Jay, I’m afraid it’s not just today’s Britain that’s ripe. A few years ago — in National Review’s May 17, 1966 issue, to be exact — William F. Buckley Jr. had this to say:

England has become a sort of pleasure spa, undistracted by the major problems of life, contented to ease into a new historical role as a little Sweden.
England, casting off a millennium’s responsibility as a crucial power, may be entitled to surcease. The United States is not, and it may be that the Republican Party should intuit that fact, even as the party of Winston Churchill did during the thirties, and endeavor, even at a tactical risk of a loss of votes, to recall the United States citizenry to greatness.

Yes, the stories of Britain’s nanny-statism are endless, from Mark’s excellent column on “’elf ’n’ safety” to your reader’s eye-roller of a tale about ladder training. Still, such anecdotes surely can’t mean that Britain is doomed. They’ve come back from worse. We can turn to Churchill, of course, for a little home defence, via Their Finest Hour:

Grim and gay, dogged and serviceable, with the confidence of an unconquered people in their bones, they adapted themselves to this strange new life, with all its terrors, with all its jolts and jars.

Indeed.