In retrospective, when was it over for them? Was it Thatcher?

>>211679957 (OP)
Our unwillingness to mass murder the traitor colonists in the 18th century

Our willingness to engage in ww1

Our willingness to engage in ww2

If only we'd put the effort into defeating rebellion that we'd put into defeating germany

>>211679957 (OP)
>Was it Thatcher?
The narrative that lefties love to engage in is that Britain was a utopia before 1979, at which time the dumbass population decided for no reason at all to make life spicy by voting in the very devil to destroy the Union of Soviet Socialist Kingdoms and turn it into The Hunger Games.

The truth is that it was already over *by* 1979, and that Thatcher just bowed to economic reality that had been kicked down the road for a long time. The British economy had been mighty from the eighteenth century up until about the 1870s, but then cracks started to show relative to the massive economies of scale and vertical integrations achievable in the USA and the large and very well-educated workforce and high-consumption internal market of the German Empire. British industry was losing out on competitiveness and modernity of plant and tooling, and then British finance was crippled by the two world wars, which collectively entailed the largest transfer of treasure (to the USA) in human history. Then the captive imperial markets were lost, as Britain no longer had the strength or stomach to keep them, and it belatedly joined the Common Market. The trouble is that British industry was entirely geared to serve protected markets and could not compete on price or quality with established export powers, so it all went tits-up.

We now have a scenario where Britain has carved a niche in services (second highest $value in the world after the USA) and high-value manufacturing, but it's nowhere near enough to sustain the abandoned parts of the country. British aversion to any kind of government investment, which was even obvious in the 19th century, has also compounded, so we lag behind on infrastructure and especially in housing units, where we have millions fewer than we need. British industry is also loath to invest in processes or plant, so we have brought in eleventy billion pajeets to effectively de-automate the economy, which lowers living standards.

>>211680677
I didn't have space to add that we also suffer from some of the worst Dutch Disease of any country in the world. The Pound Sterling is hugely overvalued, as a result of the relative size and strength of the City of London financial markets, so that makes it impossible for any other business to thrive. Every other major finance centre on earth is either part of a large and diversified economy (NYC, Beijing, Tokyo) or is effectively a city state (Hong Kong, Singapore). London has a large-ish but not especially productive country bolted onto it, which suffers massively as the currency cannot reach equilibrium to make it competitive.

In a sense, to come full circle, this kind of is Thatcher's doing. The 1986 'Big Bang' reforms of the City of London were magnificently successful, as was the Docklands redevelopment, but a series of parallel reforms meant to revitalise British industry were all abject failures. This is widely believed to be because the government had financiers in it who knew what they were doing when shaping those reforms, but industrial policy was instead left to the very captains of industry whose incompetence had led to gross problems in the first place.

WW1
They lent a shit load to its allies in Europe that could never be repaid and borrowed a shit load from the Americans, creating a debt trap that meant that, combined with the end of its resource extraction empire, it was never going to be the power house it had been for over a hundred years again. The Suez Crisis somewhat symbolically seals the deal that Britain, and France for that matter, will be subordinate to US interests going forward.

>>211680677
>>211680853
we're not coming back for at least 30 years, I need out of this shithole

>>211680008
>Our unwillingness to mass murder the traitor colonists in the 18th century
it was over once you lost the American colonies?
so dramatic lol, thatcher started the decline
>>211680008
>Our willingness to engage in ww1
>Our willingness to engage in ww2
both wars had an obvious threat to the UK if they weren't involved.

We take off the curtain and expose the fake empire, after that other countries follow and beign not fear them

>>211681939
>thatcher started the decline
Mad take. Britain was sliding for literal decades before Thatcher, and had been left in the dust by France, West Germany, and even Italy for a time.

>>211679957 (OP)
Arguably, WWI which killed off many of their smartest youths and WWII which bankrupted the UK from which they never recovered.

if you view britain as eastern europe but with a western aristocracy, everything starts to make sense

>>211679957 (OP)
Industrial practices were sliding in the late 19th & early 20th centuries, such that Germany and the US were already greater industrial powers by the 1890s, and industrial policy 1945 onwards sealed our fate, the whole thing was fucked by the late 1960s.

>>211679957 (OP)
>>211683828
It was a slow creeping death, rather than a sudden collapse.

For everyone it was the moment they let women vote. Ever since it's been a constant spiral of giving up power and possessions, ambitions, in favor of womanly welfare and domestic "guarantees."

You can point to this or that notable moment where the UK cucked out but at its core it was the moment decision making transferred from men to women.

>>211679957 (OP)
>Was it Thatcher?
Yes.

>>211683920
Something is up with that chart, right wing governments tend to gut welfare for people, is corporate welfare included?
Berlusconi definitely didn't boost welfare for the average person.

The world wars, losing its colonies, and America surpassing it as the dominant empire. You can set up a social democratic safety net like they did post-WW2 but that only remains solvent for so long with thst economy, someone like Thatcher only comes along because the country is already neoliberalizing and becoming a service & finance economy.

>>211680008
It was one or the other and geopolitically funneling your resources to oppressing far off colonies while a far stronger enemy had a free lunch right next to you with the assumption that you wouldn't be up next is absurd and moronic.
The realities of grand strategy is most decisions are made for you by decisions made decades if not centuries ago. All you can do is not make it even worse.

>>211683920
If some form of universal basic income isn't cooked up it's only a matter of time before things implode. Industrialization already necessitated the creation of millions upon millions of redundant job positions that exist just to exist. The genuine threat of AI is more grunt work automation, which once again means millions of jobs disappear. Self driving cars, millions of jobs disappear. Eventually we have to adopt some system where inventions that do the unpleasant jobs are actually a benefit to humanity rather than making more of them homeless. If we can't figure that shit out we have no business industrializing, back to the fields with all of us and stick to feudalism. At least that's sustainable.