> drift away from competitive free markets, the rise of culture war politics, short termism is business and politics, naivety about the rest of the world (disastrously reflected in foreign policy - Russia being the obvious example) and so on seem to be spreading.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. Especially the naivety about the rest of the world. As someone whom travels to India regularly (my family are there) I have to say, people have no clue about the rate of change happening over there.

In an extremely short space of time (I want to say at most a couple years) I’ve seen what used to be an all day journey from Delhi to Meerut be cut down to a couple hour bus trip through the building of the Delhi - Meerut expressway.

I’ve seen the Delhi metro continue to expand its reach and new expressways begging building (in our home city of Batala a new motorway was recently started to take us to Delhi directly)

Meanwhile the M25 continues to be a massive pothole with indefinite road works that never seem to complete