As ever, his language is a little colourful and his moral outrage set a little too high[1], but Monbiot offers an interesting analysis of the extraordinary stability of British economy and society during centuries of wrenching change worldwide and declining productivity within Britain.
It has seemed to me for a while that Britain is deeply dependent on the enormous accumulation of capital (itself a result of colonialism) in the square mile and, more recently, that systemic financial collapse would hurt Britain more than most (despite Gordon Brown’s claims to the contrary). Monbiot develops this idea a little further.
1: I don’t mean to suggest that Britain was blameless in the events that he describes, merely that the picture is vastly more complex than he makes out.