When did this country get so useless?

I'm not going to discuss whether or not Brexit is a bad thing - I happen to think it's mostly irrelevant in the long term if we are or aren't members of the European Union. But the whole fraught process has highlighted something deeper and more worrying and probably of more long-term danger to us as a nation, whatever transpires in the next few months.

It's not the vitriol. This is to be expected when the country is so evenly divided over a binary issue (i.e. IN or OUT): whilst general elections are ostensibly a choice between Labour and Conservative, the process is diluted for various reasons - you're hardly ever voting for a single element of policy, other candidates are available, it's only a temporary state of affairs etc. No, the most disappointing thing I've noticed is the general lack of faith in the abilities of the country. I've had a number of conversations with friends and/or colleagues over the last 6 months, as the nation-wide yelling has really hotted up, and I've been left a little shocked and massively deflated at how those conversations have gone. The overriding impression I get is a belief that we're not just better off, economically, in the EU (a view that I respect, and share to a degree), but that we (the UK) are actually incapable of surviving by ourselves in the big, scary world: our politicians are rubbish, our people are rubbish, we don't produce anything, we're not competent to govern ourselves responsibly or take the right decisions, whether that's commercial, environmental, social or anything else ending in -al. It's, frankly, a depressingly pessimistic point of view and one produced, time and again, as though it's a self-evident fact.

How has this happened? I don't feel that way about the United Kingdom. And I hesitate to say it but we'd never have thought that way 100 years ago. Alright, so we were undoubtedly on the wrong side of the confident/arrogant line in those days, and we perpetrated atrocities in the formation and maintenance of our fabled Empire, so shouldn't necessarily be blindly proud of what we were, but where has this defeatist attitude come from? Yes, life here is far from perfect: we've got some self-serving show-offs in power, and some citizens you might describe as losers or good-for-nothings (or pick your insult), but it was ever thus; we've also got a quite outstanding heritage of science, culture and sport, general civilisation - health service, economic strength, education system, judiciary etc. - that most countries around the world can't even dream about. We have a reputation worldwide (however anachronistic) for good manners, drinking tea and fair play. I refuse to believe that the characteristics of good that developed all of this in the past have now completely deserted us.

Yes, the world has changed. I'm not going to argue that there aren't economic benefits of being in the EU, and at least short-term drawbacks of leaving, but what has been the cost to us as a group of people? The national self-esteem, or self-belief, seems to have taken a nosedive. Whether or not this has had anything to do with being part of the EEC/EU for the past 46 years is debateable, but I think it's a big problem. Are we now only valid if we team up with a bunch of bigger kids and wander the playgrounds of the world safe inside our gang? I refuse to accept that.

Rather than 'proud' (a term with which I'm very uncomfortable), I feel very lucky to have been born into such an enlightened (relatively speaking) and wealthy country. We don't have to struggle like so many in the world do. It's natural to moan about whatever irks us in our lives, but in global terms we're very, very well-off. And we're in this position because of what we've done in the past. A good country has been created over countless generations, generations of the same people now being dismissed as no-hopers, and that's what I don't get. This is probably as close to patriotism as I get...

My approach to life is very independent and I prefer to set my own standards rather than have them set for me by any external body. That's the main reason I've been self-employed for the last 25 years. I'm not a member of any professional associations and wouldn't even dream of socialising with anyone for any reason beyond the immediate enjoyment of that socialisation. My prosperity and well-being is completely (well, as completely as possible) under my control, but that doesn't mean I'm isolated from the world around me - I need employment, I need friends, I need other people to play cricket and drink beer with - but I trust myself to decide how and with whom I do those things. I'm well aware it's a bit simplistic to extrapolate that to the country as a whole, but that's my view on stuff.

Whatever the outcome of the current political shenanigans, I would like to think that we make the best of it and prove that, individually and as a group, we're not as useless as many of us think we are. I get the horrible feeling that, the way things are going, half of the country is going to be sulking and half is going to be smug (although it's still far from clear which half is which currently), but that serves nobody's purposes. The real baddies here are the ones who made us think it's alright to write ourselves off as a basket case. Because we're not. Well, I'm not, at least - you speak for yourself.