The grim reality for Britain as it faces up to 2024 is that no other major power on Earth stands quite as close to its own dissolution.

Given its recent record, perhaps this should not be a surprise..

In 2016, when the country chose to rip up its long-term foreign policy by leaving the European Union, achieving the rare feat of erecting an economic border with its largest trading partner and with a part of itself, Northern Ireland, while adding fuel to the fire of Scottish independence for good measure.

And if this wasn’t enough, it then spectacularly failed in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, combining one of the worst death rates in the developed world with one of the worst economic recessions.

If you ask the question why is this the sorry state of England?

The answer is that it has never put its people before profit – Mrs Thatcher – privatisation.

It seems to me that Britain’s existential threat is not simply the result of poor governance—an undeniable reality—but of something much deeper: the manifestation of something close to a spiritual crisis.

At the heart of Britain’s crisis is a crisis of identity. Put simply, no other major power is quite as conflicted about whether it is even a nation to begin with, let alone what it takes to act like one.

The United Kingdom is more than Britain and the British.

Some of its citizens believe themselves to be British, while others say they are not British at all; others say they are British and another nationality—Scottish or Welsh, say. In Northern Ireland it is even more complicated, with some describing themselves as only British while others say they are only Irish.

Brexit—an apparent spasm of English nationalism that has broken the social contract holding Britain’s union of nations together, revealing the country’s true nature as an unequal union, of the English, by the English, for the English.

If anything, Brexit revealed the scale of the problem that was already there. An anachronistic country, one destined to break up into its old component parts.

We tend to think of the world’s most powerful nations as unshakable actors on the world stage, but of course they are not.  Yet the truth is that the Englishness of Brexit only matters if people see themselves as something other than British.

One of the problems in Britain is that the loss of faith in the country is now so pervasive that it is hard to know whether it can be rebuilt.

It seems to me that if Britain is to survive, it has to believe that there is such a thing as Britain and act as though that is the case.

Outside the European Union, Britain’s collective experience becomes more national by definition. Its economy diverges from the EU, with separate trading relationships, tariffs, standards, and products. It will have its own British immigration system, border checks, and citizenship.

Britain is bottom of the 14 nations for biodiversity, having lost more wildlife than any other G7 country and been shown to be one of the most nature-depleted countries on the planet.

Its vital memories are dying. To survive, it must be more than empty pomp, singing a slave song in support of its rugby team or a national anthem that glorifies a king rather than a country.

This reflects a widespread cultural indifference to its mixed population and is a staggering reality as possibly mental handicap in solving its problems.

London houses more than 8 million citizens who communicate via different languages. It is estimated that more than 300 languages are spoken in the city.

The UK has an unwritten out of date constitution. Instead, it is largely written in different documents but has never been brought together.

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