UK expected to be only major economy to shrink in 2023 – IMF
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
unnecessarily hard Brexit, raising cost of import / export, reducing tax revenues, increasing cost of employment, increasing cost of doing business
various rushed trade deals (Australia / NZ) made to satisfy the newspapers, despite them harming domestic farming for nothing in return
various boondoggles (BritishVolt) invested in to demonstrate British industrial power, ignoring economies of scale and decades long commitment needed to see it through
demonstrating fealty to the US by hostile decoupling with China, despite M15 passing Huawei telecoms products as fundamentally secure, costing UK Gov billions to replace equipment
swashbuckling leadership in support of Ukraine, overcommitting already threadbare armed forces, such that a US general commented today that the UK army is no longer a first class service as a result
the list can go on.
UK has a political crisis, based on an identity crisis, for which there is no foreseeable solution on the horizon. Needs a miracle breakthrough technology (graphene? quantum computing?) - a literal moonshot - to reverse this decline
The conclusion of your first sentence would be the solution is in the cause - the end in the beginning. If the UK can resolve its identify crisis and understand its reality as a medium sized country in europe then it can begin to make rational decisions.
For instance, if it sublimated its defence to the EU or NATO, it would not need to have a first class army. If it re-integrated with europe (via the EEA, I don't think an EU re-entry will be possible on either end for a long time) then a battery factory in France still enables a UK car industry.
It would take a miracle to align the UK's reality with its self image, but aligning the self image with reality just requires a more honest media.
EU has become less important militarily. Partly because UK left but mainly because Ukraine war has energized NATO. Sweden and Finland wanting to join NATO will get rid of potential conflict that only EU could respond to.
I cannot parse this. US is part of NATO, but so are countries (even if not all) in the EU. So NATO being revitalized can also revitalize EU, or the US, or both, in different degrees.
The EU army isn't very plausible post-Brexit because only the UK and France had decent militaries but it's technically still EU policy.
The army has been hollowed out along with everything else:
https://news.sky.com/story/us-general-warns-british-army-no-...
So basically, not much chance of this happening in the UK without substantial pain.
I'm serious, the pollical class clings desperately to these illusions and will not give them up easily if at all.
That's an inaccurate characterisation of the US general's reported comments, which were about long-term trends in British defence spending, procurement, and equipment types, as well as the lack of a plan to boost spending in light of the war in Ukraine, not about the non-frontline stuff it has sent to Ukraine.
Warnings about the state and future trajectory of the UK armed forces have been coming from the US side for a number of years now.
- The armed forces would run out of ammunition "in a few days" if called upon to fight
- The UK lacks the ability to defend its skies against the level of missile and drone strikes that Ukraine is enduring
- It would take five to 10 years for the army to be able to field a war-fighting division of some 25,000 to 30,000 troops backed by tanks, artillery and helicopters
- Some 30% of UK forces on high readiness are reservists who are unable to mobilise within NATO timelines - "so we'd turn up under strength"
- The majority of the army's fleet of armoured vehicles, including tanks, was built between 30 to 60 years ago and full replacements are not due for years
Source: https://news.sky.com/story/us-general-warns-british-army-no-...
Some of those comments are perhaps a bit unfair but it's well known the weakness of European armies.
Like, the UK is arguably the main military power in Europe at this point and a major contributor to Ukraine not being outright annexed by Russia, but you wouldn't get that impression at all from the article.
Many of the force composition decisions for the UK circa 1980, particularly the use of light "aircraft carriers" that the Harrier operated from, were controversial. The war with Argentina went very well for the UK but if they'd had worse luck those decisions would be seen differently.
In the US in the 1980s I remember seeing television documentaries about how the M-1 Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle would not be effective at protecting our forces but then in the 1st Gulf War these turned out to be superb.
If you ask me, the source of the problem is deeper: it is within Western culture itself, and the cognitive style that comes out of it. Speaking inaccurately and untruthfully is not just acceptable, it is enforced. Doing otherwise is taboo.
The UK is probably still the strongest military in Europe, but it’s trend is wrong.
It also makes sense for the UK to continue funding a proxy war in Ukraine. This allows them to bleed Russia to death and eliminate that threat for years to come at a minimal cost.
It's pretty unclear why it should have an army that's literally ready to go at full strength within days. The US does that but US levels of military spending are hardly normal. Even in WW2 there was time to rearm. Huge military conflicts on your doorstep rarely come out of nowhere, they are seen coming. The most likely next conflict after Ukraine is still Taiwan and the UK's role in that will likely be minimal regardless of the strength of the armed forces.
And they can all be solved by buying American weapons... funny that.
solution is simple, stop electing self-serving c*nts. you hire clowns you get a circus.
brexits main goal was to preserve the uk's status as a home for illicit international money.
but putins action force them to set an unwanted precedent; sactioning richman abramovich.
why do you think escobar was shot on sight. because money is higher than law.
Then they kneecapped themselves, because their previous privileged position in the EU and outside of the currency union made them a unique haven for financial shenanigans. With Brexit, the EU got out of a bad deal.
I think Bristol is actually a good example of everything that's wrong with the modern left, which seems to have shifted almost exclusively to self-centred goals such as "I want to be gay and do drugs". All of that is fine and I'm in favour of that too, but if that's the only thing... I don't want to arrogantly sit here as the arbitrator of who is and isn't a "true" lefty, but to me, you're not really left-wing if that's all you care about.
This sort of statement is something regularly repeated in the UK, but it doesn't make much sense. The UK has the world's 6th biggest GDP, is one of the few nuclear powers, has significant soft power, is a permanent UN security council member, etc. Brexit has been an act of astonishing self-harm, but talking about "trying to survive" is a bit ridiculous.
Being a nuclear power is again not that relevant today besides giving the UK a slightly greater chance of avoiding a nuclear strike (a remote possibility anyway).
It's certainly more relevant on the global stage than a lot of countries but it's not controversial to say it is in a much different position now than at the height of the empire.
As for trying to survive, Brexit has bolstered the Scottish independence and Irish unification movements and created severe, intractable problems in Northern Ireland in particular. England will survive and London will survive, but the UK? Time will tell.
"The US and the EU, at least, are exporters of rules and standards in the way that the UK is not (it effectively was when it was a member of the EU, as it had a lot of influence on the EU position)."
No, that's a common claim but not really true. The UK had very little influence inside the EU and the EU rules were almost always made to satisfy the needs of either the EU institutions themselves, or the domestic economies of France and Germany.
A good way to see this is to look at the fate of the "single market for services". The UK is uniquely strong in the services market, so guess what the EU never made much progress with? Compare to its obsession with harmonizing everything to do with goods trading, which benefits primarily Germany.
Another way is to look at how responsive the EU was to the concerns of British voters on immigration levels. Answer: they hold voters in contempt and weren't willing to budge an inch. There was no influence, that's why the UK voted to leave.
"As for trying to survive, Brexit has bolstered the Scottish independence and Irish unification movements"
The latter maybe yes. The former, probably not. Scotland would have to apply to join as a regular country and its finances are in no state that would allow that.
Absolutely agree it is a good thing. Probably not everyone sees it that way though. As for the British people choosing to wind the empire down, I must have missed that referendum.
> No, that's a common claim but not really true. The UK had very little influence inside the EU and the EU rules were almost always made to satisfy the needs of either the EU institutions themselves, or the domestic economies of France and Germany.
All I can say is that as a lawyer in the EU (who works closely with the UK) that is not my perception or experience. EU financial regulation heavily bears a British stamp, and the single market was immensely beneficial for London. One of the main EU initiatives that was in full swing just as Brexit happened was the Capital Markets Union which was absolutely a UK-led initiative, headed by UK Commissioner Jonathan Hill. Since Brexit happened and Hill resigned, that initiative has trundled on, but has completely lost momentum and not really delivered what it was supposed to.
> Scotland would have to apply to join as a regular country and its finances are in no state that would allow that.
This seems as over-confident a prediction as the predictions that the UK would never vote to leave. The EU took in Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria for political reasons, it is not that much of a stretch to say it could take in Scotland.
CMU is the EU trying to take control of the financial industry via their usual trick of "harmonizing" rules rather than allowing differentiation with mutual recognition. It doesn't address the problems actual voters had around unlimited immigration. That is taboo for the EU.
Free movement enhances trade. The US doesn't restrict people from moving between states. The UK wouldn't accept Scotland trying to reduce people from other parts of the UK from working or living there.
> a negative to basically everyone
That's a politicised absolute which is clearly false. I think your political biases are colouring this.
I go back to my previous example. The UK doesn't try to impose government control on movement between its constituent countries, and the US doesn't limit movement between states. Freedom of movement improves economic outlook.
All EU countries are reasonably affluent by global standards. Some countries are richer than others, but it doesn't make economic sense to move from a country where you have a job to claim benefits in another one.
EU countries aren't obliged to pay benefits to people who have never worked in the country, so your idea that "governments will pay for benefits" is a very simplified view.
meh. It is a deterrence at best. Contributes nothing in terms of economic might.
> Soft power
Agree. The royal family which was a major attraction seems to be on wane (imo) after Queen's death
> permanent UN security council member
This is rooted in post-World-War-2 setup. If the council had to be setup fresh today, UK will not figure in top 5 for sure. There are many countries which are more deserving.
> Brexit has been an act of astonishing self-harm
Agree.
> Talking about "trying to survive" is a bit ridiculous.
Agree here too.
The key thing is that UK is declining. Its the trend that is important here.
GDP is not a reliable metric of prosperity, but in any case the UK's GDP is built on financial services. The "moat" for that is essentially a "network effect" - people do business where other people do business. Interfere with that and it can vanish overnight.
"Soft power" is essentially a function of money. See above.
When the UK maintained a global empire, the answer was "obviously yes." When the UK held a dominant position in European governance (along with the various benefits that came with that), the answer was still "yes." But now the UK has given both of those things. So it's reasonable to ask if these are expensive luxuries from another era.
Granted, we mostly excluded 'public schools' in favor of UK universities, at least for research and engineering projects, but Edinburgh had more power than Hamburg and Hannover, and I think only Paris-Lyon had more projects than them. Mostly because we had space projects.
The EU hasn't been interested in votes for a long time and will certainly be even less interested in future.
I Was born in India, and my grandfather lived through this oppression, and told me about the things the brits did; it's kind of ironic and funny how not a lot of people talk about it.
Not that it makes it any better, but isn't that what all empires are built on? A more ethical empire wouldn't be an empire at all. It'd be something more akin to the USA, the EU, or on a smaller scale the UK itself.
And yes they're totally second class. That's why they have their own parliaments whereas England doesn't.
Yes, the fact they have their own parliaments, while "England does not", does indeed demonstrate that they are second class. Because the reason England "doesn't have a parliament" is that when Scotland "joined", the English parliament was simply renamed into "The Parliament of Great Britain", without changing anything else. They even kept the same MPs - didn't even hold an election! It was all for show, a minimal mask of fairness for dissolving the Scottish parliament. It resulted in riots and martial law.
This, by the way, was the closest England ever came to "consensually" adding a member. Wales at this point in time was a straight-up English territory. It didn't even get a parliament until 1999, at the same time Scotland was allowed to reform theirs. And would you like to talk about Northern Ireland?
> A more ethical empire wouldn't be an empire at all. It'd be something more akin to the USA
Are you suggesting that the US behaves ethically? Snowden, Assange, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, BLM, Guantanamo, ...
Or the way the native population was treated. (theft and oppression)
What other kinds do you have?
That being said, where would India be if the British Empire had never happened? Probably still doing subsistence agriculture. No slight to India, but industrial civilization is an aberrational step forward and there’s no reason to think it would arise at the same time in isolated cultures spontaneously.
The British themselves are the product of being colonized as much as the Indians. They were colonized by Rome, they were colonized by the Normans, etc. They assimilated and grew better from those influences.
Respectfully, Are other countries whom UK did not colonise still doing subsistence agriculture?
When Europe was having Industrial revolution, India was ruled by people who were busy subjugating the natives.
I don't want to gloat about an alternative timeline, But colonialism is a huge negative for India.
Always nice to see proof it's not just white people who can be supremacists.
But to be fair, you are right in a way, I personally believe the UK is the most welcoming non racist nation on earth. I'm saying that as someone who's experienced it firsthand.
It's the policy of the Tory party to reduce immigration, has been for years, and is popular policy that wins them votes. The Tories don't actually do it and among the politicians you're right: there is no serious rejection, for the reasons you've outlined.
But among the population, you seem to have an opinion based on TV, Twitter, urban areas, or maybe the youth. But to most of the country multiculturalism and mass immigration is controversial at best, and often very unpopular. In fact you can (and I do) often find critics of mass immigration among immigrants themselves, and their descendants.
But I find it compelling because these sorts of economic pushes are usually so forceful, and it's rather shocking how a country like the UK allowed itself to be fooled by external influencing to self-immolate as it did.
Getting rid of the first-past-the-post voting system would be a good start.
> Needs a miracle breakthrough technology (graphene? quantum computing?) - a literal moonshot - to reverse this decline
A figurative one surely? Actually going to the moon would make much more sense in cooperation with other countries in any case.
They also sabotaged the remain vote by saying they were pro-remain whilst saying that leave is the only option.
I don't know why anyone would trust Labour to do the right thing.
The campaign was also filled with misinformation and emotional manipulation. I'm not saying this invalidates the result, but "we had a good long look at our electoral system and made a wise and informed decision" it was not.
Yes but there was a referendum on that and people said "keep FPTP".
IMO large chunks of UK constitution needs replacement. Working out which parts are causing trouble will require putting the whole current ad-hoc mess into a single document, even if only so that people can work out if Eton really is the nexus of aristocratic nepotism and cronyism that is it's reputation.
> A figurative one surely? Actually going to the moon would make much more sense in cooperation with other countries in any case.
If we can convince the British establishment that it's Space Australia, and assuming this doesn't kill everyone involved (big if), it might work. Possibly.
The campaign against was run by the same guy that ran the Brexit campaign, and featured posters of premature babies suggesting they didn't need a new voting system, they needed more NHS funding.
And as with Brexit, they got neither. Adds further irony to the "will of the people" catchphrase popular after Brexit though.
Don't forget that apart from the Tory cronies, there is practically no one left in Britain that is happy with how things are going. Times might be ripe for a counter protest vote.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...
And as for the FT's take - "Tory austerity" didn't even balance the budget. The UK cannot afford to have the level of state spending it already has, let alone increase it yet further.
I won't pretend to have enough economic nous to know if Keynesianism is worth anything, but I do know it says to do the exact opposite: for governments to borrow and spend more in bad times to grow the economy, and pay down that debt only when things recover.
Keynesianism is a self-contradictory concept which is why it always fails. It's predicated on the assumption that governments are good at investing. But if that is true then governments have no answer back to the people who argue that good times = an even better time to invest, because if government ROI is always positive why would you not invest more when tax revenues are flowing freely? So in practice it immediately turns into high levels of government deficit spending all the time, because if you use wordplay to turn spending into "investment" then a deficit today can always be claimed to be paid off tomorrow from the ROI. So it's just an excuse for spending more than the tax take allows, all the time.
The problem with this theory is that governments are notoriously bad at investing. They are rarely in a position to even measure ROI let alone ensure it's positive. Beating the market is really hard even for full time expert investors, some argue it's impossible over the long run, and that's with the full accountability of market mechanisms in play. Without those you end up with Soviet-style "investment" in highly visible and labor-intensive heavy industry projects, or for the UK, an endless succession of heavy rail projects.
The UK cannot afford its current level of welfare and spending, along with most of the rest of Europe. Unless the economy suddenly goes into overdrive the future will have far more austerity, along with many angry citizens faced with broken promises and rotting, decaying infrastructure.
Heck, if you look at the chart of GDP per capita you can’t even tell where the Brexit vote happened or when Brexit formally happened. Something similar happened Italy around the same time, as well as Greece.
"It Was The Fu*king Banks" - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtWA3jQN1Pg
Brexit and the backlash against globalism is a result of the economic malaise brought about by those policies, not the cause of that malaise.
Under Tory management the decline continues.
The malaise in UK goes much deeper than tweedle dumb and tweedle dee political parties.
Brexit might have had an impact but it’s one of 10 things badly wrong with europe as a whole.
Even if you look at it as a purely engineering problem you'd see that adding more red tape on trade would be most detrimental to the smallest player. In the relationship with the EU, the UK is the smaller player.
Now, what about the other “major powers” which are “predicted” to grow their economy? France’s GDP per capita has peaked in 2008, and never recovered since then. Italy? Same. Spain? Same. Belgium? Only recovered to 2008’s figure in 2021, same as Netherlands, Denmark, Finland. Sweden also only now recently recovered to its peak in 2011.
In fact, the only major EU economies that did not simply recover to their 2008-2011 peaks, but rather grown beyond them, are Germany, Poland and Czechia.
The truth of the matter is that EU economies are deeply stagnant, this is by no means a UK specific problem. There is no reason to predict growth in EU but not in UK.
https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/germany
Germany growth:
2022Q4: -0.2%
2022Q3: 0.5%
This is economically illiterate, calling it an engineering problem doesn't change that.
Trade happens when both sides can benefit. If trade stops happening, both sides lose. Artificial trade barriers do not mean one side "wins", they are always and everywhere a way to penalize some local citizens in order to prioritize others, usually owners of businesses that are favoured by the state in some way.
At any rate it's an academic question. UK exports to the EU recovered to the prior level, it is selling the same quantity as before. Imports are lower, so UK buys less from the EU. Balance of trade therefore actually improved. This is not widely reported because the media is full of people who want everyone to believe Brexit has been an economic disaster. The reality is it'll never be possible to know because any impact is so small as to be invisible against the chaos caused by lockdowns.
"73 percent of people aged between 18 and 24 voted to Remain in the European Union, compared with just 40 percent of people aged over 65" https://www.statista.com/statistics/520954/brexit-votes-by-a...
And yet, people frequently succeed
I only ask because the IMF itself doesn't state Brexit as a factor in the prediction.
How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly?
I don't think you can blame the negotiators. The politicians sold a Brexit that was somehow going to be soft enough to allow access to EU markets, but strong enough that the UK didn't have to follow any rules or give any concessions.
The only two options on the table at any point in this were "stay in the single market but without any influence, and get rules simply handed down by Brussels" or "hard brexit", and the first was political suicide. Few (30%?) would have voted for Brexit had they had an honest vision presented as to what it would actually mean.
Quite literally. Aside from the broad lies - the infamous £350m a week for the NHS, and the "Absolutely no one is suggesting the UK will leave the Single Market", among many others - Cambridge Analytica aimed micro-targeted ads with knowingly misleading promises at micro-demographics.
The whole point of Brexit was to remove local and EU democratic oversight and turn the UK into a neoliberal dictatorship. Those responsible are perfectly happy to trash most of the UK's economy as long as they personally get much, much richer.
The entire project is a shocking exercise in leveraging exceptionalist collective narcissism into a pretext for oligarchy and corruption on a Russian scale.
Of course, the expectation that the EU should be saving the UK from its local elites who the UK press and voters continue to protect and elect is a strange one. It's certainly antidemocratic.
Imagine if you will, voting on what to have for dinner.
30% are vegetarian 30% eat only pork 30% eat only beef 10% eat any meat
Now, if the only two options are meat or no-meat, then you're going to get 30% voting for no-meat and 70% voting for meat - a clear majority. However when you got to the shops, what do you buy? Pork will only satisfy 40% and beef will only satisfy 40%, so you're going to end up with 60% unhappy with the choice.
UK explicitly chose to avoid such arrangements.
But the point is that staying out of the customs union was not an "inevitabile result of leaving the EU", it was a choice separated from it.
The problem is that the EU considers arrangements such as those with the Swiss to be legacy, deprecated and no longer on offer. They have also spent a lot of time pressuring Switzerland in various ways to try and force it to become a de-facto member-without-membership. They don't want any country in Europe to have any option other than membership, whereby membership means full control from Brussels without local elections having any meaningful outcomes. That is their goal and doing a trade deal with the UK would have undermined that.
They do this even though tariffs hurt people in EU countries (they are taxes on Europeans remember), because refusing to compromise or negotiate - insisting that everything comes as a single package with no flexibility whatsoever - and then using trade as a weapon to enforce this, is how the EU establishes its power over member states.
As a strategy it works well - look at the people in this thread. They are brainwashed into believing the EU position is immutable and inevitable, like a law of physics or something. Wrong. They can set tariffs to whatever they like. There is no specific reason trade barriers must be linked to who the supreme court is, or immigration policy, or any of the other thousand things that the EU makes contingent on them. When the EU does this it is purely about power.
Some people are upset and blame Leave campaigners for not making this clear enough. They say, how could tell us the EU would ever compromise on anything? The reason is that many Leave campaigners wanted to be diplomatic and not upset people in Europe any more than necessary, especially as some might end up in the government afterwards, as indeed happened. Spelling out the truth to people is deeply unpleasant. It means telling people that the EU is a fanatical organization that never negotiates with Europeans, these days it is only willing to dictate.
Of course the above was obvious all along. I voted for Brexit knowing full well it would mean the UK was out of the single market along with everything else, and predicting quite possibly a sort of unofficial cold war between the two sides. The people who performatively exclaim that the population were misled are talking nonsense. It was clear to anyone whose eyes were clear of ideology or diplomatic constraints how the EU would react, because it is a union held together by aggression and fear. If they tried to establish cooperation on everything possible without the take-it-or-leave-it approach, that fear would evaporate and many other countries would head for the exits.
(Of course if there had been a "Yes, however you like", "Yes-gently", "yes-brutally", "no", kinda question the votes would have been split enough to make no consensus possible.)
Some people might have thought they were voting for a hard-exit, others a soft-one. But the actual specifics varied depending on who you spoke to.
It was Theresa May who drew a bunch of arbitrary lines in the sand, and essentially chose the kind of exit that would happen, but that was after a "Please Leave" result, not a vote on any specific form of exit.
After that things got vaguer.
But even if we pretend there was a specific kind of exit being voted for, the fact is things are still not "done" with the implementation. Checks on the UK-side are still absent, the whole Irish border situation is imprecise, and still not settled, and the mass-repealing of EU-related laws has been postponed.
All in all it's a mess, probably fair to say its a bigger mess if you voted remain, but still even if you voted leave I'd be surprised if you'd be happy with the current state of things.
I realize I'm getting pedantic, but at the end of the day people just voted "Yes, leave" or "No, remain".
The actual specifics were wonderfully ambiguous.
(FWIW I'm a UK citizen, and I submitted a postal-vote for the referendum, having already left the country for unrelated reasons.)
I do remember brexit proponents going on TV and specifically stating that we would stay in the EU market and no way would it be a hard brexit.
But yes, the vote was flawed due to "brexit" not being defined at all.
They understand that they have a worse life, but their emotions about the vote didn't change as significantly as their life circumstances because of their vote.
>How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly?
It's my understanding that a failure to reach an acceptable solution to the Irish border produced a worse deal with a Europe less willing to compromise and also drained away the time to negotiate new trade agreements before Brexit went into effect. In a sense, Britain's colonial past came back to bite it.
They were in the union, kept their own currency and had exemptions from a lot of EU rules.
Now they fucked up royally out of pure arrogance and some ill-advised nationalism.
Good luck.
I suspect that the grandparent is joking, doing the "why did the EU do this to the UK?"
The joke is that brexit issues are never the UK's fault. Along the lines of https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/who-killed-hannibal
UK's entire chain of options were known to everyone with half a brain even before Brexit started. Described succintly in this chart: edit see first chart on House of Lords page here: https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201719/ldselect/ldeu... end edit and explained very briefly in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agZ0xISi40E
As an EU/UK citizen living in the UK - I'm okay with that. The EU signed a contract with a 3rd party company and they are requesting delivery on their goods.
For Greece - I think the level of corruption in the Greek market was pretty obvious so I'm not so too bothered by the "wrecking". If they followed the laws and didn't steal money - they would have been okay.
They also said they will get the deficit under control in 2 years and a few months later said they would most likely default.
They had massive tax evasion problems (e.g. corruption) and one of the lowest retirement ages in the EU.
I'm really nor sure how you see corruption given that the government took out loans which it had no way of repaying even with 5% YoY growth. The simple fact is they were fiscally irresponsible. It's a common pattern in the Balkans to just do what is needed to win the elections without thinking of how the country is developing and what is the right course. It stems from the corruption of the political system.
(nothing)
There was no "soft Brexit" on the table. What you are asking for is the equivalent of changing the constitution of a country for the benefit of a single city. The slippery slope isn't that the country would fall apart, the slippery slope is that the country would abandon its core values for the benefit of a small group of elites that doesn't care about the country.
The stock "it's the EU's fault!" response is nonsense, again.
https://news.sky.com/story/mi5-chief-shrugs-off-us-warnings-...
Regardless of security issues, allowing an adversary and competitor state such as China to control your critical infrastructure is clearly a stupid idea. This is a strategic issue which transcends economics.
We had Tory govts from 1979 to 1997. Current situation feels similar, we're just desperate for change as a nation. Younger folks don't even remember a non-Tory govt.
Labour are polling ~50% vs Tory ~26% which is unprecedented in modern times.
I happen to think "New Labour" did OK. E.g. 2010 saw highest ever NHS satisfaction levels, and waiting lists were nothing compared to now.
I would at least give Labour a chance to turn things round before deeming it all unfixable. I have reservations, but my God they have to be better than these current scoundrels :-(
Finally - I do believe the Brexit house of cards is collapsing. Room for manoeuvre is appearing.
i also tend to heavily doubt these forecasts based simply on their history. every institution was forecasting massive recession in december. and then in january the forecasted recession went away. and then a few weeks later germany reported they’re almost in a recession. so zero trust from me.
UK also has an incredible deficit of housing units and a general weakness in construction:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/09/01/britains-failur...
>England has 434 homes per 1,000 people, whereas France has 590
A high real price of housing increases salary demands in skilled industries like healthcare and education (nurses and teachers expect to be able to afford a home) which results in higher government outlays, which leads to higher tax burden and diminished infrastructure investment — the UK's electric grid is inadequate for Scotland's windmills:
https://archy.deberker.com/the-uk-is-wasting-a-lot-of-wind-p...
Historically, infrastructure was among the UK's greatest strengths: famous ports, first powered railroads, first subways, first power plant, first national radio broadcaster, second bus system (France beat them by a year), thousands of years of canals, etc... to lag in building the power grid should be seen as a serious embarrassment.
I think the government have inadvertently fucked up with this one. The AUS trade deal increased the working holiday visa from 2 years for 18-30 year olds to three years for 18-35 year olds as well as dropping the requirement to do farm work in order to maintain your visa. As someone over 30 who thought he'd missed the boat on taking advantage of the scheme, I'll be applying for the new visa as soon as it becomes available. I imagine lots of other people 35 and younger are looking at the state of the UK and thinking the same. What is the point in staying here when the cost of everything, but housing in particular, is absolutely insane and makes starting a life impossible? Yes, house prices in Australia are also insane, but at least the wages and weather are better and I get to have a fun adventure.
Most people I know who went to Australia never came back and I intend not to if I can find a company to sponsor me for full citizenship. I can only see this new trade deal exacerbating the labour shortage as I doubt many Australian's will be jumping to get over here in return considering what's happening.
One theory about this explains it as primarily an English identity crisis. In the past two decades trust in Westminister has plummeted in England as the rest of the UK established or is at least trying to establish with varying degrees of success their own local devolved centres of power which bring a strong sense of identity. England doesn’t have a power centre of its own and with the end of the British empire went the sense of Britishness albeit more slowly. Now Englanders feel somewhat adrift and powerless in their own land and lash out and take out their frustrations on targets offered up by populist media and politicians.
In fact, the UK parliament - Westminster - is a defacto English power centre. The fringe nations are a mathematical irrelevance except in extreme cases. The UK is in reality Greater England, same way the Russian Federation is Russia writ large. This narrative of forgotten, voiceless England doesn't stand up to examination.
Brexit, though, was most certainly born out of (some of) the English feeling that they were losing control of their domain to Europe.
Here’s a great talk by Fintan O’Toole where he explains his take on this viewpoint far better than I ever could
I lived in England for a few years and Scotland for one and yeah it’s true the opinions of the other parts weren’t really considered by English people, by and large.
I think you mean MI-5 (Military Intelligence 5), if not I'd like to know what M15 is.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M15_motorway_(Great_Britain)
No chance of that with the aristocratic Toffs who monopolize the UK establishment. The aristocracy that was broken in Europe after the French Revolution is still alive and well in the UK and its plaguing 'the commoners'.
They will never allow anything that could affect their tax-dodging wealth to happen. Its better for them to financialize the entire island and sell it out to US corporations wholesale for even more profit. And they already started that with the NHS...
What's incredible is that this is an aristocracy that is consciously kept alive and in power, with this aristocratic class vigilantly protecting their class consciousness and power. The below, very insightful description of this by a Brit is taken from a Quora post, an answer to a question "Why does the British ruling class hates Yuri Gagarin, Russians and other nations":
---------
British guy here. Etonians and the British upper class in general have an innate sense of superiority-it’s taught to them at school and the notion is pervasive throughout our whole society. Mr Finnegan is absolutely correct when he states that any contradiction of this is anathema to them. So although the whole society is rigged in their favour they still think that their achievements, wealth and money are all self earned. The idea that a bunch of Russian yokels could lead armies to defeat the Nazis or take humans into the cosmos-Yuri’s parents were peasants-shows this lie for what it is. I read a book recently by Rutger Bregner. In it he discusses an experiment where two people played games of monopoly but one was given specific advantages which essentially guaranteed them to win. What the scientists found was that after a while the people who were given the advantageous rules actual started to believe they were better at playing the game even though they were fully aware that the game was rigged in there favour!
So when people tremble at the possibility of wealthy people leaving the country due to some policy which disadvantages them in favour of the majority-I say good let them go there are plenty of people from the working class with more talent willing to what they do under fairer circumstances.
(Marcus McNary)
The "broader segment" as opposed to the genuine aristocrats - this seems like the natural working of society as it re-segments imperfectly. I don't know that anyone has devised a perfect society that helps and rewards in ways that have no bad outcomes. Maybe it's France, which was contrasted earlier with the UK. I would be keen to understand what it could be.
Its a Brit's concise explanation of a major social phenomenon. It can also be more academically explained, but it would require a longer discussion. That Brit's simple summary is the best I have ever seen in putting a lot of words into those few paragraphs.
> The "broader segment" as opposed to the genuine aristocrats - this seems like the natural working of society as it re-segments imperfectly
Privileged segments tend to form in every given society due to inequal dynamics. However, this is different from the system being set up in that direction. The UK is still an aristocracy, with royals with actual power...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jan/14/secret-papers-roy...
...unelected, hereditary, aristocratic house of lords having de facto veto power through the power to send back bills to the parliament an infinite times, and the FPTP system. The Toff-producing public schools just feed this system.
> Maybe it's France, which was contrasted earlier with the UK
Yes, compared to the UK, France is much more egalitarian for a simple reason: The French Revolution originated in France, whereas it was never able to reach Britain. Hence, whereas the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath wiped out entire Europe from the hereditary aristocratic houses and the power structures that kept in place (even with Napoleon's !appointed! psuedo-aristocracy), the medieval aristocracy lived on without interruptions in Britain.
This is the major reason why the UK still keeps not only these aristocratic power structures, but an undisrupted, entitled aristocracy that still has its late medieval mindset.
As I said, this is a gigantic history and political science topic. Also mixes in sociology, inevitably.
The House of Lords is mostly not hereditary nor aristocratic. Almost all members are life peers (~700) or C of E (26). 92 are hereditary aristocrats. I don't see the point in summarising in a way that gives people the wrong impression.
You can argue over whether or not the House of Lords in general is a good idea, but calling Britain aristocratic over it seems extremely misleading.
The solution here is (1) old people die off until a new generation hold a majority and (2) years of grinding economic pain educate people not to make economically damaging choices for fun. The fact the people who voted for this are the most insulated from it is both the reason it happened and the reason it will take 20 years to fix.
That sounds massively overstated. How could anyone pass any computer/software system developed using conventional methods as "fundamentally secure"? I haven't followed UK/Huawei closely, but I can't imagine them saying anything stronger than "we didn't manage to find any backdoors at point in time X."
The UK's economic future is not nearly as dire as South Korea's, Germany's, Italy's or China's due to the latter countries serious demographic issues
Without those the rest of the UK is an economic wasteland, relatively speaking. Outside of London and the Home Counties most of the population is ridiculously poor.
The UK is actually good at law, finance, the arts, and STEM. There's also a significant "boutique" export sector of high-value items of various kinds. There could have been a significant mix of intellectual/service activity and industrialised production, but most of the latter was sold off and shut down in the 80s - often to foreign corporations.
Brexit has severely damaged all of the above even further.
I despair at government talk about skills shortages. There’s no such thing. Our industries have been decimated, and all we really have left is financial services in London. Which is great if you decided to do accounting at university and/or went to a good private school.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China
Germany's population pyramid is significantly more top heavy as is China's. Not to mention, the UK is much better at assimilating immigrants than Germany and especially China.
I must be looking at a different graph, because the UK looks like it clearly has less people under 10, than over 60, which does not happen in China.
> Not to mention, the UK is much better at assimilating immigrants than Germany and especially China.
That is debatable.
UK immigration numbers are quite similar to Germany, with 7.7% of non EU immigrants, vs 7.8% [0]. This percentage is lower than other countries like Spain or Greece. Crime rates among immigrants in the UK seem to be similar to those in other countries, as are poverty rates.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_Unit...
The important bit is China's massive spike between 30 & 57. What's the plan for the next 30 years?
It's not just about raw numbers, but how well those immigrants integrate into the target country
I don't know, but again, given the fertility rate in the UK, and the recent clamp on immigration, I don't see how they could fare better.
> It's not just about raw numbers, but how well those immigrants integrate into the target country
Right, but you have not been able to justify either. If there are no metrics on how "well" immigrants integrate, then the point is moot.
Doubt there will be any immigrants left, after crazy stuff like sending immigrants to Rwanda and attack them publicly for any and every failure of the economy.
Also from a quick read, immigration has already filled the fertility gap in Germany and after the Ukraine war it's giving a surplus too.
Because it became such a mess I simply gave up.
For example, I used to buy Elemis brand products. They still sell in Euros but here's what it says on their website: "Please note, orders that are shipping outside of the UK will not be charged UK sales tax but maybe subject to customs charges and tax that will need to be paid directly. This affects orders placed both in £ and in Euro. We advise you to please check requirements with the local authority before placing your order." (https://eu.elemis.com/delivery)
Ordering from the UK is the same as ordering from the US or China. Which is ridiculous given the physical proximity. Great job poking yourself in the eye, Britain!
And, worse, there are businesses that have figured out the customs/tax situation and will ship directly to Europe with no problem, but now I'm gun-shy and figure it'll be a mess so I go look elsewhere.
This pretty much rules out buying anything from the UK for me, something I and many others I know would have done without much thought. It's really frustrating because you'll often find UK vendors are better stocked and have (or at least had) better prices.
I can only imagine this has hit UK based sellers pretty hard. And vice versa — perhaps more so. Brexit is a poke in Ireland's eye too, frankly.
is it hard to order from the US or China where you're from? i'm asking because i usually order from those places along with australia, and haven't noticed any issues.
[0] https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/de-minim... [1] https://www.avalara.com/vatlive/en/vat-news/uk-post-brexit-v...
For example, Feel Unique are pretty good for cosmetics:
https://eu.feelunique.com/brands/elemis?q=ELEMIS
https://eu.feelunique.com/help-centre/Feelunique+Order/Feelu...
I get wary when so many people, or so it seems to me, delight in the economic situation Britain is in, pointing out how duped the sad saps that voted Brexit must now be feeling.
But from the Brexit voters I've talked to, the whole point was always political independence. When Ireland fought to be independent of the UK, to take but one example, pointing out the economic negative effects is to miss the point of seeking independence completely. I know the situation between the UK and EU is different to that of the UK and Ireland of old. My point is that the UK has strong, old political traditions that some felt, rightly or wrongly, were being interfered with by foreign political institutions.
I'm afraid that what you're saying is just grasping at straws for the people who were either lied to, or aware of what would happen but still malicious enough to follow through. It's fitting a narrative to a problem afterwards, I think.
Again, I'm in the US, and followed Brexit closely (because I was terrified of the impact on the comedy panel shows. . . just kidding), but don't live there anymore.
In the case of the Remain side, this was a concrete, measurable benefit that could be pointed to – a very powerful argument in favour of staying. On the Leave side, I believe the economic arguments/claims made were mostly in reaction to the Remain claims: trying to weaken the Remain side's economic claims with their own rebuttals as it were.
I make NO claims, either way, as to who is "right" about the economic argument – I have my own opinion, already stated, but I am just not clever enough or well read enough to KNOW the answer to such a complex question.
My point in this whole thing is that I don't think the majority of everyday people who voted Leave were motivated by the economic claims. A few, no doubt, were convinced by the "extra money for XXX" claims, but I think the far stronger concern was political sovereignty and independence.
I voted Remain thinking it made economic sense. But I was also pro-Remain because I liked the idea of a closely integrated (politically) Europe. A Europe with a standard set of human rights, a common citizenship and so on. Not everybody shared this vision (clearly), and not because they are simpletons who expected a new golden age on the event of leaving.
Are you talking about the EU? Because its governing institutions would rightly be seen as foreign (or at least not domestic/ours), until Britons' felt national identity becomes European rather than British. That matters more than the legalistic actions taken by some politician or any particular policy.
It might have made some kind of difference if enough politicians after 1990 would have bothered to explain that to the British public.
> It might have made some kind of difference if enough politicians after 1990 would have bothered to explain that to the British public.
If I'm understanding it correctly, the UK had ~10% of the EU Parliament seats. Even if that was objectively more than anyone else had, it's still quite a minority.
I'm not British, but the all the kinds of things you focus don't seem like they'd be at all significant for one's felt identity, especially when it competes with a long-established felt identity. Felt identity is formed by other things than "we have a large but clearly minority voting bloc" or "some economic policy was strongly influenced by a domestic politician 40 years ago."
This woefully misunderstands Irish Independence (UK oppressed Ireland but the EU never oppressed the UK) but if you wish to use that analogy:
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/fintan-o-toole-brexiteers...
"But if the Brexiteers are, to that extent, right about the Anglo-Irish Treaty, they are hopelessly wrong about it in so many other ways. They miss three big things: the balance of power, the danger of partition and the folly of ignoring the complexity of the Border. "
"Secondly, the achievement of the version of Irish freedom made possible by the Treaty came at a fearful price: acceptance of the partition of Ireland. The Brexiteers do not fancy that part of the analogy."
You'll just have to sit back now and watch the inevitable breakup of your country.
The other problem is the "We were lied to" Narrative -- as if every political campaign ever didn't involve lying and outright spin. The British wanted to believe those lies and that's the crux of the difference because deep down because of the British Empire -- Brits today feel 'exceptional' and deserve more than other Europeans hence the 'give us a special deal' trope.
well then i bring some good news: nothing has changed. the UK tech scene is by far the biggest in Europe (it's bigger than Germany and France combined). salaries are the highest in Europe and rising. as long as you avoid the click bait articles, life's good.
1) this disregards cost of living.
2) If you're saying "europe" to mean the area and not the EU then Switzerland has UK beat resoundly.
3) If you're saying Europe to mean the EU, then Ireland has the UK beat too. Just not as much as Switzerland.
EDIT: Just to throw some numbers on it.
Regarding median salary for a "DevOps": I've been offered jobs in Dublin (90k EUR), London (70k GBP) and Zurich (180k CHF)
I have 10y experience. If that matters.
It's declining, but from a very high spot.
Personally I'm worried about UK actively dismantling privacy laws, which will make it even harder for UK-based companies to serve the EU market.
https://dealroom.co/blog/uk-tech-health-check-london-tech-we...
it actually looks like it's growing.
At the moment the issue really is optics, which is bad, and uncertainty. As you say it will be a number of years for the dust to settle.
Well I guess that's technically true. But in practice they're not making it easy! The issue isn't just optics. It's that it's much harder to get a visa than it used to be, the process has become a lot more expensive, and that there are much fewer guarantees that someone obtaining a visa will be able to continue to remain in the UK. It's a big decision to move your life to a new country, and it's hard to justify it if the government can eject you again at short notice on their whim.
Brexit is not all bad, but research and higher education are industries made much weaker by it.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine uses a viral vector, not mRNA. The Pfizer–BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which do use mRNA, were developed in Germany and the US respectively.
France did not produce any vaccines. Germany produced one but effectively sold it to the US (Pfizer).
Just to point that the UK is not to be written off just yet.
It would be nice to elect a competent government, but there won't be an election until the current talentless frauds call one, and I'm not entirely convinced that any of the people who might win such an election are really any better. They might be for a while I suppose, but one thing our political system is not doing well is elevating talented, capable or inspiring people into positions of authority and leadership.
Rather difficult to do that when the public discourse runs in a media landscape fuelled by the need to make online advertising revenue.
That is a massive assumption with no evidence to support it.
Also, UK is stuck in a weird spot where I think lot of people know what needs to be done [1] but those things are so much under the shadow of brexit that it is unpalatable to talk about it in public. No one is willing to call spade a spade.
[1] Rejoining EU, NHS reforms, Immigration reforms, etc
Here in the US we have George Santos and will probably see some brinksmanship over the debt ceiling this year, but in the UK the Tories are going through prime ministers and other leaders like matches. We had Jan 6 in the US but they had Brexit which is a self-inflicted injury that will never heal. Things were on the right trajectory in Northern Ireland in that there was no border and you could be as British or as Irish as you wanted to be but they wrecked it.
The calendar of strikes in the UK is filled weeks ahead of time. Sooner or later the strikebreakers are going to go on strike. It is somewhat astonishing that the Tories are still in power but you can credit that to the last generation of labor leadership that seemed to have a vision for the UK becoming more like Cuba or Venezuela.
I think like Sweden or Norway would be a more accurate description of that vision. A lot of the policies (like nationalising the energy companies) that were mooted as radical when proposed by the labour opposition have since become mainstream.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world mind you, but they also had a certain nationalization happy Hugo Chavez. UK Labour increasingly resembles the latter in attitude/aptitude and crucially, no money trees to shake.
Europe chooses their own way and within the constituent countries choose their own ways. France is wracked by large work stoppages from time to time. Russia and The Ukraine are steeped in corruption. Yes, sure, we could go in and teach them lessons on anti-bribery and corruption, but we have our own problems and we also try to fix the world and other countries' problems before we fix our own. On the one hand we squeeze retirees on their SS but on the other hand we extend benefits and housing to people without entry visas... despite our indigenous problem of fentanyl O/Ds, poverty, lack of education, obesity, etc.
In most developed countries though there are not enough births to maintain a population that can easily pay for retirement, whether through the state or through the stock market. Just about everywhere other than Israel, which has different motivations than most countries, immigrants legal or not add more to the economy than they take out by a large margin.
The trouble is that happens in a way that is fundamentally dishonest and undermines the legitimacy of the state. There will be some chicken-choking factory down south that they bust 700 illegal immigrants at but the people who run it will say "I had no idea... It's so hard to get help these days..." sand not face any consequences. Meanwhile I've worked for startups that make a big deal out of e-Verifying everybody and I worked with many immigrants who play by the rules and get treated pretty bad.
It would be nice to see comprehensive immigration reform but it would make people confront things that they don't want to confront and frankly dump the political chessboard on the floor even though it would free us up in the long term to really confront the problems of the nation.
Also, skilled immigrants add a lot to the economy, unskilled don't add as much, never the less we do need reform and normalize the system. I think business fears they would have to pay a normal wage to these workers, so they are against such a system. However, that is only fair to the immigrant workers as well as native workers who are no longer undersold.
If you need help at a dairy farm, for instance. you need someone who is almost 100% reliable to look after the cows and what you find is that the "low skill" people in the area would rather work at the gas station or Burger King than do the much harder farm work that often pays a little more (not much more) than the service jobs.
On the other hand you get someone from Mexico who is experienced in farm work and takes it very seriously because he is saving up to start his own farm. A farm owner can easily see eye-to-eye with a person like that.
There is a horse barn down the road that has struggled economically for 4/5 of the time it has been there because it has been run by angry old people, heroin dealers, and other jerks until it has recently been run by the wife of an army officer who had great success. One owner was notorious for treating the help and the customers really poorly, hiring illegals and also turned the place into the HQ of the local Republican party for one election.
It's Ukraine, without "the" at the front.
IR35 makes it a pain in the arse to do contract work. It turns a simple "want this doing? ok, sure" into a legal mess. Public sector contract? Forget about it.
Business rates on commercial property turns high streets into ghost towns.
Ridiculous "reforms" in the housing market both pump prices and also reduce rental supply. So now we have a rental crisis whereby people are paying 900 a month for a single bedroom in the capital when commonly wages are 1.5k a month.
During coronavirus the government told businesses to close but didn't pass legislation to freeze or help them with rental costs. So a ton of businesses just failed because all of their savings went to their landlord whilst they were legally forbidden from earning anything.
London added a charge of £15 a day to basically every independent tradesman's van which directly increases their costs by over £2k a year unless they spend even more than that "upgrading".
I could go on. Top to bottom it's just anti growth. A lot of this stuff needs to be ripped up and we need to start again with policies actually designed to grow the economy.
Congratulations to everyone who has been proven right!
https://www.ft.com/content/dc978c84-64c4-42cd-bfe5-7d59e1441...
Brexit is a catastrophe.
Time passes and performance stays identical to Germany and France
mind you, boston and inhabitants are a bit like innsmouth, so maybe the deep ones have had something to do with this?
Trump was the UK's best chance at a US trade deal and the terms were too unpalatable for the Conservatives. This imho was a self inflicted economic injury. Demographically most of the West (including the EU) is in terminal demographic decline and in particular the European flavour of socialism (i.e. a deep belief that the State is a necessary part of economic development) will start to fail under the crushing weight of an ever larger aging population.
The US and Mexico will be the most important growth export market for the UK going forward into the next several decades, and the cost of a trade deal with the US will increase the longer the UK gets desperate.
Alternatively the UK could try to create a Commonwealth free trade zone (and include the 2nd most important market India) but that takes imagination and leadership that again I think is lacking.
- Historically UK politics has been very opposed to immigration from India (despite many immigrants from India being very successful in the UK!)
- India is physically far away
Everywhere is physically far away, except for the EU.