Britain’s Death Has Been a Hundred and Fifty Years In The Making…
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And America isn’t learning the harsh lessons from its former colonial master.
As writers, there are times when you are forced to concede that your work is markedly inferior to someone else’s.
And that point, for me, was a few days ago.
I read an extraordinarily brilliant article on the subject matter of Britain’s demise.
Unlike anything you have ever read from me, This post was written with a level of detail and presented with the sort of clarity, of which I could only dream.
And the topic was Britain’s death.
To him, Britain had the first mover advantage when it came to industrialization in the 18th century at a time when Germany wasn’t the consolidated nation-state it later became and the United States of America was still finding its feet.
But this advantage gave way to complacency by the end of the 19th century when the previously cited countries had overtaken the United Kingdom.
And Britain has never been the same ever since.
You would think that a country which had strategic industrial outposts scattered across the Middle-East in the aftermath of the first world war, would reinvent itself to exploit the new opportunities coming its way?
It did no such thing.
Britain’s lethargy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries meant that it was woefully and inadequately prepared not only for the first world war but also for the second when Hitler, very nearly took the world to the brink of destruction.
When Churchill said that he didn’t become Her Majesty’s First minister to preside over the liquidation of the British empire, he was essentially fooling himself: Britain had lost that war long before.
Despite the best efforts of Harold Wilson to kick start the reinvention of Britain in the 1960s, those whose job it was to oversee its implementation —the mandarins at white hall — simply didn’t have the…
