Member-only story
Locked Into Failure
Why nostalgia means the UK will never be able to defend itself, and how the UK’s failure is a case-study echoed by too many other European nations
Those who take an interest in such things will know that the UK government recently made public the results of its most recent Defense Review (henceforth DR for the sake of brevity). Over the last thirty years the DR has become a British tradition akin to the Changing of the Guard outside Buckingham Palace and eating ice-cream in the summer rain. All three activities are exercises in denial and reveal how the UK is trapped inside a fantasy world that bears no relationship to the reality outside.
The primary reason the UK no longer has any military or political capacity to protect itself lies in that most British of all fantasies: nostalgia. The British never recovered psychologically from the collapse of the British Empire. Instead of accepting reality and carving out a new role in the modern world, the UK retreated into faux history in which imaginary glories of the past divert attention from the systemic failures of the dreary shrunken present. It wasn’t only politicians who cultivated this retreat into fantasy-land: an astonishing amount of British entertainment was and remains grounded in the same tedious deceptive tropes.
