Quote Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy View Post
Todays britain is better on every box you could want to tick.
Well, obviously. It would be difficult to find a nation on earth that does not have a better standard of living than it did 100+ years ago, including those in the third world. It is a bit disingenuous to use natural human advancements to gloss over real and/or relative rises and declines.

For Britain, I would argue that it suffered relative declines during the World War periods when larger powers emerged to challenge its supremacy and then real declines after the Second World War as its economic system fell apart. Thatcherism re-aligned the economy with that of the rest of the world and set the stage for an impressive rise (whether it be in relative power or standard of living).