“One scarcely knows where to begin.”

Introduction

Once upon a time, Britain ruled the seas. Today it rules the headlines with AI Prosperity Deals, collapsing infrastructure rebranded as renewal, and “investment pledges” that turn out to be little more than press releases. The pantomime continues, and the Daily Mail writes the reviews.

The United Kingdom has become a theatre where empire’s afterglow is staged as farce. The actors change - Thatcher, Blair, Johnson, Starmer - but the script is the same: Britain must always be more important than it is.

This is not a sneer. It is a tragedy. But it is also funny - in the way only pantomime can be funny, when the audience knows the joke but the cast insists on playing it straight.

The Lifecycle of the Foma

Birth - Empire as Destiny

The original foma was simple: Britain was chosen. A small island made vast by industry, trade, and conquest. Britannia ruled the waves, and with her came the myth of eternal supremacy.

But expansion was built on exploitation: slavery, famine, extraction. The colonies supplied raw materials and lives, Britain wrote the history books. Everyone else’s stories were erased or reduced to footnotes.

When people complain about immigration today, the irony is sharp: just because Britain is finished with colonialism does not mean colonialism is finished with Britain. The empire comes home, not as subjects, but as citizens - and the foma cracks again.

Scale - Institutions of Prestige

The empire’s story scaled through rituals and institutions:

  • The monarchy as eternal theatre, projecting continuity.
  • Parliament as the “mother of democracy.”
  • Oxbridge as the finishing school of empire’s administrators.
  • The BBC as the voice of reason, piped worldwide.

Together, they turned Britain’s foma into a global brand. Even after empire began to crumble, the rituals remained: pageantry, pomp, and the soft power of English as world language.

Ossification - Pomp without Power

As empire dissolved, the rituals grew louder. The monarchy became a global soap opera. London became a financial Disneyland, where Russian oligarchs and Gulf princes laundered wealth through real estate.

One story kept the whole show glued together: The War. Britain’s finest hour, replayed endlessly in films, speeches, anniversaries, and tabloids. It was the one myth that made decline bearable - a story in which Britain was not just relevant but heroic.

The problem is not that the war was unimportant. The problem is that it became the only story, crowding out everything else. “We won the war” became a talisman, waved against Europe, against immigrants, against the present itself. Even as the country hollowed out, the Blitz spirit was rehearsed again and again, as if morale alone could power the lights.

Fray - Airstrip One

The cracks are now visible to all.

  • Brexit was not liberation but self-amputation — an act of national theatre so convincing that even its performers looked surprised when the curtain fell.
  • The Horizon scandal exposed the rot: thousands of innocent sub-postmasters ruined by software, while institutions doubled down, protecting the story (“boffins got it wrong”) rather than the people.
  • Unicorn Nation was declared, with solemn faces promising a tech miracle. Instead, “investment” simply meant Big Tech and Private Equity bought up what remained, extracting rents while creating no jobs worth naming.
  • The Panto Press dutifully applauded each new announcement, mistaking press releases for reality. The Daily Mail became less watchdog than theatre critic, reviewing a pantomime as if it were Shakespeare.
  • Airstrip One is the logical endpoint: Britain reduced to junior partner, signing Tech Prosperity deals that look like sovereignty but feel like servitude. Orwell warned it would come as nightmare; in fact, it arrived as farce, complete with unicorn branding.

Closing Reflection

The national drama has curdled into pantomime: a show that insists on being taken seriously even as everyone can see the strings. The set is crumbling, the costumes threadbare, yet the show goes on. The politicians bellow their lines, the tabloids clap on cue, and the audience is expected to laugh and cry in the right places.

We have seen Starmer as the outraged Panto Dad, Johnson as the rogue who won’t leave the stage. Trump strides on as the swaggering suitor, playing out his own romanticised foma of Britain — monarchy, empire, pageantry - less love than cosplay, a mirror to his ego. King Charles, meanwhile, plays the weary monarch in a costume too heavy for the part - solemn, ornamental, faintly embarrassed by the plot. Nigel Farage is the heckler in the stalls, shouting slogans that somehow get written into the script. And the City of London itself plays the trickster sprite: flashy, elusive, promising riches while quietly draining the kingdom dry.

The tragedy is that the country still has wit, culture, and resilience in abundance. The comedy is that its leaders prefer scripts and spectacle to facing the scaffolding.

Foma stretch until they break. Britain’s foma - of empire, of exceptionalism, of unicorn salvation - is already fraying.

One scarcely knows where to begin. But perhaps the place to end is here:
Airstrip One is not destiny. It is just the last act of a very long show. And the curtain is coming down.