Britain has been playing musical chairs with its prime ministers. Last week the most recent office holder, Keir Starmer, who has been PM for less than two years, resigned.

In 2024 he led his Labour Party to what appeared to be a resounding win, taking over 60 percent of the seats. It was, however, less than it seemed. Labour received only 34 percent of the votes, the lowest of any governing party ever. As is so often the case with our voting system, a party has a big win even though most voters prefer other parties.

Labour won not because it was popular but because the incumbent Conservatives collapsed. Starmer has never been popular. According to the polls, his satisfaction rating was the lowest ever for an incoming PM and it never got much better.

Starmer was following in the footsteps of his predecessors. Since the Brexit referendum in 2016 took the country out of the European Union, Britain has had six prime ministers and now a seventh. The nation is suffering a political malaise, its public polarized and its politics fractured.

Only a century ago, Britain was an empire, the largest in history, and the British people basked in the prestige and riches that were its due. Since the glory days, it’s been a long steep decline. Brexit was perhaps a last misguided attempt to regain some of that glory, to become great again.

It failed. Since Brexit, things have simply gotten worse. Its GDP has fallen four to eight percent and business investment is down over 10 percent. Its internal ties have weakened, as Scotland and Wales gain greater independence. As has its external ties as economics forces it to cut spending on diplomacy and foreign aid. According to former Conservative prime minister John Major,“The U.K. once revelled in being a leading member of an EU with half a billion citizens and the undoubted first ally of the United States. Today, we know we are neither—and so does the world.”

The British are faced with being less and having less, and they don’t like it. They have reacted the way people usually do when they see their world failing them, they rebel against the establishment (the “elites”) and seek blindly for a saviour.

We see our neighbours, the Americans, behaving similarly. White working class men were kings of the realm after the Second World War. Since then they have seen their relative social status decline as women, Blacks and gays demanded and achieved equality, at the same time as their economic security, once guaranteed, has become more precarious, assaulted by globalization and automation. Largely out of desperation they elevated a saviour who promised to make America great again. His grievance-fuelled rule is doing even more damage to the U.S. than Brexit is to Britain.

These reactions to lowered expectations are something we should all be preparing for. We are drawing down the planet’s resources faster than it can replenish them, and polluting it faster than it can absorb the pollutants. Sooner or later, we are all going to have to come to terms with the Earth’s limits.

If we don’t modify our demands they will be modified for us. We can learn to share what the planet offers or we can descend into violent competition for declining resources. Considering how difficult it has been adapting to just one big environmental problem—global warming—it’s hard to envision us adapting easily to a possibly even bigger one, particularly when our leaders haven’t even considered it yet.

So can we do it? Can we adapt to less? Only our material standard of living is threatened, after all, and there are many other riches than material goods: nature, the arts, hobbies, family and friends. Can they be enough? That’s a question we will eventually have to answer.