On 6 November, The Economist told us that ‘Brand Britain has bounced back’. The article consists of cherry picked facts and can only be described as a fine case of “copium”, i.e. the British ruling class desperately searching for reasons to be cheerful.
British capitalism has been in decline for a long time, over a century in fact. This decline has accelerated since 2008. It is now reaching such proportions and for such a sustained period, that it has changed British mass culture to an extent that is visible from the outside.
The world has noticed, and has dubbed the vibes coming from this island, “British chaos”.
From gentleman to flag obsessed
This is quite the turnaround for a culture once known for its “stiff upper lip” reserve and cold rationality.
Examples of this undignified chaos are Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, British pornstars vying for the record of having sex with the most men in a single day.
Then there have been the overtly reactionary cries of despair, such as middle-aged men painting roundabouts in the England flag.
There was also the disturbing case of the twelve year-old Scottish girl brandishing a knife and an axe for the camera, shared by Elon Musk under the pretence that she represented white British youth with no choice but to use axes to defend themselves from immigrants.
This aspect of British culture is not at all new, but it has grown in the wake of decades of austerity and decline, and is now able to be filmed and spread all over the world.
This means that Americans no longer perceive Britain as a land of quaint toffs; but as somewhere even more garish and edgy than Florida. It’s like the world is rubbernecking Britain’s crisis.
Weird Britannia
Behind the freakish social media expressions is social breakdown. There is a palpable chaos in British society. When it isn’t searching around for signs that all is well, The Economist manages to report from the anarchic underbelly of Britain.
On 21 August, it revealed that an astonishing forty percent of phone thefts in Europe happen in Britain, and that London is now the global hotspot for car theft, which has risen by 75 percent in a single decade.
Racist British politicians like to talk of ‘swarms’ of ‘invading’ immigrants in an attempt to exploit the sense of chaos for their own gains.
But if they wanted a genuine visual symbol of this chaos, they should pick Lime bikes, which have actually swarmed our cities to the extent one regularly finds small hills of them blocking one’s path.
This outburst of weird Britain on social media is also an expression of the vapidity of bourgeois politics and culture in the dead end of British capitalism.
The flag craze is utterly desperate, but it is obviously an outcome of the years of racist immigrant blaming by politicians, which has only gotten more shrill the more empty and desperate it gets. As they say, empty vessels make the most noise.
But this is not new. Politicians have been utterly out-of-touch and unable to solve problems for a long time, and as a result they’ve been peddling nonsense about English or British values, and anti-immigrant racism for equally long. It is just coming to a crisis point now.
That is what Britain has become and how it is seen. It is so far from the respectable, powerful and stable country the ruling class either thinks it is or hopes others think it is.
Commenting on this British chaos, Vice summed it up well:
“After nearly two decades of austerity, delinquent government, and myriad social issues, nobody imagines Britain to look like Downton Abbey or Sherlock anymore. In the Starmer era, the nation has well and truly departed the stage of respectability, and instead the images of Brits beamed across the world through smartphones are more likely to be race rioters, unhinged rappers, roidheads, phone thieves, 80-year-old hippies being carted off under the Terrorism Act, and drunk men erecting Union Jack flags above vape shops.
“Perhaps British Chaos is a reflection of the society that made it; a crazed, rudderless, deluded place where the only thing that brings people together is hating the Prime Minister, and a country with nothing left to sell the world but evidence of its own insanity.”
Read @clive_mart1n on the anti-migrant, anti-government nationalist parades that have become more frequent on the streets of London these last couple of years 👇https://t.co/YTW7LZnvgW
— VICE (@VICE) November 26, 2025
In this sordid picture, Marxists stand like sober people amongst drunkards – sometimes quite literally. We understand that this chaos is not a product of a decline of national values, or abstract moral degeneracy.
This malaise is a reflection of a deep-set crisis of British capitalism, of the breakdown of the prosperity, the institutions, and public services that uphold the social order
Only through the revolutionary road can Britain be discharged from this lunatic asylum, because only in that way can the present conditions of decline be abolished.
