It's not just the UK in that position. The EU is the way that all those former European empires were going to be able to succeed economically without their colonies' extracted wealth. Some historians, like Timothy Snyder, view this as the primary purpose of the EU, which is rather contrary to its usual founding story.

But I find it compelling because these sorts of economic pushes are usually so forceful, and it's rather shocking how a country like the UK allowed itself to be fooled by external influencing to self-immolate as it did.

> Now Britain is basically irrelevant on the world stage.

This sort of statement is something regularly repeated in the UK, but it doesn't make much sense. The UK has the world's 6th biggest GDP, is one of the few nuclear powers, has significant soft power, is a permanent UN security council member, etc. Brexit has been an act of astonishing self-harm, but talking about "trying to survive" is a bit ridiculous.

Compared to how it was in the "good old days" it is certainly much less relevant. Having the 6th largest GDP doesn't really give you much sway in the developed world when you are up against vastly larger economies like the US, the EU and China. The US and the EU, at least, are exporters of rules and standards in the way that the UK is not (it effectively was when it was a member of the EU, as it had a lot of influence on the EU position).

Being a nuclear power is again not that relevant today besides giving the UK a slightly greater chance of avoiding a nuclear strike (a remote possibility anyway).

It's certainly more relevant on the global stage than a lot of countries but it's not controversial to say it is in a much different position now than at the height of the empire.

As for trying to survive, Brexit has bolstered the Scottish independence and Irish unification movements and created severe, intractable problems in Northern Ireland in particular. England will survive and London will survive, but the UK? Time will tell.

It's a good thing the UK is less "relevant" than in those days! It would not be better for the world or for Britain if the British Empire was still at its peak. After all the Empire was wound down deliberately, the people didn't want to continue with it.

"The US and the EU, at least, are exporters of rules and standards in the way that the UK is not (it effectively was when it was a member of the EU, as it had a lot of influence on the EU position)."

No, that's a common claim but not really true. The UK had very little influence inside the EU and the EU rules were almost always made to satisfy the needs of either the EU institutions themselves, or the domestic economies of France and Germany.

A good way to see this is to look at the fate of the "single market for services". The UK is uniquely strong in the services market, so guess what the EU never made much progress with? Compare to its obsession with harmonizing everything to do with goods trading, which benefits primarily Germany.

Another way is to look at how responsive the EU was to the concerns of British voters on immigration levels. Answer: they hold voters in contempt and weren't willing to budge an inch. There was no influence, that's why the UK voted to leave.

"As for trying to survive, Brexit has bolstered the Scottish independence and Irish unification movements"

The latter maybe yes. The former, probably not. Scotland would have to apply to join as a regular country and its finances are in no state that would allow that.

> It's a good thing the UK is less "relevant" than in those days! It would not be better for the world or for Britain if the British Empire was still at its peak. After all the Empire was wound down deliberately, the people didn't want to continue with it.

Absolutely agree it is a good thing. Probably not everyone sees it that way though. As for the British people choosing to wind the empire down, I must have missed that referendum.

> No, that's a common claim but not really true. The UK had very little influence inside the EU and the EU rules were almost always made to satisfy the needs of either the EU institutions themselves, or the domestic economies of France and Germany.

All I can say is that as a lawyer in the EU (who works closely with the UK) that is not my perception or experience. EU financial regulation heavily bears a British stamp, and the single market was immensely beneficial for London. One of the main EU initiatives that was in full swing just as Brexit happened was the Capital Markets Union which was absolutely a UK-led initiative, headed by UK Commissioner Jonathan Hill. Since Brexit happened and Hill resigned, that initiative has trundled on, but has completely lost momentum and not really delivered what it was supposed to.

> Scotland would have to apply to join as a regular country and its finances are in no state that would allow that.

This seems as over-confident a prediction as the predictions that the UK would never vote to leave. The EU took in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria for political reasons, it is not that much of a stretch to say it could take in Scotland.

The British effectively voted for that when they kicked Churchill out at the end of the war. It wasn't a referendum but was partly on those issues. Churchill was an empire man to the last, but the public wanted socialist spending at home, not imperial spending abroad. So they thanked him for winning the war by sending his opposition to number 10.

CMU is the EU trying to take control of the financial industry via their usual trick of "harmonizing" rules rather than allowing differentiation with mutual recognition. It doesn't address the problems actual voters had around unlimited immigration. That is taboo for the EU.

"Unlimited immigration" is how the right-wing press like to spin it, but it's a core part of the EU: free movement of goods, services, and people. Free movement is part of the deal.

Free movement enhances trade. The US doesn't restrict people from moving between states. The UK wouldn't accept Scotland trying to reduce people from other parts of the UK from working or living there.

How is it right-wing press spin, if it's entirely accurate as you say yourself?

"Spin" is the presentation. Calling it "uncontrolled immigration" is to put a maximally emotive framing on the subject. It's intended to trigger negative emotions and conjure up images of hordes of people arriving in chaotic fashion ("uncontrolled").

But as you clearly admit it is (was) in fact uncontrolled immigration. I think your political biases are coloring this. It's a statement of fact. You believe it's a negatively "spun" fact because it is, in fact, a negative to basically everyone. Unlimited immigration cannot work because, even putting cultural issues to one side, you can't build unlimited infrastructure at unlimited speed.

In practice there's no such as thing as "unlimited immigration". There are natural limitations such as available jobs, housing and people willing to relocate.

> a negative to basically everyone

That's a politicised absolute which is clearly false. I think your political biases are colouring this.

I go back to my previous example. The UK doesn't try to impose government control on movement between its constituent countries, and the US doesn't limit movement between states. Freedom of movement improves economic outlook.

The number of people willing to relocate to rich Western countries is effectively unlimited. Not literally infinite but so large it is equivalent. Jobs are not a limitation because governments will pay for benefits, including housing benefits. That's why it's actually fair to describe it as unlimited.

We're talking about movement within the European Union, so "willing to relocate to rich Western countries" doesn't make any sense at all. The West already includes Europe.

All EU countries are reasonably affluent by global standards. Some countries are richer than others, but it doesn't make economic sense to move from a country where you have a job to claim benefits in another one.

EU countries aren't obliged to pay benefits to people who have never worked in the country, so your idea that "governments will pay for benefits" is a very simplified view.

UK is a nuclear power on sufferance of the US. It hasn't built its own nukes since 1960 or so. Which by an odd coincidence is right around when it lost its empire as well.

GDP is not a reliable metric of prosperity, but in any case the UK's GDP is built on financial services. The "moat" for that is essentially a "network effect" - people do business where other people do business. Interfere with that and it can vanish overnight.

"Soft power" is essentially a function of money. See above.

The UK maintains its own warheads and its own designs. The only thing it gets from the US is the submarine missile: the hulls are also domestic.

I stand partially corrected; however it is worth noting that its "own designs" consist of a single warhead "closely based on" a US one. Although nominally the UK maintains the capacity to design a new weapons system, this capacity has not been tested.

> Nuclear powers

meh. It is a deterrence at best. Contributes nothing in terms of economic might.

> Soft power

Agree. The royal family which was a major attraction seems to be on wane (imo) after Queen's death

> permanent UN security council member

This is rooted in post-World-War-2 setup. If the council had to be setup fresh today, UK will not figure in top 5 for sure. There are many countries which are more deserving.

> Brexit has been an act of astonishing self-harm

Agree.

> Talking about "trying to survive" is a bit ridiculous.

Agree here too.

The key thing is that UK is declining. Its the trend that is important here.

The question is whether the UK can continue to justify its substantial spending on military and foreign-policy influence.

When the UK maintained a global empire, the answer was "obviously yes." When the UK held a dominant position in European governance (along with the various benefits that came with that), the answer was still "yes." But now the UK has given both of those things. So it's reasonable to ask if these are expensive luxuries from another era.

The UK never held anything close to a dominant position in European governance.

The UK was one of the top 3-4 nations by voting power (depending on the time) in the 27-member EU and a very important player in EU politics. Their negotiating power is evidenced by the fact that they were able to secure opt-outs from a number of treaty obligations.

In the past! Over time less and less was decided by voting and we saw what the UK's influence was worth when Cameron took voters concerns to the other leaders. Answer: shut up and do as you are told.

The EU hasn't been interested in votes for a long time and will certainly be even less interested in future.

It was dominant though. Top2 or top3 in research orientation. I don't think a single project was ever done without major UK participants and researchers.

Granted, we mostly excluded 'public schools' in favor of UK universities, at least for research and engineering projects, but Edinburgh had more power than Hamburg and Hannover, and I think only Paris-Lyon had more projects than them. Mostly because we had space projects.

That's only one tiny aspect which hardly matters to anyone outside of academia.

An empire that was built on theft and oppression.

I Was born in India, and my grandfather lived through this oppression, and told me about the things the brits did; it's kind of ironic and funny how not a lot of people talk about it.

> An empire that was built on theft and oppression.

What other kinds do you have?

> An empire that was built on theft and oppression

Not that it makes it any better, but isn't that what all empires are built on? A more ethical empire wouldn't be an empire at all. It'd be something more akin to the USA, the EU, or on a smaller scale the UK itself.

The UK itself is not an "ethical empire", it is the English empire. England's satellite states are second-class. All of them harbor grudges about it, and all of them have robust political factions which advocate leaving the UK.

Yes all of Scotland harbors a grudge against the English, that's why they voted to remain a part of the UK when given their "once in a generation" chance to do so.

And yes they're totally second class. That's why they have their own parliaments whereas England doesn't.

Should I have said "every one of them"? I didn't mean to imply that every citizen personally harbors a grudge. That would be silly! But they did have a referendum, and "remain" barely won.

Yes, the fact they have their own parliaments, while "England does not", does indeed demonstrate that they are second class. Because the reason England "doesn't have a parliament" is that when Scotland "joined", the English parliament was simply renamed into "The Parliament of Great Britain", without changing anything else. They even kept the same MPs - didn't even hold an election! It was all for show, a minimal mask of fairness for dissolving the Scottish parliament. It resulted in riots and martial law.

This, by the way, was the closest England ever came to "consensually" adding a member. Wales at this point in time was a straight-up English territory. It didn't even get a parliament until 1999, at the same time Scotland was allowed to reform theirs. And would you like to talk about Northern Ireland?

You're referring to the way things were in the past, whilst making claims about the present day. Empires don't generally give parts of themselves fair and free referendums on whether to stay and then win, do they?

Tell me then, why do you think England is unique among the constituent countries of the United Kingdom in not having "its own" parliament? Is it because it's the least important member, subservient to the others?

History, and the way devolution was set up by Blair. He wanted Scotland to have more power locally because it's a relatively left wing place that voted Labour at the time, and didn't want England to have more local power because that would have hurt Labour electorally.

And funnily enough the British empire was by far the best one to be in, only extracting around 6% of GDP from countries, it was much worse to be in the French, ottoman, or soviet or any other empire.

Why did so many countries want to join the commonwealth?

Unfortunately the woke oppression crusaders really need to admit Britain and the US might be slightly oppressive but it’s nothing compared to almost any other country or empire on earth.

A catalog of some of the "slightly oppressive" things done in India:

https://historiesofcolour.com/THE-BRITISH-RAJ

History is bad. Lots of people did bad things. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a relative hierarchy of evil.

I’m from the Soviet empire. Trust me. From my family’s stories they’d much rather have been in the British empire than where they were. I’m pretty sure a lot of Rwandans and Haitians would agree too. The British were relatively good to their empire.

Yeah, but we are talking about India under british empire. Not Rwanda and Haiti. Since you're so oblivious of what the british empire did, here's a 8 minute mini speech of things British empire did in India. India wasn't some poor country, it was actually one of the richest countries in the world before brits came along and stole everything.

This was my entire point in the initial post, it's both hilarious and a bit sad how people are so unaware what the british empire did in India.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7CW7S0zxv4

Stealing is a bit different to killing 30m Eastern Europeans, starving them to the point of cannibalism etc, and also killing 30m of your own people.

That’s my point. And that’s my family’s experience.

They did cause famine starving tens of millions of people. Deliberately. Among a great many other violent atrocities. Please read/watch the resources you have been given.

Even were we to accept that, the whatabout-ism is a shockingly poor taste response to someone with a personal connection to real oppression, and I don't even have words for someone labeling people "woke oppression crusaders" for pointing out that the UK committed crimes against humanity on a vast scale resulting in tens of millions of deaths.

See my comment above about my family’s experience. As an Eastern European frankly I’m fed up of this British and American bashing. These places were heaven compared to the raids of mongols, Turks, soviets, and everything else in Central Europe.

There are grades of evil.

I really don't understand your point. Mongol raids happened, so it's fine to brush the atrocities of the Raj under rug? Bit of a non-sequitor.

Let's turn it around. "I'm fed up of all the Soviet bashing. It was heaven compared to the Congo under King Leopold." See? Not a nice reply is it?

You're aware that the places the Empire conquered were all empires themselves, right? (with the exception I think of Australia/New Zealand, which weren't developed enough to have anything resembling an empire)

As a rule I find that people who take the common, simplistic, tweet-length view of British rule (i.e. that it became rich by stealing from India, that it was the deliberate invoker of India's famines, that it was racist even by its times standards, etc), assume that anyone who disagrees isn't aware of basic history.

I've also noticed that there's always an (annoying) triumphal 'gotcha' when they link to some short-form essay mentioning basic facts, denied by nobody, of the famines and loss of relative share of GDP suffered by India etc.

Again, _everyone knows this_. It comes across as naive and arrogant to assume otherwise.

The effect British rule had in India (and everywhere) was extremely nuanced, and there is a huge amount of interesting history to be debated. After all, we're talking about a subcontinent over a 350 year time period.

The British, for instance, banned the practices of Sati (burning widows alive) and of infanticide, and explicitly allowed Indians to compete on equal terms with the British in examinations to enter the Indian Civil Service.

There's very little consensus amongst historians whether or not they were responsible for the famines India suffered at the time, or if they even made any net money from India whatsoever, given their constant fear of raising taxes.

I'm not necessarily trying to take a position either way, by the way, just begging people who are nodding along to some of these bumper-sticker anti-colonialism comments to read more deeply into what is an unimaginably huge subject.

To add to your point, there’s very little consensus among people on the subcontinent about it. My mom and aunts are borderline monarchists. My dad is a republican, and growing up I heard him complain about the British dividing and conquering by creating tensions between Muslims and Hindus. But even he readily credits the British for developing the region’s laws and institutions.

As to the famines: cyclical famines were common in India: https://www.orissapost.com/this-is-why-indian-kings-used-to-.... The British didn’t cause famine in India, though it’s fair to say they mismanaged the response.

Please stop using HN for ideological battle. You've been doing it a lot, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for, and we ban accounts that do this regardless of what they're for or against.

Also, please don't use multiple accounts to do this and especially not in the same threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Firstly I'd like to apologize for replying to this comment instead of flagging it and moving on. It can be difficult to judge sometimes when to engage.

There's something I'd like to clarify. I came back to this thread to find that my own comment was flagged, and I'd also collected a surprising number of downvotes in a short span of time (unless flagging resets vote count - I'm not sure). Is the flag from you, as a slap on the wrist for fueling the fire? I didn't think flags were used that way, but once again I'm not sure. If it's not from you, then I suspect some brigading may have occurred. (It's possible someone else felt my comment warranted admin attention, but 1) the timing is odd and 2) you've clearly already seen this thread).

Sorry as well for the meta - I'd have made this a PM, but, well...

(It's better to email [email protected] than to post about this in the threads. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.)

Yes, I flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34596819 and downvoted the comment but there were flags and downvotes from other users as well.

I'm not arguing against your view on the topic (nor the GP's, for that matter) but you definitely fed the flames in this thread, and not just in one place. I flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34596819 because it seemed the most egregious.

EDIT: probably got that wrong, I'll see when you answer :)

> A more ethical empire wouldn't be an empire at all. It'd be something more akin to the USA

Are you suggesting that the US behaves ethically? Snowden, Assange, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, BLM, Guantanamo, ...

Or the way the native population was treated. (theft and oppression)

There's a reason that films usually have an englishman as the bad guy

Not to worry, as someone also of Asian descent in a hundred or so years the amount of those living in the current British Isles with heritage to the colonialists will become a small minority and hopefully out of power (as I doubt the majority will want to be ruled by a minority).

You support a replacement of the native population? After what the Normans did haven't the English had enough?

I don't have any real care for it either way because I'll be likely dead by the time it happens, I am just pointing out demographic trends. However I don't see what your point about dog whistling far-right viewpoints is for. Britain as a whole is completely supportive of current demographic trends and I don't see any serious rejection of it in politics the way you might if one brought it up in a non-Western nation.

> I don't see any serious rejection of it in politics

It's the policy of the Tory party to reduce immigration, has been for years, and is popular policy that wins them votes. The Tories don't actually do it and among the politicians you're right: there is no serious rejection, for the reasons you've outlined.

But among the population, you seem to have an opinion based on TV, Twitter, urban areas, or maybe the youth. But to most of the country multiculturalism and mass immigration is controversial at best, and often very unpopular. In fact you can (and I do) often find critics of mass immigration among immigrants themselves, and their descendants.

Well this is some weird asian supremacy replacement theory I've not seen before...

Always nice to see proof it's not just white people who can be supremacists.

I don't see how this is a "weird asian supremacy replacement theory" when Britain wholesale welcomes these changes as a part of their future, many Western countries welcome immigrants for a) brain drain from other countries and b) so their economies maintain growth. Nothing supremacist in that and nothing I said implies anything about supremacy or Asians beyond the fact I myself have Asian heritage.

I mean, when any high profile white person does complain that they don't want this, they are called a replacement theory conspiracist nazi. And they are basically cancelled from mainstream media.

But to be fair, you are right in a way, I personally believe the UK is the most welcoming non racist nation on earth. I'm saying that as someone who's experienced it firsthand.

Insecure racist undertones? Multiculturalism going as planned!

What exactly did the British rob from Indians and may I ask a related follow on question... Do you believe there is any evidence that Indians robbed other Indians during the process of regime change when various Indian states were merged with the Republic?

A lot of people don’t talk about it because the Indian elite are highly westernized. It’s hard to talk too much shit about the British when you’re also an Oxbridge graduate, have property in London, etc.

That being said, where would India be if the British Empire had never happened? Probably still doing subsistence agriculture. No slight to India, but industrial civilization is an aberrational step forward and there’s no reason to think it would arise at the same time in isolated cultures spontaneously.

The British themselves are the product of being colonized as much as the Indians. They were colonized by Rome, they were colonized by the Normans, etc. They assimilated and grew better from those influences.

> Probably still doing subsistence agriculture.

Respectfully, Are other countries whom UK did not colonise still doing subsistence agriculture?

When Europe was having Industrial revolution, India was ruled by people who were busy subjugating the natives.

I don't want to gloat about an alternative timeline, But colonialism is a huge negative for India.