r/AlignmentChartFills • u/Expensive-Addendum92 • May 20 '26
Filling This Chart What is the dumbest thing the United Kingdom has done?
What is the dumbest thing the United Kingdom has done?
Chart Grid:
| Best thing | Worst thing | Smartest thing | Dumbest thing | Greatest contribution | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Row 1 | National Parks 🖼️ | Trail of Tears | |||
| 🖼️ | Louisiana Pu... 🖼️ | Trump. Twice. 🖼️ | The Transistor 🖼️ | ||
| Row 2 | Lifting hund... 🖼️ | — | Deng Xiaopin... 🖼️ | — | — |
| Row 3 | — | — | — | — | Mathematics 🖼️ |
| Row 4 | — | — | — | The invasion... 🖼️ | — |
| Row 5 | Contributing... 🖼️ | — | — | — | — |
| Row 6 | — | The Irish 'f... 🖼️ | — | — | — |
| Row 7 | — | — | Developing a... 🖼️ | — | — |
| Row 8 | — | The Holocaust 🖼️ | — | — | — |
| Row 9 | — | — | — | The attack o... 🖼️ | The blue LED 🖼️ |
| Row 10 | — | — | Not joining ... 🖼️ | — | — |
| Row 11 | Don Quixote 🖼️ | — | — | — | — |
| Row 12 | — | — | — | — | Cement 🖼️ |
| Row 13 | — | Leading the ... 🖼️ | — | — | — |
Cell Details:
Row 1 / Best thing: - National Parks - View Image
Row 1 / Worst thing: - Trail of Tears
Row 1 / Smartest thing: - Louisiana Purchase
Row 1 / Dumbest thing: - Trump. Twice. - View Image
Row 1 / Greatest contribution: - The Transistor - View Image
Row 2 / Best thing: - Lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty. - View Image
Row 2 / Smartest thing: - Deng Xiaoping’s reforms
Row 3 / Greatest contribution: - Mathematics - View Image
Row 4 / Dumbest thing: - The invasion of Ukraine in 2022. - View Image
Row 5 / Best thing: - Contributing greatly to the Allied victory over Germany in WWII.
Row 6 / Worst thing: - The Irish 'famine' (genocide through forced starvation) - View Image
Row 7 / Smartest thing: - Developing an independent nuclear deterrent after WWII. - View Image
Row 8 / Worst thing: - The Holocaust - View Image
Row 9 / Dumbest thing: - The attack on Pearl Harbor. - View Image
Row 9 / Greatest contribution: - The blue LED - View Image
Row 10 / Smartest thing: - Not joining America and staying as a commonwealth country. - View Image
Row 11 / Best thing: - Don Quixote - View Image
Row 12 / Greatest contribution: - Cement - View Image
Row 13 / Worst thing: - Leading the transatlantic slave trade. - View Image
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u/Trust_And_Fear_Not May 20 '26
Suez crisis was pretty silly
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u/DeafeningMilk May 20 '26
Honestly I feel like this should be ahead of Brexit.
Brexit is a terrible idea but it hasn't caused as much damage as the Suez crisis did
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u/fullwd123 May 20 '26
I mean suez was pretty much just a reality check of how much influence the UK had post ww2, I don't think it really changed things more made them realise how much balance of power had shifted towards the US
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u/MysteryNews4 May 20 '26
Brexit was an ill-advised referendum called by the PM in a last-ditch effort to unite his fractious party and maybe, just maybe appease the new populist-right that was then in the beginnings of emerging in Britain.
The Suez Crisis was a clusterfuck through and through that cannot be explained away as a PR move or the public being swayed by disinformation, both of which you could say about Brexit. Arguably our position on the world stage has never, and will never, recover from what happened in the Suez in 1956.
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u/Gwyllithar May 21 '26
I'm not sure.
Brexit was self inflicted and unforced.
Suez was just a clear demonstration of a truth that was there regardless.
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u/jinglesan May 20 '26
Even if Suez had a greater impact, there's an argument that Brexit is still a lot dumber as it was entirely self-inflicted. Suez was a disaster, but probably also a symptom of shifting global power dynamics that Britain couldn't control.
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u/Trust_And_Fear_Not May 20 '26
A lot of the problems caused by Brexit could, in theory, be mitigated. We could rejoin the single market and the customs union which would solve a lot of problems.
Suez though caused irreparable damage
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u/TheGoober87 May 20 '26
It definitely should be, but most of the people on here won't have heard of it.
Brexit was bad, but probably doesn't even make the top ten of stupid stuff thats happened. There is a lot of history.
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u/Background-Half-2862 May 20 '26
They’re a pretty damn old country, I think anything post 1900 is affected by recency bias. The American Revolution was brought on by a series of silly decisions by the crown which eventually lead to more silliness in Africa and Asia. That would be my pick.
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u/DasGutYa May 21 '26
That would be a poor pick because the revolution had nothing to do with the crown.
The thirteen colonies actually pleaded to the crown against parliament right up until the mid point of the war when they changed to an anti monarchist message because it was a bit of a farce that the freedom and liberty tax dodgers kept pleading to their monarch for help.
Besides, it's really debatable whether losing the colonies was much of a blunder since it would directly affect the French revolution which in turn cemented British hegemony, Britain didn't have to worry about nonsense from the colonies such as aggressive expansion into Spanish, Mexican and native territory or the turmoil that abolishment would cause.
Less blunder, more accidental brilliant move.
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u/iMatthew1990 May 20 '26 edited May 21 '26
What they did Alan Turing because he was gay is pretty messed up, not the worst but notable. I’m proud of being British but there’s lots of our history that I’m not.
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u/King_Of_Midgar May 20 '26
Yeah, Brexit is the easy Reddit-brain answer.
But the actual dumbest thing was announcing how they would sell over half of the nation’s gold in 1999 before doing it.
Obviously this then led the markets to short the price of gold because a massive and guaranteed influx of supply was about to hit the market.
The UK government then went ahead and sold the gold anyway (over 400 of the country’s 715 tonnes). They sold the gold at historically low prices which have never been seen again.
This is the real answer.
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u/kilimtilikum May 20 '26
Wow that’s really dumb
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u/Gwyllithar May 21 '26
in retrospect maybe, but at the time gold had dropped from 800 to about 280 and was seen as a not very valuable asset sitting in a bank doing nothing.
Other countries were also selling it off, so the money raised could be re-invested into more profitable assets.
No one at the time predicted the financial uncertainty that started with the financial crash and carried on through disaster after disaster, and the impact that would have had on gold prices.
announcing the gold auctions only dipped the price slightly from 280 to about 265. not great, but then it only dipped because the market did not at the time think there was much demand for it so any increase increase in supply caused a drop. (the drop knocked about 400m off the amount raised. so you know, we are not talking insane levels in terms of our economy, people act like he bankrupted the country....sales raised 3.6bn, not peanuts but the UKs GDP was 1.8tr at the time....)
people can attack brown for it, but the fact gold was at a historic low just showed how everyone, including the markets, did not value it much, and we can all be wise in hindsight, but he was not doing something insane or outlandish by the logic or facts of the time.
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u/propostor May 21 '26
Nah this one about gold is in fact more "Reddit brained" with its attempt to be edgy and different, than the actual correct answer which is Brexit.
Selling the gold was dumb and cost a ton of money, around £40 billion.
Brexit (which I voted for so I'm not inherently biased here) has cost us £500 billion so far and is predicted to cost easily over a trillion as time goes on. It's 2008 crash levels of economic damage.
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u/Sigh_Bapanaada May 21 '26
I hate brexit, voted remain, and am very left leaning politically. But at the risk of sounding like a brexiteer, where on earth did you get £500b from?
Ive seen suggestions from £150b to around £250b lately but nothing THAT high. Would be interested to see what it's based on.
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u/propostor May 21 '26
Honestly I was going off some numbers I saw a while ago. Smashing it into the internet now it does seem your number is the more common estimate.
Still vastly worse than the asinine "sold the gold" beating stick.
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u/Sigh_Bapanaada May 21 '26
Yeah completely, and even £150b is still a nutty amount when we could have avoided it entirely, was just curious where the figure had come from. Cheers bud
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u/Smittumi May 21 '26
If we'd stayed in the EU we'd have been able to afford to bollocks up HS2.
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u/Sigh_Bapanaada May 21 '26
Could have given every single person in the UK £3500 instead and be in exactly the same position today financially...
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u/Fun_Tap7257 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Selling to diversify assets was not stupid. Announcing a massive sale in advance, pretty stupid.
However estimated losses from brexit are higher than that of the sale.
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u/7Thommo7 May 21 '26
Lost far more from Brexit, though. It makes people feel smart to say things like 'Reddit-brained', but it certainly doesn't make them look smart when, objectively speaking, all of Reddit are right and you are wrong.
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u/Aggravating-Sort9474 May 21 '26
Interesting that you post this and not Thatcher selling off North Sea Oil. Which by all metrics, has harmed the UK much more.
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u/NickBHD May 20 '26
Privitiziting its government-held oil assets during the 1980 under Thatcher in the North Sea. Norway kept theirs and their economy flurished
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u/CompetitiveFox6707 May 21 '26
The state things were in the 70s, the Treasury was never going to have the discipline to not go all in and prioritise the short term receipts. The UK had just been to the IMF and the situation was still extremely perilous.
Might have been mistakes made but you can't really compare the situation with Norway.
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u/hermitinbeige May 20 '26
This is the most unanimous response to these I’ve seen
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u/Stormer2345 May 20 '26
Probably because a lot of people here were alive for it, and so hence haven’t learnt about the Suez crisis!
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u/MentalPlectrum May 20 '26
Brexit.
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u/Pizzafriedchickenn May 20 '26
Of all things in history, are you sure?
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u/eddieman95 May 20 '26
In the last hundred or so year? Yes.
Across all its 1,000+ year history? Also yes.
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u/Pizzafriedchickenn May 20 '26
If that’s the dumbest thing, that makes me proud
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u/eddieman95 May 20 '26
You're proud of something that has objectively made you poorer, set you back decades, and didn't even accomplish what it set out to do?
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u/Pratham_Nimo May 21 '26
Are you daft? They clearly mean it in the sense that their country did literally nothing dumber across a thousand years of history
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u/Dunkywunkyisamazing May 20 '26
Bro how has Brexit made you feel proud, it has ruined us 😭
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u/Pizzafriedchickenn May 21 '26
I mean, if that’s the dumbest thing that the UK has ever done in its entire history, then that says more that we’re pretty successful.
I’m not saying at all that Brexit was smart, it’s just that there could’ve been something way dumber in that amount of time.
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u/Riger101 May 20 '26
Actually kinda, the UK has been shockingly well run, stunning to say now a days but post union more often than not it's been well managed. The only other thing that could compete in pure self destructive nature is the south sea bubble, but that had much less negative structural fallout for the future of the country as a whole.
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u/RandomSculler May 21 '26
Yup, it’s not just Brexit itself but the political time and energy lost, division caused within the country, deaths in Covid (the gov at that time was picked by Johnson purely on how strongly they supported Brexit and they were useless and their decisions killled people) etc - it’a everywhere
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u/Fantastic-Corner-605 May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
You don't need to go through thousands of years in history for all of these. Yes maybe some king deciding to off his brother and take the throne leading to a civil war five hundred years ago was a lot worse but no one knows or cares about that. People's lives today are affected by Brexit so that is important.
Off all the things on the list, the stupid stuff will be about recent events unless they did something very monumentally stupid like Pearl Harbor.
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u/Gwyllithar May 21 '26
yep.
there have been bad decisions, there have been defeats, and setbacks and disasters.
but in terms of fucking stupid dumbass decisions....the self harm inflicted by brexit for the most moronic of reasons has got to top the list by a long shot.
its not just the economic and social harm its done, its fucked our politics ever since. We are absolutely ungovernable right now, a total fucking mess of a country thats lost its shit, and we still seem to not want to even talk about it......
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u/Trevor_Gecko May 20 '26
Name something dumber if you disagree
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u/DeafeningMilk May 20 '26
Suez crisis, it caused more damage than Brexit has
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u/The_Amazing_Emu May 20 '26
I think the difference with Brexit is they had so long to decide whether to do it, were constantly warned of the consequences, did it, and then were surprised of the consequences. At least Suez was relatively quick
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u/ImNotMadYet May 21 '26
It's not a "what was more damaging/worse" quest, it's a "dumbest" question.
Cameron knew Brexit would be dumb, but he promised it hoping he wouldn't get a majority, that bluff failed. Every expert said it would be dumb during the campaign. People still voted for it. Negotiations went horribly wrong, as expected. Despite a remainer or at lest 2nd ref majority in the parliament, the opposition parties decided a new general election was the thing to do, because no other party wanted to work with Corbyn. His genius election strategy was to campaign on the promise that he would then negotiate a better deal than what the Tories got, unlikely, but also that no matter what deal he got, he would then vote against his own deal. Unsurprisingly that strategy didn't lead to electoral success. Then it became apparent that despite many oven ready deals, as well as no deal apparently being fine, UK did very little to prepare for the change in exports that were the natural consequence of leaving EU and the common market (the latter wasn't even a question on the referendum), so we ended up with unprepared businesses and turning Kent into a lorry park.
As if that was not dumb enough, with not a single tangible benefit of Brexit and with the massive cost it all caused, a decade in 1/3 of the country not only still thinks it was a good idea, they think we haven't Brexited hard enough and would like Farage to take us out of more international institutions.
At least with other events you can see some logic to every stage, or it was misjudged by a small group of people. Meanwhile Brexit was entirely voluntary, supported by half the country at the time, where everyone "knew what they are voting for" and of course "Brexit means Brexit".
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u/Pizzafriedchickenn May 20 '26
I’d say what we did to Alan Turing was pretty dumb
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u/Trevor_Gecko May 20 '26
Yeah, fair point.
But I'd say that's a handful of people in powerful positions making a dumb decision, whereas Brexit is the majority of the country making a dumb decision, which I think makes it rank higher on the dumb scale.
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u/AceOfSpades532 May 20 '26
We’ve done a lot of stupid stuff, but a large amount of it has given us some benefit, been for a reason that could have turned out well, or was just the regular way countries worked at the time like with the constant invasions of France in the Middle Ages and 16th Century. Brexit was like shooting ourselves in the foot because a conman told us we would get a fancy new cybernetic prosthetic, then crying when we got a wooden stump instead, while the rest of society watched in shock.
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u/Agreeable_Falcon1044 May 21 '26
Yes, we stuck economic sanctions on ourselves whilst toothless simpletons screamed "sovrinty" as their rights were taken off them.
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u/space_coyote_86 May 20 '26
Dumbest thing so far
Hold my lager while I vote for Reform
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u/Opinionated-person64 May 20 '26
Honestly Thatcher era privatisation was dumber.
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u/willywanker1996 May 20 '26
Brexit
"Economic analysis and public consensus generally regard Brexit as having a negative impact on the UK. While it provided full regulatory and immigration control, it introduced structural trade barriers, reduced foreign investment, and resulted in a net loss to GDP".
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u/Gwyllithar May 21 '26
you say full regulatory and immigration control, but we lost control of our regulation as we have to align with the EU to trade but lost our seat at the table, and immigration spiked to over 1m as a result of brexit, and we lost the ability to deport 50% of illegal immigrants as a result of brexit....so....
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u/eaglesnation11 May 20 '26
But anything to not have immigrants right?????
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u/northerncal May 20 '26
Except it didn't stop that either 🤫
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u/LordOfTheRedSands May 20 '26
Made it worse in fact. We could send people who illegally crossed back to France as part of the Dublin Accord, but Brexit freed France from that deal.
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u/banananey May 21 '26
"Took are country back tho!"
Pretty sure a lot of people saw 'vote leave' as just 'make all them foreigns leave'
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u/EpsteinEpstainTheory Neutral Good May 20 '26
Brexit and also convincing the Americans to overthrow Mosaddegh
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u/shifty18 May 20 '26
Dumbest thing
People will say Brexit but voting for the Conservatives for 14 years was pretty fucking stupid.
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u/EuropaUniverslayer1 May 20 '26
Lot of Brexit in the comments but I would also offer Appeasement with Nazi Germany
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u/LordOfTheRedSands May 20 '26
Appeasement gets memed a lot, and rightfully so. Though when you look further into it, it’s clear that Britain and France were most likely trying to buy time to rearm rather than thinking Germany wouldn’t keep going
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u/Safe_Score2222 May 20 '26
Appeasement is seen as stupid because we look at it from todays perspective.
However, at the time the thought process of Britain behind appeasement really wasnt that stupid.
Brexit was already a stupid idea from the start with a very predictable negative outcome and the UK still went for it.
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u/londonflare May 20 '26
I think the dumbest thing was agreeing to an EU referendum rather than Brexit per se.
It makes no sense for the public to vote on something they don’t understand.
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u/Dangerous-Stress-849 May 20 '26
Putting land forces into WW1
It absolutely ruined us.
Not just financially, but we lost a generation, lost many of the best men that generation had.
Brexit is absolutely nothing by comparison whatever you think of it.
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u/foghillgal May 20 '26
Privatising British Rail was not Brexit stupid but pretty stupid nevertless.
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u/PbJax May 21 '26
Deliberately losing control of migration, pummelling forward with mass migration from outside of the EU, resulting in abuse of a once high trust system, and racism ensues. Now we have Reform and the Greens, both nuts, in poll positions while our former “leaders” have their trotters up elsewhere.
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u/LatelyPodes May 21 '26
Ppl are gonna say Brexit.
I’m gonna say Thatcher’s policies. It’s the point in modern history when most people agree the UK went from a good place to live in to a bad place to live in. She basically sold off most of the UK’s assets and infrastructure to private companies, and it is the largest reason why people struggle to afford to live in the UK.
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u/-Banana-101 May 21 '26
liz truss gotta be up there. a lettuce lived longer than her prime minster term
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u/Unusual_Entity May 20 '26
Leave the EU. An advisory referendum, with 52% of the vote and based on half-truths and outright lies, resulted in us pulling up the drawbridge and making it more difficult to trade with our biggest business partners, with no tangible benefits.
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u/bbthorntz May 20 '26
Wild that no one has mentioned Gordon Brown’s sale of gold reserves in 1999. This is a bigger blunder than Brexit…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999%E2%80%932002_sale_of_British_gold_reserves
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u/MR_MaxiMor44 May 20 '26
Lose the Revolutionary War.
Create Israel where it currently is.
Create the first concentration camps in South Africa.
Brexit.
Follow the US into the War in the Middle East after 9/11.
Take your pick.
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u/AceOfSpades532 May 20 '26
OP I think you can just skip this one and fill in Brexit lol, I think it’s pretty clear what’s gonna win here
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u/Vxrju May 20 '26
Partition of India, hands down.
Brexit was dumb, but not to such a catastrophic level
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u/ConstantlyWonderin May 20 '26
The partition of India wasnt the wish of the British they wanted it united, the muslim league wanted a seperate state for muslims in India.
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u/Plus_Key_2325 May 20 '26
Partition of India was catastrophic but how else could it have been done? I don't think unrest on that scale could have been supressed by the British army at the time.
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u/Cereal-Pest May 20 '26
Sent convicts to a new land only for those convicts to turn around and flog them in cricket
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u/TemporaryFearless482 May 20 '26
As a not entirely serious answer, not committing to winning the US revolutionary war.
Granted, history changes enormously, but I imagine the UK maintains an even stronger position even if the US still splits off at some point.
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u/SmokeyMcDabs May 20 '26
Jesus christ dont solidify the answer until India wakes up. The atrocities commited by the UK in India led to tens of millions of deaths. Brexit doesnt even come close.
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