upcarta
  • Sign In
  • Sign Up
  • Explore
  • Search

Britain Is Dead

  • Article
  • Apr 28, 2023
  • #PoliticalEconomy #UnitedKingdom
Samuel McIlhagga
@McilhaggaSamuel
(Author)
www.palladiummag.com
Read on www.palladiummag.com
1 Recommender
1 Mention
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... Show More

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 it 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.

The overall trajectory becomes obvious when you look at outcomes in productivity, investment, capacity, research and development, growth, quality of life, GDP per capita, wealth distribution, and real wage growth measured by unit labor cost. All are either falling or stagnant. Reporting from the Financial Times has claimed that at current levels, the UK will be poorer than Poland in a decade, and will have a lower median real income than Slovenia by 2024. Many provincial areas already have lower GDPs than Eastern Europe.

Show Less
Recommend
Post
Save
Complete
Collect
Mentions
See All
Aris Roussinos @arisroussinos · Apr 30, 2023
  • Post
  • From Twitter
Keep coming back to this great piece by @McilhaggaSamuel — which is also further evidence of the narrative resurgence of the Nairn-Anderson thesis post-Johnson
  • upcarta ©2025
  • Home
  • About
  • Terms
  • Privacy
  • Cookies
  • @upcarta