UK food price inflation hit 16.2% in October – cost of food basics surging
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
It’s not clear to me _why_ this has happened, I’m not an economist, but it’s clear to me that this is the case. We’ve seen what happens when the government tries to go on a spending spree. Even Labour agree that we need to go into a period of (effective) austerity at this point.
The UK's performance wrt the growing west became uncorrelated in 2008, and negatively correlated since Brexit came into effect 2020ish+.
The UK was, in many ways, ground-zero for one of the most severe financial crises in modern history. It has never really addressed that, nor does it have an answer for a version of the UK which can exist "in the shadow of that event".
The UK's "best future" from 2008 was an significant pivot to "boring tech", a pivot to the EU, and a rationalised financial system which could support both goals. Instead, it redoubled on relatively pathological elements of the financial industry and away from the EU.
1-) China is not producing goods as before the pandemic. Another one is China's zero-covid policy, like bringing down the entire city for just one covid case.
2-) Europe's energy problem. I'm not an expert on this, but Europe's reliance on Russia's cheap gas could be Europe's competitive advantage in the markets. So, when it is gone, I might expect purchasing power could drop significantly for Europeans.
I always assumed it was a combination of WW II, collapse of the Empire and then a series of terrible governments since the 1960s.
I think a structural issue is aging demographics. Lots of welfare policies were enacted when the ratio of workers to non workers was much higher. For decades now, this ratio has been getting smaller and smaller, hence the constant political dilemma of which benefits to cut and how much and for who.
The UK seems like it will especially struggle with delivering universal healthcare promises, as well as pension benefits. Not only are fault lines along rich and poor, but they will be more and more along old and young.
We could avoided a lot of the economic cost of Covid by asking the over-65s to shield and kept the wider economy more or less going, but that was unacceptable to them and instead we shut down everything for their benefit and now they aren’t even willing to contribute to the cost.
Strongly agree. I used to work in the civil service and there are many good individuals but the management structure is poor (though I think generally very effective at line management) and plenty of duffers get promoted. Many ministers are really very mediocre.
Good ideas and techniques are very slowly adopted, but then things like Agile are cargo-culted in an inappropriate way. To be fair, plenty of tech firms do this.
Dominic Cummings has lots of interesting ideas on this on his Substack. When Truss’ mini budget nearly broke pension funds, he pointed out that not only No 10 not know how leveraged they were, but nobody seems to care that they didn’t know. Surely central government should be able to pull together all the data it gathers?
Unfortunately he turned out to be not very good at governing.
Cummings seems like a reasonably intelligent guy, if ethically dubious and difficult to work with (putting it mildly). What is shocking is that he looks like a genius when compared to those around him. He has basically read around a bit, thinks for himself, and is open to contrarian ideas. He’s just a reminder of how poor our governance is.
I think the reality is most of our govts are not just incompetent but actively harmful in terms of national interest. Obviously a hard Brexit, which Cameron and Johnson created as a byproduct of their own political schemes, is the greatest symbol of this.
1. https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e...
But voting to put trade barriers on oneself.. to stop immigration... Is going to lead to pain, no matter what way you cut it.
From my POV seems like the UK's government is tanking the country by pursuing an idiological agenda that obviously isn't working, and is obviously lowering the standard of living in the country, and yet despite all evidence they continue to double down.
The sad thing we're seeing with Labour is that they're doing the classic thing that happens when parties stay in the wilderness of opposition too long, they start to doubt themselves and instead align with what the government of the day is doing.
Labour under their new leadership is clearly now hoping that if they're timid enough and don't rock the boat at all when the Conservatives inevitably implode they'll be thrust into power because they're sitting there as the next default alternative.
It's sadly terribly uninspiring.
Despite your dire situation, you are keeping to make things even worse - See UKCA mark, return of imperial units, endless squabble with EU over Northern Ireland Protocol and threating a trade war, which would finish you off.
Thing is that you used to be interesting for investors (and for me personally) because you were country speaking English and connected to EU. So if somebody from abroad (USA, Asia) wanted to do a bossiness in EU, he would start in UK. That's gone thanks to Brexit and Estonia + Netherland took this role from you. Now you just become a hollow English speaking island which really has nothing to offer.
But quite surprisingly, this is not the case. I don't have enough information to say why, but I am definitely shocked on the lack of discourse on the matter.
There are some small movements, but it goes largely unreported by the mainstream media. There was a 10.000 people march recently in Westminster to UnBrexit and BBC didn't even report it.
- people work less hours - education is slipping - lots of imports because we don't have it anymore (outsourced because of lack of cheap labour or environment laws) ...
It's not really happening in the US. The US economy remains strong and may not even go into a significant recession in the next year.
The US dollar remains the world reserve currency and allows unparalleled monetary and fiscal policy freedom. No-one is losing confidence in the dollar the same way they did in the pound.
Inflation is coming down in the US and it's in a fantastic place in terms of energy and food security.
The decline of "the West" you refer to is really the decline of Europe.
Households won't spend, private sector won't invest as households are not spending, so if the public sector also stops spending then you go into a much longer and deeper recession.
Money itself for a government with a central bank is just a unit of account. There can't not be enough of it. It's just a way to measure resource distribution.
Wealth on the other hand. There's plenty of that in the UK, but it's increasingly in the hands of a few.
40 years of financilising public services and nearly every aspect of our lives means that household and public spending eventually ends up being concentrated even more in the hands of a few. That's the actual issue with public spending into such an economy, that without an effective tax system (which we don't have), then it makes inequality worse.
Both Tory and Labour are pushing a false narrative, because ultimately they represent those who are doing pretty well out of this deal.
Our society has gone from one of growth to one of decay.
You can't do as much when you want to work a few hours a day a few days a week with seasons of time off.
You can't do as much when the supply of energy is falling over time.
You can't do as much when regulations grow and grow, making building anything less and less worthwhile and less and less possible.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...
There is no point where the workforce, assisted by technology, was dramatically more productive than it is now. Given the rise in productivitiy, shouldn't we expect the standard of living to at least remain constant?
I got a graduate degree in Edinburgh, and the one thing I kept noticing about the entire country is how difficult and expensive it is to acquire housing. People literally ooh'd and ahh'd when they learned that a friend had inherited a small home in Norwich, saying she was effectively set for life. It's like California's NIMBY-fuel housing apocalypse, but on steroids due to the greenbelts.
The problem with a housing crisis, is that it's zero-sum wealth consolidation slow-motion event that takes place over a multi-generational period. A country's personal disposable income would generally pumped back into the economy constructively by/via entrepreneurs, but in a rent-seeking housing environment, that disposable income is lost to consolidated entities, who generally pump the excess rents back into further housing consolidation, or in international markets.
The reason it sneaks up on you is that once the housing freeze happens, you slowly fill in the excess housing capacity exponentially, until almost overnight, rents skyrocket. Suddenly, the nation becomes dramatically poorer within a decade or so.
The only good news to this theory is that it's trivially fixable with massive housing construction plans, the bad news is that it will be politically unlikely for people to suddenly vote to allow "ugly" new construction in the most historic and important cities in the country.
Just imagine how much capital Londoners could put to work if they had housing taken care of. As of 2017 they have been spending 50% of their income on rent: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42179119
Only around 20% of people in Britain earn these amounts, which means 80% of people are taking out more than they contribute. I don't know how this compares to other countries but it is clearly unsustainable and I think that now the era of generous Government handouts and cheap borrowing have come to an end, it is starting to bite.
One example. They have to find Brexit benefits so we have pointless plans to depart from eu rules. Result is higher costs for businesses and uncertainty for anyone trying to plan.
This allowed someone like Truss to get into power with a fantasy economic plan.
You can want Brexit for lots of reasons but the denial of its real economic impact has poisoned the discourse about how to manage the U.K. economy.
And looks like UK is in the "The more you mess around, the more you find out" stage, with every day they are finding out new things
https://davidallengreen.com/2022/11/getting-any-quick-intern...
“ All you have to do is turn up to the negotiation, ask what the other side’s negotiators want, give it to them, and – Hey Peston! – the United Kingdom has a trade agreement.”
They claimed the UK was so essential that it could dictate its own terms with both the EU and other trade partners.
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate
Inflation is high because governments printed enormous sums of money to fund lockdowns and furloughs. Helicopter drops of money creates inflation, it's as simple as that. This effect was predicted right at the start of lockdowns and now it's here. Moreover Brexit only actually took effect at the very start of 2020 so there was all of a few months to do anything before COVID hit and the government had no time to actually do much with its new powers.
Honestly, it's very tiring to see these kind of unsubstantiated comments so systematically rise to the top. If you want to prove something is causally linked to leaving the EU you need to prove it, not simply assert it and then declare anyone questioning that assertion is engaged in "denial".
Even Jeremy Hunt has conceded Brexit is causing problems!
https://www.politico.eu/article/brexit-had-significant-adver...
Re: OBR. We're talking about food price inflation. The article you cite in turn cites the OBR, but (a) contrary to what you're suggesting the OBR doesn't have seem to have done any of its own analysis and (b) it only mentions Brexit twice, once about immigration and the other is a single paragraph which isn't about food price inflation. It says:
"Our trade forecast reflects our assumption that Brexit will result in the UK’s trade intensity being 15 per cent lower in the long run than if the UK had remained in the EU"
They don't define what "long run" means and they don't state where this assumption came from. That's the quality of the OBR's in-house analysis: there isn't any. That's not a huge surprise. The civil service has a poor track record of economic forecasting in all respects, but especially on anything to do with Brexit. The government forecast before the vote that voting to leave (not leaving, just voting to leave) would trigger an immediate recession in which between 500,000 and 800,000 jobs would be lost, due to "uncertainty". In fact the economy grew and unemployment fell.
They do then mention the "latest evidence suggests a significant adverse impact on UK trade", and cite two other papers. Both are only about claimed changes in UK/EU trade, not UK trade as a whole. The first ESRI paper relies on such complicated modelling it's not worth spending time on and their abstract asserts a dubious assumption right up front. The LSE paper states:
"Second, the implementation of the TCA triggered a small and only temporary decline in relative UK exports to the EU in 2021. These sharply fell in January, immediately following the introduction of the TCA, but quickly recovered within half a year"
It does say that the UK reduced imports from the EU significantly, but this would be expected given the currency value decline and that the EU external tariffs no longer discourage UK companies from importing from outside of Europe. The UK trade balance hasn't had a sudden improvement so it just means imports are now more balanced w.r.t. ROW.
Believe what you want at the end of the day. I would love to have to been proven wrong, but Brexit is an unmitigated disaster to almost every expert worth listening to.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/mar/26/nhs-under-t...
"The National Health Service will face budget cuts, falling standards and an exodus of overseas doctors and nurses if the UK leaves the European Union"
NHS budget has dramatically grown since leaving the EU and so has NHS employment of immigrant workers:
https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/chart/number-of-eu-and-non-...
i.e. his predictions were wrong and his track record is therefore not good.
As I say, believe what you want, I genuinely want to be wrong as I feel ever-growing despair at what has happened to my country, not least under recent Tory governments. We are a country in decline. I'm now pretty certain of it.
Well, the Conservatives officially campaigned to remain and Boris had to kick out dozens of MPs at the last election to even be able to implement the vote at all. Whether someone is a truly reformed Remainer or not has been a question at every leadership contest since. So there's nothing significant or new about Tories disagreeing with Brexit, it's a pretty standard position within the party.
"We are a country in decline. I'm now pretty certain of it."
I am too! We don't actually disagree on that. The GDP/capita trends are pretty clear there, especially when compared to the USA. It's not relevant to food price inflation which has different causes, however.
The difference between us is I think the issues long pre-date 2016, are mostly to do with entrenched social attitudes, were made worse/locked in place by EU membership and therefore that Brexit is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for reversing the decline. Whereas you see a decline as a recent thing and Brexit/the ruling party as the cause.
The EU enforces a very specific economic and social model which prioritizes geopolitical unification over wealth creation. External tariffs are high, there are many other less obvious protectionist policies in place, regulation is vast/constantly growing, there's a lot of grant dependency and internal subsidies, the EU theoretically doesn't control tax but in practice has taken control of it anyway and now prevents tax competition (see Ireland), and the ex-Soviet states have provided a legal pool of very cheap labor which has systematically discouraged investments in productivity for decades. The Euro creates a whole other set of problems but fortunately the UK avoided that. Because the EU's scope constantly expands this results in the slow strangulation and homogenization of local politics: huge swathes of policy that people care about are effectively off limits and politicians from all parties simply refuse to discuss them at all, knowing that there's nothing they can do or say because the EU will simply overrule them. It was often very unclear to voters why these "black holes" existed or even what they were exactly, because the middle class consensus was that the EU should be beyond criticism and is at any rate an immovable object, the ever-increasing dominance of which was an unavoidable fact of political life best left undiscussed.
The UK's divergence from the USA in wealth terms isn't directly caused by the EU. That's why I say the EU locked in social problems, rather than causing them. The divergence really kicked into gear after WW2. [1]
Post 1945 the USA continued its more explicitly capitalist and libertarian approach, wheres the UK became wedded to the European social model. Compare employment law between Europe and California, recall all the usual HN discussions about why Europe doesn't create tech startups at the same rates, etc. It's all a part of the same package of attitudes that creates those outcomes. Inside the EU divergence from this model towards something more explicitly pro-business is simply not possible, as the Irish have discovered. They were picking up US tech firms and investments like candy due to their low tax model, but the EU preferred to forcibly align everyone on French levels of corporation tax to avoid "harmful tax competition" [2]. It doesn't even control such taxes by treaty, but treaties are largely irrelevant in Europe - the subservience of the political class and fear of EU retaliation means there are no real checks on its power, and thus they were able to bring Ireland to heel anyway.
Outside of the EU the UK can in theory diverge from this approach and pursue a more US style model, eventually perhaps even catching up with US levels of wealth. Certainly that was a big part of the appeal to a lot of the Brexit campaigners. However it isn't on track to do so currently. The social attitudes described above have been a feature of British society for many decades and the Conservatives are effectively a centre-left party dominated by the need for wealth transfers towards the the pensioner demographic that reliably turns out to vote for them. Even if alternative parties appear, alternative social models start to be discussed and attitudes change, it will take a long time to even re-match the USA in terms of growth, let alone close the gap. That's why I think the impact of Brexit will have to assessed by historians over a span of a century or more, in the same way people still debate the impact of the events of the 1920s today.
So - it creates new options. People haven't even been thinking about those options for nearly 100 years, so nothing is going to happen overnight and it may never happen. But at least it will mostly depend on what voters want.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/maddison-data-gdp-per-cap...
[2] https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/harmful-tax-competitio...
> However it isn't on track to do so currently. The social attitudes described above have been a feature of British society for many decades ...
> Alternative parties, alternative social models.
> Brexit will have to assessed by historians over a span of a century or more
Ah I see. All is clear now. If only the British people were different. Britannia unchained.
Thanks for making my point about fantasy economics so thoroughly.
This type of shallow, unintellectual dismissal of any thinking outside the EU box is exactly why Remain lost in the end. Describing everyone who pointed out the problems as fantasists, racists etc made the pro-EU side look unclever, unthinking. The "fantasy economics" line was tried over and over, it didn't work because enough people saw through it. The claims of an instant recession were tested and found to be false. Who cares what economists think about Brexit or the EU nowadays? The UK is out and people can see the claims of immediate/total economic devastation weren't true, so there's now potentially a reason to argue for more growth/wealth oriented ways of doing things. Before there wasn't because the EU would stop it anyway, so back then a model more like the US or parts of Asia really was fantasy economics.
The UK is in a no-mans land outside of a huge market on our own continent and all you can offer is 'we can try new stuff now'.
I can accept the vote as long as there is an honest discussion about the consequences. What I can't accept is lines like 'Who cares what economists think about Brexit or the EU nowadays?'. Going back to my original point, Brexit has poisoned economic discourse.
My point is that in order to build democratic support for a policy you have to be willing to put in a lot of effort and campaign for it. In the EU there was no point in doing that, because even if you won a democratic victory (an election, referendum, etc) then it didn't matter, the EU would overrule you and the voters, the end.
Yes, Liz Truss tried to do the easy bits of pro-growth policies without the hard bits of actually cutting spending. That doesn't work and she was quickly replaced. The shadow of lockdowns is a long one and the country will be much poorer as a consequence regardless of what politicians do. Nonetheless, I doubt anyone is trying to claim that the new higher tax levels are going to reverse the UK's economic decline.
The UK is not in a "no mans land", that's the sort of emotional catastrophising that this thread is full of. It's a big country and still sells to the EU just as it did before - see my other comments. Exports haven't actually fallen at all because the much vaunted single market wasn't really a single market for the UK's companies anyway so leaving it didn't make much difference.
We all want honest discussions of the consequences. That's why I'm posting on this thread in the first place. Blaming global lockdown/furlough-inducted inflation on Brexit isn't honest economic discourse. Neither is simply insisting on deference to academic/civil service economists, who have been consistently wrong about it.
I don't lay the entire blame for our decline at Brexit's door, I too think it has been decades in the making. For me though, Brexit was a singular moment of lunacy, and many of the morbid symptoms our politics have displayed in recent years, the terrible quality of leaders, the hard right wing creep in some sections of the govt, the sheer reality-ignoring stupidity, does seem to have a Brexit link. But no, I don't think everything was great pre-Brexit. The lunatics took over the asylum is probably more how I see it. Now we have 'grownups' in charge, I'll concede that much, but I find this new project a grim re-run of the Cameron era. Another ideologically motivated choice to slash the state to address a mythical fiscal hole. I dread to think where we will end up after this latest round of austerity. It's truly grim.
Rather that Brexit had undermined the discourse about how to manage the economy. I gave two specific examples of how this is happening. This is clearly relevant to any discussion of the U.K. economy.
However, the idea that leaving the biggest trading block in the planet in exchange for a couple of piss poor (by the admission of those people who negotiated them) trade deals with small economies on the other side of the world hasn't damaged our economy is the more extraordinary claim.
That's why exports to the EU haven't changed much (see my other comment). Imports did fall, but that the UK continues to import from elsewhere so it's unclear why people in Britain should care. The EU lost an export market, the UK didn't really (because the EU rules weren't benefiting that market in the first place).
This is the sort of thing I mean - there are a lot of people who very much want leaving the EU to be a disaster for long term ideological reasons. To determine whether it actually is or not requires a holistic analysis that goes well beyond economics, but at the moment even establishing basic economic facts like "inflation is not caused by Brexit" is apparently hard.
Like yes, increasing the money supply is the root cause here but nobody ever states what the alternative should’ve been.
I hope this clarification has made you feel less tired.
We have massive supply side issues though: extreme gas prices in Europe, raised gas prices in the rest of the world and raised oil prices in the world because of the Ukraine war. Extreme electricity prices in Europe because of failing French nuclear reactors. Missing parts from China because of a continuing zero-covid strategy there.
As a consequence, savings broke records over the pandemic period [1]. Now restrictions are gone that money is flooding into the economy as everyone tries to buy things. Simultaneously supply chains are still recovering and energy/gas supplies are limited, this is true. Nonetheless, you can't print thousands of pounds per person and not expect that to create large price increases.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco....
I think it's pretty clear.
I don't think this has anything to do with Brexit, Brexit was achieved when the UK gained sovereignty. This is clearly a really dumb move to do quickly and unplanned. They are on purpose putting an insane amount of pressure on politicians to look through literally thousands of potentially important documents.
One reason could be that they think the Labour party have a real chance of election in the next cycle, and they want to sabotage them from being able to rejoin the EU.
I suspect the real reason has more to do with purposely destabilizing the legal system to promote growth. The idea would be that you suddenly open tonnes of holes in your legal system that relax regulation and open profitable loop-holes.
In the long-term these EU laws do need to be repealed and merged with the British legal system, but you could set a more realistic target like 10% per year or something. I would at the very least commission a study to be conducted to evaluate the actual contents of these laws.
I think what ends up happening if this is stuck to is that we end up with a broken system that _nobody_ understands or knows how to enforce. We then end up with rushed and messy legislation being rammed through to plug the holes, which open up other problems. We will also likely see other things being slipped in under the rug that further erode people's freedoms.
If you asked a heart surgery patient mid surgery if they're doing OK their -- and any professional's -- answer would range from "no, my chest is open" to "inconclusive until the surgery is complete.
The purpose of this is two-fold:
1. Make it harder for future governments to reverse Brexit or reverse parts of Brexit
2. Make it harder for Scotland to leave the UK by making it harder for an independent Scotland rejoin the EU due to regulatory differences
I don't know for sure what the main cause of our current problems is, but I know that it's not a single issue. Brexit, Covid-19 and the war with Russia – not one of these issues alone is the cause of our problems.
My hope for the country rests in the fact that it still has wonderful, tough, resourceful people in it, and that it has survived worse catastrophes than this in the past, and come out okay.
Only one of these issue is UK specific tho; so either your fears extend to the rest of Europe and/or the western world, or you can pinpoint the cause of your anxiety.
But the severity of UK's problems are solely of their own making and are pretty much entirely due to Brexit, and the fallout from Brexit that caused by a string of ill-prepared "leaders".
That said, one reason I'm hopeful about the UK is that, compared to US politics, there is much less "tribalism", much more fluidity among how people will vote, and more willingness in your parties to vote for pragmatic policies when strict ideology fails. In the US most voters couldn't conceive of voting for the opposite party, such that most elections in the US come down to turnout and a small sliver of maybe 10ish percent of "swing voters".
In the UK, by comparison, after the sheer idiocy of Liz Truss, she was quickly canned, a much more realistic/pragmatic PM was installed (even if one disagrees with his overall political stance), and policies quickly changed. Also, at least in polling, there were huge swings in sentiment against Conservatives and towards Labour because Conservatives were (correctly in my opinion) being blamed for their massive fuckup.
I can't see the equivalent happening in the US.
The leaders weren't just I'll prepared with Brexit, they head-on despite the consequences, since they were chasing the "EU-bad" popularity votes by pointing at the EU as the scapegoat for the UKs own self inflicted internal issues. Now the leaders have no more outside scapegoats other than COVID and Putin.
Well, arguably, they kind off got carried away by the thing they created; Brexiters pre-referendum were usually advocating some sort of soft Brexit (albeit often with conflicting demands which made it impossible; "single market access but we don't need to follow European rules" sort of thing), then there was May's Brexit which looked 'hard' at the time but soft compared to what actually happened, then Boris's Brexit, and then Truss wanted to make it _worse_. All of these things were worse than being in the EU, but the degree of badness intensified as the leaders of the movement were captured by the movement itself.
Well yeah, the population voted to jump off a cliff, and the leaders (Boris) cheered them on and promised them the most spectacular cliff jump ever just to shove it to the EU.
In a way this is populist democracy in action and is a lesson for future generations.
Pretty much all the Euro Area (of which the UK was not a part of) sees similar numbers. According to [0], it was at 15.5% in October, from 13.3 in September.
You're making a very slippery argument here. You started by asserting that things are worse in the UK than elsewhere in Europe and this is due to Brexit, but you didn't name any specific way in which things are worse. So you were called out on it because this discussion is about a single data point - food price inflation - which is not different to elsewhere. Now you're saying well no, but if things were worse then it'd be the fault of Brexit.
HN discussions on anything UK related seem to always be like this nowadays. Intellectual curiousity is dead, killed by motivated reasoning. "Things are worse, I won't say what, but if anything is worse, then it's clearly Brexit and not anything else". That's not a valid argument, it's not even an attempt to lay the groundwork for an argument. We get it - you wish no country ever left the EU - but if you want to blame leaving then you need to show a causal relation, not simply assert that the EU can only ever make things better in any conceivable capacity.
The France CPI increase was 6.2% for the same period [2].
That is a huge difference for similar developed economies.
1. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bull....
2. https://www.rateinflation.com/inflation-rate/france-inflatio....
The difference is caused by France more heavily subsidizing/capping energy costs. It reflects a short term deviation in market policy triggered by gas shortages, not some fundamental divergence.
The UK is simply doing worse WRT inflation than any comparable country, and nobody, not even Conservative UK politicians, really debates this.
According to [0], the UK isn't doing that much worse than Germany (12.2 vs 12.6%). It's doing same as Norway and better than the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic and way better than Sweden. The latter being barely better than Ukraine, which is actually at war. Now I agree those are "smaller countries", so maybe not comparable?
Some "peripheral countries" are doing great (Romania), others terribly (Hungary). This is to say that values are over the place. I don't see any emerging trend that would allow easily to pinpoint the reason prices are going up in this or that country but not in the other.
The issue with Germany's decision, wrt to nuclear, is that it affects everybody because of the way electricity prices are set in the EU (priced for the most expensive production).
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/consumer-price-ind...
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate
Netherlands: 14.3%
UK: 11.1%
Germany: 10.4%
Euro area: 10.6%
Italy: 11.8%
etc.
"The UK is simply doing worse WRT inflation than any comparable country, and nobody, not even Conservative UK politicians, really debates this."
Nobody debates this because outside of the HN anti-UK bubble nobody is claiming it, and nobody is claiming it because it isn't true. This is what I mean by HN discussions about the UK being hot garbage for the last few years. Way too many posters are willing to simply make things up in order to attack the UK.
As for fears for the rest of Europe – I don't doubt that the rest of Europe has problems. My worries are confined to the UK because that's where I live. (To be clear, this isn't me saying I don't care about other countries. But there's only so many problems a person can concern themselves with.) I think the country could very well cease to exist unless we figure a lot of problems out.
The three reasons I listed are the ones that people keep citing. I actually suspect that the UK's problems are longer term and more fundamental. I don't think it's related to either party, either. The Conservative Party of the last few years has not been good for the country, but I'm not convinced Labour will be able to fix our deep, societal problems, either.
Do you mean something like Scotland going their own way? Or something more dramatic (think revolution)?
Yes, exactly this – the four countries of the UK going their own way and the UK ceasing to be.
(It's my personal opinion – people will of course have their own take, and good reasons for having their views – that such a happening would be a devastating event.)
Source:
https://www.ft.com/content/f752a1ad-4a23-408f-a549-4909974c6...
However, the next decade or two might be quite difficult. To be fair, there is some justice in it. You (collectively, as a country, not you personally) cannot keep voting for the same failed ideologies and then complain when the consequences come. This needs to be the end of Toryism as it currently exists. Conservatism in itself is fine, but the combination of chumocracy, alternative realities, and rabid nationalism is toxic and destabilising more than the UK.
[edit] just look at the peerage thing, or the way prime ministers have been chosen by party members. This just cannot go on for long if you want to keep the pretence of a democracy.
To me this seems to be the product of Blair-era Labour, which gutted the country by shipping jobs and industrial capacity to Eastern Europe and China.
Populist nationalism is rising throughout the western world. It’s a reaction to the failings of globalist liberalism, not the cause of those problems.
Blaming the decline of industrial capacity is correct, blaming globalism is wrong-headed. Continental European economies that have buckled the trend of deindustrialization have done so precisely because they are competitive on global markets.
No, that definitely was the 80s.
Eastern Europe wasn't open to any serious trade in the 80s because it was behind the iron curtain. What rayiner means is that the UK under Labor didn't engage transitional immigration controls like other EU countries did, which combined with being an English-language-first market meant that once the ex-Soviet states were able to join the EU much larger numbers of people migrated from eastern Europe to the UK than in other countries, and then started competing/taking the lower paid jobs. This was a deliberate decision by Labour.
They came to power 12 years ago when interest rates were <1% and they've cut investment in every industry, from Wind Power to Tidal energyto basic infrasteucture like an HDVC cable to iceland to import cheap geothermal power.
They have sold profitable state assets like the green investment bank, and essential security like gas storage.
The office for fiscal responsebility has calculated that these cuts have cost us hundreds of billions in the current energy crisis.
It has also been the most law-breaking government in living memory - they illegally deported thousands of british citizens in the Windrush scandal, had party in the middle of lockdown at number 10, to the PPE/covid eqipment contract handed out without tender to friends and family, Lordship titles for friends and dobors, breaking laws on political campaigns finance in Brexit referendum and taking godgy russian donations.
Combine that with the fact that they recently proposed a law to ankle tag 'repeat protestors' without a court process or any evidence of a crime.
I genuinely fear that UK is becoming like Russia or the inside, but with better marketing.
Was there any alternative to 6B people in the developing world offering to sell their labor and environment for less than the 1B people in the developed world? Arbitrage opportunities cannot go on forever without being outcompeted.
The alternative is to make sure that you provide a mechanism to bring the best and brightest to your country instead of coddling the least productive at home.
It’s not popular politically so we promise coal miners another generation of work instead.
Importing other countries’ elites seems like a bad thing for the proles both at home, and the country losing their best and brightest.
Seems like a better alternative would be to do the exact opposite: force elites to stay in their home country and make it better.
Absolutely not! We need people in position to make decisions to see the world and understand it, not be insular nationalists because they know no other country. We need more people high up in government who are familiar with the mainstream ideas and cultural quirks of other countries, and we need more contact between cultures. Having people go to other countries is vital.
You also want enough of them to come back home, ideally (though not all of them, expats are still useful from a soft power point of view), but keeping them and preventing them from going abroad in the first place is really bad and counter-productive.
There is a new book describing research that shows that even after four generations, immigrants retain about half of the attitudes of their home countries: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594.
A fundamental feature of American culture is that it idolizes the “common man.” When you allow elites from other countries to immigrate to the US, you’re importing the cultural elitism from those countries, and destroying American culture in the process.
My family immigrated from Bangladesh to northern Virginia in 1989. When I was growing up, it was an egalitarian, decent place. But we were a wave of elite immigrants, and now 30 years later it’s unrecognizable. Much wealthier, sure. There’s tech jobs and elite immigrants to fill them. But the culture has changed completely. And what’s the upside for the people who were already there? Do they really benefit from Google employees pricing them out of housing, etc?
New Labour was a short interlude. No, the problems did not start this decade. You can see the roots in the 1980s, when London was more or less set up as Europe’s financial district at the expense of the rest of the country. Of course, some roots run even deeper, like the Empire thing and the whole class structure.
> To me this seems to be the product of Blair-era Labour, which gutted the country by shipping jobs and industrial capacity to Eastern Europe and China.
They did not help, true (and the Iraq war was much worse in terms of consequences, it killed any alternative to the conservatives for a decade and amplified the divisions without the Labour Party). But it’s disingenuous to blame them for the country’s de-industrialisation.
> Populist nationalism is rising throughout the western world. It’s a reaction to the failings of globalist liberalism, not the cause of those problems.
Populist nationalism is really not a new thing, it’s a tool that is used quite regularly. What’s almost unique to the UK and the US is how it corrupted a mainstream party, thus creeping into the heart of government. True, it’s worse in Hungary and Poland (and Russia), but that’s not setting the bar very high.
They are not in the same place as the UK. I don't the UK did anything different than what was the liberal consensus of what to do at the time.
> UK manufacturing employment fell especially steeply in the early 1980s during a recession triggered by a high exchange rate and high interest rates. The job losses during these years were documented in particular by Townsend (1983) and Fothergill and Guy (1991) and the process of deindustrialization more generally by Martin and Rowthorn (1986). The recession of the early 1990s added further major job losses (Gudgin, 1995). Thereafter, manufacturing output largely stagnated and manufacturing employment continued to slide even though the UK economy as a whole enjoyed 15 years of sustained economic growth.
What’s notable about New Labour was how manufacturing job losses continued even during a long period of sustained economic growth. Finance and knowledge sectors grew while manufacturing sectors declined.
Moreover, as to China specifically, the UK had little trade with China until 2000: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53468925.amp
Likewise immigration really got turbocharged under New Labour: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-32162123
When evaluating Blair's impact it's also important to look at regional shifts, with money and jobs becoming more and more concentrated around London at the expense of the periphery. You can argue about the causes of these shifts, but their existence is not in question.
Look at France and Germany: industry, tech, lots of "producing" businesses thrive. Paris has even overtaken London in finance. There's simply more ambition, innovation and energy.
citation please?
in terms of financial centres: NYC is first, followed by London (and they swap places every so often)
down at number 15 or so is Paris
Apple's market cap alone is larger than the entire LSE, and Paris exchange
Using the Paris exchange overtaking the London exchange as a barometer for broader overtaking of the finance industry is akin to saying that a person is taking over the F1 title from someone after beating them in a bike race around their house.
London Loses Crown of Biggest European Stock Market to Paris - 14 November 2022
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-14/london-lo...
Ever noticed that the L in LIBOR stands for London?
Interest rates and money (FX) (money can also refer to short term rates but KISS) is very much still London's thing especially relative to other European cities.
Aside: French engineering talent is massively underappreciated.
Monetary exploitation is the most effective means of bondage and most widely accepted form to exert control over a population because it is required for any transaction that doesn't get solely resolved by violence, in doing so you can essentially tax, govern, and structure Society without the need or expense of an occupying presence just the occasional military operation to remind them of said colonization: up until 2020 or so the CFA was used in 8 African nations and had a dire strain on those nation's people [0]. You should listen to Francis Ngannou's talk about the effective bondage African nations were operating under French rule because of the CFA that made trade between even neighboring African nations impossible.
Colonialism takes on many faces, but as the saying goes: He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.
> go and have a read about the CFA franc
Agreed, also look into why France has had continual conflicts in the Ivory Coast to see how it achieved this.
Edit:
> Aren't states free to adopt or drop the CFA franc? How does that make them colonies?
They were not free to do so, at all; as I said in a response HN won't let me post (posting too fast prompt) it would benefit most on HN to focus on why Fintech matters, it's more than just writing lines of code aimlessly and for it's own sake to create some new toy that can and will be soon forgotten on Github. Despite the prevailing narrative, it's not just the domain of what many regard as 'techbros,' but rather it's an approach to effect and enhance Society when done right in a more nuanced manner coming from a well informed understanding of how and why Society functions they way it does.
Hence why I used the quote that I used by a former US president to underscore what was written in a concise manner.
0: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/23/africa/france-stops-use-of-cf...
Currently the UK system is not "pay to play", if this changed tomorrow someone will be happily own the asset sacrificing a true percentage. In fact Tax is an idea our bankers want to see more of, the outspoken ones that is.
Our UK assets are still worth a pretty penny and last I checked it's kinda difficult to annex physical property to an offshore country. The political classes job is selling this country to the highest bidder as fast the public allows them to get away with and they plan to be in power for a very long time with the help of the media.
Brexit was a disaster for their economy and it will take decades for the UK to stop feeling the pain.
They are a bit bureaucratic for sure.
I don't think UK people are inheritantly less ambitious than anywhere else, but the very low social mobility here has always dragged down potential for some, while the punishing austerity and lack of investment over the past decade has limited other people's opportunities further.
The FPTP system essentially means that elections are decided by a small number of people living in marginal seats, that usually straddle poor urban and wealthy rural areas and so that is who (successful) politician's messages and policies are targeted at. It's also how you get the weird situation that on a lot of social and economic issues both major political parties are often to the right of the public.
Add to that the dominance of the Oxbridge PPE brigade in both parties, and you end up with them all drawing on a small, outdated set of policy options (basically what they were taught as undergrads), that don't really work in the modern world.
Finally we still have a monarch, and it turns out the last one (God bless 'er) had a large number of kaws modified in her and her family's favour.
So yeah. Sclerotic socio polotical system
I forgot about the famously non-existent ancient Egyptian and modern Chinese governments.
We do know about the free economic zones in modern China, which had very very limited government. So these only reinforce my point.
It has been called the first command economy [1][2].
[1] https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-c...
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=318&v=DiG0LomEptE&...
Arguably it was the new power blocks associated with industry that destabilized Tsarist Russia, not that WWI helped.
Post-WWII USA was both a period of big government and tremendous economic growth.
The government is just people deciding to come together and delegate power. It’s not something separate from people. Why can’t the “human spirit moving things forward” express itself through the public sector?
Power concentrates to a few. Sometimes very few, as in North Korea. Sometimes a slightly broader few, as in America. But it's always a few. The rest are acted upon by government.
Also it's pretty jokey to say that government is people delegating power. The only reason it needs to be delegated is because it was seized in the first place - by government!
The classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian “revolution” against what we might call the Old Order—the ancien régime which had dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century, imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions.
The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell conferred by central (and local) governments upon their favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic, war-making central State with privileged merchants—an alliance to be called "mercantilism" by later historians—and with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
-- For a New Liberty / by Murray N. Rothbard
Today we have a much worse alliance of government and privileged monopolies, corporatism. The few have decided that the companies are "responsible" for doing the decisions for us. Effectively removing any personal freedom the people might have, freedoms that most countries had in their constitutions for centuries are today being removed by government-backed corporations, as-if they don't need to exist at all.
It’s a big world out there with a lot of variety and the appropriate destination depends on a lot of individual factors.
I do think it's a nation on the decline in many ways.
However, I met so many ambitious immigrants who came to the UK to work hard and make a good life for themselves.
I believe these people will continue to keep the UK humming along.
It might not be a mighty outsized county economically but they'll be fine.
In PPP, Paris, Warsaw and Prague are roughly on par. UK looks like a poor-ish country with one rich city.
My wife and I do online shops at Waitrose (which is probably the most expensive supermarket) and at a local butchers and don’t particularly try and save money on food. We spend about £100 a week on average including the delivery cost.
Where I’ve noticed increases this year it’s been on milk, butter and some basic vegetables like potatoes. But at the same time - there’s been articles about how dairy farmers were under such competitive pressure in the UK that they’re closing and going out of business in the last couple of years, so to some extent, price rises in that area were inevitable.
A dairy farm may own or rent the acreage for growing its feed and related equipment or may buy it on the spot or futures market. May own, mortgage or rent its milking equipment.
Every country’s subsidies work differently, and it’s a bit opaque since everyone claims they’re hardworking and don’t get/need subsidies, but sometimes they’re even securitized and bought/sold.
So as each farmer makes its own bets/hedges, there are winners and losers when interest rates go up or down, feed goes up or down, land value goes up or down.
So the story of the “farmers going bankrupt, we need more subsidies” will never end.
In Canada, becoming a new dairy farmer requires you to buy $$$ “quota” from an existing farmer. Possibly they grow organically as demand grows too.
Reading about what has been happening over the past years in the UK while sitting in the US is really strange. Sometimes it feels like reading about a cartoonish banana republic in a novel aimed at young teenagers.
USCIS I-485, Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status
I have lived in countries that are so corrupt and incompetent where I wonder how anything ever works at all and yet I never read how terrible these places are in the media?
The very foundadtions of the country are being removed. How do you run an economy when there's no one educated enough to do it? Even if we drop 1% of the future leaders, business owners, start up founders, and whatever .... what is the UK then? I don't think we'll be fine, we're slowly sinking and everyone is banging pots for the NHS and saying 'keep calm!' and selling their houses to AirBNB lettting agents and NOT VOTING and we still have the most stupid voting system on planet earth so nothing can change.
I'm not sure who's worse off.
Took a position with 2/3 of the US salary but actual tangible security.
Re: food- Fresh produce in the PNW is incomparable imo. Never had anything like it in the world. In the UK I was largely limited to Sainsbury's etc., which have pretty poor quality food and produce.
Here in the PNW the variety (and quality) far exceeds what was available to me in the West Midlands, Greater Manchester and Greater London (not sure about other parts of the country).
It's a very pleasant luxury to not be limited to supermarkets.
Increased risk, increased reward. And if I'm fired, laid off, or deported, worst case I just go back to the UK having already earned hundreds of thousands of dollars more than I would have in the UK.
Even at within the same firm, for the same job, it seems like UK engineers are usually paid much less than US ones.
that's funny as that's exactly what we think about the US (especially its political system)
this was particularly terrifying to watch: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-63417249
What I have realized since living in the US is that every state is wildly different. Even regions within states are wildly different. Of course, I knew this before moving here, but it's a different thing entirely to experience it.
There are definitely big issues in US politics, at the federal level, at the state level and at the city/regional level. But if you don't like somewhere, you can move. I live in Seattle, for example, where a significant number of LGBTQ+ young adults move from all over the country.
The UK in comparison feels incredibly homogeneous, diversity of regional accents aside. London dominates the entire country both politically and economically. The impacts of poor governance at the country level are felt everywhere and cannot really be offset by regional authorities.
Reguonal authorities seem to have just enough power so that central government can blame them when something goes wrong, but nothing of substance.
The pinnacle of their day seems to be a pay dispute with the bin collectors or blocking someone from converting their loft because they submitted the request on the wrong kind of paper.
The only chance for UK to turn around is constitutional change, for example federalisation
'Analysts believe that the return of 'Bambo' Johnson, the controversial strongman whose protectionist policies have been criticised for the country's sluggish growth rates, will bring little respite to the troubled country.'
About to go through the process, any tips would be greatly appreciated.
I-765 was approved for me after 32 days, the day after I went to give my biometrics. This was important for me because the new legal team at my company were dropping the ball quite a lot with my L1 extension at the time (it was later approved with 1 day to spare...)
Although I got the I-765 card, the I-131 petition has not even been looked at yet, so although I applied for Advanced Parole, in practice the petition will just be cancelled/voided because the green card will have been issued before the I-131 has a chance to be adjudicated.
This seems to be in line with a recent change in USCIS policy to prefer producing individual I-765 and I-131 cards vs. the previous preference to issue combo cards (which took longer).
The I-485 and I-130 petitions were approved on the same day after 154 days of processing time, and surprisingly my wife and I were not called for an interview.
Hope this helps!
All these things in the news are very real but you only really feel them when you live there and your bills are higher than last month, etc
It’s quite strange feeling like a “foreigner” in your home country but I suspect you will feel it just as I did when I visited last year.
It's a bizarre feeling. I visited the UK in 2014 after being away since 2007. I felt so odd and displaced there, I couldn't wait to leave again. Not a reflection on the place, although I was disappointed by how unfriendly people were - almost like all the friendly Brits have left and are the ones I meet overseas.
Second is a paper from UCL, based in London.
In the top few is a paper by DeepMind, also in London.
Yet HN likes to go absolutely nuts about how the UK is “done” at every opportunity.
The current crisis can be blamed on energy, but the post 2008 period of wage stagnation and low growth wasn't exactly great and wasn't due to energy.
Cambridge and Oxford basically have no lab space and are surrounded by greenbelt, and neither has enough housing, but rather than for e.g. dump a ton of investment in new labs into Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, etc. and try and build the equivalent of Max Planck Institutes in Germany, the government sticks more in Oxbridge and in central London.
Why would you put a 'Turing Institute' to lead AI research somewhere where your Postdocs aren't going to be able to afford to live? Oh, because it's easy for politicians to nip there for a photo op.
The Conservatives should've stuck with May's compromise - now Labour are likely to take power.
It was blocked by Labour and other parties.
It would have been the most practical way forward at the time. It would have been softer and better planned and with a better working relationship with the EU.
It would also have meant that Labour would have been in partial control of parliament for another 3 years as May's majority relied on people who hated her and was never going to last for every vote. Then we would have had another election this year not in 2019.
I honestly don't know what people were thinking at the time. It was obvious that not compromising would end in chaos.
The working visas that are created for this will remove the rights UK citizens have to make the visa holders "more attractive" to employers.
Good luck to native workers in the UK competing with an Indian on a work visa that has no working time regulations, holiday allowance, etc. and very little leverage to complain in case their visa gets revoked.
There's an important point to highlight here: low paid workers from India working long hours with no holiday will not actually be able to compete with either highly skilled Indian workers who can already get visas, or highly skilled native workers or workers from other developed countries, even if they demand holiday, high pay, etc.
Indeed, this migration report [1] suggests that immigration decreases wages for low paid workers, but increases wages for medium and high paid workers.
Immigration doesn't just boost labour supply, it boosts demand too, but not always in the same jobs, so the effects on wages can be uneven.
If it were that simple to replace highly paid workers, we'd have all already been offshored, but that never seems to materialise.
1: https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/th...
This has e.g. happened with the Horizon Europe research program which Switzerland is no longer part of.
That’s so self-destructive - surely the EU needs Switzerland’s powerful universities more than Switzerland needs Horizon?
Their primary reason for existence now is for rich foreigners (mainly from China and the middle east) to give their kids a status symbol education, this includes not failing bad students because the fees are so high.
The only people to benefit from this is are the University leadership and the property developers that build luxury accommodation for all the rich students.
I'm not sure if it is that bad in Switzerland. If they properly fund higher education for native citizens maybe not.
[0] I excluded the UK but I'm not going to check which Nordic countries are EU members.
It's well-known that the US News rankings have their problems, but it seems like they'd have to be really out of the ordinary in order to support your claims.
https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...
Only one EU in the top 50.
I'm not saying EU would ever do something that radical, but my point is, the EU has far more screws to turn on Switzerland in case of a diplomatic conflict, than vice versa.
Which is why Switzerland tightened their banking secrecy regulations at the insistence of the EU despite Switzerland not being beholden to EU laws.
Switzerland in practical terms needs the EU more than the EU needs Switzerland. The current situation is suboptimal for both sides obviously, but from the EU side you can mostly ignore that discourse.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/nov/20/hardline-br...
wishful thinking by journalists...
but this one's such a huge vote loser even the opposition refuse to discuss it
it's some journo that's got wind of part of some second hand discussion and has turned it into a scoop
I don't think that the central bank solution of putting up interest rates to reduce the number of jobs is going to help, people still need to eat.
According to the government's own statistics we've seen massive increases from countries like India despite the anti-immigration rhetoric displayed by the Tories.
We've also got a partnership with India that helps fill in the gaps. Not to mention the record study visa's issued to India.
"India first again. I’m delighted that Indian nationals were issued the largest number of UK study, work and visitor visas in the year ending June 2022. More strength to the unique living bridge that connects our people." Alex Ellis, British High Commissioner to India [2]
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/india-receives-largest-sh...
Edit: the link above shows that in raw numbers, non-EU migration increased while EU decreased. Appears to not be a complete 1:1 replacement, though. I asked because if you only give the proportion, it can still increase if just the EU migration numbers go down.
Also relevant to reading the graph, the campaign/referendum on brexit started in 2015.
>An estimated 202,000 citizens from other EU countries immigrated to the UK in the year to September 2018, and about 145,000 emigrated abroad. So EU ‘net migration’ was around 57,000—roughly the lowest level recorded since 2009.
>In the year before the referendum, net EU migration was estimated at 189,000, so there’s been a large fall following the vote.
Obviously other countries are going to make up a higher percentage of those immigrating, but the total amount of immigrants is down according to that article.
If you look at that report you will notice that the main change to net migration was Covid-19 and even with that, it's pretty steady but you can see that EU migration is down significantly but completely compensated by non EU immigrants (page 16).
There was also the issue that some EU countries(i.e Italy) were giving italian/EU citizenship to fresh immigrants from Africa so that they can travel to the UK. For some reasons a big part of the UK didn't like that for obvious reasons.
Source for this please? As far as I understood it is extremely difficult for such people to get Italian citizenship and had never heard of this as an issue
https://www.euractiv.com/section/uk-europe/news/african-migr...
The argument was made that UK cannot control its borders from non-EU immigrants because Italy at the time was giving them enough papars so they could travel legally to the UK.
To be honest I cannot recall for sure if they were getting instant italian citizenship or just some form of residency. However in the end they could even get british citizenship because they would live in the UK long enough(i believe it's 5 years) using the EU papers. There was benefits fraud as well.
Unfortunately I cannot find the articles anymore. It's almost like a conspiracy that everything regarding immigration before Brexit is no longer search-able(I know it's just Google's algo discarding old news). Immigration was the issue number 1 for the british people before Brexit. I beleive it's not over yet as european politicians are still ignoring people's concerns on immigration.
Meanwhile we had a hot summer affecting the harvest, rising cost of energy inputs to the food sector (and every other sector) and a bird flu epidemic affecting supplies of eggs and poultry.
You can't simply up sticks and go to work in Paris or Amsterdam or Vienna anymore. That birthright was stolen.
The idea that this is a "global problem" is convenient for the UK government and Brexit supporters, but not based in reality.
I don't know about reality, but what you've done is delivered anecdotes when we know that prices in the US have gone up about 10% and prices in the UK have gone up 15%. There's no need for anecdotes, especially for another round of calling Brexiteers deluded.
where does this rumour keep coming from?
bar during covid I haven't observed this in any supermarket (unless you go at 9pm on a Saturday night or something, where they haven't restocked yet)
Prices are rising for some lines though.
Eggs got expensive here but it’s generally been in stock.
That range is significantly lower than 16.2%.
We see that the current government is unwilling to go down that path, although Covid did throw a major spanner in the works of public finance, so the country is almost guaranteed a slow (or not so slow) decline.
This is not about whether I think Brexit is good or bad, but it did happen and that changes what the country can and should do in order to prosper under those new conditions.
And of course even many in her own party were out to kill her, which did not help.
Parties were saying exactly the same thing about debt in 2010 when debt / GDP ratio was lower in order to win an election and implement austerity.
Covid Debt in the UK was all QE anyway, so is effectively money we owe to ourselves.
I do agree that Truss could have done all the things she wanted to do if she had just been smarter about presentation.
Edit: Level of QE does not imply that the government did not take on massive debts as well. It's not one or the other.
QE went from 445bn before Covid to 895bn at end of 2020
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/quantitative...
EDIT: also https://neweconomics.org/2021/10/99-5-of-government-covid-de...
It's like how everybody got to attack May as incompetent for the Brexit she proposed, which was obviously the only Brexit possible (i.e. as far as the EU was ever going to go.) They push her out, sneering, then go on to do exactly the same deal they pushed her out for. The UK public just needs scapegoats, and the UK political class serves them on a platter.
The problem with this strategy is that the major trading blocks of USA, EU and China will not allow the UK to undercut them. So if the UK goes down this path, then companies based there will find themselves cut off. The UK domestic market is not large enough on its own.
China is even more controlling than the US.
London used to be the center of finance in Europe and now the EU sees an opportunity to grab that revenue / power.
Where does this leave London?
And the UK as a whole is heavily dependent on London.
I think you'll find it still is, by quite a long way
> now the EU sees an opportunity to grab that revenue / power.
the EU hasn't even managed to pry Euro clearing out of London (despite trying extremely hard)
and it'll be pushed back again
China is not relevant.
You're not making a convincing point, IMHO.
Reading the UK personal finance subreddit is really sobering. Most people’s idea of a high salary (even in good industries) is less than a mediocre junior dev salary in the US.
I feel extremely fortunate to have moved into tech when I did, but even there only American companies offer top tier wages. Are there any British companies competing with FAANGs on salary?
On the plus side, maybe inflation is good for indebtedness?
For example, I live less than an hour from London and my total monthly outgoings (including a mortgage) are less than £2,000.
> In July 2022, the Scottish Greens announced that, if a referendum were blocked, they would fight the next general election as a referendum instead
General elections are 25 months away. Labour is up 30 points in the polls or something like that. Brexit probably didn't help the UK economy but the economical ramifications of the Ukraine war haven't even begun to unfurl yet. Hard to take polls two years out seriously no matter how huge the margin is and yet if these things don't somehow resolve that will be a general election for the history books. The UK will simply never be the same again.
I don't have a horse in this race but it is pretty clear that Labour surfing such a populistic wave, given their current rhetoric, will turn the place into an actual banana republic. (People no doubt will get bent out of shape about this because of political ideologies but the observation is simply about populism)
Much as it pains me to say it, the French will become the new UK. And England will become like Italy.
the SNP have been saying this since the first vote in 2014
If an actual referendum was allowed and held today it would perhaps be a toss up. But two harsh winters from now if the economy is still spiraling it will be a foregone conclusion.
Point being why would anyone invest in Scotland or the rest of the UK during such tumultuous times? And this political instability is set to continue for years and years now.
to what end? with no agreement from the UK government nothing will happen
> Point being why would anyone invest in Scotland or the rest of the UK during such tumultuous times?
there's no doubt it hurts investment in Scotland
however its economic impact on leaving the UK would be more or less a non-event for the rest of the UK
(Scotland's share of UK GDP being less than the UK's share of EU GDP)
Obviously to exploit anti-union sentiments for political gain.
> however its economic impact on leaving the UK would be more or less a non-event for the rest of the UK
It would be followed by Ireland and the end of the union. England will find itself with a smaller population than Italy and similarly mired in political instability and infighting.
The difference between vying for the #1 economy in Europe and #4 is quite profound.
and how effective has this been?
if the UK government doesn't permit it: it doesn't happen, end of story.
> It would be followed by Ireland and the end of the union.
I have news for you, Ireland left in 1921
(if England does end up being independent again its citizens would be significantly better off as the subsidy to the other parts of the UK are quite considerable)
Great. I hope so, I have no idea. But it won't be the UK anymore. Very different place in the world and very different internal politics. Maybe it will become like a mini-US but without the natural resources and economical clout.. doesn't seem promising.
it'll be exactly the same an England is essentially the UK (which is the SNP's problem with it)
this is explained in one very simple chart: https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-96b10105bd7d45574f1b5...
I don't think I've heard this proverb used to justify vague predictions before. It's always been the (proper) meaning of "you were right, but only by accident".
It's interesting to see it used in a "I know we've been saying that for eight years, but we'll be right at SOME point!" way.
I'm neutral on the topic of Scottish independence but from a purely tactical perspective it'd be surprising if another referendum could be won at the moment. Sturgeon appears to know that and looks a lot like she's trying to string the SNP base along by claiming to want one without actually getting another referendum.
Problems any new campaign would face:
- The EU. It could be mostly ignored last time. A large part of the SNP base is pro-EU and wants to join as a separate country, whilst another large part of the SNP base is genuinely pro-independence and wants Scotland to be ruled by Scots. These two positions can't be reconciled. EU membership means rule from Brussels. The SNP is theoretically an independence party but would be campaigning on a vision of gaining full independence and then immediately attempting to give it up again, and this would create weaknesses that any competent pro-union campaign would presumably exploit. The hard border and being required to join the Euro would also be a new requirement that wasn't a part of the debate last time.
- Relatedly the financial situation is now worse than before and the EU might not want Scotland as a consequence, as it would be expected to replace the UK's massive subsidies. Joining can take years, in the meantime it would require severe austerity measures to stabilize the new state's finances.
- The SNP has never resolved many of the open issues that caused them to lose last time. What currency would they use, would there be access to the BBC and other infrastructure, border issues, North Sea decomm etc. These questions had clearly been left to the last minute and the pro-union side hammered that fact to great effect. Yet they don't seem to have got much further with the planning since. Tactically this just strengthens the unionist attack line that the SNP don't really want independence - if they did, surely they would be obsessive about all the things they'd do differently after leaving the UK and would have whole libraries devoted to the topic.
If the SNP want to force and win another referendum they need to start having these discussions with their supporters, even if they're unpleasant (e.g. adopting the Euro is generally unpopular).
This was the Brexit lie, and it's not really a sustainable argument post-Brexit.
> Joining can take years, in the meantime it would require severe austerity measures to stabilize the new state's finances.
A referendum wouldn't require leaving immediately; again, see Brexit. Negotiate an EU entrance while preparing for exit.
> The SNP has never resolved many of the open issues that caused them to lose last time.
Again, didn't stop Brexit.
Why do you think rule from Brussels is a lie?
Because it was a lie the last time it was the talking point.
The UK still winds up having to meet EU standards if they want to sell products there; all the regulatory burden, none of the benefits. They could have decided to have blue passports any time they wanted. The 350 million pounds a week for the NHS never materialized. etc. etc. etc.
Presumably with the UK now out of the EU, many of those people would vote for independence. (And I believe Spain, which was the country people were most worried about vetoing an independent Scotland joining the EU because they don't want to encourage those regions of Spain that want to break away has since said that it would have no objection as long as Scottish independence happens in a way that is legal under UK law).
Land borders. In Northern Ireland this creates a problem because you eitehr have to have a customs border between NI and the Republic of Ireland or between NI and Great Britain. The first can't really happen. The second is more natural but separates the Unionists (Protestants) from the UK but it's the only practical solution.
Combine this with the Republican (Catholics) population growing faster than the Unionists and Brexit has made reunification essentially inevitable.
So imagine how "Scexit" would work. A hard border between Scotland and England? It's almost as unworkable as a border between NI and Eire. This is really why Scexit has failed and that'll continue to be the case.
The situation with Northern Ireland is different because Ireland is part of the EU, and no one wants Northern Ireland mainly as a smuggling route between the EU and Great Britain. It has crossed my mind that some folks must have thought about smuggling/regulatory arbitrage as some sort of Brexit dividend for the UK as a whole, but so far this doesn't seem to be happening.
It's also significantly worse, as there's only around 25 scotland-england border crossings, whereas there are over 200 border crossings between NI and ROI (more than on the entire eastern border of the EU).
The rUK government is likely to be as bloody minded as the EU has been and acting in it's own perceived interest (which is not purely financial). It would be able to make things very difficult for an independent Scotland if it so wanted.
Why is a hard border unworkable in the Scottish case? I could definitely imagine this is true, e.g. if Scotland has to import much food or other goods. Or because Scotland depends on the pound. And maybe, in that way, it shares some parallels?
Pick any other country, America, France, Brazil, Germany, Australia etc and allow me to also tell you how it is falling apart.
Sure, now the cost is added on top of the global average, but the UK economy would be suffering regardless, now it’s just suffering more.
But this was a deliberate choice. The Brexit was about “are you willing to pay X to get Brexit?”. Even low estimates of X were pretty bad.
How do you justifying your suggestion that brexit has had a meaningful impact on recent inflation? The UK inflation rate has maxed out at around 2.5% for the last decade until mid/end of 2021. It's growth is line with the rest of the developed world.
Pretty much all of my friends, family and old colleagues speak of problems in the UK while asking me if I am experiencing the same here.
Obviously [redacted] isn’t perfect but I haven’t had anything like my parents and sister have had with electricity price increases as just one example.
My worry is the UK will continue on a self-destructive path still.
This was my worry when I originally planned leaving the UK back in 2016 (moving to [redacted] in 2018) however I did not predict it would be quite this bad.
The UK is 20 years behind where it needs to be in terms of nuclear, renewable and storage capacity.
There is no silver bullet.
It’s going to take 20 years to resolve, and that’s assuming they start today with an Apollo-program-level investment in energy production.
The country has been geographically "unbalanced" for most of its history, and if you understand preferential attachment, you'll see why.
There's been nothing one can do to "rebalance the UK" for several hundred years at least.
20% of the population lives in london, and it often has ~1/3 of the people in the country in the area -- as tourists, travelling in, etc.
No one in a millenium has done anything to "plan" this
A street that I lived on was considered to have been around 1000 years a 1000 years ago.
This is cost push inflation, but the UK government is trying to use the usual tactics to control it - tax and interest rates.
To be fair, it's what current economic theory prescribes for inflation, either cost push or demand pull. Tax and interest rates certain work for demand pull inflation. Cost push though? Everyone gets poorer, lower standard of living (whatever that mean...), but the government can be happy it has some part of inflation under control.
Even if the UK had more energy generation, just the existence of an international energy market means public UK companies would buy and sell that energy on that market and I doubt we'd be much better off.
The UK, and all of the West to be fair, is in the middle of "weak men, hard times" part of the cycle. It's no surprise that Putin invaded Ukraine when he did.
One final thing I'd add is that it feels to me as if the Government has been influenced by the mainstream media, and even social media, far, far, too much over the last decade or so.
> The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said it was hitting poorer households hardest, as they spent around half of their income on food and energy, compared to about a third for those on middle incomes.
The branded foods that middle-income families eat would likely try to absorb as much of the inflation as possible. It's the "no-brand" food that will rise in cost the most, the food that the poorest families eat.
For example, Tesco (a popular supermarket in the UK) used to have a brand named "Tesco value" which would sell very cheap items, even at a loss sometimes. See the following examples: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wZCcuiS0his
This brand has since been wiped out almost entirely, replaced with "Stockwell", a much more expensive alternative. There is no longer any 'cheap' alternative. You used to be able to buy a tin of beans for 9p about 10 years ago, in the shop the other day I couldn't find any less than 40p.
This wouldn't be a problem if wages also raised at the same rate, but they have been locked as they are in most Countries. The only time we see the wages raise is when then minimum wage legal requirement increases.
But this problem is much worse. The government will increase the payments to the non-working due to the increased cost of living, but as a result they will also increase taxes on those who do work. The increased taxes will move even more families into poverty. You have families where both parents work reasonable jobs above minimal wage, barely paying their bills.
Not to worry though, the ONS are going to redefine troublesome terms such as 'growth' [1] and 'recession' [2].
[1] https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2022/11/11/inclusive-measures-of-gro...
[2] https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2022/11/11/uncertainty-and-the-r-wor...