How far?

I remember watching this scene back in the Summer of 2012 with my Wife and kids, we were away for a week in Devon sitting around a tiny little screen in the lounge/kitchen of a holiday cottage near Colyton. The kids were young and full of excitement and the whole evening was brilliant, a real high point and pure joy. The overwhelming feeling I had was of optimism, progress and contentment. I thought we (I mean the UK) were in a really good place, successful, outward looking, progressive and optimistic and I felt good about our lot. Of course, that may just have been a reflection of my personal circumstances but, since then, I have spoken with many other people/families who also express similar things about that time. 

When I reflect on where we are now I can't help but feel we have fallen from this high point, our country is struggling, we're no longer successful, we're inward looking and divided and our Government doesn't seem to have a clue about how to fix it, in fact worse than that, the optimism seems to have been slowly and painfully sucked from most of us over these ten years. We look at our leaders now and simply shrug our shoulders when they lie and cheat, our continent is once again embroiled in a pointless and bloody war and our economic situation is looking more and more like a train wreck. My overriding feeling, and that of many media commentators, is that we're on a generally downward trajectory at the moment and that it's going to get worse before it gets better, the key question is how far will we fall?