Most people are ignorant about businesses that are not international consumer brands. However this only represents a tiny fraction of the total number of businesses out there.
This visibility problem goes back to even Napolean's time, when he dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers". In a way he was correct, but he failed to appreciate what such a nation was and is capable of.
Why would the UKs living standards increase? Because the world continues to get richer.
Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? That's a heck of a claim. Has any country that was among the richest in the world regressed to developing nation status? This is supposed to happen on the basis of being marginally disadvantaged in trade negotiations?
Get real. This is sentiment because people are mad that the UK rejected their political beliefs. Could the UK suffer negative consequences versus the counterfactual as a result of Brexit? Sure. Is it going to regress to being the equivalent of, like, Peru? Obviously no.
Lexically, tats an oxymoron, if you are regressing you are clearly not developing.
Empirically, living standards have been falling in UK for a decade, while developing countries are developing. Clearly, eventually they will intersect.
Logically, you seem to claim that a developed economy cannot collapse no matter how badly it's mismanaged?
I don't think that "being out of the EU" is in the same category.
1 - for the past 7 years, the government was doing nothing except infighting around brexit. Things like economic policy have been neglected. Straighforward non-political ssues, like the fact that wind farms wait for 10 years to be connected to the grid, are unaddressed.
2 - the current leadership is braindead. They have spent the past few months discussing how they will get rid of all EU laws in one fell swoop, without replacing them or analysing impact.
But they cannot answer basic questions - what happens in areas of economy that rely on EU law?
Like logically, what happens when you repeal EU law about ebikes? Do ebikes become illegal? Do all ebikes, even with 10 horsepower become legal? I hate the EU ebike law but you cant just delete it.
Good, good, so now that you have deleted 50 years of law from UK, what are those things you've just legalised?
Certainly some types of Money laundering, probably a few types of financial fraud, carcinogens in food, and driving high-powered electric motorbikes without any kind of training or licence?
> Most people somehow managed so survive
Most people survived World War 2, and in Nagasaki most people survived getting nuked. In fact at least 50% of the population manages to survive almost anything.
On the other hand, in Victorian Britain 1/3 of kids never reached age 5, so there is that. Also many didn't survive child labour in the coal mines.
Thing is though, lots of politicians have shared similar sentiments, and completely failed to achieve this in office. That makes me think it's harder than it sounds to avoid undesirable consequences — figuring out which laws are in the set of "some" that won't increase child (or indeed adult) mortality, for example.
Generally, existing laws either superseded pre-existing laws (which may well have been repealed by the same process) or regulatory frameworks (which may or may not be still operable).
Although in this context, common law is more like an interpreted language like JavaScript, so the app will keep running and then randomly just stop because of the missing lines.
For e-scooters, or whatever? Might be fine, might be nobody will insure them, which means they can't be legally on the road, which might be fine (because the police just assume it is) right until someone has an accident and it gets to a court case for driving without insurance…
It doesn’t take a lot for a country to go down the tubes.
This is party independent as this collapse was seen in all states.
Based on HDI (both Niti Aayog and UNDP calculated), India regressed to the same developmental indicators as in 2015.
Silver lining is that institutions still exist, and if managed correctly in the next decade, could ensure rapid economic development. That said, if this is mismanaged, we'd be in a similar boat to the Philippines - strong fundamentals and institutions but horrible execution leading to it lagging well behind it's peers.
The next 10 years are crucial for India's development.
I don't see how you propose to maintain the same level of prosperity when fewer productive workers need to support more unproductive seniors.
Immigration may or may not help the current shortage of labour in the UK in various aspects of the economy that's likely to get worse as the population ages (more pensioners) with insufficient replacements (making the things and doing the services the pensioners might buy), given that's already a weird combination — not sure how the UK is managing to get both of these wrong at the same time, but, somehow, it is.
UK definitely needs more homes though, whatever else. Too much as a faction of income going to landlords like me…
> counterfactuals about how they "should have" grown
No, they were growing a lot and extremely wealthy, then they chose to go down a low growth path. Growth is not some magical thing, as if they just stopped growing for no reason as you appear to be suggesting. The point is their growth trajectory changed for very particular reasons, which were mostly things in their control.
I mean if in 100 years time the USA was the poorest country in the world but still richer than it is today in real terms, would you really go "yep, yep, nothing to see here, stop dealing in counterfactuals"? Obviously not.
One of the most important assets of british people used to be their national brand; it was never an accurate image of who they were as people, but the public relations carefully orchestrated by their government was effective on the international stage. Perhaps the big favour Farage did to the world was to encourage british people to speak up and show everyone what was really behind the so called exceptionalism and the superficial veneer of manners. However, it was also the irreversible deterioration of their image; and I’m not sure british people should celebrate the fact that they shocked and offended the international audience with their beliefs and values.
This is a regression though, university used to be free from 1976-1998.
The UK has always been a merchant, trading economy - partly why Brexit was so stupid regardless of the EU's flaws, but nonetheless London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on.
Yes, the libel laws have been especially helpful in allowing despots and oligarchs to move their wealth into the country and build contacts with No. 10 while suing journalists reporting on it. Chelsea FC, major football club, was owned by a Putin pal for 20 years. He was forced to sell only in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine.
Prigozhin, Wagner CEO, was able to hire a UK law firm to sue a journalist for reporting on his link to Wagner. This was after sanctions were placed on him by the UK government [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jan/31/russia-ukraine-w...
No shit we're not going to have the same standard of living as the past.
Sweden had an empire, Austria-Hungary was an empire up till the end of WWI. Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US. The same with German emigration.
It was _called_ an empire, but it wasn't an empire in the same sense as the British empire; if Britain had been feeling particularly grandiose they could have called Queen Anne the Empress of England and Scotland as part of the Act of Union on a similar basis. Sweden's was also not a modern colonial empire; it economically did not work at all the same way.
> Also, there was extreme poverty in Norway and Sweden not that long ago (the 19th century), leading many to emigrate to the US.
I mean... there was in the UK, too. For the most dramatic example see the Great Famine in Ireland, but there was extreme poverty all over the UK.
AIUI, American citizens must eat broken glass once a year under the name "filling taxes".
Many nations in Europe require businesses to eat broken glass just to do basic business functions - Spain is astonishingly non-functional.
By contrast, most British citizens have very little red tape to contend with, and what form-filling does exist can be done easily online.
Creating a company takes an hour and has a very light annual burden.
It's a large-ish, English speaking country, with plenty of other countries nearby, that isn't North America.
If you really meant the G8, well, the UK for all it's faults is still somewhere I'd rather live than Russia.
(I didn't feel this way 5 years ago. My views on the current state and future trajectories of both the UK and Russia have changed significantly over the past few years.)
Russia’s government has been very stable for the last couple decades, with little change in substantive authority even in the inter-Putin period when Medvedev was nominally President; certainly much less substantive change than in the UK.
(One might reasonably suspect its the kind of stability produced by a brittle regime that does not bend and is thus more likely to catastrophically break, though.)
A failed coup attempt is not a coup.
I certainly wouldn't have wanted to live in Russia in the 90s, as it was a horrible time for the country. But Russia is vastly improved now, while I see the UK as going, quite quickly, in the opposite direction.
And as I also said, this is a fairly new sentiment for me. I have become very disappointed with where the UK is heading and frankly sickened by the actions of its governments, most prominently, in the last 18 months, its warmongering and peace-breaking in Ukraine but of course, it was also a prime instigator of the warmongering in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan and many other prior examples. But also, which is important for living there, the negative actions of its governments on its own people.
I still have a great affinity and regard for the British people and British culture but the country itself is sadly now in a very sorry state, thanks to its quite awful 'establishment' (governments, banks, intelligence agencies, media, etc).
The one thing that I am unsure about with living in Russia is living so deep inside a continent. I live on the coast of Australia (like most Australians) and my affinity is generally for coastal living or island countries. So the UK has appeal to me there. If I did have to live in the UK its west coast would be the most appealing prospect for me.
For me, a gay man, living in Russia is a real risk to my life with it's rampant violent homophobia, in a way that I feel pretty safe living in UK (or Australia, where I am from).
But sure, I guess the Russian economy is on the way up? The private military market is booming!
Fair enough, although I would only add a mildly sceptical note that perhaps the 'violent homophobia' is less rampant than is reported in Western media. We are fed a huge diet of anti Russian propaganda in the West. I haven't looked into this matter personally but I would imagine that it would be good to try to find out what ordinary gay men in Russia say about how the situation actually is on the ground (versus what is said in the western press). But certainly, Russia is a more 'socially conservative' country. Although, as you probably know, being gay and being socially conservative are not necessarily antagonistic positions (cf. the great number of gay men in the clergy).
> Australia, where I am from
I'd wondered if you might also be. Partly because I saw your comment elsewhere about not wanting to live in North America & not liking its aesthetic. I feel the same way and it's probably quite common for those who leave Australia and choose the UK over the US out of English speaking countries.
> But sure, I guess the Russian economy is on the way up?
Yes, and I could make quite a case for why that's true. Let me know if you want me to assemble such a case.
Where you live is heavily loaded towards your personal preference, rather than any sort of objective economical measure. Personally, I only want to live in an English speaking country (I don't want to be a language-guest in a country). I want to live somewhere where there's "lots" going on - plenty of work opportunities and fun things to do outside of work. I don't want to live in North America because I just don't like the aesthetic.
Military importance is a big one. Part of the reason Japan and Korea industrialized so quickly after 1950 was because the West supported them economically as they were needed as a reliable bulwark against Communist expansion. The US also tolerates dictatorships worldwide (incl S Korea until 1988) if the regime is friendly to the US.
That said, even when I was a kid on Vancouver Island (the 2000s), we always had plenty of UK transplants working at VIHA, schools, corporate jobs, and blue collar jobs, and I've heard similar stories from coworkers of mine in Australia and NZ (eg. our head of Sales for ANZ was a First Class Honours LLB grad from a Russell's Group uni, but felt the wages and opportunity working for a Magic Circle firm were less than that if he went to Australia)
This article is valid for UK-sans-London, but we shouldn't pretend that London is suddenly Warsaw
UK has become like USA with yawning gaps between the have and have nots.
But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed, and now any trade deal they make will probably be under quite unfavorable terms.
That was always going to be the case. Brexit fantasists thought they were going to recreate the empire with UK at its center. They also thought they could do a deal with USA. What does UK offer USA if they're not in Europe?
Trade deals are multi-year projects and the terms you can get depends on how much leverage you have. Its noy the kind of thing you jump into after leaving a bigger trade bloc. The UK wasn't going to be able to negotiate anything without the bargaining chip of duty-free access to 500m customers.
It's unclear that there ever was such a window, given the _sort_ of Brexit they did. By far the most important trade goal for Britain would have been maintaining access to the European market on similar terms to previously (or at least similar terms to, say, Switzerland); everything else paled in comparison. But the form of Brexit chosen made that impossible.
It has problems for sure, but other EU countries have the same problems.
Seeing the continental Europe is currently being baked dry, I'm kind of glad that the weather in Scotland is miserable.