Britain's civilization, which for more than a thousand years has weathered countless wars, insurrections, and social upheavals, is now on the brink of collapse following revelations that Cadbury changed the recipe for their popular creme eggs.

The British confectioner, which in 2010 was purchased by the American multinational Kraft Foods, admitted to the Sun newspaper that it had "secretly" stopped using its iconic Dairy Milk chocolate in the eggs, instead now using "standard cocoa mix chocolate."

"It's no longer Dairy Milk," said a Kraft spokesman, standing bestride Britain's ruins like Scipio at Carthage. "It's similar, but not exactly Dairy Milk."

The spokesman defended his company's decision to utterly destroy the culture whose gifts to the world include the presumption of innocence, Newtonian physics, the Industrial Revolution, and the Parrot Sketch by pointing out that they never promised to stick to one type of chocolate.

"The Creme Egg has never been called the Cadbury's Dairy Milk Creme Egg," said the modern-day Visigoth. "We have never played on the fact that Dairy Milk chocolate was used.”

Britons have taken to Twitter to vent their despair that, like the mysterious Rapa Nui people of Easter Island, their entire national heritage would soon slip into oblivion.

"I don't believe it's acceptable to mess around with the Cadburys #CremeEgg," tweeted Winchester-based writer Jennifer Mills, in a statement that, if it were translated into American English, would be rendered in all capital letters and include a reference to firearms.

Surpassing the Crown Jewels, the Magna Carta, Big Ben as the United Kingdom's foremost national symbol, the Creme Egg was first introduced in 1963 as "Fry's Creme Eggs." They were renamed "Cadbury's Creme Eggs" in 1971. The company sells them only between January 1 and Easter Day.

As with most instances of societal collapse, the destruction of the United Kingdom was preceded by many forewarnings, including an increase in sales of baseball caps, the closure of the "Dandy," and the independence of India.

In 2010, English satirist Charlie Brooker displayed remarkable prescience upon learning that Kraft had purchased Cadbury. In a piece for the Guardian titled "Britain tastes better when it's swaddled in Cadbury's Dairy Milk chocolate," Like Cassandra at the gates of Troy, Mr. Brooker prophesied that Cadburys would soon begin to resemble Hershey's, a confection that he describes as "an entire universe of yuk."

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"[T]he thought of the ­Americans," he writes, "so good at so many things, so bad at snack foods – meddling with the Cadbury formula is too much for many of us to bear."

In addition to complaining that the new eggs would taste disgusting, Britons also complained that packages of them now contain five eggs instead of six.