France's role in future global affairs easily eclipses the UK's. France still has a future as a great power, whereas the UK's opportunity is already squandered.

40,000 dead[1] and two million houses damaged in a country of 40 million people (presiding over a global empire of a billion souls) over six years is not meaningful... Especially in the context of the largest and most destructive war the world has ever known.

> Sure.. Okay.. France was worse,

Don't look at Metropolitan France, two thirds of it got to sit the war out as a puppet state.

Look further east. How many houses were 'damaged or destroyed' in Germany, Poland, the USSR..?

This isn't a suffering Olympics, but compared to war expenditures, the cost of rebuilding the damage inflicted to the Isles was a rounding error. Those expenditures (and their associated debts) were what crippled Britain's ability to maintain an empire, not the cost of rebuilding.

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[1] That sort of thing was a normal day over there. A normal one - not even a bad one.

This isn't a "who had it worse"

My point is the UK decided to rebuild at home after significant damages in their capital city, and I agree with them.

A lot of EU was destroyed and had to rebuild, the US wasn't and was able to boom.