Meet the Society That Had It All — And Blew It Straight to Hell. Britain.

History’s Jaw Will Drop at How Fast and Hard Britain’s Collapsing, And So Will Yours

Image Credit: PA News Agency

The decade from 2015 to 2025 will be remembered by history for three things. The pandemic, signaling the arrival of mega-scale climate change impacts. The rise of far right fanaticism — and its rejection, beginning in America. And — most strikingly of all — for something baffling, almost bewildering. The first rich country to…blow itself up. Just toss a hand grenade into its own house of democracy and prosperity, walk away, and grin, while it burned to cinders.

It’s official. The UK’s going to be the only major economy to shrink — to go on shrinking — in 2023. The outlook isn’t exactly rosy for the rest of the world. But for Britain? It’s dire.

These last ten years? They’re going to be remembered as the one in which Britain became the first modern country to go backwards. Not in a small way. In a profound one. Irreversibly. To a lower level of development, prosperity, democracy. To being a country without a future. And one that seems oblivious, still, to not having one.

Consider, for a moment, what it means when the IMF says that Britain’s economy is going to grow less than…LOL…Russia’s. I scanned the news. Britain is now a country in a kind of Orwellian erasure of knowledge, history, truth. So its economists, many of them, said — shamefully, because they should know better — that this wasn’t “true.” I guess the world’s authoritative source on growth — the IMF — is wrong. I flicked on the BBC, and I wasn’t surprised that in their segment discussing it…guess which word couldn’t be said?

I write often about the collapse of America and Britain. But they’re different kinds, forms, categories of social collapse. Britain’s is, arguably, worse. How so? America never had anything. As a modern society? America didn’t even get close. It never had a universal public healthcare system. Never had affordable education. Never had public transport, really, at any meaningful scale.

Americans long for a society with these things. 70% of them back such a society — one aspiring to be a social democracy, even if that’s a dirty word in America — versus the massacre-ridden theocratic dystopia that the GOP’s trying to fast implode America into.

But Britain’s different. Britain had it all.

And not so long ago, either. Just a decade ago? Britain was the most sophisticated Anglophone society of them all. It led all the world’s English-speaking societies, by a very long way — in hard terms, like living standards. It had built the very things that Americans envy and long for, knowing they’ll probably never have, from the world’s best healthcare system, the NHS, to pretty decent public transport, to affordable education. It had a social contract that was approaching European levels of sophistication — and that’s saying a very, very great deal for an English-speaking society. Economically, too, as the gateway to Europe, the world raced to beat a path to its door. The world’s banks and corporations headquartered in London, which was one of the world’s great cities, buzzing with creativity and modernity and commerce, the raw energy of…

A country that had it all.

Do you know what most sane Americans would give for the right to live and work in Europe? Especially young ones? Just to mention such a thing is to make Americans screw up their faces in envy and frustration, because so many of them are desperate to live in a functioning social democracy.

Britain had all that.

It occupied a position in the world, not so long ago, that even America envied. Needless to say, the poorer world looked up to it and admired it, having forged such a society. Who wasn’t that Britain’s friend? Europe was. America was, President after President warmly embracing British PM after PM. But now look at the way Joe Biden, LOL, has pretty much open contempt for Rishi Sunak. If you’re American, you can see that look on Biden’s face. What the hell have you done to your country, son?

If you were American, on the side of the Democrats? You’d have this kind of disbelief-level contempt for Rishi Sunak, too. Why? Because…he’s the exact sort of figure…that caused this unbelievable, staggering, jaw-dropping situation.

A society that had it all, and gave it up.

How many societies in the world have what Britain had? Not many. Just a handful. But how many are foolish to throw it all away, like Britain did? That list consists of just one entry.

Let me make all the above much more concrete.

What does it mean for a society to “throw it all away?”

Right now, Britain’s doctors are on strike. It’s “junior doctors,” and not enough Brits understand that means all but the NHS’s most upper rank of doctors — all the way through doctors in mid, even advanced career level, So most of Britain’s doctors are on strike. Why?

Guess how much such a “junior” doctor’s paid in Britain. About…$17 an hour. No, I’m not kidding. The “junior” doctors — again, most of them, even at advanced levels — are striking for a raise to..a whopping…$22 an hour. In America? That’s poverty level income. It is in Britain, too, though, and the point these doctors are making is that they can’t afford to live on such low incomes anymore — especially in a broken system, where everything from beds to ventilators are in such short supply waiting lists are now years long for patients. Would you want to do that miserable, dispiriting, impoverishing job?

So why are their incomes so low? Because they haven’t had a raise in over a decade. Not even to keep pace with inflation. Which has been ruinous for the last couple of years. They’ve got a point. So why haven’t have they had a raise…for over a decade…from this abysmally low figure to begin with…for some of a society’s most skilled and necessary professionals?