The table below is the result of a collaboration between the editorial team at The London Prat and Claude AI. The question we set out to answer was simple and slightly mad: what if you could reduce the entire health of the United Kingdom — its economy, its democracy, its military reach, its social fabric, its standing in the world — to a single number, every year, going all the way back to William the Conqueror?
Nine hundred and sixty years. One line per year. One score out of 100.
The obvious objection is that you can't. History is too complicated. The Black Death and the Battle of Agincourt and the founding of the NHS and the chaos of Brexit are not the same kind of thing, and no spreadsheet is going to make them commensurable. Fair enough. But narrative history has its own problem, which is that it makes comparison almost impossible. Was Britain weaker in 1348 when a third of the population died of plague, or in 1956 when Anthony Eden launched a botched invasion of Egypt and then had to reverse it under American pressure three days later? Most historians would say 1348 was worse. Our scoring system agrees — the Black Death year craters social cohesion to near-zero and drags the total down to 22, the lowest in the entire dataset. Suez scores a 62. The numbers make the argument in a glance that a historian needs three paragraphs to make.
That is the point of this exercise. Not to replace serious historical scholarship. To give readers a navigational tool — a way to orient themselves across a thousand years of one country's extraordinary, turbulent, occasionally catastrophic and occasionally magnificent story.
We settled on eight dimensions after some back and forth. Each is scored from 0 to 12.5, giving a maximum total of 100.
Economic strength tracks productive capacity, trade, industrial output, and fiscal health across the centuries. It moves slowly in the medieval period, accelerates sharply during the Industrial Revolution, peaks in the Victorian era, craters in 1929 and again in 2008 and 2020, and sits at a middling 5 out of 12.5 in 2026. The trajectory of this single column is essentially the story of British capitalism — its astonishing rise and its increasingly complicated present.
Democratic health is deliberately scored near-zero for most of the medieval and early modern period. There was no democracy. Magna Carta in 1215 nudges it upward slightly — not because it created democracy but because it established the principle that the crown was subject to law. The first Parliament in 1265 moves it again. The Great Reform Act of 1832 is a genuine step-change. Universal suffrage arrives properly in 1928. By the 20th century this is consistently the strongest column in the table, which tells you something important about what the UK got right even as it got plenty else wrong.
Military power is the most dramatic column to watch across time. It peaks at Trafalgar in 1805 and again in the two world wars, when Britain mobilised its entire industrial base for killing on an industrial scale. It has declined steadily since 1945 as the armed forces shrank and the empire dissolved. In 2026 it scores a 5 — a mid-ranking European military power, capable, professional, and a fraction of its former self.
Territorial integrity tells the story of expansion and contraction. It climbs steadily from the Norman base through the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707 and the absorption of Ireland in 1800, reaches its absolute peak during the Victorian empire when Britain controlled roughly a quarter of the world's land surface, then retreats through the 20th century as independence movements succeed one after another. The score for 2026 reflects a United Kingdom that may not stay united — Scotland's independence question remains open, and Northern Ireland's constitutional future is genuinely unresolved in a way it has not been since the 1920s.
Social cohesion is the column that registers plague, famine, civil war, class conflict, and the moments when the country pulls together. It scores 9 in 1940 and 1945 — the Blitz spirit and the post-war consensus are real and the data reflects them. It scores 4 in the miners' strike of 1984, 4 again in Brexit 2016, and 4 in the COVID years of 2020. The pattern of peaks and troughs in this column is essentially a history of when Britain trusted itself and when it didn't.
Rule of law starts low and climbs slowly but consistently. It registers every major legal development — habeas corpus, the end of judicial torture, the independence of the judiciary, the Human Rights Act. It is the most stable column in the modern period and the most revealing in the medieval one. The Anarchy of 1135, when Stephen and Matilda fought over the throne and the entire legal order collapsed for nineteen years, scores a 2 here. It felt like a 2 to the people living through it.
Global influence is the column that tells the story of Britain's extraordinary overreach and its long retreat. It scores 12 at the height of the Empire, drops through the 20th century, and registers the Suez humiliation of 1956 as a cliff-edge moment from which it never fully recovers. In 2026 it scores a 5. Post-Brexit Britain has less formal leverage in the world than at any point since the early 18th century. Whether that is a tragedy or a sensible adjustment to reality depends on your politics.
Constitutional stability is the column that Brexit hits hardest. The score drops to 3 in 2019 — the lowest since the Civil War — as Parliament paralysed itself, the executive prorogued Parliament unlawfully, and the basic operating assumptions of the constitution were contested in public in ways that had not happened for three and a half centuries. It has recovered somewhat since. It has not recovered to where it was.
The technical architecture is straightforward. Working with Claude AI, we defined roughly 85 named historical anchor points — years where confident scoring judgements could be made from well-established historical evidence. The code then interpolates linearly between those anchors to fill every year in between, producing 960 data rows. The result renders as a filterable HTML table: search by year, filter by era, set a minimum or maximum score. It runs entirely client-side and pastes directly into any content management system.
The current values are explicitly described as placeholder data. The architecture is designed from the ground up to receive deep-researched replacements. Every anchor point is a citation waiting to be made — a Hansard record, an economic history, a population survey, a military order of battle. The methodology is open. The numbers are an invitation to argue.
Even on placeholder values the broad conclusions are hard to dispute. Britain in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, scores 84 — the highest in the dataset. It is the richest country in the world, the most powerful militarily, governs a quarter of the globe, and has just passed a series of electoral reforms that make it at least nominally democratic in a way that would have been unrecognisable a century earlier. The fact that the same country also ran the Atlantic slave trade, enforced famine conditions in Ireland, and treated its own working class with casual brutality does not appear directly in these columns — a limitation worth naming honestly.
Britain in 2026 scores 50. Technically stable. Constitutionally bruised. Economically middling. Globally diminished. Democratically functional, which matters more than the other columns combined and which many countries that once scored lower than Britain on every other dimension have now matched or surpassed.
Fifty out of a hundred. The world's oldest parliamentary democracy, sitting exactly at the halfway mark of its own assessment rubric, trying to figure out what comes next.
That feels about right.
This dataset and interactive table were produced in collaboration between The London Prat and Claude AI. Scoring methodology and anchor-point values are placeholder estimates pending full historical research. All criteria definitions are open for editorial revision. Apple Daily UK publishes pro-democracy, free-market journalism for the expatriate and diaspora community.
editor: alan@prat.uk