What Went Wrong? The Prologue To The Great Repeal

To provide a solution, one must first understand the problem; to restore, one must face the decay. It's painful. In 1914, Britain stood as the world's dominant power, master of the seas, banker to the globe, and exemplar of constitutional government where free peoples ruled through their elected representatives. Today, barely a century later, Britain exists as a regional administrative unit of international organisations, its parliament reduced to a ceremonial assembly, its people transformed from sovereign citizens into managed populations subject to the whims of unelected bureaucrats, foreign courts, and supranational authorities.

As C.S Lewis observed in The Abolition of Man and Peter Hitchens continued in the Abolition of Britain, the transformation was not inevitable. It was not the result of military defeat, natural disaster, or economic collapse beyond human control. It was the deliberate consequence of conscious political choices made by successive generations of leaders who abandoned the constitutional principles which had made Britain an extraordinary nation from a small island. Each decision, seemingly reasonable in isolation, formed part of a cumulative surrender of sovereignty which accelerated with each passing decade until complete collapse became unavoidable.

Wrong Turn 1: The State Takes Control During WWI

The catastrophe began in 1914, when Britain followed Germany and abandoned its winning formula of limited government and individual liberty for the false promise of state omnipotence. As A.J.P. Taylor observed, "The state established a hold over its citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed." For the first time in British history, the English people and the English state merged into a single entity, obliterating the careful balance which had made Britain great.

The Defence of the Realm Act granted unprecedented powers to bureaucrats who had never faced an election. Drinking laws restricted ancient liberties in the name of wartime efficiency. Gun licensing emerged not from any threat of crime, but from elite fears of communist uprising among the very soldiers who had fought for king and country. Drug laws multiplied as returning servicemen faced criminalisation rather than compassion. Each measure, justified as temporary wartime necessity, became permanent peacetime oppression. The precedent was set: in every crisis thereafter, liberty would be sacrificed on the altar of state security.

Wrong Turn 2: Surrendering British Financial Sovereignty

The interwar period witnessed Britain's deliberate surrender of monetary sovereignty. Churchill's catastrophic decision in 1925 to return to the gold standard at pre-war parity destroyed British industrial competitiveness and triggered mass unemployment. This act of economic masochism demonstrated political vanity mattered more than national prosperity.

The pattern of monetary surrender culminated in the Black Wednesday humiliation of 1992, when George Soros broke the Bank of England and forced Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The spectacle of a single speculator defeating the British government exposed the fiction of economic sovereignty. The subsequent independence of the Bank of England in 1997 completed the transfer of monetary policy from democratic control to technocratic management, ensuring future governments could never again be held accountable for economic outcomes.

Wrong Turn 3: Ignoring Warnings Over And Over

Pyrrhic victory in the Great War bred not wisdom but complacency. While fascism and communist extremism rose across Europe, Britain's political class remained wilfully blind to the gathering storm. The Irish independence question, which could have been resolved through federalism or dominion status, was instead handled with such spectacular incompetence it required partition and decades of violence.

More catastrophically, as Hitler openly rearmed Germany and proclaimed his intentions, Britain's leaders chose appeasement over deterrence. They had learned all the wrong lessons from the previous war, believing any show of strength would lead to another catastrophe. Meanwhile, the state quietly assumed control of education through the tripartite system, ensuring future generations would be trained not as independent citizens but as compliant subjects of an ever-expanding bureaucracy.

Wrong Turn 4: Resorting To Socialism After World War II Bankruptcy

The Second World War's end brought not restoration but revolution, on top of a 100% tax rate. Churchill's acceptance of the Bretton Woods system subordinated sterling to the dollar, ending London's role as the world's financial centre. But this was merely the prelude to Attlee's socialist transformation, which nationalised vast swathes of British industry and pushed state control to fifty percent of GDP. The Englishman no longer owned his own land, and needed permission from the state.

The welfare state was constructed on a catastrophic demographic error: each generation would be larger than the last, creating an ever-expanding base of contributors. The post-war baby boom was treated as permanent demographic reality rather than a temporary anomaly. Time proved them completely wrong: the proportional size of the generations did the opposite. It decreased. The fundamental premise of the entire welfare project was in error.

National insurance and PAYE systems stripped individuals of control over their own money, creating a population dependent on state largesse rather than personal responsibility. Brutalist architecture, adopted for rapid reconstruction after catastrophic war damage from its Soviet origin, scarred the landscape as surely as socialist economics scarred the nation's spirit, replacing organic communities with concrete monuments to bureaucratic hubris.

Wrong Turn 5: Accepting US Bullying For Protection

The Suez Crisis of 1956 marked Britain's final unnecessary capitulation to American hegemony. When Eisenhower threatened economic warfare against the pound, Britain's leaders discovered their "special relationship" meant special subservience. This established a pattern which persists today: whenever America demands compliance, Britain obeys.

After World War II, Britain was financially weakened and increasingly economically reliant on the U.S. A key driver of accelerated decolonisation was American insistence London relinquish control unless it could secure continued influence—preferably through weak successor states rather than a powerful Commonwealth bloc. UK leaders ultimately acknowledged the "wind of change" it could no longer resist.

Under American pressure, Britain accelerated decolonisation in Africa not to counter Soviet influence, but because Washington preferred dealing with weak post-colonial states rather than a reformed British Commonwealth. The results speak for themselves: Zimbabwe's transformation from Rhodesia's prosperity to Mugabe's tyranny, Uganda's descent under Amin, the Caribbean's economic stagnation, South Africa's post-apartheid decline. Each independence celebration marked not liberation but the birth of another failed state.

Even domestic policy fell under American influence. Britain adopted America's catastrophic drug prohibition policies under UN mandate, abandoning the successful Rolleston system which had treated addiction as a medical rather than criminal matter. The empire which had once set global standards now meekly followed American failures.

Wrong Turn 6: Making Parliament Subordinate To International Bodies

The creation of the United Nations marked the beginning of parliament's long surrender. What began as an organisation to prevent wars became a supranational government usurping domestic policy. Baseless artificial, "Human rights" doctrine, well-meaning at the time and imported through the European Convention on Human Rights, replaced Britain's ancient tradition of negative rights with positive claims against the state and fellow citizens. The Englishman no longer enjoyed liberty, but was issued European-style permissions by the state.

International law and international courts assumed authority over British justice. The ECHR established "human rights" which were contrary to British legal tradition, which had always understood rights meant freedom from interference, not entitlements to other people's property or labour. Parliament, once supreme, became merely a rubber stamp for international diktat.

Wrong Turn 7: Embracing Moral Licence As Social Progress

The 1960s brought what elites celebrated as social progress but which represented the systematic destruction of Christian tradition and social capital. As the UK copied the US civil rights movement, the legalisation of sodomy (buggery), abortion on demand, pornography, and easy divorce were presented as advances in human freedom. J.D. Unwin's research in "Sex and Culture" had already demonstrated the connection between sexual restraint and civilisational vigour. Social entropy increased as traditional institutions weakened.

The intelligence services, compromised by Soviet infiltration, proved incapable of defending British interests. The socialist comprehensive education system destroyed grammar schools and merit-based advancement, ensuring talent would be subordinated to ideology. Most symbolically, the death penalty was abolished despite consistent public support of sixty percent or more for its retention, and parliament continued voting to keep it banned for thirty years against the public will. Murder rates promptly increased, but elite opinion mattered more than public safety or democratic consent.

Meanwhile, self-defence was criminalised and firearms restrictions multiplied, leaving law-abiding citizens defenceless while criminals remained armed. The message was clear: the state's monopoly on violence mattered more than citizens' right to protect themselves and their families.

Wrong Turn 8: Subjecting Education To Ideology

British educational excellence was systematically demolished through comprehensive schooling which eliminated meritocracy and social mobility. Grammar schools, which had provided working-class children with pathways to advancement, were closed in favour of socialist comprehensive schools which ensured equality of outcome by preventing achievement. The eleven-plus examination, which had identified and nurtured talent regardless of social background, was abandoned to prevent any suggestion some children might be more capable than others.

The expansion of universities from elite institutions serving genuine academic excellence to mass processing centres destroyed their educational function while creating generations of debt-laden graduates with worthless qualifications. Higher education became a wealth transfer mechanism from working taxpayers to middle-class consumers of credential inflation. The capture of universities by partisan ideology ensured British institutions would train their own destroyers, producing graduates committed to dismantling the civilisation which had created their opportunities.

Wrong Turn 9: Deindustrialising A Country Responsible For The Modern World

The systematic deindustrialisation of Britain represented the deliberate destruction of productive capacity and working-class communities. The closure of coal mines, steel works, and manufacturing centres was presented as economic modernisation but represented a fundamental shift from creating wealth to managing its distribution. The transformation from a nation which made things to one who merely moved money around epitomised the preference for financialisation over genuine wealth creation.

This destruction of industrial capacity eliminated the economic foundation of working-class communities which had provided social stability and democratic ballast. The replacement of productive work with service sector employment and welfare dependency created a population divorced from the sources of genuine wealth creation. The shift to financial services as national strategy created dangerous dependency on volatile global capital flows and regulatory compliance with foreign authorities, as the 2008 financial crisis would later demonstrate.

Wrong Turn 10: Enshrining Authoritarianism Into Law

Accession to European Economic Community demands meant surrendering control over agriculture and economic policy to foreign bureaucrats. The Northern Ireland troubles escalated into decades of state abuse as security forces operated without accountability. The Public Order Act, ostensibly targeting football hooliganism, became a weapon against free speech itself.

Wiretapping and surveillance expanded beyond any democratic oversight. The poll tax riots demonstrated what happened when government lost the consent of the governed. Most shamefully, Britain began following America into foreign wars against clear public opposition, turning the military into an instrument of American foreign policy rather than British defence. The Leveson Inquiry represented the final assault on press freedom, while social media censorship completed the establishment of narrative control by unelected authorities.

Wrong Turn 11: Allowing Rent-Seeking To Displace Heritage

The deliberate creation of housing shortage through planning restrictions, combined with mass immigration, engineered one of the largest wealth transfers in British history. Property prices were artificially inflated by restricting supply while dramatically increasing demand, transferring wealth from productive young people to asset-holding older generations. This systematic impoverishment of the young destroyed social cohesion and economic dynamism while creating permanent class divisions based on property ownership rather than merit or effort.

The transformation of housing from shelter into speculative investment eliminated homeownership as a realistic aspiration for ordinary working people. Social mobility was replaced by inherited advantage, as property wealth became the primary determinant of life chances. The housing crisis represented the triumph of rentier capitalism over productive enterprise, creating a society divided between property owners and permanent tenants.

Wrong Turn 12: Untethering The Union Into A Quango-Managed EU Economic Zone

The backdoor Maastricht Treaty (followed by the Lisbon Treaty) represented the final surrender of sovereignty, signed without referendum or meaningful democratic consultation. China's rise was accommodated by handing over Hong Kong, abandoning six million people to communist tyranny. The separation of powers created a Supreme Court which usurped parliamentary authority, completing the transfer of power from elected representatives to unelected judges.

Charity law was perverted to fund "human rights" NGOs which campaigned against the very people who funded them through taxation. Mass surveillance of telephony and internet communications created a surveillance state which would have impressed Orwell.

The Good Friday Agreement and devolution tore apart the United Kingdom, replacing a successful union with sectarian division and competing nationalisms. The devolution settlements of the late twentieth century represented systematic constitutional vandalism disguised as democratic reform. The establishment of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, and Northern Ireland Assembly created competing centres of power which deliberately undermined parliamentary sovereignty while maintaining the fiction of union.

The West Lothian Question epitomised this constitutional incoherence: Scottish MPs could vote on English matters while English MPs could not vote on Scottish matters. This asymmetric arrangement was not an oversight but a design feature, intended to fragment the United Kingdom while preventing English democratic representation. Devolution created permanent constitutional crisis while empowering nationalist movements dedicated to the complete destruction of the union.

The European Convention on Human Rights, enshrined through the Human Rights Act, violated English traditions of negative rights and parliamentary supremacy. Most insidiously, a vast network of quangos displaced parliament's functions, creating a managerial bureaucracy accountable to no one but itself. Ordinary people discovered they had no voice in their own governance, as every aspect of public policy was removed from democratic control and placed in the hands of unelected experts.

Wrong Turn 13: Fixing Socialist Disaster With Unwanted Mass Demographic Change

The IMF crisis of the 1970s, following Nixon's abandonment of Bretton Woods, had previously brought Britain to the edge of financial collapse. Rather than address the underlying socialist policies which had caused the crisis, subsequent governments chose mass demographic change as their solution to fuel GDP growth under Modern Monetary Theory. Sterling nearly disappeared in the 1990s as Britain's economic sovereignty evaporated.

Mass immigration from newly-expanded EU countries transformed British society without democratic consent. Asylum claims exploded as the system was deliberately overwhelmed. Canada and Australia's multicultural gamble was imported wholesale, treating Britain not as a historic nation but as an economic zone open to global settlement. The people whose ancestors had built the country were told they had no special claim to it.

The transformation of the National Health Service from public service to national religion made rational discussion of healthcare impossible. The NHS became immune from criticism despite delivering increasingly poor outcomes at enormous cost, consuming ever-larger portions of national resources while providing steadily declining service. Its elevation to untouchable status demonstrated how socialist institutions become self-perpetuating regardless of performance, creating bureaucratic empires which exist to serve themselves rather than the public.

Wrong Turn 14: Arresting Productivity Through Excessive Taxation And Regulation

Economic growth, which had resumed in 1979, ended definitively in 2008, as Bank of England Governor Mervyn King later acknowledged. Rather than allowing failed banks to collapse and markets to clear, government intervention increased the size of the state while destroying market discipline. The financial crisis, caused by government manipulation of credit markets, was used to justify permanent expansion of state power and permanent reduction of economic freedom.

An enormous portfolio of new taxes emerged: VAT, council tax, and ever-more-progressive taxation which punished success and rewarded dependency. Britain achieved its highest tax burden since World War II while delivering steadily declining public services. Regulation multiplied exponentially, strangling entrepreneurship and innovation in bureaucratic red tape. Every aspect of economic life became subject to government approval, creating a system where wealth creation was subordinated to wealth redistribution.

Wrong Turn 15: Entrenching Debunked Marxism & Pseudoscientific Quackery Into Law

"Climate change" pseudoscience captured energy policy, creating the highest energy prices in the developed world and destroying British industrial competitiveness. The pursuit of net zero carbon emissions eliminated reliable nuclear energy production in favour of intermittent renewable sources which required massive subsidies and backup systems. Energy policy was determined not by engineering reality but by environmental ideology, ensuring British industry would become uncompetitive with countries which prioritised economic growth over climate virtue signalling.

Hate speech laws criminalised opinions which had been mainstream for centuries, creating a chilling effect on public discourse which extended far beyond actual prosecutions. The College of Policing overtook the Peelian Principles, and adopted sociological theories which corrupted law enforcement into political activism, training officers to see crime through the perspective of oppression stories rather than individual responsibility.

The definition of marriage, unchanged for millennia, was subverted to accommodate same-sex unions, not through democratic debate but elite imposition. Identity politics replaced merit and equality before the law with "protected characteristics" which created hierarchies of privilege based on immutable characteristics rather than individual achievement. The Equality Act embedded Labour theory of value as legal requirement, bankrupting Birmingham Council and countless other institutions forced to comply with economic nonsense disguised as social justice.

Wrong Turn 16: Sabotaging The Country's Largest Democratic Exercise

The 2016 Brexit referendum represented the largest democratic exercise in British history. The result was clear: leave the European Union. For three years, MPs deployed every possible trick to reverse this decision, bringing the country to the edge of civil disorder. Parliamentary procedure was weaponised against democratic outcomes, with MPs who had promised to implement the referendum result instead working systematically to sabotage it.

Civil servants manipulatively kept Britain entangled in as many EU institutions as possible, ensuring Brexit would fail to deliver the sovereignty voters had demanded. The permanent bureaucracy proved more loyal to Brussels than to British democracy, demonstrating the administrative state had become an independent political actor pursuing its own interests rather than serving elected government.

Three consecutive governments promised reduced immigration while presiding over mass immigration at unprecedented levels. Commonwealth immigration was deliberately increased to boost GDP figures while ignoring the social costs and welfare dependency which resulted. The political class had declared war on their own people, using immigration as a weapon against democratic accountability.

Wrong Turn 17: Lockdown and Two-Tier Justice

The COVID crisis provided the excuse for unprecedented peacetime authoritarianism. For the first time in British history, the entire population was placed under house arrest without trial, without time limit, and without meaningful parliamentary oversight. Ancient liberties were suspended on the word of unelected scientists whose models proved catastrophically wrong, demonstrating expert opinion had replaced democratic consent as the basis of government authority.

Small businesses were destroyed while large corporations thrived, accelerating the concentration of economic power in the hands of global entities beyond democratic control. The lockdown represented the triumph of technocratic authoritarianism over constitutional government, establishing precedents which will be used to justify future restrictions on liberty whenever experts declare an emergency.

Criminal sentences for social media posts reached absurd proportions as Ofcom exceeded its mandate to become a thought police force. Two-tier policing and sentencing, combined with systematic cover-ups of Islamic rape gangs, triggered discussion of civil war. The summer riots of 2024 after the massacre of children revealed Britain had become a country where different laws applied to different communities, with native British people subject to harsher treatment than favoured minorities.

The final insults came in 2025: abortion until birth, euthanasia on demand, a Chinese mega-embassy, and the surrender of the Chagos Islands. Each represented not just policy failure but the complete abandonment of British interests to foreign pressure and ideological fashion.

Lessons From Our Century Of Humiliation

Three fundamental patterns emerge which explain how the world's greatest empire destroyed itself.

1. Systematic transfer of power from democratic institutions to unelected authorities, whether international organisations, judicial activists, or bureaucratic managers.
2. Deliberate replacement of national identity and constitutional principles with ideological abstractions and universal values which dissolved the bonds holding the nation together.
3. Consistent choice of short-term political expedience over long-term institutional survival, with each generation of leaders preferring to pass problems to their successors rather than face difficult decisions.

Britain possessed a proven formula for greatness: constitutional government where free peoples ruled through elected representatives, limited state power balanced by individual liberty, national identity rooted in shared history and culture, and sovereignty exercised through parliamentary supremacy.

Every major decision of the past century moved us further away from this formula toward its opposite: unlimited state power exercised by unelected authorities, individual liberty subordinated to collective ideology, national identity replaced by multicultural fragmentation, and parliamentary sovereignty surrendered to international institutions.

The critical mechanism driving this transformation was the conversion of temporary emergency measures into permanent institutional arrangements. The pattern began in 1914 with wartime state control which was never fully relinquished, accelerated through economic crises which justified international oversight, continued through social emergencies which required expert management, and culminated in health emergencies which normalised population control. Each crisis expanded state power while reducing democratic accountability, creating a ratchet effect where authority flowed inexorably toward unelected institutions.

The British people discovered too late democracy is not a natural state but a fragile arrangement requiring constant vigilance to maintain. When citizens ceased to demand accountability from their representatives, when representatives ceased to resist pressure from international authorities, when institutions ceased to serve their original purposes and became ends in themselves, the democratic system hollowed out from within while maintaining its external forms. Britain retained parliamentary buildings, electoral procedures, and constitutional language long after their substance had been transferred to Brussels bureaucrats, judicial activists, and quango administrators.

The economic dimension of Britain's collapse reveals how political and economic freedom are inseparable: the transformation from productive economy to financialised service sector, from industrial strength to regulatory compliance, from entrepreneurial dynamism to managed decline created the material conditions for political subjugation. A nation which cannot feed itself, cannot power itself, cannot defend itself, and cannot govern itself has already ceased to exist as an independent entity regardless of the symbols and ceremonies it maintains.

The housing crisis, mass immigration, deindustrialisation, and energy dependency were not unfortunate byproducts of well-intentioned policies but deliberate strategies to create permanent dependence on international systems beyond democratic control. British workers competing with global labour pools, British families priced out of property ownership, British industry relocated to countries with cheaper energy, British governance subordinated to international law—each development reduced the capacity for independent national existence while increasing integration with supranational structures.

The systematic destruction of British culture, institutions, and historical memory was essential to the political transformation. A people confident in their achievements and proud of their heritage cannot be convinced to surrender their sovereignty to foreign authorities. Ergo, British history was rewritten as a catalogue of oppression, British institutions were condemned as systemically racist, British culture was dismissed as one choice among many in a multicultural marketplace, and British identity was declared non-existent or illegitimate.

The educational system, media institutions, cultural organisations, and religious establishments were captured by ideologies which taught British people to hate their own country, doubt their own judgment, and defer to international opinion. Three generations were raised to believe British independence was dangerous nationalism; British traditions were backward prejudice; British sovereignty was selfish isolationism; and British democracy was insufficient without international oversight.

Britain's transformation served as a test case for the possibility of eliminating national sovereignty entirely in favour of global governance structures. The success of international institutions in overriding British democracy; the effectiveness of human rights law in superseding British justice; the power of climate ideology to control British energy policy; and the capacity of migration policy to transform British demographics demonstrated even the birthplace of parliamentary democracy could be subjected to post-national rule.

The European Union, United Nations, international courts, global financial institutions, and transnational NGOs used Britain to establish precedents for the subordination of national governments to international authority. Every surrender of British sovereignty became a template for similar surrenders elsewhere, while every assertion of international jurisdiction over British affairs established presumptions of global governance which extended far beyond Britain's borders.

Future historians will identify several universal principles from Britain's collapse which apply to any free society.

1. Emergency powers granted to government during crises will never be voluntarily relinquished and will be used to justify permanent expansion of state authority.
2. International institutions created for limited purposes will inevitably expand their mandates until they assume sovereign authority over member states.
3. Cultural and educational institutions captured by hostile ideologies will systematically undermine the foundations of national cohesion until resistance becomes impossible
4. Mass immigration deliberately designed to transform demographics will destroy the social trust and cultural unity necessary for democratic governance.
5. The concentration of economic power in international financial systems will be used to override democratic decisions which threaten elite interests.
6. Technological systems of surveillance and control, once established, will be used to monitor and manipulate populations regardless of their original justification.

Britain's century of wrong turns will be remembered as the definitive example of how the greatest civilisations destroy themselves not through external conquest but through internal surrender. Every institution, principle, and tradition which had made Britain great was systematically abandoned by leaders who preferred international approval to national survival, ideological purity to practical wisdom, and bureaucratic process to democratic accountability.

The transformation from empire to irrelevance, from sovereignty to servitude, from constitutional government to administrative rule occurred not despite Britain's democratic institutions but through them. Parliament voted away its own authority, courts subordinated British law to international jurisdiction, universities taught students to despise their own heritage, media institutions promoted stories which delegitimised national independence, and civil servants served international masters rather than British interests.

The final lesson of Britain's collapse is free institutions cannot survive when the people operating them no longer believe in the principles which created them. When political leaders view democracy as an obstacle to enlightened governance, when judges prefer international law to national sovereignty, when educators treat national identity as dangerous prejudice, when civil servants serve ideological causes rather than democratic mandates, the forms of freedom will persist long after their substance has disappeared.

History will record Britain's century of wrong turns was not inevitable but entirely preventable. Every surrender of sovereignty was a choice, every expansion of international authority was voluntary, every weakening of democratic accountability was deliberate. A people who had defeated Napoleon, survived the Blitz, and built the greatest empire in human history possessed every resource necessary to maintain their independence and liberty. They chose instead to trade their birthright for the illusion of international respectability and expert management.

The question which will haunt future generations is whether other free peoples will learn from Britain's example or repeat its mistakes. The precedents have been established, the institutions exist, the justifications have been tested, and the techniques have been perfected. Britain's transformation from great power to managed territory provides the template for the elimination of national sovereignty everywhere. Whether the template will be successfully resisted or universally applied will determine whether the twenty-first century witnesses the birth of global governance or the revival of democratic nationhood.

The archaeology of Britain's collapse offers one final warning: the price of freedom is not merely eternal vigilance but the willingness to pay any cost necessary to preserve the institutions and principles which make freedom possible. Those who will not fight for their liberty will lose it to those who fight to take it away. Britain's century of surrender demonstrates even the mightiest nations can be conquered not by foreign armies but by domestic cowardice masquerading as enlightened governance.