Hacker News Reader

Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

"Brexit has delivered some deregulation, though: notably, the Conservative government ditched EU standards on effluent discharges, resulting in the (private) water companies discharging raw sewage into almost every river, and the seas around the UK coastline. So it is no longer safe to swim in UK waters."

Holy crap!

"the Bank of England are forecasting 13% inflation towards the end of the year."

And we thought things were bad in the US.

This article sounds absolutely dire, can someone in the UK comment - are things really that bad there?

View on HN

To answer such questions I always imagine transplanting a random citizen of country 1 to country 2 and vice versa. In other words, I guess you should ask the expats.

Having lived in both the UK and the US, I would say that anyone not rich is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare, better infrastructure, cheaper education, etc.

However, in my experience the UK living standards (again, for a non-rich person) are significantly worse than the rest of Northwestern Europe. And the UK's trajectory is not looking good.

> is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare

Is it? The NHS is completely useless since the pandemic for anything non-emergency (can't comment for emergencies). You go private or you go without.

Whether it's still cheaper than US, I don't know - US healthcare is priced to milk out as much cash as possible out of insurance policies, so I'm not sure what the true price is when you negotiate and are paying privately.

> You go private or you go without.

This is vastly overstating it. The third option is waiting. Many hours at A&E, months for non-urgent surgery, but it's there and it's still free.

If you demand next-hour treatment, yeah, it's not that, but they're doing their best.

> are things really that bad there?

UK resident here. I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. In the short-term, I can ignore the issue and pretend it doesn't exist. I wish it was only a short-term issue.

Long-term however, most of what attracted me to the UK in the first place died with the pandemic. The high street in most places is a shadow of its former self (replaced by money-laundering fronts masquerading as gift/American candy shops), work in tech is stuck in a weird hybrid state where it's neither fully remote nor on-site and is the worst of both worlds, wages haven't kept up with inflation while housing prices have skyrocketed, businesses are struggling and will struggle even more as people don't even have the money to pay their heating/energy bills, let alone for discretionary spending. The NHS is basically a write-off at this point and your only option is to go private.

Taxes on the other hand are still high. Now I don't know anybody who likes paying taxes, but it stings less when you feel like you get your money's worth out of them (in terms of infrastructure or services, such as the NHS) and the tax rate is adequately calibrated. However, the tax brackets have yet to adjust for inflation, so you must earn more (and thus pay more tax) even though your standard of living hasn't actually changed at all. Services that you used to be able to get for "free" (paid by your taxes) such as the NHS are no longer functional, so you must now effectively pay twice and go private instead.

Politically, there doesn't seem to be any urgency to fix the problem either, from any side of the political spectrum. I haven't paid attention to them too much here (I can't vote anyway), but the feeling I got was complete apathy from the ruling class. It always felt like a plane flying on autopilot with nobody at the controls - we happened to luck out for a while and prosper despite that but now we're approaching a mountain and it will be really bad if someone doesn't change course.

I have an EU passport, when my current lease expires I will be moving back to the EU and taking my business with me. At this point I am losing money by staying here, paying huge rents and taxes for sub-par value in return.

> I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially.

Yet. But I'm not sure if that is something that has enough staying power to see you through to the end of this. Inflation is a fickle thing. So are bankruns.

Taxes in the UK are not actually that high. I live in a Northern European country and my take home pay on the same salary in the UK would be 12% more a month, and even more if you take into account all the tax free savings options (there's none where I live). And my country doesn't even have that high taxes, take a look at how much you'd be paying in somewhere like Italy.

Plus the UK is a mini tax haven, being one of the best places in Europe for the self-employed.

It depends on who you ask. If you ask any british person who has been out of the country for a few years, yes, it's absolutely going down the pipes.

If you ask people who have lived there the whole time, they've been frog-boiled.

The truth is somewhere in the middle: the current malaise is a continuation of pre-existing trends. There were always holes in british roads, now there are just more of them. There were always food banks, now they just run out of food before they run out of hungry people.

I don’t think so —- it’s all a bit hyperbolic . Yeah tough times but most inflation forecasts have it going doing to near 0% by the end of 2023 — guy needs to breathe.

Those people have better crystal balls than mine. I would be very wary of such optimistic projections given the current situation.

Are they the same inflation forecasts that last year said it was 'only transitory'? And that inflation would "peak at 5%"? We're now at 10.1%. Meanwhile the private sector (Citi Bank), who tend to know what's actually going on in comparison to the public sector because their responsibility is to investor's profits rather than catering to politics and public perception, have now got inflation hitting 18% in early 2023. I would love to see how you square going from 18% to 0% in the space of 9 months. Especially when energy bills are forecast to go over £5000 in January unless the government intervenes.

Pubs are warning of over 70% closure rates due to rising energy costs. 457,000 people are employed by pubs. If 70% of those jobs go that's 319,900 jobs lost, not to mention all the knock on effects. How many brewery jobs will be lost? Delivery jobs? Taxi driving jobs? How many communities will be damaged through losing one of the main socialising spaces? This is just one sector of the economy. Similar stories are being reported in restaurants, takeaways, manufacturing and retail.

On top of this we now have barristers, postal workers, railway staff, teachers, refuse collectors, journalists and hospital staff all on strike. More professions will likely be joining the list in the coming months. How is any of this hyperbolic?

There is a very real feeling that this is the calm before the storm and how it plays out is very much going to depend an awful lot on who gets elected next month and what they choose to do about the energy price rise in October.

Sources: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-10645425...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflatio...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/uk-had-ea...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/23/pubs-winter...

https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62632167

That cannot possibly be the only thing it delivered. The likes of Farage have been working on this thing for decades. They must be getting a lot more it of it

Yep. Less anti corruption

As much as I want socialized medicine in the US, I worry when look at Britain and see how a wave of regressive politicians can damage carefully built government institutions so quickly

>so quickly

it's been 43 years, as the author points out

But the last decade has been especially bad, and the last two years even worse than that.

There's plenty but obviously someone who sums up leaving the EU as literally sewage isn't going to give you a straight story on anything. This piece is basically just yet more anti UK propaganda from the Remainer set who never accepted that they lost for good reasons and will continue telling everyone how horrible the UK is until they die. It's a genre, ignore it.

> And we thought things were bad in the US.

That inflation is mostly driven by energy costs, which are a direct result of European policy failures on nuclear and fossil fuels. The US is mostly a net neutral producer/consumer of fossil fuels and energy, which is why it's insulated from the impacts of Russia cutting off gas.

Yup. A big thing in past decades was energy independence. The US actually achieved it but it didn't get the attention that griping about not having it got.

I mean sort of. If fuel prices are still at the whim of global markets, does it matter if the country is a net importer or not?

Electrification with domestic electricity supply seems like it would provide much greater security. Though there's still the global markets for all the electronics and materials and such for renewable generation.

>If fuel prices are still at the whim of global markets, does it matter if the country is a net importer or not?

But they are not completely at the whim.

With a nontrivial lag time, as prices raise, local (especially North America as a whole) production will go up and NA will become a significant net exporter. The shale and tar sands production is considerably more expensive than other production methods and requires high prices (and predictions of long term high prices) to operate successfully.

We are coupled, but not entirely dependent. The local price will be progressively lower compared to global price as global price rises. Being able to overproduce our requirements enables this.

If high prices significantly (for some sufficiently high level of significance) threatened our local economy or supply actually limited people's ability to buy at any price, controls can and would be enacted to decouple the local price and economy from the global market.

From an energy security standpoint being net neutral or better is good but is the US insulated from fossil fuel prices?

From a market perspective I would have thought a decrease in supply (say sanctions on Russian oil) would up the price of oil. This would effect domestic oil prices as well since either the domestic producers also participate globally or other sources of oil available domestically are also available globally (higher global price would decrease domestic supply and thus increase domestic price).

If domestic policies are put in place which limit access to the global market then that would change things.

> is the US insulated from fossil fuel prices?

To a large degree, yes [1]. The US is affected by oil prices globally, but if OPEC decides to cut off the US it wouldn't have the same effect that Russia is having on the EU right now.

> also participate globally

In crises, the US has the option to restrict exports. The EU does not have that option because it is not a net producer of fossil fuels.

[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/natural-gas-p...

Wow, that chart is quite compelling.

> From an energy security standpoint being net neutral or better is good but is the US insulated from fossil fuel prices?

The US as an economy is mostly not effected by fuel prices anymore.

But the average US consumer is - that's probably the important part.

But the average US consumer is a big part of the economy - if they're effected, then how is the US economy not effected?

If the US consumer is buying from US producers, then it is just money bouncing around domestically. You could argue that from a birds eye view, the US economy as a whole, at least on a national scale, is minimally affected.

That being said, I can't agree with the parent post, it's not that symmetric.

Doesn't that assume that those local producers are only using local resources? It's very hard to be insulated well in this day and age. Livestock feed price is up. Fertilizer price is up. Equipment shipping costs are up, when they aren't hard to come by. (I can provide sources, but I just googled price of those over time and found charts supporting it easily enough).

Its very hard to be really insulated from higher fuel costs, even if it's produced locally. You still need to ship it to a refinery, and then ship it back out to gas stations. Unless you run a farm where you get all your inputs locally and they are also trying to use only local inputs, you're going to see these price increases. Many of the economic inputs people use for production, whether that be food or built items, have gone up, and often there's only so much they can do to insulate from that.

Hey Sorry to follow you!! I am deeply curious on your knowledge.

Not fully insulated - US oil prices should also go up when marketplaces as a whole does. However, the laws of physics indicate that domestic markets are still cheaper to supply to - if it is at all possible (and LNG is more quite a bit expensive than pipelines).

Furthermore, a super strong dollar when US oil production is sold in, of course, dollars makes other parts of the world that want to purchase more US energy in lieu of Russian energy pay top dollar for it compared to domestic customers.

It's starting from a decent place, but the delta is steep. (I'm not from the UK.)

It’s pretty grim at the moment.

But where do you think it'll be in 10 years? Progress is being made towards renewable energy, people are taking trips by bicycle more, and although the change hasn't happened yet, public sentiment is that the NHS needs to be "fixed", whatever that may end up meaning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com