Chaos in our skies, crumbling concrete in our schools: grim symptoms of a British disease | Will Hutton

A long-term lack of investment has left our infrastructure in pieces. Instead we are prey to dire fallout from events that should be within our control

Our national malaise is that nothing works and that the country is falling apart. Two recent episodes have captured the gloomy zeitgeist. On Monday, the national air traffic services (Nats), thrown into crisis by the input of a small amount of mismatching data, went down for several hours, spreading mayhem across Britain's skies, with 1,600 flights cancelled and many others delayed, and the lives of hundreds of thousands of returning holidaymakers disrupted. And on Thursday, days before the start of the new school year, we learned that more than 100 schools are to be closed, all or in part because of fears the light concrete with which they are made could collapse.

These disparate events have common roots: they underline the lack of system resilience of so much British infrastructure and the unwillingness to plan for unforseen contingencies, so that reactions to unexpected failures are ad hoc and on the hoof. And when things do go wrong, the processes for redress and compensation are feeble - in these cases, organised around minimising a duty of care to schoolchildren and parents, and to airlines and passengers. There is a complete lack of accountability. Be sure the same is true for so much else.

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