has Britain just run out of luck?

MOST FADDY NEW words and phrases enjoy a brief spell of fevered ubiquity in headlines, think pieces, hot takes, TikToks and so on, before fading back into deserved oblivion (looking at you, “very demure, very mindful”, hopefully soon to be joined by everything “maxxing”).

“Enshittification” on the other hand, is going nowhere. It’s a truly fabulous term coined by journalist and author Cory Doctorow in 2022. Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary dubbed it word of the year and defined it as “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.” In short, online is increasingly awash with crappy ads, AI slop, swivel-eyed conspiracies, airheads, greed-heads, crooks, scams, trolls and the terminally thick.

However, observing various recent news events unfolding in Britain, particularly in the England bit of the island, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that our nearest neighbours are in the throes of a process of enBritification.

To be clear, this isn’t a bout of Brit-bashing, even though the World Cup is over, and the hurling is done and dusted and the football finishes in Croker this weekend, so therefore it would be natural to resume that other traditional Irish sport just for something to do.

Au contraire – one has to feel a soupçon of sympathy for them-next-door. They seem to be stalled under an unlucky star; the breaks don’t fall their way these days – hopes and expectations are routinely dashed and anticipated events fail to fully deliver. To tweak former Crystal Palace manager Ian Holloway’s famously doleful observation, Britain has such bad luck at the moment that if it fell in a barrel of boobs it’d come out sucking its thumb.

No luck

Supporters headed to the US last month chanting “football’s coming ‘ome” with a real conviction that this was where the 60 years of hurt would be shown the red card, with Harry Kane landing the Golden Boot with a hat-trick against France in the final.

Alas, Kane unable. Argentina not only won, but then converted a v-for-victory sign into a raised middle digit by unfurling a banner proclaiming “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” (“The Falklands are Argentine”). And if that wasn’t enough salt in the six decade wound, dejected England fans then watched their national team turn in a scintillating 10-goal thriller against France for an utterly meaningless third place. It was, declared football aficionados, the “real final”.

Except of course, it wasn’t. And it was one million Spaniards dancing in the streets of Madrid at the homecoming of their heroes.

Meanwhile in Wimbledon this month, a ferytale seemed to be unfolding. Local lad Arthur Fery, a wildcard player with a world ranking of 114, improbably battled his way into the last four of the tennis circuit’s most prestigious tournament, sparking a cacophony of happy hooting on Centre Court (“fery”, geddit?) until Fery fell at the quarter-final fence.

No happy ending – unexpected hope had risen in English breasts, the likes of which hadn’t been felt since Andy Murray’s last triumph there in 2016.

2016, you say? Hmmm….

For if ever there was proof that enBritification is afoot, it lies in the rackety vibe which has emanated from British politics since…well…2016.

First there is the utterly bizarre byelection triggered this month by goggle-eyed chancer Nigel Farage pulling what is known in Irish political circles as a ‘stroke’, only to have his cunning plan backfire spectacularly, landing the Reform leader in a bonkers contest with 34 candidates including Count Binface and three members of the Monster Raving Loony Party.

Yet even that enjoyable piece of political farce has been horribly overshadowed last week by the shocking news of the brutal murder of former Conservative MP Ann Widdecombe at her home in Devon, deeply rattling both the public and parliamentarians alike. A man, 28-year-old Joshua Kerry from Rotherham, was charged with the crime on Monday.

Political unease

Also, this week, the seventh – seventh – British prime minister in ten years moved his bits’n’bobs into 10 Downing Street this week.

This by any standards is a mad statistic, but it’s absolutely extraordinary by the standards of a country which has long touted itself as the epitome of a stable and rational democracy. To recap the madcap decade:

Andy Burnham now replaces Keir Starmer (two years 15 days), who was ultimately felled by scandals and policy U-turns despite overseeing a Labour landslide election in July 2024.

Starmer took over from posho Conservative Rishi Sunak (one year eight months 11 days), who resigned after his party was hammered in the aforementioned Labour landslide election in July 2024.

Before Sunak came the fleeting reign of error by the breathtakingly bananas Liz Truss (49 days).

Lettuce Liz was preceded by mendacious bluffer Boris Johnson (three years one month 13 days).

Before Bo-Jo was the hapless Theresa May (three years one week and four days) who had been flung headlong into the endless shouting and chaos which was convulsing the Houses of Parliament.

The chaos had been caused by sitting prime minister David Cameron (six years two months two days), who had called a Brexit referendum with the casual insouciance of a chap ordering a pint of IPA in his local Pig & Whistle. An ashen-faced Cameron resigned early doors on the morning of 24 June 2016, before the ink on the resulting defeat had quite dried.

There’s little doubt that was when enBritification kicked off. Brexit has turned into a sort of a decades-long hex. “Set us free from the pestilential EU!” demanded 52% of UK voters. And the monkey’s paw curls.

Yes, British travellers got their blue passports back, huzzah! But at quite a cost – social media feeds this summer are overflowing with videos of disgruntled holidaymakers stuck in endless lines at airports from Rome and Palma de Mallorca to Malaga and Faro, caused by the rollout of the European Union’s digital Entry/Exit System (EES) which requires non-EU citizens entering the 29-country Schengen area to register their fingerprints and a facial image on arrival at an EU border.

Post-Brexit wobbles

And then there’s the British economy. While countries around the globe have taken financial hits in recent years due to Covid disruptions, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and Donald Trump’s crazed trade-killing obsession with tariffs, leaving the EU certainly hasn’t delivered the sunlit uplands of prosperity promised by the shady drivers of the clown car that was the Big Red Brexit Bus.

The number-crunchers continue to quarrel over precisely how much damage Brexit has wreaked on the economy, with calculations reckoning it is four to eight per cent smaller than it would have been had Britain stayed put within the EU. UK employment trails other countries by about 4%, wage growth is stagnant, the pound remains stubbornly weak, and the number of 16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training has risen to more than a million, the highest level since 2013.

Brexit did promise to Stop the Boats, and currently net migration to the UK has dropped to its lowest level, outside of the Covid pandemic, since 2012. But this decrease has reshaped the labour market, with industries such as hospitality, food processing and health and social care struggling to find staff.

There hasn’t been the immediate collapse of everything in Britain as predicted by the Remainers a decade ago. But nor has there been a brave new Britain First dawn. Far from it. Instead, there’s been a steady rise in impatience among disillusioned voters waiting for things to improve faster, mingled with a growing feeling that withdrawal from the EU and the swinging door in Downing Street has made the quality of British life seem, well, shittier, unluckier, gloomier. Even the Royal Family seems diminished and tarnished since Queen Elizabeth died in 2022, and is riven with illnesses, fighting siblings and ugly scandals.

Cool Britannia can seem more like Ghoul Britannia these days, given the headline-grabbing ubiquity of the repellent likes of toxic misogynists Andrew and Tristan Tate, far-right figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon aka Tommy Robinson and the spectacular fall of Andrew Windsor-Mountbatten, former buddy of Jeffrey Epstein.

But maybe it’ll be seventh time lucky for beleaguered Blighty. Prime Minister Andy Burnham delivered a hopey-changey vibe as he stood outside Downing Street bathed in sunshine and cheers.

“Let’s pray he knows what he’s doing,” muttered the Daily Mail’s front page headline the morning after. And who can blame them for being beady-eyed about the future? It’s high time Britain did a hexit and rid themselves of their self-inflicted enBritification jinx.

And given the weekend that’s in it, surely the good people of Mayo can sympathise with our neighbours and wish them godspeed. For they, more than most, know that it’s the hope that kills you, every damn time.

Lise Hand is a journalist and writer, and a columnist for TheJournal.ie.

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