Hacker News Reader

Comment by testfrequency | Hacker News Reader

You’re not allowed to celebrate how prepared for the future the UK is over nearly every other country in the world. You must get angry about current high energy costs due to the investments and war that are happening, just ignore anything positive.

View on HN

In fairness, it is very difficult to look at the last 16 years of British governments and hold the belief "these people have well prepared the UK for the future".

I agree there’s no shortage of misses and embarrassments, though I would argue there’s still a lot to be proud of. A lot of progress has been made - especially when you zoom out and compare to peers. The HN crowd these days seems to have it out for Europe, and only sees headlines about doom and gloom in policy.

If anything, the past 16 years has taught me personally that everyone in the UK wants change - too much change possibly.

The UK was the first G7/G20 to cut carbon emissions by 50%, we just ranked [0] 3rd globally large in part to setting up for the future with green energy.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/08/climate-...

Ed Miliband has been doing really well as Energy Secretary, "overseeing a boom in clean energy investment, driving jobs and growth" (1)

But he hasn't been there for very many of the last 16 years.

1) https://observer.co.uk/news/politics/article/miliband-bids-t...

Oddly, the Conservative government was overseeing the renewables boom, although they did kneecap onshore wind unnecessarily.

Sadly the current Conservative leadership have fallen quite far, prioritising cheap culture-war nonsense instead

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/kemi-badenoch-says-tory-hopefu...

Mm. Double-checking their actual record, much moreso than I remember.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com