From My Email and Common Sense Reasoning

From Ann Coulter in Human Events, "The Sun Never Sets On The British Welfare System"—for those of you too young to remember, the title is an allusion to a common, though even then ironic assertion by the school teachers on both sides of the Atlantic among us that "the sun never sets on the British Empire"—which was frequently heard when studying geography because of all the pink countries on the globe; and from Anthony M. Daniels, writing with the pen name of Theodore Dalrymple in the City Journal, "British Degeneracy on Parade," we have an attempt to explain what is going on in the country formerly referred to as Great Britain.

They both say, in much more nuanced terms, this is what you get after from a welfare state—"The Nazi war machine couldn't break the British, but the modern welfare state has." I saw that up close in the early 70s. When I timidly pointed out the tendency for everyone to be 'fiddling' in one way or another, upper, middle and lower classes, it was not well received by my fellow officers in the Royal Air Force.