Large empires take a very long time to unravel. The collapse is rarely cinematic. No single moment, no clean break—just a slow, grinding process that can span generations. Britain, or what remains of it, was widely thought to have turned a corner after decolonisation and the Thatcher years. The story went that a new chapter had opened, that the imperial rot was finally behind it.
It wasn’t.
The journey simply continued under a different banner. The old imperial self-image is still there—lingering, nostalgic, faintly indignant—but reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate. Britain still behaves as though stature alone should command outcomes, as though history itself should do some of the heavy lifting. It no longer does.
That said, few countries have been so thoroughly wrecked by their political parties as Britain. The Tories, once at least nominally conservative, have shed almost every remaining trace of conservatism. They have drifted so far into fashionable moral posturing that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish them from Labour. To find positions meaningfully to the left of the Tories, you now have to squint toward the more extreme fringes of the Labour Party.
The ideological center didn’t move gradually. It slid. Then it gave way.
The newer parties offer little consolation. As is often the case with fresh political groupings, they resemble dens of personal ambition more than coherent movements genuinely concerned with the structural problems of the country. Careerism dressed up as renewal. Ego masquerading as reform. It’s not unique to Britain—but Britain is paying the price for it now.
And that is what makes the decline so stark. Britain isn’t falling from mediocrity. It’s falling from very, very high. From the pinnacle, in fact. And the old rule still applies: the higher you rise, the deeper the fall feels when gravity finally asserts itself.
History has not been kind—but then again, it never promised to be.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/22/british-climate-crusade-creates-economic-disaster/