Britain Is Dead

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/04/27/britain-is-dead/

by barry-cotter • 3 years ago

37 33 3 years ago

Every decade or so, the UK finds itself in crisis. These are the moments that open up rare and brief periods of reflection on the decline of the country’s geopolitical relevance and of the British state. Then the gates close, the crisis diminishes, and an overpowered financial services sector—combined with the prestigious longevity of British institutions—cushions the downward trends until the next crisis. The British governing and commercial classes may well vampirically draw on financial and institutional soft power for at least another century. But the cumulative effect of these moments makes it increasingly difficult to deny the British elite’s profound inability to prevent national decline.
British institutions exert impressive amounts of soft power for a tiny island nation. One can think of the country as playing the role of an Italian city-state in the fourteenth century: it capitalizes on historic cultural prestige, educates the children of elites from its former empire, and serves as a playground for wealth and status games while not really producing anything of hard value.

panick21_• 3 years ago

Italian city states produced some of the best art and philosophy in history. They produced many other things of high craftsman ship that were valued way outside of Italy. I didn't just capitalize on historic cultural prestige.

Italian city states failed primarily because they were in a playground between much, much, much larger powers, namely, Austria, Spain and France.

jleyank• 3 years ago

This time the wound is self-inflicted. Several of the previous crises came with world turmoil started by others.

neovialogistics2• 3 years ago

Compare, for instance, the backgrounds of two elite class premiers: George W. Bush and David Cameron. Bush’s patrilineal great-grandfather Samuel P. Bush established the family’s political dominance through technical education and the management of a firm that manufactured steel railway parts.
In contrast, Cameron’s father, paternal grandfather, and great-grandfather were all Oxford-educated partners in the stockbroker’s firm Panmure Gordon & Co, while another Sir Ewen Cameron was chairman of HSBC. His maternal grandfather came from a family of minor titled gentry and military officers. The differentiating factor between the two major factions of the British elite was whether they derived rents from aristocratic land holdings or professional-class financial speculation. Neither built their fortunes on the industrial basis that enriched the Bush family and many of their American peers.

This needs expanding into a full journal article that addresses societal sector representation over time. My hunch says that most developed nations lie on a linear continuum (more elected officials with generational manufacturing backgrounds vs more elected officials with generational finance backgrounds) but I'm only somewhat familiar with political histories of the US, UK, Spain and Italy.

roenxi2• 3 years ago

There is a valuable lesson here from WWII. Even the winners lose. It is remarkable to look back and see how the Germans lost the war, had their state destroyed and still managed to take out the British Empire. If the British had lost WWII, they'd have ended suddenly and ignominiously. Being on the winning side, they've faced a relatively graceful decline into an international non-entity over 70 years. But at the end of the day their power was broken.

There are lessons here for the Americans - the US may reasonably expect to win any war it gets in to with Russia and China, but if it actually ends up fighting it could still end up shattered. There are no real winners if a fight escalates.

Incipient• 3 years ago

Generally war is a net zero endeavour, sure. I'm not sure if WW2 necessarily 'broke' English power? They were in decline before they, as the US is in decline now. War or no, the outcomes seem to be the same?

roenxi2• 3 years ago

Everyone everywhere is always in decline. Including the groups that go from strength to strength. The Byzantine Empire was in decline for more than a millennium.

The UK came out of WWII looking at the bleak ruins of a country. It was quite a bit worse than net-zero, they lost a lot of real wealth. To the point where India immediately discovered it had enough power to go their own way (a net win for the world at large, but still the proximate cause was the collapse of British strength leading to an implosion of the empire).

The lesson here is when you have a good thing going, provoking a big war will cause change and the good thing will go elsewhere. Keynes warned them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_t...

skissane6• 3 years ago

When Alexander the Great conquered Persia, he encouraged his generals to marry wives from Persian aristocratic families. He also conquered a small part of northern India (now part of Pakistan); no doubt if he had conquered more of it he would have extended the same policy to India. Can you imagine the British in their rule of India ever encouraging the sons and daughters of their leading families to court the children of the leading families of India? Which I think was part of why the British Empire failed - many ancient empires, conqueror and conquered mingled to the point that people forgot who was which. The British viewed themselves as superior and apart from their conquests, which prevented their conquests from coming to identify as “British”, in same way as many peoples conquered by ancient Rome came to see themselves as “Roman”. In the end, there was nothing to hold the Empire together.

polotics• 3 years ago

War has been a net negative the world over for all time. Please find me an example of net zero!

kaycey2022• 3 years ago

My takeaway is that noone knows why nations decline. People just grasp at straws trying to retrofit their theories to explain the past and present. To say that a country like the UK which produces products like the Raspberry Pi and companies like ARM, is having a "human capital problem that affects every layer of society" seems bizarre.

smitty1e• 3 years ago

My theory is that "nation" is so much synechdoche. That is, a symbol referring to the reality of a snapshot of a population.

The population sloshes about, a sea of people called a nation, but there is a continuous ebb and flow of greatness and depravity.

Continuity is the issue. A David begets a Solomon, and zenith takes a turn for nadir in Rehoboam.

Why? The struggle that made the David great is unknown to the Rehoboam. Decadence and collapse follow.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

csomar2• 3 years ago

It's not like the UK has become a third-world country. I think the comparison is relative to their past rather than an absolute one.

gsatic• 3 years ago

Thats the best our 3 inch chimp brains can do, in the face of complex ever changing systems. People have been saying the Post Office is dead for about 100 years now, yet number of post offices in the world havent declined.

onetimeusename• 3 years ago

Compare, for instance, the backgrounds of two elite class premiers: George W. Bush and David Cameron. Bush’s patrilineal great-grandfather Samuel P. Bush established the family’s political dominance through technical education and the management of a firm that manufactured steel railway parts.

In contrast, Cameron’s father, paternal grandfather, and great-grandfather were all Oxford-educated partners in the stockbroker’s firm Panmure Gordon & Co, while another Sir Ewen Cameron was chairman of HSBC.

That's just one president. I can scarcely think of any presidents of the US at all who have a familial connection to industrial manufacturing. Similarly, British Prime Ministers in the past 50 years have no connection to gentry besides Boris Johnson and David Cameron. Harold Wilson's father was a chemist and maybe that could be counted as a familial connection to manufacturing.

In effect, Britain didn’t have an incentive to chase development for survival, because it was the dominant power of early industrialization.

The industrial revolution started in the UK and a number of people who made a fortune were ennobled or given a knighthood, etc. The land holding noble is actually not very accurate. Most titles were given post 1800 even post 1850 when land holding was no longer the most profitable business.

The avenue into power for this synthetic class had for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries been the Oxford literae humaniores course in classical Greek and Latin, often supplemented by study for civil service exams focused on British constitutional history. These exams, both old and new, have produced a generalist administrative class with institutional and humanistic knowledge but little technical skill.

This is pretty typical for politicians to have humanities degrees. The degrees have changed over time but political sciences and law are common for politicians. It's maybe worth noting that Margaret Thatcher had a 2nd class degree in chemistry so not every prime minister was someone with a classics background.

I don't know what the thesis of this article is exactly. I think it might be that the old, aristocratic, elite, leaders is to blame for the decline of Great Britain because it didn't value industry enough to be able to compete with France, Germany, and the USA. I don't think that's accurate though and is a cliched scapegoating.

jzellis• 3 years ago

I moved to Britain from the US almost three years ago, and I'm astonished by how little is actually produced here. Aside from the Pi and ARM and maybe, what, Rockstar Games, the tech industry here seems almost entirely focused on fintech, providing services to the City, which in turn seems mainly to function as a giant laundromat for the money of kleptocrats who can't take their business to post-9/11 Wall Street anymore. There seems to be little interest - institutionally, commercially or even on a personal level - in innovation or independence. Brexit could be seen as the latter, but it's really just more blustering nationalist idiocy like the MAGA bullshit back home; the difference being that, awful and pathetic as those people are, it's at least theoretically possible to imagine an isolationist America. But Britain literally doesn't have enough arable land to feed its population without imports. It's like if, I dunno, Massachusetts decided to secede from the US and tried to create "favored trading partner" status with Romania and Ghana and Thailand; like, dude, uh, what? :-D

It's weird and sad, because this is literally where the Industrial Revolution began, but now Britain seems like a machine that converts abandoned factories to luxury flats that it can pimp out to Russian oligarchs at absurdly inflated prices to wash their money clean. The collateral damage from this leaves much of the populace here scrambling to afford a skyrocketing cost of living and rent - we pay more in rent for a tiny Charles Dickens ass terrace house with a barely functional kitchen and no storage space, just outside the official borders of Greater London, than I paid for a big 3br/2bth 50s ranch house with a covered driveway in Las Vegas.

It really makes me sad because in a lot of ways, I prefer living here to America - it has a civilized healthcare system instead of the barbarity back home, it's a more humane country in so many ways. But the entire nation and its future is in the hands of Tories who prop up the City boys at the expense of literally everything else, and even if Labour gets in at the next election, which they almost certainly will, they're barely even an opposition party anymore - Keir Starmer is as much a leftist as Bill Clinton was, which is to say not much at all.

I have hope for Britain, but it needs to take a deep look at itself and fundamentally change the way it thinks about power. Also, the tacos suck and I'm pretty sure that's somehow at the heart of all of this. :-D

revelio2• 3 years ago

The idea that Brexit was ever about "isolationism" is one put about by its opponents. The people who actually campaigned for Brexit were almost universally free trade lovers, with the uneasy coalition with the working classes being forged over a willingness to restrict immigration.

It is actually the EU that promotes isolationism. Their policy of "join the EU or we'll make it hard to trade and work with us" is one that places mutual cooperation and free trade very low down the list, seeing these as levers to advance their political ideology more than things that are beneficial in and of themselves. Other countries that aren't attempting to absorb an entire continent into one government find ways to collaborate and trade easier just out of a belief that it's the best thing to do. Not Europe.

it's really just more blustering nationalist idiocy

The EU is a nationalist project: it has its own borders, flag, government, laws, trade rules, taxes, even its own national anthem, so Brexit can't be "nationalist idiocy" unless you've not understood the fundamentally nation-oriented goal of the EU. It's just that the EU wants the nation in question to be called Europe and to be formed by abolishing the existing nations. Whether or not the people who live in them actually want that, is not seen as very relevant.

illiac786• 3 years ago

i think the word "nationalism" is maybe difficult because it all depends what you call a nation. You seem to think Europe is a nation for example.

Instead of thinking like this, maybe we should see how many borders are added or made less permeable. Brexit added stronger borders to 27 other countries. EU made borders between 28 (now 27) countries more permeable / less hard.

From that point of view I would say Brexit is more nationalist (more "borders-loving") than EU, clearly.

jemmyw• 3 years ago

That was a very interesting article and the comments here are also worth reading. I'm from the UK and I left in 2007. Looking in at what used to be home it doesn't seem like a good place. I'm very glad I was out of there during brexit, working in Europe as it happened.

richliss• 3 years ago

The UK is absolutely doomed because those with wealth and power are content with gaining a larger percentage of a smaller pie for a minor overall increase rather than growing the pie and having a smaller percentage potentially but a fair amount more pie overall because that takes more effort.

It's classic feudal class system thinking.

At least in the US there's this mentality of wanting to grow the pie under the assumption you still want to grow your percentage of it but at the very least you end up with more pie either way and as a side effect others end up with more pie.

I know loads of people who want to leave the country.

1letterunixname• 3 years ago

America is likely to suffer a similar fate: that of a former colonial superpower unable to admit its current situation to improve its own situation productively. Brexit was but one signal of this wasteful, collective cognitive dissonance. Corruption, income inequality, pettiness, and infighting are what will drag them down when there is a lack of hope with a mission for the future. Just look at the current PM, a neoliberal vulture capitalist, and the current POTUS: also a Clinton neoliberal dotard, with a likely race between a dotard for the rich and a rich, racist, populist idiot dotard pretending to be for the working person, both of which offer nothing constructive in the face of existential threats of climate change.

Meanwhile, China is basking in a "1960's US"-like expansionist, pancolonial, triumphalism, but I fear it will reach a similar conclusion as other superpowers in roughly 1-3 generations.

The long-tail of most, if not all, civilizations is peaking and decline. Most civilizations do not survive in a successful state beyond 10 generations or 250 years. The danger is in those who once had power or privilege and losing it, for they rarely take it well. Rejuvenation is had by being honest*, finding hope, and working towards something difficult and useful, sometimes it's a common foe be it human enemy or natural calamity.

* Unthinking, absurd dishonesty, polarization, arbitrary ostracism/civil death, and fungible redefinition of simple words are other signals of civil implosion.

tim333• 3 years ago

Not completely dead. We're still no 6 in the world by GDP on the Wikipedia page "List of countries by GDP (nominal)".

Admittedly there's been a bit of a relative decline since the peak of the British Empire. And Brexit has been a bit of a hiccup. Still life goes on.

MattPalmer1086• 3 years ago

I'm not sure I agree with everything in this article, but it makes some good general points about the decline of Britain.

The elites have lost interest in actually governing. They are primarily rent seeking, taking as much as they can for themselves while the nation slowly sinks.

When I was younger I thought we just had a few crap politicians, but it is deeper rooted and more systemic than that. Even the better politicians find it hard to effect any meaningful positive change.

I've lived here most of my life, and there are still things to admire about it, but my wife and I increasingly discuss leaving, even though we are now in late middle age. I am worried for my son and what the future holds.

hkkwritesgmail• 3 years ago

Who is the most influential or most well paid Briton ? Its either the hedge fund manager, real estate monarchs from Central London or the old and established elite. No innovators or upstarts in there. The society has somehow chosen to value people fiddling with complex financial instruments or real estate power broking over the real productive individuals. The post does not mention, but the same thing unfolding in America ? (* Apart from Elon Musk *), the darlings of the American society are developers of cutesy social networks or subprime mortgage schemers... Even America feels very different than what it used to be at the height of competition with the Soviets.

Britain Is Dead

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