I'm waiting to see the effects of the brain drain
French universities offering to adopt US academics
EU gives you a choice of price & quality - you can pick what fits your budget best. You can have dirt-cheap but also run down/shitty, or you can have expensive (but still nowhere near the UK) and pleasant.
The UK is the worst of both worlds where it's both expensive and shitty.
But of course the received wisdom is that the UK is a third world shithole with more in common with the Democratic Republic of Congo than any European country, so as you were.
> has London
Yes, the place where in prime city centre locations, you see trash bags dumped on the street because there's literally no space for dumpsters, since they'd rather use that space to (quite literally) seek rent. I swear if there was a way to make people pay rent for oxygen, UK would be the first one to implement it.
> the highest wages in Europe
Where half of it will go to taxes (for nothing in return - again, other EU countries' public services are much better value) and the other half on rent and cost of living (the quality of properties is awful, so you really need to go high-end to get something that's merely considered average in many EU countries).