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Comment by TheOtherHobbes | Hacker News Reader

Maybe you didn't read all the way to the end.

"For all that, debt sustainability is not an imminent risk."

The UK is in far worse shape because Brexit has nuked a huge hole in the economy. 4% is about £80bn a year.

But the real problems are systemic and political. The UK has been taken over by a far right cabal of criminals and opportunists who think nothing of wasting tens of billions of government - in addition to Brexit - while demonising asylum seekers and those on low earnings as a distraction.

Britain has the potential to be a powerhouse, but its political class is one of the least competent and credible in all of the G20.

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Agreed. Having spent substantial amounts of time in the UK, it is clear that there is a new group who are there to just enrich themselves.

> a new group who are there to just enrich themselves.

The UK’s been ruled by a relatively small hereditary aristocracy for, what, 1,000 years? A self-interested political class is hardly a new phenomenon there.

The UK has a hereditary aristocracy, but it has been several centuries since it actually ruled the country.

And there is a big difference between a hereditary aristocracy and a government of people who are just interested in enriching themselves.

The 'Queen's consent' is more of a political lever than is typically acknowledged. See https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/08/queen-...

Well, that's interesting. I had no idea. I was about to say: yes, the queen nominally has this power, but she famously never uses it. Except that apparently she does. TIL.

Still, all of the examples of her meddling are in laws that apply to the royal family. There aren't any (known) examples of her putting her thumb on the scales of public policy. Not that that makes it a whole lot better, but it still falls short IMHO of "ruling the country." I think she knows that if she tried to do that it would be the end of the monarchy.

The hereditary aristocracy may be just a component of the ruling class, but they are a still a significant one, and it's one which the Tory party represents.

On the flip side, David Camerons grandfather was a recipient of slavery reparations which indebted the country for 150 years but created inter-generational wealth for a small elite of merchants, slave traders and the like. So he may not be a hereditary lord, but it's not exactly a far cry from it, either.

Land ownership, for example, is highly concentrated with the aristocracy/gentry.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/money/2019/...

> Britain has the potential to be a powerhouse, but its political class is one of the least competent and credible in all of the G20.

Britain is washed up and will take years to recover from Brexit and Tory rule, if ever.

If ever? That’s a long time.

If it's a longer time than the time industrial civilisation has left on this earth then it is effectively forever.

There’s the real possibility that the UK may fall apart with things like Irish reunification, Scottish independence, etc.

You could argue that at that point the UK no longer exists to recover and thus “if ever” is a pretty realistic outcome if the decline continues for much longer and the resentment in the outlying areas continues to grow.

> The UK is in far worse shape because Brexit has nuked a huge hole in the economy. 4% is about £80bn a year.

The EU lost the exact same amount in that exchange and had to substitute it with inferior or more expensive goods and services from elsewhere.

So no, the UK is not in far worse shape as they can open up to the rest of the world and the EU cannot because it's built around the principles of self-isolation and trade barriers.

Why the UK hasn't done as much after Brexit is a different problem. Sadly, Johnson has turned to be useless, although not nearly as useless as May. I'd like to see a "UK Trump" take over for a while. It's very hard to do worse than the two main parties.

80 billion is a smaller percentage of the EU’s ~17.9 trillion USD GDP than the UK’s ~3.3 trillion USD GDP. Though as I make that 2.4% of the UK’s GDP (and 0.45% of the EU’s) I’m not sure where the other commenter got the number and percentage from.

The EU is likely to find it easier to get useful trade deals as it has more recent experience of writing trade deals, partly because it does that for its members, and partly because the UK government doesn’t trust British people who worked for the EU to get that experience.

The UK also has limited room for getting significant alterations to the terms of imports to the UK in any trade deals, because every deal that contradicts EU rules represents another thing that has to be checked for with NI—GB trade.

That said, the UK appears to be very good at getting a large quantity of trade deals, by the cunning method of giving the counter-party whatever they ask for at negligible cost, so the British negotiators can get themselves another headline with the words “trade deal” in it.

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