British Political Foresight

Were there any prominent individuals in British politics around the time WWI began kicking off, that had the foresight to realize getting involved in such a war would bleed the empire dry and start a precedent for it's eventual collapse/dwindling into irrelevancy?

I'm pretty sure a few did, but I can't seem to remember their names.
 
Even socialist and communists opposed to the war generally saw it as tool of empire, not one which would critically weaken it.
 
Churchill predicted that the wars of peoples would be more terrible than those of kings and that the winners of such wars would be ruined as gravely as the losers. At the same time it's worth reflecting that very little in the cases of the Italo-Turkish War and the two Balkan Wars would have led to the conclusion of the Ottomans proving to be one of the more effective Central Powers in a battlefield sense. Without that, it's not quite so easy to see a WWI that'd be as protracted and bloody as the OTL one.
 
Churchill predicted that the wars of peoples would be more terrible than those of kings and that the winners of such wars would be ruined as gravely as the losers. At the same time it's worth reflecting that very little in the cases of the Italo-Turkish War and the two Balkan Wars would have led to the conclusion of the Ottomans proving to be one of the more effective Central Powers in a battlefield sense. Without that, it's not quite so easy to see a WWI that'd be as protracted and bloody as the OTL one.

Even if one discounts the Ottomans, surely cracking the Germans apart would not have been seen as an easy task?

Though I guess it really was rather difficult to predict what sorts of madness would pop up during the war. Still, I could have sworn a few prominent politicians were vocally against entering. I might be confusing it with WW2 though.
 
Even if one discounts the Ottomans, surely cracking the Germans apart would not have been seen as an easy task?

Though I guess it really was rather difficult to predict what sorts of madness would pop up during the war. Still, I could have sworn a few prominent politicians were vocally against entering. I might be confusing it with WW2 though.

Don't underestimate arrogance and stupidity. There were politicians who warned against WWI, but we should not assign to the glory days of colonialism our modern scruples against major wars with big battles. It really was seen as glorious by enough of the population everywhere that every single country saw mass volunteer rates in 1914.
 
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