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Comment by hunglee2 | Hacker News Reader

UK is in a unique position of consistently making political decisions which cost money;

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

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>> 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.

The UK is a very powerful country *in Europe*. Their defenses are already sublimated to NATO, they’re wounding their economy unnecessarily by decoupling from Europe but as a member of the EU they were the second biggest economy and a huge financial and military hub. They could be again if they opened their economy back up

The EU and NATO are dependent on militaries of constituent countries. The US complaint is that UK has cut military too much to contribute as they should to NATO. If UK rejoined EU, they would be required to contribute more as one of the larger powers. OTOH, rejoining the EU would help the economy and make military less of an issue.

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.

> EU has become less important militarily. Partly because UK left but mainly because Ukraine war has energized NATO.

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 wants to be a military power independent of NATO, hence the EU army that Remain campaigners insisted wasn't a real thing, was misinformation and would never happen (reality: it was the primary topic of discussion at the first EU leaders meeting after the Brexit vote).

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.

>For instance, if it sublimated its defence to the EU or NATO, it would not need to have a first class army.

The army has been hollowed out along with everything else:

https://news.sky.com/story/us-general-warns-british-army-no-...

> If the UK can resolve its identify crisis and understand its reality

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.

Market forces will teach them a bitter lesson which will help them to understand. It has already started with their bonds.

It would take a lot of pain to overcome the tendency to "Blame the EU for the UK's decisions". This line of thinking is encouraged by politicians and tabloid media.

> 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

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.

SkyNews reported from their "sources" that it is understood that:

- 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.

That article seemed to me like a microcosm of what's wrong with UK journalism since Brexit. Every one of those issues is shared with Europe as a whole (or in the case of "the ability to defend its skies against the level of missile and drone strikes that Ukraine is enduring", basically every country on the planet as I understand it), but the article makes the UK look uniquely bad by using a completely different framing when talking about the UK's military vs other countries like France and Germany. For the UK they talk only about the current problems, whereas for other countries they focus only on the fact that those countries have annouced plans to improve their militaries whilst ignoring the current state of their militaries and the question of whether those plans are realistically going to work or actually happen. Germany's military in particular is in an awful state and they've kept on putting off the supposed funding increase it's meant to be getting.

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.

Armchair quarterbacks can always find something wrong with a military.

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.

> That article seemed to me like a microcosm of what's wrong with UK journalism since Brexit.

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 difference is that EU armies are improving, while the UK army is worsening.

The UK is probably still the strongest military in Europe, but it’s trend is wrong.

The UK is an island country with its single actual existential threat getting its own military capability shredded in Ukraine. Unless something wacky happens and France decides to reignite the Hundred Years war the UK really doesn't need much of a military anymore anyway, so why invest in it?

As an island country the UK is still highly dependent on global trade. It makes sense to invest in a strong navy plus some expeditionary land and air forces in order to keep their sea lines of communication open. They need to have their own capabilities as a matter of national survival rather than relying on the US.

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.

And the UK has done that. It has two aircraft carriers.

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.

> 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.

And they can all be solved by buying American weapons... funny that.

The UK has a very healthy domestic defense industry that makes most of its money selling to the Americans. I imagine BAE Systems would appreciate the local business.

Selling arms to despots is one of the things that's actually going well in the UK.

You're talking about the UK, the core of a former global empire with no shortage of arms manufacturing expertise.

They can also be solved by developing their own industry. Not sure they want to spend the money on it though.

Man, if he doesn't like the UK army, wait until he looks at the rest of Europe...

> there is no foreseeable solution on the horizon

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.

> brexits main goal was to preserve the uk's status as a home for illicit international money.

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.

Where I live, in Bristol, it's strange as we're a very lefty city surrounded by right-leaning counties. I often forget that my experience is so slanted until I end up discussing events with non-Bristolians and then I'm just shocked at what they believe.

And even Bristol is not as left-wing as it pretends to be, IMHO. If it had been located in the US people would be talking about a segregated city. Rioting because a Tesco's opens is not being "lefty", and neither is buying drugs on Stokes Croft.

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.

I don't agree with your characterisation of Bristol people - there's a lot of people and there's certainly some richer areas. It seems like you're setting up a strawman - that the 'modern lefties' only care about two distinct topics and then making value judgements based on that. There's also a hint of the True Scotsman fallacy, but you're not defining what you consider to be 'true' left-wing.

It’s worth looking at the UK through a broader historical lens, as a former empire that is trying to survive post-decline and collapse. Britain was an empire not that long ago. My parents were literally born in the British empire, until Pakistan became a republic in 1956. Now Britain is basically irrelevant on the world stage. That has got to have a ton of economic and political ramifications that will play out for decades longer.

> Now Britain is basically irrelevant on the world stage.

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.

Compared to how it was in the "good old days" it is certainly much less relevant. Having the 6th largest GDP doesn't really give you much sway in the developed world when you are up against vastly larger economies like the US, the EU and China. 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).

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.

It's a good thing the UK is less "relevant" than in those days! It would not be better for the world or for Britain if the British Empire was still at its peak. After all the Empire was wound down deliberately, the people didn't want to continue with it.

"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.

> It's a good thing the UK is less "relevant" than in those days! It would not be better for the world or for Britain if the British Empire was still at its peak. After all the Empire was wound down deliberately, the people didn't want to continue with it.

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.

The British effectively voted for that when they kicked Churchill out at the end of the war. It wasn't a referendum but was partly on those issues. Churchill was an empire man to the last, but the public wanted socialist spending at home, not imperial spending abroad. So they thanked him for winning the war by sending his opposition to number 10.

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.

"Unlimited immigration" is how the right-wing press like to spin it, but it's a core part of the EU: free movement of goods, services, and people. Free movement is part of the deal.

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.

How is it right-wing press spin, if it's entirely accurate as you say yourself?

"Spin" is the presentation. Calling it "uncontrolled immigration" is to put a maximally emotive framing on the subject. It's intended to trigger negative emotions and conjure up images of hordes of people arriving in chaotic fashion ("uncontrolled").

But as you clearly admit it is (was) in fact uncontrolled immigration. I think your political biases are coloring this. It's a statement of fact. You believe it's a negatively "spun" fact because it is, in fact, a negative to basically everyone. Unlimited immigration cannot work because, even putting cultural issues to one side, you can't build unlimited infrastructure at unlimited speed.

In practice there's no such as thing as "unlimited immigration". There are natural limitations such as available jobs, housing and people willing to relocate.

> 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.

The number of people willing to relocate to rich Western countries is effectively unlimited. Not literally infinite but so large it is equivalent. Jobs are not a limitation because governments will pay for benefits, including housing benefits. That's why it's actually fair to describe it as unlimited.

We're talking about movement within the European Union, so "willing to relocate to rich Western countries" doesn't make any sense at all. The West already includes Europe.

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.

> Nuclear powers

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.

UK is a nuclear power on sufferance of the US. It hasn't built its own nukes since 1960 or so. Which by an odd coincidence is right around when it lost its empire as well.

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.

The UK maintains its own warheads and its own designs. The only thing it gets from the US is the submarine missile: the hulls are also domestic.

I stand partially corrected; however it is worth noting that its "own designs" consist of a single warhead "closely based on" a US one. Although nominally the UK maintains the capacity to design a new weapons system, this capacity has not been tested.

The question is whether the UK can continue to justify its substantial spending on military and foreign-policy influence.

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.

The UK never held anything close to a dominant position in European governance.

It was dominant though. Top2 or top3 in research orientation. I don't think a single project was ever done without major UK participants and researchers.

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.

That's only one tiny aspect which hardly matters to anyone outside of academia.

The UK was one of the top 3-4 nations by voting power (depending on the time) in the 27-member EU and a very important player in EU politics. Their negotiating power is evidenced by the fact that they were able to secure opt-outs from a number of treaty obligations.

In the past! Over time less and less was decided by voting and we saw what the UK's influence was worth when Cameron took voters concerns to the other leaders. Answer: shut up and do as you are told.

The EU hasn't been interested in votes for a long time and will certainly be even less interested in future.

An empire that was built on theft and oppression.

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.

> An empire that was built on theft and oppression

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.

The UK itself is not an "ethical empire", it is the English empire. England's satellite states are second-class, and were annexed coercively if not violently. All of them harbor grudges about it, and all of them have robust political factions which advocate leaving the UK.

Yes all of Scotland harbors a grudge against the English, that's why they voted to remain a part of the UK when given their "once in a generation" chance to do so.

And yes they're totally second class. That's why they have their own parliaments whereas England doesn't.

Should I have said "every one of them"? I didn't mean to imply that every citizen personally harbors a grudge. That would be silly! But they did have a referendum, and "remain" barely won.

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?

You're referring to the way things were in the past, whilst making claims about the present day. Empires don't generally give parts of themselves fair and free referendums on whether to stay and then win, do they?

Tell me then, why do you think England is unique among the constituent countries of the United Kingdom in not having "its own" parliament? Is it because it's the least important member, subservient to the others?

History, and the way devolution was set up by Blair. He wanted Scotland to have more power locally because it's a relatively left wing place that voted Labour at the time, and didn't want England to have more local power because that would have hurt Labour electorally.

EDIT: probably got that wrong, I'll see when you answer :)

> 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)

> An empire that was built on theft and oppression.

What other kinds do you have?

A lot of people don’t talk about it because the Indian elite are highly westernized. It’s hard to talk too much shit about the British when you’re also an Oxbridge graduate, have property in London, etc.

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.

> Probably still doing subsistence agriculture.

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.

What exactly did the British rob from Indians and may I ask a related follow on question... Do you believe there is any evidence that Indians robbed other Indians during the process of regime change when various Indian states were merged with the Republic?

There's a reason that films usually have an englishman as the bad guy

Not to worry, as someone also of Asian descent in a hundred or so years the amount of those living in the current British Isles with heritage to the colonialists will become a small minority and hopefully out of power (as I doubt the majority will want to be ruled by a minority).

Well this is some weird asian supremacy replacement theory I've not seen before...

Always nice to see proof it's not just white people who can be supremacists.

I don't see how this is a "weird asian supremacy replacement theory" when Britain wholesale welcomes these changes as a part of their future, many Western countries welcome immigrants for a) brain drain from other countries and b) so their economies maintain growth. Nothing supremacist in that and nothing I said implies anything about supremacy or Asians beyond the fact I myself have Asian heritage.

I mean, when any high profile white person does complain that they don't want this, they are called a replacement theory conspiracist nazi. And they are basically cancelled from mainstream media.

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.

You support a replacement of the native population? After what the Normans did haven't the English had enough?

I don't have any real care for it either way because I'll be likely dead by the time it happens, I am just pointing out demographic trends. However I don't see what your point about dog whistling far-right viewpoints is for. Britain as a whole is completely supportive of current demographic trends and I don't see any serious rejection of it in politics the way you might if one brought it up in a non-Western nation.

> I don't see any serious rejection of it in politics

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.

Insecure racist undertones? Multiculturalism going as planned!

It's not just the UK in that position. The EU is the way that all those former European empires were going to be able to succeed economically without their colonies' extracted wealth. Some historians, like Timothy Snyder, view this as the primary purpose of the EU, which is rather contrary to its usual founding story.

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.

> UK has a political crisis, based on an identity crisis, for which there is no foreseeable solution on the horizon.

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.

FPTP - couldn't agree more. However, Labour are the only ones who can do it, and Starmer has not said a word about it so far, so in typical Labour fashion they will be so thankful of 'a turn' in power to lose the generational opportunity to truly improve the governance of the country

Remember that Labour campaigned against an alternative voting system when we had a referendum on the matter.

There was a referendum on removing FPTP and it was rejected by the British people.

Because both Tory and Labour campaigned against it.

Do you expect that's going to change next time, or do you expect that a third party will get a chance to do it against the campaigns of those two?

A 3rd party did try, Lib Dems Vs Labour and Tory, and the Lib Dems lost. Labour haven't shown that they would be for a change to the voting system, so I can't see why they would support it.

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.

There was a referendum on Alternative Vote (which is actually not that different from FPTP). I don' want to be overly pedantic, but I think the difference does matter.

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.

> Getting rid of the first-past-the-post voting system would be a good start.

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.

> Yes but there was a referendum on that and people said "keep FPTP".

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.

Sure; nevertheless, I don't think that's likely to influence the result if there was a rerun.

I don't know, at a certain point the pro-Brexit pro-FPTP protest voters will be fed up by the state of things, and decide to protest vote for the Euro, rejoining EU, and eliminating FPTP.

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.

They did in fact get more NHS funding. Why does every single thread about the UK or NHS contain this lie? NHS funding has only ever gone up.

https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/nhs-in-a-nutshell/nhs-...

See the FTs recent graphs for the oh so clever way this talking point is "technically correct" while being obvious BS to the man in the street:

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1606223922474627073

The point is not merely technically correct, it is actually correct. If you want to say funding didn't go up enough for your liking, say so directly. Don't say something you know isn't true, and then when called on it try to wriggle out of it.

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.

IMO the problem with austerity is that it presumed the economy would grow, which it then promptly didn't.

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.

Austerity as a concept doesn't really presume that, austerity is just a weird word meaning a government cutting spending. It doesn't contain any argument about the future. The Tories implementation did presume growth which is why the UK had austerity-lite vs what actually turned out to be needed.

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.

You’ve mixed tiny trivialities with the one factor that’s killing the UK economy—Brexit. The rest aren’t even rounding errors.

The UK’s GDP per capita peaked in 2007 and has stagnated since then: https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+gdp+per+capita&ie=UTF-8&o.... 2008 was the global financial collapse, of course, but in the UK it seemed to have exposed some fundamental economic problems because the country never recovered. Whatever is “killing the UK economy” happened long before Brexit. It’s actually like the Sixth Sense—the UK isn’t dying, it was dead the whole time.

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.

The UK response to the global financial collapse in 2008 was to blame the Labour party that was in power, and "immigrants", which led directly to austerity and then Brexit, as memorably captured by Frankie Boyle, who compared it to watching Columbo with his Granny with dementia.

"It Was The Fu*king Banks" - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtWA3jQN1Pg

New Labour was in power for the decade preceding the financial crisis and two years after. They quite justifiably bore the blame for what happened, just like the Bush administration did in the US.

Brexit and the backlash against globalism is a result of the economic malaise brought about by those policies, not the cause of that malaise.

And the Tories have done nothing to turn the ship around after being power more than a decade.

Under Tory management the decline continues.

The malaise in UK goes much deeper than tweedle dumb and tweedle dee political parties.

The UK's back was broken in the Battle of France. It's all downhill from there.

People seem to ignore the EU is in just as bad a state as the UK, especially now that Russian energy is over Germany as we know it is basically over.

Brexit might have had an impact but it’s one of 10 things badly wrong with europe as a whole.

But the thing is that the EU is not. Every major power in the EU is predicted to grow their economy and the UK is the only one that is not.

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.

Predictions are not worth much. Everyone predicted UK’s economy will collapse after Brexit. While it certainly has not flourished, it is not any worse than before.

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.

Germany contracted the last 2 quarters. Your explanation?

It seems that is not true.

https://countryeconomy.com/gdp/germany

Germany growth:

2022Q4: -0.2%

2022Q3: 0.5%

"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"

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.

1. Imports from EU are higher than pre-Brexit and higher than exports. So it's the deficit is also higher than before. 2. The EU does not have the UK as their biggest (40%+) market. Therefore the smaller player is the UK. If all trade stops - yes both sides lose. One collapses economically overnight. 3. The EU can either absorb the cost on its internal market (and sell goods internally for a smaller margin) or export to other players as there are existing trade agreements (again with a smaller margin). The UK does not have access to the same deals. 4. The EU market has a much higher GDP. Losing 1 trading partner even of the of Britain would not take down the Union.

All you're saying is that the EU has a higher willingness for self-inflicting economic pain on its citizens, which is true, but not an argument for being inside it.

A friend of mine straight up left Britain for Canada in his 20s after Brexit. He wanted to get out before it all came down. Now that's one less young worker in an aging country. It's hard to overstate how much damage that vote did to the UK.

Same, expat here under 40 living in the US, left when the referendum came in as an exit vote.. grabbed my bag and hit the ocean road! Took my skills with me.

Same except I went to Berlin, and I delayed leaving until late 2018 as my mother got Alzheimer's and I wanted to help while that still meant something.

There's probably something insightful to say around the topic of constantly shitting on the most important people in your economy (young workers) in order to curry favor with the biggest drags on your economy because they are the ones with the spare time to vote (retirees), but I'm not economically smart enough to figure out what it is.

"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...

>It's hard to overstate how much damage that vote did to the UK.

And yet, people frequently succeed

When most ppl around you succeed more than you is it really a success?

"I moved (edit: willingly) to the UK because of brexit" is not a statement that's often heard either.

Would you mind providing a factor analysis? Which specific economic indicator(s), when compared to other countries, screams 'brexit wot dun it'?

I only ask because the IMF itself doesn't state Brexit as a factor in the prediction.

You're right - I'd add a decade of austerity too mind you.

The trivialities amount to an evidence of systemic problems everywhere. Even though the whole Brexit farce has exposed all of that on its own :)

I was ordering bike parts in the UK from Belgium, after the import taxes hit the company, they lost 80% of their sales.

How can brexit negotiators fucked up so badly?

> 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.

Leave were perfectly aware of this, which is why Brexit was presented as everything for everyone instead of a specific deal.

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.

> The whole point of Brexit was to remove local and EU democratic oversight and turn the UK into a neoliberal dictatorship.

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.

It's even stranger if you think about another common anti-Brexit argument: that many of the "EU laws" which caused people to vote for Brexit were actually created by the UK and Brexit supporters were tricked into blaming the EU for them, where the "UK" in question was actually the same tiny group of UK leaders that we're meant to fear Brexit will hand over control to, behind closed doors, with no real functioning democratic oversight.

It did moderate some of the more vicious impulses of local elites. Look at the enthusiasm with which they went at the human rights act.

My favourite analogy for the Brexit vote is as follows:

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.

I think you describe the fundamental crisis of democracy. No single proposal ever has a majority of support. So you get what is essentially a confidence motion... that the 'winner' themselves would not survive.

That's a weakness of FPTP voting systems, not of democracy

they didn't negotiate. Cake-ism was not a Boris Johnson joke, it turned out to be the actual policy. Hence, bare bones agreement (which, according to Michel Barnier, we are not even compliant on) and massive surge of costs to UK consumers.

brexit is about setting the stage for things to come. brexit will make fewer people a lot of money. Is it far fetched to see NHS getting bled dry, paving the way for privatized health care?

Distribute the costs among the many, concentrate the benefits among the few.

Wasn't import taxes an inevitability as a result of brexit? The free movement of goods and people is a fundamental part of EU and EEA and once you are no longer part of it you no longer have those freedoms and instead have the normal external EU/EEA costs?

no, they were not, Turkey and Switzerland are not in the EU nor in EEA, but they can sell (some) of their goods to EU countries with no taxes due to specific agreements.

UK explicitly chose to avoid such arrangements.

Turkey, Switzerland, and/or even russia (pre-Ukraine war) are part of the EU Customs Union that the UK chose to stay out of.

not switzerland, and I have no idea why you think Russia was ever part of the EU customs union.

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 UK didn't choose to avoid such arrangements and requested many times for a comprehensive free trade deal.

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.

No, the EU could choose to simply not levy such tariffs. They have signed free trade deals with other countries before that don't require membership, they simply refuse to do that for any country geographically in Europe.

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.

They didn't necessarily "fuck up". Many people voted for exactly this sort of BS. I am not saying that was a good idea. But that's what things like "Less Imports" and "no more regulations" mean in practice.

No. People didn't vote for that, because unfortunately the referendum was very non-specific "Do you want to leave the EU?" question with only a yes/no answer.

(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.

If you are voting for vague promises and unrealistic, bonkers, literally impossible trade agreements, and end up with how brexit went, you have no one to blame but yourself. There was no "No longer be part of the EU" that would have resulted in a stronger Britain because the UK is not that important, so nobody would sacrifice themselves to make the lives of angry brits easier.

I'm fairly sure that most brexit voters were expecting a soft brexit. There were plenty of politicians stating that it was absolutely not going to be a hard brexit, or at least that's what they said up until the vote.

Different politicians promised different things, with varying degrees of seriousness and commitment. (For example the Boris-Bus).

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.)

UK Remoaner here.

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.

100% correct. Was not a negotiating failure, it was the desired outcome, though perhaps not the desired consequences of such an outcome

It's interesting to see interviews with people who voted for Brexit.

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.

For many people it was a religious decision, a matter of faith. "You cannot reason people out of something they did not reason their way into"

It's because the reasons they have a worse life aren't caused by Brexit. The ruling party hasn't actually changed anything even though now they legally can.

It is also told, that the EU has the toughest negotiators in the world. They got trained full-time on inner conflicts and just keep burying interlocutors, no matter the country.

It was essentially a 50/50 split. Why they decided before hand simple majority wins and not 66% or something is beyond me.

Import taxes are a 100% voluntary policy of the United Kingdom that has nothing to do with any negotiations (except insofar as the UK uses them for leverage). The government could abolish these taxes with the stroke of a pen, effective tomorrow.

>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.

No other outcome was possible. Why would europe have given the UK anything?

How can the EU be so unfriendly?

How can the UK be so deluded as to think they would get a better deal and be better off than they already were?

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.

This was the real shocker to me. The UK had an absurdly good deal in the EU. This was a fight between guys who make billions from domestic commerce and guys who make billions from international commerce and the local guys won. A cost of living crisis is a boon for them.

> How can the EU be so unfriendly?

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

I think the EU were perfectly happy to have talks and negotiations, but the UK wanted to be able to influence the EU without being bound by its rules - hardly a reasonable stance for the UK to take

The EU is a huge economic block, and Britain's single most important trading partner. They can be whatever the fuck they like to be. And the EU was exceptionally friendly and patient towards the UK which demanded all the benefits with none of the responsibilities.

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

How can England be so unfriendly and not allow a Scottish Independence referendum?

It always amazes me how people always believe the EU is honest and truthful in all negotiations. This is even after they wrecked Greece and tried to prevent the UK getting their COVID vaccinations.

The EU didn't try to prevent Covid vaccinations in the UK. AstraZeneca decided to interpret contracts. The EU held them to their contract.

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.

The corruption in the Greek economy was a drop in the ocean though. It had 5% growth per year, enough to outgrow its corruption like every other developed country.

But also had 13% budget deficit (of its GDP). Other countries had to bail them out of default on loans.

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.

EU was in a position where it couldn't allow a soft exit to Britain, because the whole EU would fall apart and even more behind other big economies.

soft Brexit would have been single market, Norway style. This was rejected by UK, not by EU

Norway style means that UK would still have had to allow freedom of movement. If the EU and especially Germany had adapted their (imo insane & ideology driven) immigration politics, I don't think the UK would have left. But in the given situation, what could UK have done?

(nothing)

immigration is the right thing to do, Germany will reap the benefit of the millions of people they have brought in. The issue is how to integrate, which is an entirely different problem. So far, no other mechanism to stymie population decline has worked

The UK wanted a hard Brexit.

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.

You cannot blame the EU for the UK's hard brexit. That was all down to the UK politician's brexit purity spiral. Theresa May tried to moderate it somewhat, and was swiftly thrown out because of that. This was all internal to the UK. The UK insisted on a hard brexit.

The stock "it's the EU's fault!" response is nonsense, again.

MI5 never passed Huawei telecoms products as "fundamentally secure". Their claim was much more limited. The UK government could still securely share intelligence with the USA even if the civilian telecoms infrastructure used Huawei equipment. Presumably government and military networks would still use other more trusted suppliers.

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.

>> UK has a political crisis, based on an identity crisis, for which there is no foreseeable solution on the horizon.

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 think people are reading way too much into this. since the UK had one of the strongest numbers in 2022 it’s quite normal to see some backlash now due to inflation, taxes and gas prices. the lack of low wage labour and extra paperwork when exporting/importing is surely not helping, but it’s usually a lot more complex than a single factor.

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 has a political crisis, based on an identity crisis, for which there is no foreseeable solution on the horizon.

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.

> various rushed trade deals (Australia / NZ) made to satisfy the newspapers, despite them harming domestic farming for nothing in return

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.

Don’t worry they decided to shut down TechNation to give Barclays more money. The one large government funded organization known to help the UK bring in tech talent that has started major tech companies will lose funding so a bank can get a handout.

TechNation shut down? Never rated it in the first place, but surprised that this has happened also. Incredible

> UK has a political crisis, based on an identity crisis

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.

> England doesn’t have a power centre of its own

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.

Sorry I meant more in the sense that a large number of English voters don’t feel Westminister represents their English specific concerns.

Here’s a great talk by Fintan O’Toole where he explains his take on this viewpoint far better than I ever could

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1SeadvWsn_k

Might be my outsider view but I don't see much representation of the opinions of Scottish, Northern Irish or Welsh. It's almost always English here English there. Do the others matter less in UK politics, do they align pretty much to English opinions, or it's just sloppy a way of generally referring to UK citizens?

It’s probably mostly just down to the fact that there are a lot more English citizens than others. Historically, England is richer and until recently all important decisions were made in London. Then there is the fact that most Americans and especially in American media British=English and even then mostly Southern English so that influences how outsiders view the place.

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.

> M15

I think you mean MI-5 (Military Intelligence 5), if not I'd like to know what M15 is.

It's also a cancelled motorway[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M15_motorway_(Great_Britain)

Predecessor to the M16 rifle, of course

my guess was an intentional misspelling to evade their radar, e.g. N5A, FB1, interp01

> Needs a miracle breakthrough technology (graphene? quantum computing?) - a literal moonshot - to reverse this decline

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...

How many of them are aristocrats?

An appalling percentage of them are actual aristocrats. The broader segment seems to consist of relatives, aristocratic bastards, their broader 'gentleman' circles and so on. Basically what constituted the elite in Britain in the past ~300 years.

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)

Fair enough. The Quora answer you quote seems quite absolutist, or at least only scoped to rich people they don't like. I can see how someone's worldview could develop from such experiences, though.

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.

> The Quora answer you quote seems quite absolutist, or at least only scoped to rich people they don't like

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.

> ...unelected, hereditary, aristocratic house of lords having de facto veto power through the power to send back bills to the parliament an infinite times

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.

When the decline is choice (like it is for the UK), no miracle breakthrough will be allowed to reverse it. That's sort of the point.

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.

> despite M15 passing Huawei telecoms products as fundamentally secure

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."

>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 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

The UK has a hopelessly unbalanced economy, with "financial services" and arms sales providing the bulk of GDP.

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.

This is extremely well put. Finance and defence really are two of the only well performing industries left. - but this is despite there being excellent talent and people within the UK.

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.

UK fertility rate is barely higher than Germany, and the population pyramid looks significantly worse than China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_the_United_Kingd...

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.

> Germany's population pyramid is significantly more top heavy as is China's.

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...

>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.

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

> The important bit is China's massive spike between 30 & 57. What's the plan for the next 30 years?

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.

> the UK is much better at assimilating immigrants than Germany and especially China.

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.

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