The Great British Bunk Off How the British summer holidays offer the worst of all worlds Aug 20th 2026 August in England is a strange affair. Offices are half-empty but the cities themselves are not. Parks are strewn with the working-age, lazing in the sun; bars fill from the early afternoon. On a warm Friday, anyone hoping for a dip at Canary Wharf’s new outdoor pool is out of luck. Every session is rammed with working-age adults enjoying Britain’s new Mediterranean climate. The Great British Bunk Off has begun. Britain does not shut down over summer. There is no equivalent of the grandes vacances in France during the height of summer or Norway’s Fellesferie when the entire country disappears for most of July. The closest Britain comes is “holibobs”—a week or two in Europe or Cornwall. Yet for the rest of August, while their peers in France and Germany are away from
their desks, Britain’s holibourgeoisie are stuck in purgatory, neither truly at work nor at rest. All that results is an epidemic of skiving and shirking. It is a British malaise. Britons are inveterate liars when it comes to how much they work. A decade ago statisticians found that a big chunk of Britain’s hourly productivity gap with France was due to Britons vastly overstating how many hours they did. Heat makes them only more deceitful. During summer, about half of British workers confess they clock off early or take extended lunch breaks, according to a survey by Dayforce, an hr- software firm. And who can blame them? Productive work becomes close to impossible in summer. Co-ordination falls apart. Any request is met with a flurry of out- of-office emails. Some professions such as mps and judges are Augustocrats able to take the whole month off. Schools shut so teachers can enjoy six weeks off. This has a knock-on impact. Four in ten working parents combine working from home with child care, according to the Trades Union Congress, a federation of unions. Arriving emails compete for attention with screaming six-year-olds. The result? More bunking off. Partly it is culture struggling to keep up with the climate. Mild temperatures have long meant that Britons soldier on through the summer, while continental Europe hits the beach. Climate-change deniers are rare but summer deniers are common. Some still do not accept that Britain is a hot country, for a few months at least. And heat makes people listless: each degree above 20°C knocks about 2% off productivity. Almost all the European countries Britain compares itself with are more productive. If searching for a solution, start with Britain’s summer. It was not always this way. Britons once enjoyed a rigid separation between work and rest. During “wakes weeks” in the 19th and early 20th centuries, mills would fall silent for a break in summer and the inhabitants of Rochdale and Bury would descend en masse to Blackpool, a seaside resort in England’s chilly north-west. Today the lines are blurred. In Greater Manchester, mills that once contained looms are now filled with digital admen firing off emails that could be sent from anywhere. And so people do. Britons work from home for about 1.8
days per week, which is far more than in most European countries. In France the average is half that, according to one paper. Turning two days a week into four or five during August is easy. Maintaining motivation in a sweltering attic office while messages pile up is hard. In another sense it is a return. Before the Industrial Revolution, working patterns were ragged, argued the historian E.P. Thompson. One poet summed up the working week in 1639: “You know that Munday is Sundayes brother/Tuesday is such another/Wednesday you must go to Church and pray/Thursday is half-holiday/On Friday it is too late to begin to spin/The Saturday is half-holiday agen.” Strip out the trips to church and a 17th- century satire is a fair summary of August working in 2026. Employers can fight back. Technology that liberates workers from their commutes on Fridays can capture their holiday in August, points out Nick Bloom, an economist from Stanford. And so the front line of the fight between labour and capital is now the sun lounger rather than a factory floor. A leisurely backstroke at 3pm in Canary Wharf on a hot August weekday becomes a wet wildcat strike; a manager emailing an underling they know is on the beach is the equivalent of a Victorian mill owner fiddling the clocks to shorten a break. Who can bring peace to this struggle? Politicians show little interest. They once promised leisure: in 2017 Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party proposed four new bank holidays. Interest rates were zero and money was free, so why shouldn’t time be? Now no major party bothers. Labour’s sweeping Employment Rights Act had little to say on holidays; the government chickened out of a “right to switch off”, which would have made it harder for companies to contact staff out of hours. The Great British Bunk Off could be a solution rather than a scandal. Skiving is perhaps a necessary pressure valve for the labour market, allowing it to clear. If workers actually worked the hours, would companies be happy to offer a pay rise (plus a little extra for child care)? The Great British Bunk Off becomes a Soviet compromise: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
Joining the rest of Europe and embracing an actual shutdown would be a gamble, a bet that Parkinson’s law—the idea that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”—is a fundamental rule of economics, rather than a joke. Telling people to knuckle down is no more appealing. One cabinet minister suggests that if Britain wants to survive, it should consider a six-day week, rather than a four-day one. It would be a brave politician to pitch it. And so the Great British Bunk Off will remain a summer fixture, best observed from a berth at the lido or horizontally in a park. Good luck finding a spot.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/08/20/the-great-british-bunk-off
What happens when interceptor missiles run out The growing shortage is causing panic in Ukraine and elsewhere Aug 20th 2026 Residents of Kyiv are sleeping once again in overcrowded metro stations or in cars in underground garages. Above, the air war is turning into a turkey- shoot. Russia is bombarding the city with ever more ballistic and hypersonic missiles. Ukraine, which had previously thwarted most such attacks with Patriot anti-missile batteries, is “going Winchester”—military jargon for running out of ammunition. Ukraine’s plight is the most acute sign of the West’s shortage of interceptors. America’s depleted arsenal also helps explain why President Donald Trump has repeatedly retreated from threats to return to war with Iran. America’s allies are alarmed.
Switzerland expects its order of Patriots to be delayed by up to seven years. Taiwan worries that 102 ordered years ago will not arrive this year as scheduled. Lockheed Martin, which makes the most advanced version, the PAC-3 MSE, says it cannot guarantee delivery times to any foreign client, given the Pentagon’s power to divert them. Shortages of munitions are common in wartime, especially in big, attritional wars. Yet America is running short after a brief war against a medium-sized power. What if it had to fight mighty China? It would exhaust its interceptors within days, and be unable to use its bases in Japan and Guam, reckons a recent study by the Heritage Foundation, a think-tank in Washington. The proximate cause of the crisis is the prodigious use of interceptors by America and its Middle Eastern allies during Mr Trump’s war against Iran this year. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), another think-tank, thinks the Pentagon has fired nearly two-thirds of its pre-war stock of Patriots, as well as big shares of other interceptors (see chart). But the war merely hastened a reckoning that has been decades in the making. On both sides of the Atlantic defence industries work to a peacetime rhythm, though the drums of war have been beating faster. That
error has been compounded by the global proliferation of missiles, generals’ tendency to spend more on flashy weapons than on the munitions they consume, America’s dysfunctional budget process and complacency about American military supremacy in the air. The CSIS reckons it will take until 2029 to rebuild Patriot stocks to pre-war levels. That is assuming Congress approves Mr Trump’s gargantuan $1.5trn defence-budget request (a 50% increase on current spending), which is unlikely. Yet Patriots have become the prime system for point-defence—that is, to protect a specific target such as an air base—for 19 countries. “Patriot is a dinner-jacket solution: you don’t need it very often, but when you do, very little else will do,” explains Justin Bronk of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British think-tank. The hitch is that ballistic missiles are generally cheaper than the interceptors trying to hit them (PAC-3 MSE rounds costs $4m-5m apiece). Iran’s Shahed drones (or other unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs) are two orders of magnitude cheaper still. “If your adversary can field a one-way attack UAV for the price of a used car, and your answer is a surface-to-air missile that costs the same as a small apartment here in London, you’re losing the exchange even though you’re winning every single engagement,” Colonel Sabah Al Sabah, a Kuwaiti officer, argued at a recent RUSI event. What is more, defenders typically fire at least two interceptors at an incoming missile to improve the odds of success. Ukraine has improvised a system of layered defences. It has a world-class network to counter swarms of Russian drones. It can also take out most larger cruise missiles, thanks in part to European air-defence systems. But only the precious Patriots can take on Russia’s Iskander-M and Kinzhal ballistic missiles. In March Ukraine boasted of intercepting about 70% of ballistic missiles. In July it was 20%. In August the rate will be even more dire. On one night—August 5th—there were no interceptions. The air force has stopped issuing regular updates. Russia, taking note, is increasing missile production. With winter approaching, Ukraine has asked for at least 300 Patriot interceptors. Some countries still have them in reasonable numbers,