Abstract
This essay reflects on the debate on British decline which consumed the political class for several decades particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. Decline has many meanings and has always been a contested term. The essay distinguishes between absolute and relative decline, imperial and economic decline, and explores the different debates which have emerged over relative economic decline during the last hundred years and the various political programmes on right and left to overcome it. Imperial decline came to be accepted as inevitable in a way that relative economic decline was not. The varying accounts of the economic decline hold different national peculiarities responsible. The essay analyses the debates around an anti-industrial culture, the size and role of finance, the distractions of empire, the absence of a developmental state, and the organisation of industry.
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