Yes, I think so. This "managed decline" to which you refer, doesn't have to be that way, but we have to focus on what we're good at, and as a nation, get behind those things. Ever since Brexit, I have started to get the feeling that we are being "played" by powerful interests who would benefit from us being at each other's throats all the time. It's not a new trick. Julius Caesar knew all about "divide and conquer". The UK has done well (better than most countries, in fact) on renewables. We could actually really make something of this and gain energy independence, but for some reason, we'd much rather keep giving it to already obscenely wealthy companies and some deeply unpleasant regimes who don't really like us very much! But of course, that's not really what the Murdoch press wants, is it?
The planet is facing a variety of increasingly serious problems, and instead of getting behind the overwhelming majority of the world's scientists, and actually leading for once, we have too many people who want to bury their heads in the sand, keep paying Big Oil for an increasingly rare substance and claiming that the very people who are trying to wean us off this dependence are "selling us fears". Well, we can certainly agree on one thing - we are being played - or at least some of us are...
Britain will continue to backslide and will continue to tear itself apart, while there are those out there who are too easily manipulated by those who want to maintain the status quo. "Follow the money", as they say. They did it to us with Brexit and they're doing it again now, with the transition to low carbon. We British are an extraordinarily inventive bunch. We gave the world steam. We gave it railways. We gave it a variety of sports, popular the world over. We were pioneering mass production techniques two generations before Henry Ford "invented" it! We could do it again, if we had a few less people dragging us back all the time...