($3,600) a month, with living standards rising 2.3% a year since 1996. The over-50s have accumulated more wealth, largely from rising house values, than the combined GDP of the UK, Germany and France.
But the society has changed in more ugly ways as the result of technology, the decline of the family and even the political climate of the ‘war on terror’.
Western society has long considered itself a model for the rest of the world to follow. In the 1990s Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” proclaimed the universality of the West after the collapse of Soviet communism. Most English people seem still to believe this. Greater overseas travel has done little to challenge the assumption that other societies are inferior or backward.
Neither has the internet — the world’s virtual rubbish bin — stymied the culture of tourism. As technology has shrunk the world, the mainstream media has slashed its foreign news. Big stories like the Iraq war are reported by journalists good at drama but lacking any real knowledge of the country.
Even the good old BBC has replaced reporters like Mark Tully in India or Charles Wheeler in the US with aspiring celebrities who change countries every other year.
This is beyond the old British Foreign Office practice of moving staff before they “went native”. Today, all change is seen as improvement and the media merely follows the business trend.
Sandwiches and mobile phones sell, and each accounts for around a quarter of the shops on an average English high street. The marketing is aggressive, and even people on low incomes change their mobile every year.
While the variety of handsets and SIM tariffs is bewildering, an old-fashioned land-line is less of a money-spinner and so a low priority for suppliers.
I tried BT, the former state-owned company, who installed the line in my home many years ago. I spent 50 minutes trying BT’s free helpline from a street phone without an answer, and by e-mail could extract only a promise to call two weeks later.
Virgin, the all-dancing brand from Richard Branson, offers cable in my area, so I chose broadband, television with Sky Sports and a land-line at a basic of about $80 a month. The land-line was still not working four weeks later, and the broadband has slowed to the pace of Beirut dial-up on a bad day.
The Virgin ‘help line,’ unlike BT’s, is not free, and when I eventually got through, the person answering had an accent that suggested he hadn’t been long in the UK and was probably working for peanuts. He admitted he had received little training and wasn’t sure what could be done.
The business model is clear. Offer tasty bait to hook the customer. Resources go into attracting customers with glossy brochures, TV advertisements and ‘cheap’, introductory offers — rather than delivering a service once the customer has paid up.
The transport system is a similar mess. The cold, damp British weather makes an immediate attraction of cheap air travel to Europe and beyond — once you get through the airport and flight delays. But the rail and bus systems have fragmented into privatized, shabby chaos.
Before you travel, get some cash, and pray you don’t face any complications. Banks have massively cut staff, offering on-line and push-button telephone banking while reducing their branches to high-security kiosks fronted by ATM machines.
At all times be vigilant. The ‘war on terror’ has brought a fear that terrorists may have moved in next door, and I’ve been asked more times about my bag in London than I was in Iraq.
My friends tell me not to worry, that I should get out more, and that I will adjust in time. I dare not tell them how much I miss Tehran.
