Never Had It So Bad: The Decline of the Great British Empire

Where are thy men of might? thy grand in soul?
Gone — glimmering through the dream of things that were:
First in the race that led to Glory’s goal,
They won, and pass’d away — is this the whole?
A schoolboy’s tale, the wonder of an hour!
The warrior’s weapon and the sophist’s stole
Are sought in vain, and o’er each mouldering tower,
Dim with the mist of years, gray flits the shade of power.

— Lord Byron, “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”

I

It was during a Tory rally on July 20, 1957, organized to commemorate 25 years of public service by Alan Tindal Lennox-Boyd, 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton as MP for the constituency of bucolic Mid Bedfordshire, that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan uttered his famous pronouncement that Britons had “never had it so good.” Having ridden into office on a wave of popular discontent with the “doctrinaire nightmare” of Labourite socialism, Macmillan could proudly direct his compatriots to “go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my lifetime — nor indeed in the history of this country.”

Go around that same country today, to mouldering industrial towns like Bradford and Luton, and you will search in vain for the state of contented prosperity described by Macmillan, though you will find, on the litter-bestrewn high streets, plenty of pound shops and vape shops, Dawah centers and remittance services, and Palestinian flags as far as the eye can see. As for the farms Macmillan praised so highly, they are dwindling in number and size with farmers being crushed by lower output prices, reduced yields, and skyrocketing costs, and subjected to a Labour dekulakization campaign redolent of Maoism or Stalinism. The cost-of-living crisis is in full swing. The NHS is in shambles. Schools are crumbling, literally and figuratively, before their pupils’ and instructors’ eyes. Violent crime and public disorder incidents are on the rise. The Victorian-era sewer network has finally reached a breaking point, leaking untreated sewage into lakes, rivers, and seas at an alarming rate. Climate change policies are close to achieving something unprecedented: a “zero-industrial society.” The British Armed Forces are suffering from a recruitment crisis, stockpile shortages, and a total lack of combat preparedness. The Chelsea Partridges have shut down (arguably the most unkindest cut of all). The official portrait of King Charles III, appropriately enough, looks like an insane fever dream.

And Labour’s solution to this ongoing systems collapse? An economic kamikaze mission to create a zero-carbon electricity system, a VAT tax on private education and vocational training, a crackdown on parents who have gifted children cash or assets in the last seven years, an authoritarian war on free speech, a genuinely mad and completely botched Labour intervention in the 2024 American presidential election, and a sinister fixation on physician-assisted euthanasia, among a panoply of other badly-judged initiatives. Having looked “Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,” Ozymandius-style, you may very well wonder: have Britons ever had it so bad? (READ MORE: The Death Throes of Free Speech in the United Kingdom)

Perhaps they have, during some long-ago outbreak of typhus or the bubonic plague, or during the Great Frost, when birds fell frozen from the skies, or during the Blitz, or maybe during the dark ages of the 1970s, but surely things have never been quite this bleak, nor Great Britain so adrift, so geopolitically irrelevant. Sean Thomas, writing in the pages of the Spectator, has come to the conclusion that, simply put, “it’s depressing to be British.”

Why? Not because of British weather or the existence of Luton – annoying as they can be. No, being British is depressing because we Britons are the first globally hegemonic people to witness the decline and extinction of our world-ruling empire in little more than a generation…And now all of that has gone, in a few brief decades – a single lifespan. My mother, for instance, can recall when a third of the world was pink. It is that close in time. Yet she has also lived to see that empire entirely vanish and Britain come close to breaking up. And now she has to witness the invidious spectacle of a British prime minister begging a US president for permission to pay a foreign country to take one of our last imperial possessions. A transaction so ridiculous and craven no word exists to describe it in the English language.

“Ridiculous and craven” — the regime of former(?) Trotskyite Prime Minister Keir Starmer summarized rather succinctly. It has not reached the point where the United States and its NATO allies must consider contingency plans for securing the United Kingdom’s nuclear arsenal, but things are definitely going downhill at a rattling pace across the pond. And, for the record, I write this as someone who is an admitted and confirmed Anglophile, having spent a not inconsiderable portion of my life in the United Kingdom, and as someone whose living room is decorated with engravings from Jacob George Strutt’s Sylva Britannica, whose favorite novelist is Evelyn Waugh, whose wardrobe is largely comprised of Peregrine menswear, who never goes anywhere without a beloved Birmingham-made Yard-O-Led 1.1mm propelling pencil, and who shaved this morning with St James of London shaving cream (“Black Pepper & Lime,” highly recommended).

II

A good barometer of national decline, I think, is whether the state of public affairs makes satire unnecessary. What need is there of an issue of Private Eye, or a revival of Armando Iannucci’s The Thick of It television series, when the British government already represents a parody of itself? Not that any of this is particularly amusing, except if one has a particularly dark sense of humor. Take the disturbing case of a (likely schizophrenic) Rwandan teenager who is referred three times to the British government’s counter-terrorism program, still gets his hands on an al Qaeda training manual while purchasing precursors for ricin production, and carries out a horrific mass stabbing at a dance studio in Southport, only for Keir Starmer to respond by blaming, of all things, Amazon.co.uk: “Time and again as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them. And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue.” Actor Idris Elba, producer of a recent documentary on knife crime, was then called upon to go even further, suggesting on BBC Radio 4, that ”not all kitchen knives need to have a point on them, that sounds like a crazy thing to say, but you can still cut your food without the point on your knife, which is an innovative way to look at it.” Innovative is certainly one word for it.

In any event, talk of “two-click killers” and round knives is strongly indicative of a deeply unserious nation, to the extent that it is still a nation and not a collection of discrete economic units indoctrinated into looking askance at their formerly shared history and cultural heritage. Consider the behavior of the Royal Navy’s Ships’ Names and Badging Committee, which frantically changed the name of the new royal submarine HMS Agincourt to HMS Achilles so as not to offend fragile continental sensibilities, a move described by the former NATO commander Chris Parry as “craven political correctness and ideology gone mad,” and by former defense secretary Grant Shapps as “pathetic” “sacrilege” symptomatic of “Labour’s woke nonsense.” If His Majesty’s Naval Service cannot celebrate the Battle of Agincourt, one of the cornerstones of Britain’s glorious martial tradition, what can it celebrate? What can any Briton celebrate, when British museums warn that even something as anodyne as a John Constable landscape can evoke “dark nationalist feelings” that “only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong,” and when activists draw up hit lists of statues and memorials, including those commemorating King Charles II, Admiral Lord Nelson, and Winston Churchill? The inescapable conclusion is that Great Britain is once again in the grips of a doctrinaire nightmare, one from which it may struggle this time to awaken.

III

Faced with an ominous political environment of disquiet, degeneracy, and decline, the Labour regime has hit upon a new strategy, namely to establish a “Soft Power Council” that will harness the expertise of “soft power and foreign policy experts to champion a new, hard-nosed approach to soft power,” creating a “forward plan for government campaigns that promote the UK image and offer to the world, drawing on the breadth of U.K. strengths, including diversity.” Ironically, the Soft Power Council was immediately criticized for the lack of diversity in its composition, as well as for taking the focus away from the “parlous state of the arts in this country.” The entire project is a non-starter, obviously, but I am nevertheless fascinated by the very notion of Keir Starmer’s Britain exerting soft power abroad.

First, a brief primer on the concept of soft power. We see it taking form in Thomas Jefferson’s June 12, 1815 letter to the Scottish-American businessman Thomas Leiper:

I wish that all nations may recover and retain their independence; that those which are overgrown may not advance beyond safe measures of power, that a salutary balance may be ever maintained among nations, and that our peace, commerce, and friendship, may be sought and cultivated by all. It is our business to manufacture for ourselves whatever we can, to keep our markets open for what we can spare or want; and the less we have to do with the amities or enmities of Europe, the better. Not in our day, but at no distant one, we may shake a rod over the heads of all, which may make the stoutest of them tremble. But I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.

The term itself was popularized in the late 1980s by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, who contrasted “co-optive or soft power” with “hard or command power of ordering others to do what it wants.” A country’s soft power, according to Nye, depends on “its culture (in places where it is attractive to others), its political values (when it lives up to them at home and abroad), and its foreign policies (when others see them as legitimate and having moral authority),” all of which allows it to “obtain the outcomes it wants in world politics because other countries — admiring its values, emulating its example, aspiring to its level of prosperity and openness — want to follow it.”

It remains to be seen how the U.K. Soft Power Council will make its case that Britain’s values, whatever those are, should be admired, that its example should be emulated and that its level of prosperity and openness should be aspired to. If anything, other countries are treating Britain’s decline as an object lesson. Douglas Murray has warned his countrymen that “Britain is losing friends — and making enemies” by occupying a “netherworld” where it has “never been further away from the Europeans, [but] the geniuses in charge seem to have decided to make sure that the American government doesn’t like us either.” As Murray puts it,

Our government has no idea how to grow the economy, is trying to tax its way to growth, is busy chasing out the rich and making the ambitious scram. Having one side of Britain stuck against the European side of the cliff, we have a government with no apparent desire to clamber out of the ravine on to the booming American side. Instead our politicians preen and fall back on student slogans and banalities so past their sell-by date that they would shame the discount shelf at the Co-op.

Indeed, Labour’s brazen intervention on behalf of the Harris campaign, its regulatory targeting of American social media sites, and its insistence on surrendering the Chagos Islands on increasingly, even suspiciously unfavorable terms, have all deeply harmed Anglo-American relations. At the same time, Brexit has hardly endeared Britain to its closest neighbors, leading to diplomatic tensions and precipitously declining economic intercourse with the continent due to post-Brexit trading restrictions. European governments now view the island nation with something bordering on contempt. Austrian FPÖ politicians, for instance, once insisted that Wien dürfe nicht Chicago werden (“Vienna must not become Chicago”), and then that Wien darf nicht Istanbul werden; now, they demand that Wien darf nicht Birmingham werden, with the city in England’s West Midlands representing the myriad horrors of industrial decline, municipal bankruptcy, and comprehensive demographic shifts.

IV

Soft power, even “hard-nosed” soft power, will not cure what ails Great Britain. A reckoning long in the making can no longer be avoided. While the Labour government is already in the process of imploding, the preceding 14 years of Conservative rule will not be remembered kindly either, mainly for the Tories’ inability to rein in the administrative state, the bungled lockdown-centric response to the coronavirus pandemic, and the so-called “Boriswave,” an unprecedented flood of immigration that occurred post-Brexit between 2021 and 2024, resulting in one in every 13 London residents being an illegal migrant, and some London boroughs having more than three-quarters of social housing occupied by residents born outside the United Kingdom. Whether British conservatives have learned any lessons from all of this is unclear. The commentator Peter Hitchens, for one, seems to prefer residing in what Douglas Murray called the political “netherworld,” horrified as he is by Labour but directing substantial bile towards the new American administration on the grounds that “I’m a Christian believer. Because (as a direct consequence) I treasure the rule of law over power. Because I’m a conservative, not a free-market liberal. And because I’m Britsh [sic], not American. All else flows from these.” It is hard to discount any positive agenda here beyond a disavowal of populism.

There is, however, growing evidence of a tonal shift elsewhere on the British Right. James Price, a former Conservative government adviser, has argued in the pages of The Critic that “harsh immigration measures seen in the U.S. will soon become essential for U.K. national survival,” adding that “Britain should emulate the example of Trump’s treatment of these countries and withdraw all aid, travel rights, and other niceties with Pakistan and all other countries under we have cleansed our island of their malign presence. Anything less amounts to national self-cuckoldry.” Citing recent reports out of Northamptonshire, in which parents complained of migrants milling around primary schools, and even filming them, Price castigated “these bogus claimants [who] have been harassing girls in local woods and ‘hanging around’ outside primary schools. I call them bogus because no genuine seeker of asylum from a war-torn hell hole would ever repay the generosity of a host country by attempting to rape or kidnap the children of that society. Enough is enough. They have to go.” This is strong meat, of a variety seldom heard in respectable circles since Enoch Powell’s 1968 controversial “Rivers of Blood” speech at the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham.

Populism is clearly gaining a purchase on British politics. A recent poll, conducted by Opinium in the early days of 2025, found that despite President Donald Trump’s low personal approval rating in the United Kingdom, an overwhelming majority of Britons actually agree with various Trump administration platforms when transplanted into the British context. Issues pertaining to illegal immigration and deportations, trade protectionism, merit-based/color-blind policies, the existence of two genders, and the restoration of free speech all indicated a rightward or pro-populist shift on the part of the British public, leading Opinium managing partner Gavin Davis to surmise that “we might be closer to the U.S. than we think or would like to believe.”

Another poll, more shocking still, was the Feb. 2-3, 2025 YouGov survey which found that the Nigel Farage-led Reform UK party leads all parties in voting intention at 25 percent, with Labour in second at 24 percent, and the Conservatives trailing on 21 percent. Just as the German Christian Democrats are struggling to maintain their Brandmauer (“firewall”) preventing cooperation with the Alternative für Deutschland party further to their right, so too will the Tories have to grapple with the extent to which they can or should work with the populist Reform party. And if the YouGov poll is to be believed, Reform may even be replacing the venerable Conservative and Unionist Party as the ideological alternative to Labour, putting the Tories in the same position as France’s Les Républicains, a center-right rump party overshadowed by the more zealous Rassemblement national. The British Left, meanwhile, has acknowledged the mounting threat posed by Reform, and the need for sustained economic growth (which, incidentally, its current policies by their very nature cannot create) to stave off the rise of populism.

“There was a time,” writes Douglas Murray, “when one of the great slogans in our country’s history was ‘Very well, alone.’ Whether on immigration, crime, the economy, energy or foreign policy, we are now in that strange position again. But not in a good way. Not in a good way at all.” The catchphrase “Very well, alone” refers to the iconic David Low cartoon, published on June 18 1940 in the Evening Standard, depicting a British infantryman poised alone upon a jagged rock at the water’s edge, his fist raised in defiance as German bombers soar overhead — a visual representation of Winston Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds” speech.

It remains a powerful image, albeit a slightly misleading one, insofar as Britain did not fight alone, per se, but with an empire of 545 million souls, something like a quarter of the world’s population. It had flourishing farms, a solid industrial base, a powerful military, a vast merchant marine, a profound sense of self-respect, and the knowledge that, as Churchill noted in his renowned speech, “in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might [will step] forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” Much has changed since 1940. Britain again stands alone, this time “sinking giggling into the sea,” as Peter Hitchens has so often bitterly characterized it, while its ill-timed lurch to the left has placed it out of sync with political developments across the Atlantic and across the English Channel. May the freedom-loving peoples of the New World and the Old provide Britons with an example of how to undo the damage inflicted by a ridiculous and craven regime, one whose doctrinaire nightmares have inflicted such terrible damage to the body politic and the collective spirit of a great nation.

READ MORE from Matthew Omolesky:

The Cold Goddess: Anne de Kyiv and Her Brigade

Bauhaus and the Cult of Ugliness

The Death Throes of Free Speech in the United Kingdom

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