“The shores of history are strewn with the wrecks of empires,” Churchill once said. How quickly the empire over which he presided has joined those wrecks.

It’s easy to forget just how great Great Britain was, and how recently. At the turn of the last century, its wealth and power were immense and unmatched. It was the world’s number-one or -two producer of petroleum, coal, steel, pig iron, gold and nearly every other precious metal. Its electricity output dwarfed every other comer. Its Royal Navy—by law larger than the world’s next two largest navies combined—extended its presence around the globe. The company of nations over which it ruled comprised one out of every four people and one of every five acres on the planet.

Today, Britain is having trouble governing its own children.

In place of an empire is a weakened, fractious little nation about to collapse under its economic woes. It is besieged by social breakdown; it is plagued by radical subcultures; its police are conceding the battle against crime; its military is a shell of its former self and continuing to shrivel.

After years of budget cuts and neglect, Britain’s armed forces have been decimated. While politicians speak of technological advances with words like “modernization,” “flexibility” and “efficiency,” steep and steady cutbacks in troops, vehicles, weapons and equipment have devastated the nation’s defenses. As an example, the Royal Navy—almost 900 warships strong at its peak—currently has 22 warships, only a third of which can operate at any one time.

Britain has surrendered its once-prized military self-sufficiency in arena after arena. The latest of these came in December, when the Defense Ministry scrapped an order for 2,000 armored utility vehicles. The manufacturer that lost the order, bae, happens to be Britain’s only remaining heavy-duty combat vehicle maker—and it said it will likely soon have to abandon the business. This would mean the nation that invented the tank would be forced to trust other nations for its military needs, parts and maintenance.

In a world of increasing dangers, this trend is all the more alarming. While a loss of national pride in British power is certainly to blame, so too are the economic constraints facing a nation in decline and sinking under its own ridiculous welfare commitments. (Recent figures show, for example, that 140,000 British households are receiving tax-free government handouts that exceed the average British salary.)

Making matters far worse, the British economy has been absolutely walloped by the global financial crisis. It is predicted to shrink 2.7 percent this year as a plunge in consumer spending drives the nation into its deepest economic slump since the Second World War.

To address the contraction, the government is expected to borrow somewhere between $172 billion and $190 billion—up from “only” $52 billion last year. These figures are certain to balloon to even more perilous heights in the longer term, considering the scale of the “stimulus” initiatives being discussed. At the same time, Gordon Brown is considering the printing of vast sums of more money to dump into the vortex.

The International Monetary Fund says the UK will face the worst recession of any industrialized nation in 2009. The British people are facing the simultaneous economic pressures of a depreciating pound, abnormally high inflation, exorbitant and rapidly rising taxes, and exploding unemployment. This in a nation already known as one of the most expensive in the Western world.

Britons’ notoriety for keeping a stiff upper lip during tough times is proving to be a thing of the past. The UK is already seeing a rise in thefts, domestic burglaries, knife-point robberies and fraud—economically related crimes that the government directly links to the crippled national economy.

But other factors are clearly contributing to the problem as well, most notably the wasteland that once was British family life. The broken homes that dot the landscape are proven breeding grounds for future criminals.

“The offspring of the first big generation of single mothers were children in the 1980s,” deputy head teacher Ralph Surman told the Daily Mail. “Now they are adults with their own children, and the problems are leading to higher crime rates and low participation in the labor force.” In Surman’s view, Britain is raising a generation with no social skills or work ethic, and that cannot be educated.

Surman was responding to figures released last month showing that the number of 16- to 24-year-olds who are not in education, employment or training (known as neets) is increasing across Britain—from 94,000 in 2003 to a remarkable 850,000 just four years later. What are these hundreds of thousands of unproductive young people doing with their lives?

Unsurprisingly, antisocial behavior like drunkenness, vandalism and verbal abuse has become epidemic: An estimated 35 million such acts occur each year in England and Wales, which averages out to more than one per second, round the clock.

The government’s own patently anti-family welfare policies also bear their share of blame for these pathologies. Since the Labor Party came to power in 1997, the British government has eroded tax breaks for families and replaced them with a system of tax credits that benefit single mothers rather than couples. Recent figures show, shamefully, that a couple with children can become over $7,200 a year richer simply by splitting up. Under this system, the number of single-parent homes has soared. Today it stands at 2.3 million British households.

“There are now so many children growing up in broken homes or with disruptive backgrounds that the self-restraint taught to previous generations is no longer there,” Robert Whelan, a member of a British think tank, told the Mail. “They think when they are angry they can just lash out.”

And that’s just what they’re doing. Government figures show that one in three British youth carry knives. On average, more than five people die from knife crime each week, and a British child dies in a knife attack every two weeks.

Violent crime is now the most common offense committed by females in England—recently overtaking theft. Additionally, crimes of violence—which include assault, street brawls, grievous bodily harm and even murder—committed by girls under age 18 rose almost 50 percent over the past five years. “Half of all violent offenses are linked with alcohol,” the Telegraph reported, “causing concerns that the ‘ladette’ culture of binge drinking is turning more and more violent” (January 31). Last year, 10- to 18-year-old girls carried out almost 58,000 crimes in England.

In major cities like London, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham, whole areas “have become lawless enclaves, places where even the police fear to tread,” says South Africa’s Argus Weekend.

The public’s confidence in the police is plummeting. The Brussels Journal reports, “In the last few years violent crime has risen sharply, with the police seemingly unwilling to investigate or prosecute even many serious offenses, and government guidelines requiring judges sentence those found guilty to little or no prison time.” Concurrent with this erosion in civil order, Britain is losing more and more of its sovereignty to Europe (“well over 300 European laws have been established in Britain against the wishes of Parliament,” the Journal says)—and it is turning over more and more cases to the parallel Islamic judicial system it is fostering in its midst.

The gradual surrender of British law enforcement to antisocial forces is perhaps nowhere more chillingly illustrated than in their capitulation to hate-filled Muslims. Throughout the recent Gaza war, public demonstrations of condemnation against Israel and support for Hamas filled the streets of London. Israel’s embassy in Kensington was the object of daily violent siege. “Certainly, there have been anti-Israel protests around the world,” wrote Melanie Phillips. “But in Britain, not only have these been particularly violent but the authorities have done nothing to stop such incitement of hatred.” At least once, police demanded that pro-Israel demonstrators put away their Israeli flags so as not to be “inflammatory”—even while allowing some Hamas demonstrators “to dress up as hook-nosed Jews pretending to drink the blood of Palestinian babies.” “One recent video clip,” Phillips wrote, “captured the astonishing spectacle of Muslims stampeding through London’s West End hurling traffic cones and other missiles at the police, all the time shrieking ‘Allahu akbar’ and ‘cowards.’ The police ran and stumbled backward rather than standing their ground and stopping the rampage” (emphasis mine).

It is a fitting metaphor for what has become of the world’s mightiest empire.

To understand how this dramatic collapse was written about in advance in your Bible, order a free copy of Herbert W. Armstrong’s masterwork The United States and Britain in Prophecy, or read it online here at theTrumpet.com.