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Comment by kmeisthax | Hacker News Reader

Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The people who were most screwed by Britain's prior mistakes voted for it in a vain attempt at fixing the problem by throwing misguided nostalgia at it.

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The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.

I wonder how Napoleon would react to finding out that British voted to impose the continental system on themselves.

Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.

The problem I see is that although the trend may have started before, Brexit caused the local financial services sector to effectively collapse and move to the Netherlands and Germany. London will never be able to recover that loss in ten generations. Had brexiters not ejected your finance industry, there was probably an opportunity to recover.

As far as I am aware, this is just straight up is not true. Do you have a source for this? Because if the financial sector in the UK halved and moved into the Netherlands and Germany the UK would be doing much, much worse, and Germany much better economically.

See:

https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-yea...

which is a source that is not going to be biased towards Brexit success, and instead against it (not that there was any success in it, but still).

I looked this up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre#Global_Financ... ) and I think you have got things wrong.

This - the economy rode on financialisation and north sea oil for the two decades before 2008. Since 2008 there has been no real action to resolve the core issue of unlocking the potential of the North of England - everyone knows that that is low hanging fruit (human capital, regional infrastructure etc) but no one will actually take the risk and go for it.

Not really, growth in the UK has effectively stalled since 2008, quite a few years before Brexit.

I’m sure Brexit hasn’t helped, but it seems that the economic stewardship of the coalition and post-coalition governments was also lacking.

I don’t know what the UK can do about it, but it’s been stuck in a spiral of economic stagnation for over 15 years now.

That’s the time the Conservative Party were voted in and imposed “austerity”. This involved scaling back government spending and scratching their heads wondering why growth is stalled.

"Austerity is the idea that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton." - Alexei Sayle

It is insane that not only has it lasted multiple Conservative governments and appears to be alive and well under Starmer's Labour, but also that the USA has now decided to embrace it too.

I don't understand it, I thought these guys were all supposed to have studied economics (is that not the "E" in that Oxbridge "PPE" degree they all have) how are they fumbling the basics so badly

post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7, notably countries that imposed much more severe austerity fared even better - Ireland who are still wedded to the policy continues to thrive, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian economies all grew at a much faster rate than the UK (and by extension the rest of the G7)

> post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7,

Found George Osborne's account! Seriously though, you're wrong:

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370599/g7-country-gdp-g... there is one year (2014) where the UK has a higher GDP growth rate

- https://www.statista.com/statistics/1370625/g7-country-gdp-l... when looking at GDP per-capita it tells a similar story

Even reading those you can surely see it was the correct approach.

Reading the graphs I can see that you were making stuff up and can be safely ignored

Head in the sand eh? even using your data the picture is very different to what you were claiming and much closer to my assertion, so we use different sources...your conclusion is still incorrect.

Bet you're not interested in looking at the three Baltic states I mentioned or Ireland...because it would be another fistful of nails in the coffin of your purely ideological belief that "aUsTeRiTy BaD" (truthfully, some austerity is bad, but the fiscal kind).

We’d had a decade of zero growth and 30 years of industrial decline in the North. The country was not doing well, that’s the primary reason it was inevitable putting a big button marked “do not press, posh boy David Cameron says he doesn’t want you to but has no other solutions. Ignore the people saying it will fix the country” would result in the button being pressed.

The economy was doing well for some parts of the country, but you can only ignore the rest for so long.

Well now its not doing that well anywhere, bravo. Thats the problem with populists - they easily find some real issue and point to it, blaming all even completely unrelated woes on it. So far so good.

But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Like trump stop blaming immigrants or its (former) allies for all US woes.

The cure? Nothing easy, intelligent moral population for democratic elections. Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good (ie refusing 6 weeks mandatory minimal paid vacation per year for workers). That's the population bar for true democracy.

Sure, I'm not saying Brexit was the solution to any of it, quite the opposite. But it wasn't a binary choice between X populist saying "Brexit will fix it immediately" and Y mainstream politician saying "here are the complex factors causing this issue, here's how we as a country can address them over so many years". It was a choice between "Brexit will bring sunlit uplands!" and "the country's doing well, don't ruin it!".

It's not hard to understand why, given that choice, someone stuck in a Northern ex-mining town facing zero prospects, poor housing, no local amenities, massive regional unemployment or unstable employment would listen to the one pretending to be listening to their issues. Again, we'd had 30 years before that where FPTP allowed the main parties to more or less ignore huge parts of the electorate.

> Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good

eh, somewhat.

There are still plenty of emotionally charged decisions being made by Swiss voters, like banning all minarets (in a country that had ... 3 minarets before), blanket granting all pensioneers one additional month of payment per year or routinely wrecking your relationship with the EU.

I agree that on average, the Swiss voters don't do too badly. But it's also easier to vote rationally and for the common good when you're as well off as the Swiss are.

It has preformed broadly in line with other western European economics. If you look at GDP numbers over time the big problem was COVID. The UK is richer relative to France or Italy than it was 25 years ago, but no European country has done as well as the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

The old, which have been ‘criminally’ favoured by Britain’s mistakes, have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. While the young, who have been royally screwed, voted Remain.

What were those prior mistakes?

Allowing the concentration of wealth solely amongst the super wealthy.

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