UK officially in recession for first time in 11 years
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
With such a massive recession already happening, and talks around Brexit going nowhere, they are really not going to have a nice next 5/10 years.
I have just left the UK, several Europeans I know, working in tech, are doing the same. Not data backed, just personal experience. Maybe this is going to be even tougher than expected. Hopefully not.
The UK is a nation that is stagnating and this one two punch could be what pushes it into a decline.
Brexit has become something of a religious movement. Things will magically get better after brexit but first you need suffer for your past sins before you get to the promised land. It’s not at all clear how this will happen but the less possible it looks the stronger the faithful become.
People like me who try to dissuade people from Brexit try to paint a picture of doom and chaos. The UK will be “fine” but it will fall in the League of Nations to the influence of an Italy or a Spain and in the long term this can be hard to swallow for people used to the glories of empire.
This is also one of the most egregious cases of the older generation screwing over the futures of a younger generation by taking away huge opportunities from them. The enormity of this will take a decade to sink in. You’re going to see a lot of pissed off zoomers in 10 years who’ll work to reverse all of this anyway.
There are two very important facts you're not giving people here. Firstly, yes, the UK has had stagnant GDP per capita since 2008. So has Germany, so has France. So has Switzerland, since 2010. Clearly, this is not a UK specific issue.
The exceptions? America and ... Ireland. That's tech companies. They are big enough to move per capita GDP by themselves.
The second rather important fact is that the UK is still a part of the EU today for all intents and purposes. It still has to pay and is still a part of all the systems. What you're saying is that as part of the EU the UK, and additionally other major European economies, have seen 12 years of economic stagnation.
You know what one of the top arguments for Brexit was? The EU is a stagnant economy, structurally so, and it's getting worse. If we leave we can be more dynamic and fix that problem.
hard to swallow for people used to the glories of empire.
This is such a bizarre, insulting and ridiculous talking point. Remainers bring it up repeatedly but I've never encountered someone who supports Brexit who talks about the British Empire. It doesn't happen. It's a fantasy.
Germany’s per capita GDP has also stagnated: Thats because you chose the date as 2010. I was comparing to the 2008 peak and in comparison UK has gone down but Germany is up. The UK does somewhat worse than the others.
Now on top of this stagnation Brexit will make it worse because you will lose the vast majority of your trading advantages. There’s no magical resurgence that’s going to happen.
As for empire nostalgia as someone who moved from a colony it’s actually quite evident in the politics here. That there is some magic sauce in this tiny island which will allow it to somehow return to glory all by itself.
A poll by YouGov showed that 27 % of Britons want Britain to still have an empire. Closely followed by Netherlands at 26 % and France at 17 %. So these people exist. They are not a fantasy and there’s polling data to show it.
My point wasn’t that they vote for brexit because of the empire. But it feeds into a sense of exceptionalism and megalomania that goes into decisions like Brexit which the vast majority of international observers of the situation agree is a very foolish decision.
It’s just like voting for Trump. Everyone outside the US could plainly see the idiocy and hordes of people would descend to defend it while every passing day exposes it for the foolishness it was. Same will be the case here.
But 10 years have passed. You were misleading people when you tried to imply that Brexit had something to do with GDP per capita statistics. It clearly doesn't. And many argue it's the other way around: the EU is the cause of the stagnation.
As for empire nostalgia as someone who moved from a colony it’s actually quite evident in the politics here
Evident in the politics? If it's evident then evidence it. You're seeing what you want to see: I can't recall any politicians talking about Empire. It never comes up. It's not even taught in school. The "people used to the glories of the empire" as you put it are virtually all dead. Nobody cares.
As for polls, they routinely show all kinds of garbage when pollsters ask questions that don't matter. For example 4% Americans believe the Earth is run by a conspiracy of lizards, and 7% aren't sure:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
If some random person wasted my time by asking me if I'd like Britain to still have an empire, I'd probably say, sure why not? Empires have their benefits. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. That doesn't mean I'd think about it even one iota the rest of the time. Heck there was an HN thread just a few days ago about colonialism, that was the first time I'd seen it come up in years.
it feeds into a sense of exceptionalism and megalomania
The majority of the British voting population are not megalomaniacs. Listen to yourself. The very concept is absurd.
Anyway, if you're really convinced the UK is filled with delusional imperialist megalomaniacs, why not leave? You clearly have no respect for the country.
https://apnews.com/2be77e0ade49893bfefe508eb15c2d56
I suspect the government will use the pandemic as cover for all the failures of Brexit, and they will get away with it given the dire state of British traditional and social media. You're better off out of it.
No. Nobody who voted for Brexit was thinking logically or clearly at all. Anybody can dismiss this as a political opinion, but not a single person who supported brexit did so for anything other than :
* Flag-waving nationalism. * Financial self-interest from a long-term reduction in EU standards. * Perceived (but incorrect) financial self-interest.
Please, do elaborate.
Because I'm yet to hear a sensible reason for Brexit that doesn't end up with general pearl-clutching about soverignity or can stand up to any sort of logical argument.
This is nothing to do with brexit.
The sad thing is that everyone will say that Brexit went through great with no issues, it's the Coronavirus' fault that the economy is bad and is getting worse.
The fact that the economy shrank 22% over the last year rather than 12% in Germany or 10% in the US (a 10% growth difference is _enormous_!) is up to Brexit and government ministers selected not on the back of competence but by picking from the strongest Brexit advocates.
Out of interest, where did you end up?
Ireland looks tempting to me, given I currently work as a contractor (and the tax law isn't too hostile) and it's not _too_ far away.
Germany and the rest of EU are just oblivious for now.
The biggest change is that the UK can close its borders to citizens of EU countries.
Based on what exactly?
Millennials keep getting fucked.
Anyone born 1914 through 1945 experienced either one or two wars plus the post-war depression.
Anyone born 1952 through to the early seventies lived under the cloud of imminent nuclear holocaust (read interviews with those who lived in those times -- especially those with first-hand knowledge of the Cuban missile crisis -- and you'll realise just how certain people felt that they were going to be annihilated).
I think the mid-seventies onwards are the earliest you can say that people have had a sense of existential stability.
Most western countries have also had a huge rise in living standards during the same time period meaning that the conception of 'economic hardship' is very different today to the post-war depression.
> The economy is more than a fifth smaller than it was at the end of last year. This fall is not as bad as the 22.7% decline in Spain, but about twice the size of contractions in Germany and the US.
I think Germany's handling was exceptional anyway, and for the US it hasn't hit fully yet. I reckon there's a lot more to come in the UK, as well, when the government furlough scheme comes to an end. And not to forget to mention the country is still in the Brexit transition period, which runs out at the end of the year.
Debatable why, plausibly because the Spanish lockdown started earlier in Q1.
Since the entirety of the rest of the article is about today's Q2 results specifically though, a comparison of those would be more relevant. Smells like the BBC cherry picking to try and find anything where the UK isn't in last place.
(Also, speaking of misleading, it's interesting that all of a sudden the BBC can correctly compare US GDP figures with European ones now that it's the UK they're comparing with. Previous coverage quoted US quarterly figures that had been multiplied by four to annualize them next to non-annualized European ones, making it look like the US was doing worse economically than other European countries like Spain when it was doing better.)
There is a well made map in this article:
The same, I believe, goes for comparing infections & death rates. Calling a marathon by who's in the lead at the 10km mark can turn out correct, but it doesn't have to.
Probably the more clientele in the employee's living neighbourhood doesn't equal it out. While I shop more at the local diary store I don't buy lunches etc.
When they say the UK has a strong service industry that drives exports etc they don't mean cafes and bars they mean financial, legal etc services. Those should have stayed strong. I suspect some of the decline is actually Brexit related decline in financial services.
The UK is hard hit because it went from a fairly moderate response to swinging hard into a deliberate policy of panicking the population as much as possible. The turning point was Imperial College / Ferguson predicting millions of deaths if there wasn't hard lockdown immediately. The UK's SAGE committee is largely responsible for the resulting devastation, including deaths: they literally told people they had a quasi-patriotic duty to stay away from hospitals. This is almost certainly why England is one of the few places in the world to report excess mortality amongst young adults. They have been opening and re-closing parts of the country with only hours of notice ... given on Twitter. Even Trump hasn't done that.
They even used imagery straight from 28 Days Later:
https://cdni0.trtworld.com/w960/h540/q75/76203_20200408T1313...
This was largely a consequence of SAGE "experts" telling the government they had to deliberately create fear in the population.
Is it any wonder the economy has been crushed when the government deliberately set out to make the population think COVID is the Rage virus?
I said a percentage of the decrease. Obviously Brexit has not caused a 20% economic drop.
China is not working on herd immunity, they are containing.
Is or was the WHO advocating herd immunity? I can't recall at least.
Current evidence suggests "herd immunity" is the only feasible option. There seem to be precisely two kinds of places that can successfully lift internal restrictions without a resurgence: tiny islands like Guernsey with closed external borders that can eliminate the virus, and places like New York City, Italy, and possibly parts of Sweden where a substantial proportion of the population has been infected. That's it (and it's entirely plausible the former have just got lucky so far). Between the two is only an endless kind of purgatory countries like the UK and South Korea seem to have ended up in, where testing and tracing and restrictions short of lockdown keep case numbers down but fail to eliminate the disease and can't be lifted because that leads to exponentially growing infections.
Part of the problem is that the press has heavily obfuscated this. For example, they've tried to spin New York City as a success story and an example of flattening the curve working, when in reality it seems to be a perfect demonstration of what a non-flattened curve looks like - including the much sharper decline than that seen in places with lockdowns that did actually flatten the curve and fewer people infected. They've also mislead everyone into thinking that the decline in antibodies in people infected with Covid means they don't have immunity after a few months, when in reality that's not how long-term immunity works at all.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhaseltine/2020/06/19/imm...
Also it seems that mild cases don't result in lasting immunity so lasting herd immunity via live infections is impossible.
Found the brit.
And also most flouted?
That's the issue here. One data point, of spurious accuracy, which we fully know and expect to be an outlier is being used to imply an economic trend and that trend is being extended to social trend. I could just as well say "the stock market is up so we are clearly fine"...
A proponent of this argument would say it's meaningless - or at least not helpful - to worry about two (or more) quarters of contraction, only to have them followed by stupendous 'growth' once everything's OK and the hibernating demand has somewhere to go.
Someone more critical of it might say Well yes, 'or more', for how long can we hibernate?
We could choose the base to be ~2.7048138 such that 1% regular growth corresponds to 1% logarithmic growth. For low percentages they would mostly agree. But +40% would become +34% while -40% would become -51%, thus making the combined effect more apparent.
After the lockdown is over, people who reside there should get out while they can.
The UK sold ARM to Softbank, Imagination Technologies to a private equity firm in China, SwiftKey to Microsoft, DeepMind to Google, Deliveroo to Amazon, Dyson has gone to Singapore and most of these startups will not exist in 20, 30 or 40 years time.
The UK's homegrown tech companies are selling out and you think it is still best in Europe? Thanks to Brexit there is no hope.
> but London is booming.
OK, but compared to the UK as a whole, disaster. I expected jobs to flow all through the UK, not be crammed into London where people from other areas have to travel there by train or suffer rent hikes, thankfully this pandemic has put an end to this.
If selling to a bigger firm is the same thing as failure then Silicon Valley is drowning in failure.
> ...and most of these startups will not exist in 20, 30 or 40 years time.
> These companies were at least all actually profitable (except DeepMind).
I agree with Dyson but we need more of them. Unfortunately ARM and Imagination technologies have a great history that is now in the hands of foreign companies.
Deliveroo isn't profitable. SwiftKey as AFAIK didn't make money (MS bought them for the AI tech), Powa Technologies (remember them?) hailed as one of the original UK tech unicorn went bust, Blippar is dead. Skyscanner is gone to China and laid off 300 people recently [0], Shazam is gone to Apple.
The situation is so dire OneWeb had to be rescued by the UK government, and they don't even have majority ownership.
What is the UK's answer to FAANG? rather than FAANG coming to the UK? [0]
[0] https://layoffs.fyi/2020/08/12/skyscanner-launches-talent-di...
There's some incredible French engineers, but I get the impression a lot of the talent is lost to the US, Canada and the UK. Compensation isn't too dissimilar to the UK or other western European countries. There's still a huge emphasis, especially in larger companies, on where you went to school - if you didn't study at a Grand Ecole you can get snubbed by a lot of people. France is also very conservative when it comes to technology, and often the French bureaucracy leaks into the workplace, I had to have multiple managers sign off my request form to get a HDMI cable.
Also, UK relies heavily on services, international business, students, tourism, all heavily hit, so that increases the pain of a travel and mobility freeze.