Services across England now lag far behind East Germany | Hacker News Reader

Services across England now lag far behind East Germany

cam.ac.uk

54 pointshhs65 comments

What kind of article is this? So in 30 years we where not supposed to equalize the country?

And from England nonetheless?

Apart from the recruiting and financial circles England is more on par with Poland that it is with any real western country...

This literally has been this way for more than 20 years now, we are even closing hospitals and banks because we have to many.

Finally this article has shown that even the level of cambridge has sunk, so maybe the title should read "how england has fallen constantly for the last 200 years". Real household income hasn’t increased For the past 15 years. The average UK household is 20% poorer than may others in northwestern Europe.

You must understand, for your average wealthy SE UK voter, the UK is still a dominant world force, a peer to China and the United States. Brexit was quite popular down there, despite not being the majority. Of course, their worldview is about 30 years out of date, so they need comparisons to East Germany or Poland to shake them out of it.

I understand! Henceforth I will compare my style of living to Nottingham and from that point of view everything is awesome. :D

The question is, why do voters allow it?

The conservative playbook in the UK and elsewhere is to say there's not enough money and they must cut services. That omits the possibility of increasing taxes; also, the UK and probably other wealthy countries have never had more money.

But voters aren't victims of talking points. They still go along with it. Why?

It's not obvious governments have more money than ever, at least not relative to costs. The age of the population is going up and that makes some services like healthcare far more expensive. If governments really wanted to they could find the money to keep quality constant, but it would actually involve both making a choice and getting more money than the government previously had.

Money is never something governments "have." They collect and spend, not necessarily in that order.

Accordingly, "their" costs inevitably exceed revenue. It is obvious they're spending more than ever.

Correct, and the Conservative governemnt have done a stellar job of taxing, cutting, and stealth-taxing the public sector who all voted Labour 1997-2010 for their own benefit to get annual 15% pay increases. Just look at Leeds area who were predominantly Labour hotbed who were clearly punished by the Tories and had their HS2 train route cancelled, and have been cut more than most areas. If you are a Labour borough 1997-2010+ you are going to receive the biggest cuts and least support from the Tories, likewise under Labour 1997-2010 Tory boroughs were slammed too.

Governments are powerless because the rich are becoming increasingly adept at not paying taxes. Same goes for companies.

I suppose it's not really new. Many English kings had to beg their robber barons for money.

If the UK seized the entire wealth of every billionaire it would not even cover one years deficit. The issue is bigger than just the rich.

The trick people are learning is to not give their money to the billionaires, people are shunning combustion engined vehicles in droves enough to force opec to look at the books and futures and it's only going to increase from now on.

Conservatives are anti-taxation and pro self-reliance, the only groups who are geting their taxes increased are the Labour voting public sector workers who love a sytm of taxation because it has benefitted them and put them up the ladder.

people don't mind about healthcare in england, they are gambling on the probable likelyhood of staying healthy, whereas housing prices, and unemployment was out of their control under labour.

> That omits the possibility of increasing taxes

That’s lazy. Taxes are the go to solution for incompetent politicians. The uk needs lower taxes, and a more efficient, less corrupt government. You cant keep throwing money at services hoping they will magically work. The uk is not understaffed, it’s under skilled. With european expertise thrown out those left have no competition - meaning they can slack all they want. Everywhere you go you bump into mediocre quality and people that lack any desire to be better at their job. I am sorry but i dont want my tax money to patch their gaps in interest and skill, or to cover for government inefficiencies.

I know the comparison is between the UK and Easy Germany, but the UK already has much higher taxes and much worse services than Canada where I live.

The problem probably isn’t money but rather something else, like low throughput, or too much work being absorbed by bureaucracy, or some other issue that is much harder to solve than simply levying more tax.

> but the UK already has much higher taxes and much worse services than Canada where I live

I can't speak for services but as of 2020, the UK and Canada's tax intake as a percentage of GDP was only about 1% apart.

Now consider the area over which Canada must provide services, and the intrinsic inefficiency that entails..

Are you perhaps not aware that most Canadians live south of Seattle, and 90% of Canadians live within 100 miles of the US border?

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/canadians-south-seattle-me...

Yet the Canadian government provides services across Canada in huge areas with extremely low population densities. This is incredibly inefficient, which is the point.

What is your solution, then, O wise one? If you're going to say it's "inefficient," then I ask: inefficient compared to what?

A solution to what? The Canadian government runs very efficiently when you consider their geographic handicap.

The UK on the other hand has a serious problem with bureaucratic inefficiency. Their geography favors efficient services, yet they can't do better than Canada? That's a problem.

The money/effort wasted by the Canadian government is at an all time high level. Canada just spent their total debt 200 billion in one year doubling it. They still keep spending into debt. Remember We and the billion lost?

Don't go around bragging. It's a national shame.

> This is incredibly inefficient, which is the point.

That's true in the abstract, but it's not important/significant enough to consider. The costliest services for the government to provide (welfare, healthcare, education) grow in proportion to population, not area. A rural hospital or school might spend more on ambulances or school buses respectively, but those additional costs aren't anywhere near the top in terms of expenses.

Education and healthcare are more expensive to provide over huge areas with low population density. Particularly with healthcare, the government has to pay professionals to live out there and those professionals serve fewer people than they could in high density areas.

Again, I'm not denying that there's increased costs associated with serving rural populations. I'm just skeptical about the actual scale of such increased costs.

U.K. does a shoddy job of nearly everything - from wireless connectivity to infrastructure to healthcare dispensation - compared to even similar sized advanced economies.

Just take broadband / wireless connectivity.

Outside of London / S.E. England, the rest of the country has shoddier coverage than places like Thailand! Twitch streamers who have tried to livestream their exploits outside of London were met with spotty coverage at best. You can go watch the VODs yourself. Its unbearably bad even with the aid of cellular-bonding equipment ( multi-SIM multi-data plan fused to provide better signal ).

Whereas in similarly sized places like South Korea the same live-streamers have been able to stream the length and breadth of the country with a single SIM data plan, right from their phones without so much as a bitrate drop-off!

Large swathes of U.K. are still serviced by those one-lane-each-way thoroughfares you saw over a 50 years ago in films such as Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange.

My personal gripe - air conditioning is nearly non-existent outside of big box commercial establishments & good non-bed & breakfast hotel chains. ( This is the case across much of Europe - scores of people died in a heat wave in France not so long ago )

[1] The size of South Korea is approximately 99,720 sq km, while the size of the United Kingdom is approximately 243,610 sq km, making the United Kingdom 144% larger than South Korea. The population of South Korea is approximately 51.8 million people, while the population of the United Kingdom is approximately 67.8 million people.

It's a long border. 100 miles (=160km) * 8891km = 1,422,560 km*2. Google says the UK is 250,000 km*2.

Your point that Canadians are concentrated into big cities is true. But on the other hand, there are hundreds (thousands? millions?) of small towns all over the place in Canada, and all of the ones I've seen are clean, neat, nice, safe, and shockingly (to me) well-served by infrastructure. (not to say it's perfect; we've all heard of indigenous towns without water).

Indeed, trying to overcome bureaucratic inefficiency by raising money is like trying to beat cancer by eating sugar.

Is the Canadian budget inflated by the tax revenues of Canada's many mining companies? I wonder what total tax collected per capita looks like.

That’s a good point - it still adds to the total tax burden, but I know my individual tax burden is a fraction of my UK friends’. And thats on the higher incomes over here as well.

Well, I'm saying, maybe Canada raises more tax outside of personal income tax.

Not necessarily though, same could be said about, say, Finance industry in the UK.

the skilled working class is already being squeezed down to the last penny. engineers are paid absurdly low salaries given the cost of living in London, and that's where they're best paid

But voters aren't victims of talking points.

I'm not so sure about that, there's a good argument that many folk get exhausted trying to resolve all the political calculus (while still living their lives and dealing with everyday problems) and just give up. Bryan Caplan called this 'rational irrationality' in his book 'The Myth of the Rational Voter' and I found his argument quite persuasive. Also look into Alistair Smith/Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Logic of Political Survival and their notion of 'selectorate theory'.

The question is, why do voters allow it? > England has been a two party state for a very long time, and has no real action plan to change that. Even when alternative parties appear they are very cleverly shut down using smear and media campaigns. Most 40+ people remember Labour party rule of no services and no money, and draconian state. Likewise under Tory rule there are still poor services but the money has gone from none to a comfortable trickle, but the people are still afraid. Labour or Conservative are very similar parties once in power, except for the direction of annual pay rises to either public sector workers or private sector workers depending on who is in power at that time.

The conservative playbook in the UK and elsewhere is to say there's not enough money and they must cut services. > it is not exclusively Tory, Labour did the same when in power. The people don't trust either, and are waiting for the coming election. I don't think Labour will win simply because too many voting people exist who went through hard times under Labour rule and will use their vote to prevent that happening probably for a few decades more.

They still go along with it. Why? > Fear. Being in a state of destitution or being the one with a job and watching those who didn't get a job drift into poverty creates a very worrying environment.

> Most 40+ people

So born 1983.

> I don't think Labour will win simply because too many voting people exist who went through hard times under Labour rule and will use their vote to prevent that happening probably for a few decades more.

Have you seen a poll lately? How old are you, if you have any functional memories of 1979?

i'm 47, And you're patronising. Watch and see the vote result, people are going to vote conservative until a third more right leaning party arrives.

I'm 43, and I hate to agree with you but...

We have hit an all time low of Brexit success in opinion polls, but that's still 30%. Cameron held on to power with 33% of the vote. As much as I would like to see the Tories out, I'll believe it when I see it.

2015 GE was 36.8% vs 30.4% of the vote resulting in 330 seats vs 258 seats (FPTP is a joke), so a 6.4% gap on the day.

Opinion polling in the run-up to the 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2015_U...

Recent polling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...

I'll watch, and I'll see another 1997. Don't you remember what the last days of the Major government felt like? It felt like this.

I'm older than you (not by much) and my earliest political memory is of the 1979 election. Nobody aged under 60 is voting based on what happened in the 70s, and damn few people over 60. Maybe some are still using it as an excuse, but I think most of them have moved on to the Iraq War as their acceptable fig leaf.

By your logic (hordes of "Never Labour" voters still replaying the winter of discontent in their heads) 1997 couldn't have happened.

Don't you remember what the last days of the Major government felt like? It felt like this. > I remember, and today is nothing close to what you are suggesting, the climate is incredibly different now. Nobody aged under 60 is voting based on what happened in the 70s, and damn few people over 60. > Sorry to tell you but they are voting based on Tony Blair & Gordon Browns tenure and that won't change for a generation. Never Labour. > Due to 1997-2010. 2005-2010 were the years that cut hardest. It's only 13 years ago and well within the feelings and memories of a very large amount of the population. Don't you recall the pound value crash 2008, poor benefits, forced unpaid labour, peak housing price inflation, mass unemployment.

> Most 40+ people remember Labour party rule of no services and no money

They would have grown up in the 90s. The Labour government oversaw a great rise in living standards, the largest reduction in child poverty, and the largest increase in GPD. Which the Tories have cut and spent since.

Probably not the best example.

simply not true. The Labour government brought 35% crash in the pound 2008, Forced unpaid labour to benefit private corporations (who remembers those who were forced to work unpaid at supermarkets to ensure they got a meagre £46 a week benefits), Houses which were forever increasing in value, became impossible to buy for the majority of graduates leaving university with £45k student loan debt. Hope left the building. I had friends who were picking food from bins and sleeping on floors and they were graduates, parents didn't want to help because they didn't understand the problem. And now those parents are dying out or siding with their children who are very angry and bitter and will vote conservative always, far-right if the option came along.

That's nice.

It's all completely wrong though.

Blair came in 1997, stayed steady in 2001, and was already losing seats by the 2005 despite the improvements to living.

Take a look at the graphs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_Kingdo...

Poverty in the UK dropped significantly under Labour, and after they were replaced it flattened.

2008 was a global financial crisis, so a little harsh to blame it on Labour. Could it have been handled better? Maybe, but the recovery here was pretty quick until the Tories decided to do what they can to extend it through breaking the country up via austerity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_financial_...

>Poverty in the UK dropped significantly under Labour > False & incorrect, Labour simply moved a few million 18-30s from unemployment to University/Loans thus changing the statistics. > and after they were replaced it flattened. > Those millions of students then became a heavily in debt unemployed.

Possibly because what in germanophone society is known as Solidarität with laudative valence, in anglophone society winds up labelled socialism with pejorative valence?

(I got a letter a while ago from the local Liberal Party —for the yanks, this means a pro-small-business anti-regulation centre-right party— and its opening sentence exhorted solidarity with our compatriots)

Corrupt and / or exceedingly inefficient government bureaucracies are going to be a problem, regardless of whether they have a socialist bent or not.

Everyone here loves to trot out north European countries as prime examples of the glories of socialism, neglecting to point out what makes them work better than, for example, various South American countries.

Small business organizations might be perfectly happy organizing themselves into political action, while rejecting the notion that society as a whole would benefit from being organized by the government itself.

If reciprocal aid only applied to small factions and not to society as a whole, that would suggest solidarity must have a different meaning than it does here.

If a government organised its society instead of a society organising its government, that would suggest democracy must have a different meaning than it does here.

(and, yes, I'm completely open to the idea that these words do have different connotations in different cultures; part of the trouble is vastly different experiences: it is easy to be skeptical of governments in general if one has never personally experienced a functional one)

An excerpt from a WaPo opinion piece, earlier this year:

   But look outside this golden world and you discover a
   different picture. Real household income hasn’t increased
   for the past 15 years. The average UK
   household is 20% poorer than its peers in northwestern
   Europe. A survey for the Resolution Foundation in January
   found that 11% of Britons (the equivalent of 6 million
   people) hadn’t eaten when hungry because they didn’t have
   enough money for food.
   .
   .
   Britain’s low-growth economy is not only relentlessly
   reducing the country’s living standards (on current
   trends, the average Polish family will be richer than the
   average British family by the end of the decade). It is
   also forcing everyone to pay higher taxes for worse
   public services: The great British Middle Class live in
   a world of petty crime that goes un-investigated let
   alone punished, over-crowded emergency health services,
   and ever-lengthening NHS waiting lists (Britain has one
   of the lowest ratios of doctors and hospital beds per
   patient in the whole of the OECD).[1]

[1]

Britain Should Stop Pretending It’s a Rich Country July 18, 2023

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/07/18/stagnant-...

The UK is not a wealthy country. The UK has a lower GDP per capita than any state in the US except for Mississippi, the poorest US state, and has lower purchasing power than all 50 of them.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/08/25/britain-...

> The UK is not a wealthy country. The UK has a lower GDP per capita than any state in the US except for Mississippi, the poorest US state, and has lower purchasing power than all 50 of them.

That's an odd piece of evidence to cite; Germany also has lower GDP per capita than any state except Mississippi. By PPP, it's ahead of 17 states and behind the other 33.

But Germany is well known to be a wealthy country. England is also a wealthy country. Europe is poor compared to the United States, but that won't make it poor in a global sense.

It does tend to leave the question open of why there's such a large American constituency for "why aren't we more like Europe?".

To add to that, there was an interesting article in the FT, showing that the UK is essentially a poor country with some very rich elites. If you look at the standard of living for say a "median income family" it is considerably lower than many countries on the continent. And perhaps, the rich too are running out of steam and being outpaces by their peers on the continent.

Basically, inequality in action...

I think that the value of being "rich" is derived from being able to use that money to get other people to do things you can't or don't want to do yourself. This requires a functioning society, infrastructure, and a healthy low & middle class where those people can still afford a decent living to be able and motivated to work, provide services to the rich and consume what the rich' businesses sell (which in turns helps you be rich and remain so).

This is where I see the UK failing more and more - critical infrastructure is falling apart as people outright "check out" from the grind or leave the country for greener pastures - why would you bother working for the "rich" if you'll end up no better off? Thus service quality decreases, "nobody wants to work anymore", every business is short-staffed and failing since patronage is falling due to lack of disposable income. When this starts affecting critical infrastructure such as transportation, healthcare or law enforcement, it becomes a death spiral that's really hard to reverse.

Being "rich" in such a country is an increasingly precarious situation, especially when so much of that "richness" is inherited wealth owned by a generation that is itself aging rapidly and in dire need of good healthcare.

According to figures from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38437011 on a per-capita basis the only polity that is predicted to beat the UK for losing High Net Worth Individuals is — Hong Kong.

Although the reason HNWI's might wish to leave HK is obvious even to the casual observewr, reasons why the UK went from net importer to net exporter of HNWI's in 2017 may be murkier?

Well, they're not poor, they're just not wealthy. They're not Rwanda or Angola, and they've got most of the world beat, but they're not what they once were. Europe peaked during the colonial period, and it turns out, there is no special sauce that makes them more successful than the rest of the world, they're just countries on the planet same as anyone else.

Regardless, the UK in particular and Europe in general can't continue to pretend that they can socially fund every need under the sun.

> It does tend to leave the question open of why there's such a large American constituency for "why aren't we more like Europe?".

because even if the US is very rich and ahead, their public infrastructure feels very run down compared to Germany, Austria, and others in Europe.

What choice do these voters realistically have but to allow it? What alternative is there? As a minimum they would need to be able to put their votes somewhere that would somehow "disallow it", but where would that be?

As for extra-parliamentary measures, I believe most of these are illegal and the rest of symbolical value only.

Added:

I feel sorry for those in the UK. Other former wealthy and admirable European countries seem to be on the exact same path of decline, too. I'm sure it's not due to Brexit at all; OTOH I have a feeling that I can't really explain rationally (ie. this comment box is too small) that Brexit will somehow be good for the UK on average once the transition pain is over and done with. That might be a while, though

This situation is not new, it's been a slow decline ever since Maggie and most likely long before that.

Vote for Labour? I don't think they try to push tax cuts and then cry austerity.

Well, they spend money on rich old people in the South, who vote for them. Up to now anyway. To the people in the North, Scotland and possibly also NIreland, they say "times are tough and we must all make sacrifices".

They had a go at telling the North how they will be showered with money for levelling up, and reaped unprecedented votes there. But I believe they did precisely 0% of what they promised and are probably toast in the polls there for a generation.

Except their national support is around 25% recently so even the Southerners seem fed up. I guess old people need healthcare...

With the cancellation of HS2 they will do even less than promised!

> The question is, why do voters allow it?

The truth is, they don't really have a choice. The Conservatives and their financial backers have been taking full advantage of the electoral system in the UK, which is how they reached 56% of seats in the House of Commons by winning only 43.6% of the vote.

Well, raise your taxes, UK. For a long time, tax rates in the UK were similar to those of western Europe but sometime in the 90s (?) they dropped them drastically and never brought them back.

Of course with low tax income you can't fund public services.

Another problem is who pays those taxes.

The cost of living crisis made it so you have to earn a much higher salary to get the same standard of living as before, yet the tax brackets haven't been adjusted to match.

You shouldn't be in the highest tax brackets just to be able to enjoy decent housing in London. Raising taxes without adjusting the tax brackets would just make that situation even worse.

Things must be pretty dire if they compare themselves to Germany.

Infrastructure in Germany is crumbling too. Access to basic public services is always measured in weeks. Access to mental healthcare is extremely difficult if you don't pay out of pocket. Public transit is falling apart, especially in the last few weeks. Housing prices are out of control, and yet it's impossible to find a place to live. I hear that education has already collapsed. Berlin has been repeatedly called a failed state over the last decade.

I help people settle in Berlin for a living. I just don't know what to tell them anymore. I'm seeing the collapse in slow motion and it pains me. Berlin was always dysfunctional but at least it was cheap. Now it's not.

Things are bleak, especially when you consider the upcoming challenges that all countries will face: ageing population, cost disease and global warming.

your choice of words are quite poor my dear poster.

Infrastructure is not crumbling, you can be across the entire country in less than 4 hours.

I agree that public transit in Berlin specifically has been better, but you can still get across the city which is wide and not high in about 40 minutes. Car, bike and scooter sharing is plenty-full too and if you really want to, everything is walkable.

The challenges you call out for are also an international problems and the follow up of the boomer generation

When everything takes 4+ weeks to get any piece of paper and the Deutsche Bahn has 52% punctuality (cancellations excluded), I would say that my choice of words is appropriate. These things are getting worse every year. It is crumbling.

Are you reading all of this online or have you actually used any of those transportation methods recently? I have just had a trip for from the boondocks of baden würtenberg to the center of Berlin in said 4:30 hours.

As for your pieces of paper, that is because Berlin is at capacity. Which is also why housing is expensive. Its also -the city to be- for anyone under 50 and one of the top 10 cities for clubbing in the world.

Nothing is crumbling and your punctuality are mostly slight shifts in arrival times.

You are blowing this way out of proportion.

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