‘Oh, the empire of course’

In early March, an Iranian-made Shahed drone hit RAF Akrotiri, the Royal Air Force base on Cyprus. The destroyer the Royal Navy meant to send, HMS Dragon, was in Portsmouth for maintenance, and it took three weeks to reach Cyprus. In the meantime, the U.K. relied on its friends, not least the French, for protection. As Arnaud Orain said here in The Signal, so much for “Rule Britannia.”

That’s not Britain’s only high-profile failure of late. “The most spectacular recent blunder is the planned high-speed railway High Speed 2,” the economist Paul Collier said here in The Signal. Planners meant HS2 to link London with the north of England. The government has since cut it back to London and Birmingham, and the line is now expected to cost more than £100 billion and won’t open until 2039. To protect bats near the tracks, HS2 has built a 900-meter tunnel through a wood in Buckinghamshire, at a cost of about £100 million.

Britain’s National Health Service is struggling too. An independent investigation published in September 2024 found the NHS “in serious trouble,” with public satisfaction “at its lowest ever.” “Although I have worked in the NHS for more than 30 years,” wrote Ara Darzi, the surgeon who led it, “I have been shocked by what I have found during this investigation—not just in the health service but in the state of the nation’s health.”

So what’s gone wrong?

A.G. Hopkins is the Emeritus Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge, an emeritus fellow of Pembroke College, and the author of The Land Where Nothing Works: How Britain Lost the Plot.

Hopkins says a good deal of it comes down to decisions British governments made themselves. Some are recent: After the 2008 financial crisis, the government cut public investment, though British business had long invested less than its peers abroad. Others go back further. Since the 1980s, prime ministers have kept the power of the purse in Westminster and left the old industrial towns to fend for themselves—though in July, Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester, became Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, promising to let mayors keep a share of the income tax and business rates their regions raise. But the trouble started long before any of this, Hopkins says, with a political stability most countries would envy …

Gustav Jönsson: How bad are things in Britain, really?

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A.G. Hopkins: It’s easy to exaggerate, and you might say the title of my book suggests a desperate situation. So let me first put the present in a longer perspective. There has been a revolution in the world since 1945. Peasant countries, in Europe as well as Asia, have industrialized and raised their standards of living, at a pace that’s rapid by historical standards. Any talk of adversity has to be set beside that.