Nobody drinks tea anymore and it’s ruining Great Britain

Alas, the last bastion of Britishness has fallen. Tea in Britain has gone the way of good manners and Hong Kong and is now but a rare feature of life in these sceptred isles with consumption falling by 20 per cent in the last five years.

Seriously, wars have been fought over tea. The British Empire was built on tea and now Britain’s falling out of love with the beverage. This decline is only half the story though: the reason for tea’s fall from grace is the rise of the coffee shop. Britons, it seems, are trading teapots and crumpets for cappuccinos and free wifi.

This used to be a green and pleasant land dotted with the occasional scone, but like a blight on the earth, this United Kingdom is now plagued by Costa, Starbucks, Café Nero and the rest of their axis of evil. From Aberdeen to Ashford, Llandudno to Lyme Regis, the country is being held hostage by these relentless forces, representing just another nail in Albion’s coffin.

I’ll take this over your hipster flat white any day

Don’t pretend you don’t hate it too. The nitwit with his topknot, beard, Mac and stupidly-pretentious-sounding coffee, the din of an entire room full of pontificating sociology undergrads, smugly reciting some bullshit from their social abjection lecture: it’s all too much for the sane to bear. It’s bad enough coffee has displaced tea as the go-to hot drink of the British, but to add salt to the wound, the whole coffee shop vibe is just sanctimonious. Gone are the days of quaint little tea rooms where Victoria sponge and Earl Grey were de rigeur. Gone are the days of adorable old ladies chatting away over teacups and saucers. Woe, woe for England!

Don’t look at me – you’re all to blame for this cultural suicide. After all, who among you hasn’t quickly nipped into a coffee shop on the way into lectures? But fear not, there is a way out. We must proverbially fight on the beaches until we rid the land of the coffee shop scourge and upon its ashes restore a more civilised way of doing hot drinks – with two sugars. It won’t be an easy fight – tea’s not all that nice anyway – but it’s a fight worth having. If we persist we can restore this land to one of street parties, fêtes, and all the other quintessentially British things which depend almost entirely on that not-so British invention – tea.

I’m not kidding either, I wouldn’t be surprised if the decline in tea consumption directly correlated with homicide rates, teenage abortions, people joining ISIS, and X Factor viewership. I bet the London rioters took coffee rather than tea.

This isn’t a call to arms to reclaim some bygone, misty-eyed, bowler hat-sporting past, it’s a plea to defend civilisation itself. There’s a fine line between society and chaos, and by God tea is the only thing stopping us slipping into a Hobbesian nightmare. Drink tea, save a life.