Why has Britain become so poor?
thetimes.co.uk
thetimes.co.uk
On top of this the absolute waste of talent in the UK is prodigious. The education system has been a wreck for decades, to the point it simply has to be a deliberate ploy to reduce social mobility.
I remember when regions were smaller than nations...
> How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-e...
The subtitle says it all:
> Britain chose finance over industry, austerity over investment, and a closed economy over openness to the world.
In terms of per-capita GDP, the UK was behind France from 1985 to 1998. It jumped to parity with the US from 1998 to 2008. But that jump seems to be a product of the very financialization that the Atlantic article complains of. That evaporated after the 2007 recession. And since then, the UK hasn’t done any worse than France or Italy: https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+per+capita+gdp&client=saf...
That does track. The finance industry required an open economy. The actual "makes things" industries? Not so much.
Of the two the finance industry is much more vulnerable to deglobalization. Paper wealth can evaporate overnight.
If the data is good and illustrative, then so be it - that’s an incredible increase of economic output in a developed economy (and the UK should go back to whatever they were doing during that decade). But that metric just seems disconnected from any actual improvement in the standard of living.
Interesting data point though!
Is looking at house prices in USD a sensible measure for the UK? It seems slightly perverse to me, but maybe it makes sense in the context of financialization, foreign investors putting money into UK real estate and/or immigration? Or whatever other factors may be relevant.
My gut feeling is yes, but only if you're trying to answer a wider question than "can I afford a house?" I'm not smart enough to articulate it in economic language, but I think of it like a physics model. Are houses getting more expensive, or is the country getting poorer? If you've only got two particles, you can tell the gap between them is widening, but you can't tell which is moving because you don't have a frame of reference. Comparing with the global reserve currency builds that frame of reference. If most of the house price increase disappears, the prices aren't really going up, our wages are shrinking (relative to the rest of the world).
> The Lower Thames Crossing, a tunnel project to connect Kent with Essex under the Thames estuary, has held five consultations since 2017 and still does not have permission to build. To date, more than a quarter of a billion pounds have been spent on the planning application — more, Dumitriu tells me, than it cost to build the Laerdal tunnel in Norway, the longest road tunnel in the world.
And housing may just be a subset of the problem of not really being able to build anything anymore that's shared with the US.
What's your source on this? I see similar claims, never cited.
Even if true, that would be a symptom of under-production. Build more and there isn't the incentive to invest in an asset with government-boosted appreciation.
Those countries are total basket cases, where the population are either sleeping all day or burning their own cities in protest.
Its unfair to compare the UK against them.
It's a serious point though, but unfortunately one that has copius evidence that the outcome of that approach is worse, not better.
The problems with democracy are evident (brexit being a poster child.) The democratic successes are equally good (South Africa, Northern Ireland).
The primary problem with alternate systems is that there's no way out. Once you have an authoritarian approach, if you don't like the authority you SOL.
Basically it's all the worst bits of democracy without any of the up sides.
Ultimately people vote, (or don't care) and get to live with the consequences.
I'm not sure how rampant official corruption, cronyism, a skyrocketing murder rate [1], crumbling infrastructure, dwindling regional influence, and a deeply polarized civil society can be considered a democratic "success".
[1] - https://www.groundup.org.za/article/how-bad-murder-in-south-...
At 46 murders per 100k per year, it might just be the worst intentional murder rate in the world right now.
But Apartheid was a problem several magnitudes larger. World pariah status, 80% of the population subjugated, colonialism at its worst. Democracy (the White vote in 1990), the national vote in 1994, lead to a revolution without a civil war.
Of course it has not lead to utopia, and democracy has challenges there, as it does elsewhere, but the authoritarian regimes before were far, far worse.
This whole thread and story has folks explaining how this has been a slow creep over 30+ years.
The "genius" of democracy is that it guarantees that at least half the population is in that group, because a popular vote can dethrone the government. That doesn't mean they are the only group the government is paying off to stay in power, but better to be in than to be out.
One of the problems we have currently is that the population is aging, meaning it's more rational to cater to old people who on average dislike change. This eventually leads to stagnation or even regression.
So considering how severe those consequences are, something would need to be done to prevent that outcome if that’s the trajectory you’re on.
The electoral system is unrepresentative (the more representative system used to elect the mayor of London was recently changed to FPTP). The upper house is composed of people nominated by the government, children of nobles and bishops.
In the last few years, the traditional behaviour expected in Parliament — not to lie — has been lost.
As the most recent example, when Johnson resigned the election[1] for his replacement was heralded as a win for the Conservative party. The campaign centred around green policies. The Conservative party has fewer votes than Labour + Green, but still takes all the power.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Uxbridge_and_South_Ruisli...
That's a twist on the Churchill quote.
Churchill didn't say there are no better alternatives. Just no better that we've tried.
- How so?
- What can be done to fix it?
- Is there a viable path to getting there?
the parent comment to me sounded like democracy as it exists in the UK basically led them down this path and now has them stuck in a death spiral
Currently the UK vote is based on trying to get about 1/3rd of the country, in specific places, to vote for you, not 50%. It's a flawed democracy that has gradually evolved from an even more flawed democracy but now lags the state of the art by some margin.
The “why” is conceit and arrogance - an unshakeable belief in British superiority, that it can never happen here, and that there will be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover.
That, I see little sign of changing. I write this as a Briton who has turned his back on the U.K., rather than hold out hope for change.
* The country chose austerity at the time of negligible interest rates. They should have used that to make infrastructure reforms.
* The austerity not only prevented infrastructure improvements, but also actively made the country less prepared for things like covid and Ukraine war shock.
* Brexit. The idiocy of this act of self-harm is becoming clear to a large fraction of the population now.
* Overspending during covid. Because we had BJ as PM during that, Covid was managed pretty badly, with significant debt accumulation that we now have repay at high rates (because a lot of this debt was created in form of inflation indexed gilts)
* Series of bad governments over last 5 years. While Cameron was pretty bad, what we had since was really terrible. May, BJ, Truss, Sunak...
* Bad housing policy. Not enough housing and allowing extensive usage of housing as an investment vehicle (i.e. promoting Buy to Let).
That's not how it works. The UK and EU were bound to one another by various treaties. There was no mechanism for the EU to make such a demand, whereas an exit from the EU is a defined path.
If the UK wanted to rejoin then the EU would be able to make such a demand.
Britain literally has the perfect geography for high speed rail, and yet France and Germany out-build them to a hilarious degree. Thankfully they are now doing some high speed rail.
This combines with the non buildings of housing, not building housing along transport corridors, making the housing situation increasingly worse and worse.
How much did this lead to issue? Hard to say. I don't pretend to understand the UK economy in full.
In reality, most of the west is declining due to bad ideas and the rejection of good ideas that our people once held.
To return to ideas and traditions would not be to go back in time - noone can do that, rather to reinvent, to rejuvenate, and revive the good ideas of the past in the context of the present.
For example, in the 1950s people would have been appalled by the idea of mass immigration. In 2023, it is at the root of many of the UK's most significant problems: the housing crisis, the collapsing NHS, the destruction of the high trust society, the shattering of British identity into dozens of cultural enclaves.
There is no honourable way to undo the mass immigration that has already happened. However, we can radically reduce it.
At the current immigration rate, it is simply impossible for the rate of cultural integration to keep pace with the the rate of influx. At vastly reduced rates of immigration, our society would have space amd time to forge a new British identity.
We have made choices that have proven themselves destructive, but it's not too late to revisit those mistakes, and then build anew from the ashes of the current decade.
Refugee laws were written a hundred years ago when there were frequent wars in Europe that would displace non-combattent women and children. They didn't have much option to go far beyond a neighbouring country and would likely go back home after the war was over.
Our current system of laws requires us to host any refugee or immigrant from anywhere in the world on a permanent basis.
There is no way this is sustainable economically, and much less so culturally.
The government could fix this instantly, but they choose not to.
1) Massively build out social housing
2) Stop tax incentives, part ownership and other house buying incentives
3) Tax empty houses like in Switzerland, Germany etc etc
4) Crackdown on use of house purchases for money laundering by Saudi princes, Russian oligarchs, corrupt Chinese Communist Party officials, South American drug cartel bosses etc etc
The sub-replacement birthrate is a reason Britain sucks in immigrants like a vacuum cleaner. The English don't make babies, and when they do, they murder them in the womb. The immigration is the only thing stopping Britain turning into one big ghost town.
A huge segment of the migrant flow comes with basically no skills, and is immediately dependant of the welfare system. The migration we are currently experiencing is a net negative for the UK
Even just having reached adulthood and attained secondary-school level education makes you a capable worker that the country they migrate to has had to do nothing to support until that point. Any small amount of extra investment to ensure they learn the language and obtain employable-skills on top of that is virtually always going to pay off.
(*) including my Dad, who came here as a 10 pound pom!
Europe mostly survives by selling its identity, legacy and history to the world.
MG, Jaguar, Land Rover - all owned and operated by Chinese/Indian businesses make a big deal of the “British heritage”, when that heritage is just a branding ruse.
The second largest company is pharmaceuticals, the third microprocessor manufacture.
If anything, it shows the European economy is more balanced than the American one.
Four of the top 10 are luxury/makeup brands - LVMH, L'Oreal, Hermes, Dior.
> serious about anything except
> managing public opinion
I'd like to underscore that this issue persists also here in the United States. I know it is true in California and San Francisco (I presume other regions across the country are similarly afflicted).
The real issues are mostly financial, economic, or environmental justice issues that can’t be addressed by individual states. Even in the cases where it can be, like California air quality regs, it’s being eroded and rolled back anyway. But stuff like containing medical costs or single-payer medical/educational systems are not issues that can really be done by a state. The most you get is things like sales/property/income tax being shuffled around a bit, or californias bizarre prop 13.
That's a matter of timing. When they were enacted, they weren't being rolled back, they were being rolled out. Maybe it will catch on in 100 years. Hard to say it has no impact, when historians are able to point to the effects, when informing the future.
The thinking that everything must be solved/corrected immediately is misplaced despair, rather than a philosophical flaw in the system.
Politicians have none. Only popularity and polling. And donors, of course.
What behavior would anyone expect?
Good old British understatement there. Her proposals were so utterly unhinged that they would either prove the entire field of economics since WWII fundamentally wrong, or meet with abject fail. It was - predictably - the latter.
If you're not going to be around in 20 years, don’t understand the issues that will impact working people today and into the next generation, maybe you shouldn’t be voting.
I’m not sure I could fully express how foul I consider this recent memeplex that older people shouldn’t be allowed to participate in democracy.
We also have lower age limits on voting and there’s very good reasons for that too.
People try to raise the voting age limits all the time to curb the political influence of the younger voters. It’s a situation like class wars where one side is playing hardball and the other side isn’t even aware they were playing.
Point out the nature of the game you’ll be pounced (just as you did here) for “ageism” despite ageism already being written into the rules, and despite the elderly here (in the US) are continually trying to shift those rules even further in their own favor.
The hand of the dead should not bind the living, nor should the hand of transient populations bind those with a long-term stake in the society. And there will inevitably be some edge-cases where people slip around the edges of the rules (citizens with deadly illnesses, immigrants who own homes and settle, etc) but those are just the guiding principles society has agreed upon, except when it comes to the elderly.
This is not why we don't allow migrants who have not yet become citizens the ability to vote. They have not (yet) been granted a place in society because they have not yet demonstrated commitment to the country, nor contributed, and the country has not yet decided they are valuable enough to allow into the society.
> We also have lower age limits on voting and there’s very good reasons for that too.
Yes, due to inexperience of life, ignorance of politics and the wider world, and brains which are not yet fully formed, reasons that people below these ages are denied full autonomy in a number of areas. These reasons are not applicable to most older people.
> People try to raise the voting age limits all the time
In the context of the UK, which this discussion is about, this has literally never happened, not once. The elections are comparatively well run, you seldom have to wait more than a few minutes to vote there because polling stations and staff are not limited, gerrymandering doesn't exist, voter suppression is pretty universally regarded as evil. You seem to be in the US, one of your political parties appears to have effectively become cancerous and is trying to kill US democracy, I wish you luck in dealing with it but inter-generational hate is unlikely to help.
> It’s a situation like class wars where one side ... Point out the nature of the game you’ll be pounced (just as you did here) ... those are just the guiding principles ...
There are no sides here. There is no war between the young and the old. These are not principles that society has agreed on at all. It's hard to see how you could be more wrong. I 'pounced' upon these views because they are gross.
At what age do you think people have no stake in the long term future? Do you only have a stake or guidance to give if you personally will be affected? Do you not get to vote on the short term matters that do personally affect you? Should people in general only be able to vote on things that affect them personally and directly? I don't have kids, should I be denied a vote because we might be deciding eduction policy and school funding?
Besides naked prejudice, you seem to have a very transactional view of democracy - you assume people will obviously only vote in their own short-term self interest, not use their knowledge and morality to guide their choices for their own good and that of others.
I wish you luck in fixing the US, but don't project its flaws onto everyone else. And don't just blame old people for your woes. Those steering the ship over there are not all ancient and there are plenty of young people involved in all sorts of terrible stuff.
Moreover, you can be 18, not be around in 20 years and don't understand the issues that will impact working people today.
Or you can be 40 and never have worked a single day.
Or you can be 80 and have a lot of experience and understand plenty about history repeating and see things coming before anyone else.
Age is one of the worst proxies for human intelligence
A lot of the rhetoric around "old people not getting it" sounds to me a lot like that classmate that never studied, but blamed the professore for the bad votes, "he hates me" they usually say.
Whoever suggested it was a good one? I would never support any attempt to block older voters from participating in democracy, but it can be an issue if a particular demographic, particularly one that might have the least direct motivation to vote for policies aimed at long-term system wide improvements, has outsized representation. Interestingly we allow that governments are determined currently by the number of seats (representing a particular area) they can win, maybe it's not so crazy to consider the number of age brackets they can win...that way the fact that there might be many more 65-70yos vs 20-25yos wouldn't affect the outcome.
that's democracy working as intendend.
Besides: don't underestimate the fact that older people have much more motivation than adults, because they are at rest, they can think about the past, they actually have a past to think about and can draw conclusions on what their generation did and what the results were and how that affects the people they love and are worried about, particularly their nephews, who represent the real "new hope" for them. Most elderly were too busy working and taking care of their families when they were younger to focus on the long term results of their actions.
While younger people lack either the motivation, the experience or the tools to make such an analysis.
> that way the fact that there might be many more 65-70yos vs 20-25yos wouldn't affect the outcome
You are assuming that all the old people vote against the interests of the 20-25 years old people and vice versa, but actually it's very far from the truth.
The tension between equal representation and fairness of the outcome has been studied for a long time.
See the Arrow impossibility theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
Not at all - but we already accept that the fact there are so many more voters in concentrated in a few cities that a pure one-person-one-vote system would lead to virtually no representation of voters in sparsely populated areas. If the age pyramid were even more extreme (e.g. 5 or 6 times as many voters between 60 and 65 than there were between 20 and 25) I'd say we'd have little choice but to consider some sort of age-bracket based voting system.
As it happens apparently the historical trend of voters becoming significantly more conservative as they age seems like it might be breaking down anyway, and the concentration of voters in the "boomer" bracket is a somewhat temporary thing, so there's probably not enough justification for overhauling our electoral systems simply to counter the current demographic distribution, however I do think we're unnecessarily reluctant to at least seriously debate and ideally trial different electoral systems rather than assume what was put in place hundreds of years ago is still the best we can do in this day and age.
We do not accept the pure one-person-one-vote system because we live in representative democracies, were the elected represent a community. We solve the problem by designing dynamic voting areas of varying dimenions containing more or less the same population, so any representative is the spokeperson of the same amount of people (more or less). At least that's what we do here in Europe AFAIK.
> If the age pyramid were even more extreme (e.g. 5 or 6 times as many voters between 60 and 65 than there were between 20 and 25) I'd say we'd have little choice but to consider some sort of age-bracket based voting system.
You are saying that you don't like democracy then.
Which is an argument, we can discuss about it, but, for the sake of the argument, in Russia there are 86 men every 100 women. In that case what should we do? Limit the representation of women? What about people with disabilities, should we create a "people with no disabilities bracket"? How should we address the fact that the majority of the population has received no form of higher education, they are ill-educated if not uneducated hence they lack the tools to make an informed decision to the detriment of the entire society? etc. etc.
> As it happens apparently the historical trend of voters becoming significantly more conservative as they age
That's a cool quote, but it's never been proven. The word you're looking for is not conservative, but prudent.
Anyway, if we look at the voters now in Europe, where I am from, we can clearly see that the far right is very popular among young people, they are having good if not extremely good outcomes in many countries (Germany, Sweden, Italy, Finland, Hungary, Poland). It never happened before the last generation had the right to vote. In my country, Italy, the far right is the preferred choice among people < 25 years old and women, while people over 65 have voted in majority for the left and are progressive.
What should we do about it in your opinion?
"Democracy" says nothing about ensuring every single vote counts equally. While I am inherently skeptical of systems that decide some votes are worth more than others, personally, the idea that my vote should count for more when I'm part of a smaller but younger demographic bracket and less when I'm older and part of a bigger bracket doesn't bother me too much. Whether it would actually produce a better result is almost impossible to know.
> In my country, Italy, the far right is the preferred choice among people < 25 years old and women, while people over 65 have voted in majority for the left and are progressive.
That's certainly quite interesting, and different from the pattern I'm aware of occurring elsewhere, and it would be fascinating to do a deeper dive into why that might be. It certainly suggests to me that whatever the "left" in your country is offering, younger voters are not seeing it as representing the policies they feel the country needs over the coming decades. Though I did just come across an article that suggested this trend is possibly because younger voters in Europe have no first-hand knowledge of how awful things became under far-right leaders in the early 20th century. Or perhaps because they've seen first hand that welfare-state-type policies associated with left have benefited older generations far more than themselves.
we found that casting a vote is the best way to make that possible.
In that system everyone is an island, everyone should think about their personal interest, because there are more differences intra-group than extra-group.
If some demographic group is more numerous than others it also mean that that group will have statistically the most variations
There are more poor old people, marginalized old people, frustrated old people and unhappy old people than younger ones. Most of all old people have literally no future, they have no time to recover from mistakes, they simply have gained enough experience to not risk everything for the sake of trying something new.
Doesn't mean their interest do not align with the interests of younger generations, it's just that younger generations can afford to lose everything and come back from the consequences.
One explanation of what is happening in my country is that the far right can sell themselves as outcasts that for a long time haven't participated in the decay we are experiencing and can look to the untrained and unexperienced eye as "revolutionaries' that fight against the establishment, while the people who have known them their whole life can see through the facade.
But in the end the real problem is that last time the elections were won by a movement supported in majority by young people that wanted to flip tables and disrupt the status quo and, guess what, the elected members were such incompetents that 5 years later even the far right seemed a better option to many.
It's the exact opposite.
When you are retired you paid all of your life for those things trough taxes.
It's the youngsters that are getting them for free, having contributed a lot less if not zero.
on the contrary, they have acted far too fast and too mindlesly - for instance brexit.
With 4.0% unemployment rate I would disagree with surplus of labor
Nobody cared about the rural peasants, or the urban families that lived in one small room without water, sanitation, education, healthcare, or enough food. But, hey, look at the aristocrats, the commercial kingpins, and the Royals.
Also, for a hundred or so years, Britain extracted a lot of wealth from its Empire. When that went away in the 1940s, there was a lot less money floating around, even for the upper classes.
Britain hasn't become poor, it always was.
The UK has a ridiculously assymetric economy. You either move to London or fight for scraps anywhere else.
This ties with the housing problem. Education is a debatable investiment, because highly qualified work presumes moving to London.
There is no serious infrastructure investment. There are virtually no specialised companies in big projects, so everything is cut up in small pieces and commissioned to out-of-depth small contractors that see big projects as a "once in a lifetime" opportunity. The process is not streamlined, it can't cope with efficient big infrastructure work.
Even small infrastructure work is not being done, like saving classrooms from literally crumbling (https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/may/14/england-cr...).
Countryside and suburban people live in a dream-like state induced by the incredibly propagandist media (especially tabloids) where people happily believe that we "once owned the US and Canada" and repeat "5th-6th largest economy" while having tea with the vicar is enough to keep Britain's "achievements".
Childcare is preposterously expensive, education likewise. Housing famously so.
I could go on for a bit.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/poverty-r...
(Edit: the numbers are from 2017 and 2018, so it is possible that things have changed. For example, it's possible that the UK was hit harder by rising energy costs. I don't know.)
> Poland is a remarkable success story. But it is not alone in catching up with Britain. South Korea and Slovenia are both set to overtake us in terms of GDP per capita too, as early as next year.
This hold only true when looking at PPP per capita. Looking at GDP in US$ per capita, tells a very different story:
UK $45,850.43
South Korea $32,254.63
Slovenia $29,457.40
Poland $18,321.28
vs. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/GDP_per_capita_PPP...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?end=2...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
Until the people start making smarter decisions this country will race further and further into the morass it finds itself in.
I despise the establishment. I despise the generally spineless main stream media who are strangely unable to ask the right questions and dig deeper for the truth. I despise right wing voters. I despise people who conflates socialism with communism.
Pretty much sums up the country.
I blame mostly the Murdoch media. The government was always full of Tory pyschophants, but the media kept the masses informed enough to keep the damage in check. People used to resign in disgrace if they failed their post.
After the phone hacking scandal in 2007, the Leveson Inquiry[1], and the resulting lack of action that passed after it, Murdoch media has only been emboldened to act and report disgracefully. As much as I hate the Tory's, I blame the Blair-Murdoch relationship for kicking it off.
There needs to be far more transparent accountability for wayward ministers and prime ministers - otherwise what's the point?
You despise me then, I can live with that. Having grew up in both, I despise them both equally.
Maybe it’s different for the UK but they’ve always framed themselves as an economic mover, fundamentally not believing that there is something in the UK that business wants to access is a refutation of this idea of there being any domestic economic value in the UK as an institution.
Fabric, lace, clothing, etc... you just need to walk around most post-industrial cities and look at all the things that were pioneered in Britain for mass production.
> Even eastern Europe is catching up with our sluggish GDP. Our politicians have been slow to act, but economists say there’s still reason for hope.
Our finest journalists can't even get through the subheading without failing. Our politicians have been acting - thats the problem.
(2) Take whatever you don't like about the UK, ignore the rest, and write an article with no scientific causal inferences whatsoever about how the things you don't like caused (1).
(3) Let everyone argue about how "no no no, it was the things I don't like that caused it--not the things you don't like."
I have a friendly reminder that life and society are very complicated. Even with ample data and decades of scientific inquiry, for example, we only have dubious theories as to why crime declined in the 90's so much, and the most plausible ones were not evident until a decade after the fact. Anyone simplifying the UK's economic decline with convenient political talking points is a charlatan.
To import energy, Britain need to produce things to sell. I can't think of anything the rest of the world wants to buy besides nostalgia e.g. "Downton Abbey" and "Princess Kate".
(including Blair and Brown)
This is not true. Britain is not poor, but the proletariat is. Capitalism has no notion of nation.