Regime Change in London? Don't Count on It
Rome wasn't burned in a day, and Britain won't be either. The more plausible—and concerning—historical heuristic for our national unwinding is Beirut 1975, not Bucharest 1989. It is hard to see how Britain could undergo the relatively rapid, bloodless and successful transition that occurred when Romanians toppled Nicolae Ceaușescu. Far more likely is a future involving the slow but containable spread of localized bursts of low-level civil unrest of the kind we have witnessed across England since 2024. The British will witness even more varieties of state dysfunction, but the state will avert its disintegration by adeptly wielding its monopoly on violence and its increasingly vast powers of surveillance. Similarly, while economic stagnation will persist and deepen, the bond markets and the International Monetary Fund will successfully stave off total collapse.
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