From the financial rent seeking of London, to the tax and privacy regulatory arbitrages of Ireland the same pattern of exploiting arbitrarily erected information walls to evade scrutiny and accountability.
Of course this is a tango that takes three to dance...
It is amazing to see how Brits outside of (hell, even in) London live, the British countryside has some of the poorest areas in western Europe. Evidence marketing is effective!
All rich countries have impovrished areas that have been left behind.
> It is amazing to see how Brits outside of (hell, even in) London live,
The same can be said for California, New York, Florida, Dublin, Paris, Barcelona, etc.
Check which countries make the top 10 lists in QoL. You'll find their ghetto's are as nice to live as some of Britain's good neighbourhoods!
Not quite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_fiscal_balance
Anecdotally, the stereotypical British farmer is a wealthy Tory, and low income populations are concentrated in council estates in postindustrial northern towns and cities (i.e. not the countryside).
As for post industrial rust-towns, I think of the northeast/Newcastle, Humberside & Scotland --maybe influenced by 'The Post War Dream' and Kris Killip's photography.
The Welsh Valleys too since the loss of the mines.
They’re just better at keeping under the radar and probably have better PR.
They're running the dog and pony show.
Ireland is an outlier in the fact that her ascendancy coincided with the US tech boom and language was an advantage. You have a very awkward situation developing and the current political leaders don't have the imagination to get out of it.
The UK is an outlier because though they had a far more robust and diverse economy they threw everything into finance and have just burned any bridges back.
That's not really true.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06...
The financial services sector only contributes around 7% of total UK economic output.
Now that Ireland has passed most of the rest of the EU in GDP per capita, it's time to pull that back, and that's starting to happen.
The UK...well... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's not a British Isle -- it's an Irish one. Great Britain refers to the main island composing England, Scotland and Wales. The Irish isle of Ireland is composed of the two Irelands (Ireland and Northern Ireland). The 'British Isles' term is disputed by many Irish people. The reason it's not a geographic term is because it's not a river -- Britain is a geopolitical entity not a purely geographic one.
The fact the Ireland was head of the GDPR for the EU was merely an odd coincidence and has been rectified. You won't many upset Irish people over this.
> The British Isles are a group of islands in the North Atlantic off the north-western coast of continental Europe, consisting of the islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Hebrides and over six thousand smaller islands. [They] include two sovereign states, the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
No-one in Ireland would refer to them as the British Isles.
Simply Britain and Ireland (or Ireland and Britain) is far more commonly used if referring to the archipelago.
The talk pages and edit history for the Wikipedia article on the British Isles term are interesting. You can see the arguments and edit wars. Much like the insistence on naming the country page for Ireland the "Republic of Ireland' (which is our football team and country descriptor, not the name of the country), I think Wikipedia are on the wrong side of history here, but some editors até vociferous in their objections to change.