Britain’s economic record since 2007 ranks near the bottom among peer countries

I'm HN's resident Republican curmudgeon, but this is all squarely the fault of the Tories. They've over-optimized the economy to _only_ do what they're the best in the world at, the rest of the country be damned. They're out of touch with people in Manchester, with immigration sentiment in the Midlands, and with just how hated they are by the Scotts.

I really wish Labour would get it together, focus on something besides hating Israel, and end this nonsense. The UK used to have a bunch of competitive car, aircraft, and train manufacturing concerns - no more. This is a total failure of governance.

Although it UK appears to be a democracy but in reality it is not. One of its true test is whether the people make the govt implement the key policies they want or whether the will of the people is truly reflected in the way govt conducts its business. It seems there is a big disconnect.

The general sentiment amongst people that no one listens to their plight & problems. I have felt this sentiment since Tony Blair's days. There appears to be a permanent establishment which influences the key policy making no matter which party forms the govt. This is not democracy.

This has resulted into feelings like nothing radical is going to happen to reverse the decline of the British empire.

Worse than Italy? (I'm Italian, it's hard for me to believe UK fared worse).

The problem with the Brits is that we keep voting in slimy incompetent leaders. The country is completely at the whim of The Sun and The Daily Mail.

UK's GDP grew 14% from 2007 to 2022. The EU's GDP grew 12%.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/281744/gdp-of-the-united...

Paint me ultra skeptical about all such claims. It might be true or it might not. The error bars on these metrics should be enormous but none are given. In reality the British government has absolutely no idea about even far more basic stats like the size of the population, and calculation of things like GDP/capita and productivity are all heavily influenced by errors in that sort of base figure. Official population estimates are massive under-estimates and there's now lots of evidence that this is true.

Until about 2020/2021 a lot of the case for this had to be built on things like mismatches between expected electricity/water consumption and population claims, but since Brexit and the vaccine rollouts there is now far clearer evidence.

For Brexit, the government claimed there were 3.7 million people from other EU countries living in the UK and the actual number who came forward to apply for residence was 2 million more than that.

COVID made the problem even clearer. In some age groups more people came forward to be vaccinated than theoretically existed in the country at all. The government claims 9% of the population is unvaccinated but an opinion poll run by the BBC yielded 25%, a likely more accurate figure. The ONS recently had to admit in writing that their vaccine effectiveness numbers were meaningless garbage (and always have been) because if you take them at face value, vaccines are magical elixirs of invulnerability that make you much less likely to die for any reason at all including things that aren't health related, like workplace accidents. The ONS pretends it must be because they missed some confounding factor despite adjusting for some crazy number of them, in reality the explanation is simpler: because the population estimate is far too low, they think there are far fewer unvaccinated people than there really are, and thus the calculated death rate is far higher than it really is. The size of the vaccinated population is known to a higher degree of accuracy and thus the death rate in that group is actually accurate, creating this apparently nonsensical effect.

After 10 years they tried to do a new census, but did it in the middle of lockdowns and the resulting figures were massively out of line with other known figures:

https://www.cityam.com/census-2022-london-population-funding...

"CLF, a group of 12 local authorities, stressed that the figures were “skewed”, with Westminster missing 30,000 residents (15 per cent of the population.)"

So the chance to repair the data was flunked. Although the ONS is in denial, in the past the government has taken some steps towards admitting this. The official population size was downgraded to "experimental" (lol) and could no longer be classified as "national statistics".

A government that can't even count how many people exist on an island is in no position to accurately measure the output or productivity of those people, a far more subjective and complex set of statistics to compute. In reality nobody knows how the British economy is doing. At best they can measure a subset of it.