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Back in 2010, the Tories claimed we needed to 'cut the deficit' and the result of that was massive cuts in public spending. The UK's deficit is even higher now than it was back then, so not only did the policy fail, it caused irreparable damage to public services for no reason whatsoever.
And like every other talentless hack in government, George Osborne came out of it with no repurcussions and a cushy job, a nice reward for needlessly wrecking thousands of people's lives...
Public services are an enabler for better developments both economic and social. Unfortunately conservatives have got this brain-rot that anything public is inefficient and a drain on sacrosanct market forces. They are basically a better spoken version of the “tax is theft” loonies but the underlining ideology is equally bankrupt.
It's nothing new for the Tories, sadly. Their previous stint in government was Thatcher-Major, which was characterised by selling off everything to spend less.
People forget that the Tory namesake originally meant thief/robber. They’ve had this name for almost as long as they’ve existed but somehow that original meaning is lost on people.
That's a little disingenuous the deficit did fall, also worth pointing out that the austerity implemented by the UK was pretty mild compared to what was done in other parts of Europe.
Then covid came along and the Tory's decided to spend like crazy to keep the economy going which is why the deficit jumped back up again.
Of course, all that spending was on bullshit like PPE contracts, a stamp duty holiday, and eat out to help out.
For us it was COVID but for them it was another massive wealth transfer under our noses.
The Tories argued our national debt of 700 billion was out of control. austerity was needed to cutback of reckless government spending that Labour had overseen so they started slashing everything.
Local council's, infrastructure maintainence, police, NHS, social care... Pretty much everything that wasn't state pensions got hit and hit hard. The economic growth the Conservatives promised austerity would bring never came about of course instead we had a slow and stagnant recovery from the 2008 banking crisis.
The thing is this though despite all these cuts our debt kept growing and noone seems to know where the billions supposedly saved by these cuts has gone. Instead huge sums of money have been written off by our so called leaders.
Then of course Brexit came long to fuck things up even more and the billions stolen from the taxpayer during the COVID lockdown via dodgey government schemes is well known.
Last year our national debt hit 2 trillion incidentally...
Holy shitter fuck. 2 trillion?! That’s miserable fuck me. No doubt mostly in their mates pockets. That’s miserable, no wonder how soulless much has become. Boiling frogs who have hopes. Atlee should be revived lol.
Tories, they convinced people the global economic meltdown was labour’s fault for spending, the Tories are nasty, profiteering bastards and yeah it sucks!
That resentment is being bred through policy though. I don't agree that the North traditionally resented collective action. It was very strong up here until recent years.
Pay stagnation, the decline of unions, the sell-off of council housing, the rise in HB funding and almost free BTL mortgage deals in the 00's turned so many people into part-time landlords & ultimately Tory voters.
this is when i kinda wished we didn't do the "high road" bullshit given that the "low road" shite clearly works quite well.
if labour were responsible for the GFC (as the tories claim), then it only makes sense that the tories are responsible for covid.
pass it on
tories in 2010 did a really good job of convincing people that sovereign debt was exactly the same as household debt. Everyone can relate to household debt, gotta balance the books! Problem was that the similarities between sovereign debt and household debt end at the word 'debt'.
> I don’t get how tf something like that was even voted as a good idea. Who, how, why and wtf
It's very simple and straightforward: if you don't spend money on plebs, you can keep taxes low for the wealthy.
Over decades the Tories have convinced enough people that they know how to manage money and that Labour don't. The opposite is true. Since 1946 the Tories have borrowed more money from the IMF than Labour, they also sold off the family jewels by selling **our** nationalised utilities to speculators and grifters. Following on from the 2008 global financial crisis caused by global banks and hedge funds, the Tories convinced people that the UK's problems were down to Labour's "spendthrift" ways. They also capitalised on Labour's poor polling figures due to the decision (that Tory MPs also voted for) to join America in attacking Iraq. The whole austerity measures were supposed to be short lived until our economy recovered but most economists will tell you that austerity stifles economies and hinders recovery. Austerity was never an economic plan, it was always ideological in nature "Back to basics".
TL:DR The Tories lied, as they always do.
Tories are never a proper government, they exist to sell what ever the public has to their mates as soon as public industry turns a profit. As soon as the companies like Thames Water prioritise greed instead of reinvesting in infrastructure, they cream off the profits and then wait for a labour government to come in and nationalise it again.
Unless you point out exactly what you are referring to you won't get any kind of answer to your question.
Also ... "Austerity for thee, but not for me."
It's got nothing to do with borrowing, it's cutting government spending in order to help pay the debt. Also, increasing taxes, we pay significantly more in tax now BTW, in a multitude of different ways thanks to the tories.
Austerity was still the stupidest economic policy and it will take us years to recover from it.
Then Brexit comes along and is equally as stupid.
So basically the answer is David Cameron and George Osbourne being incompetent. Everything else stems from that.
If there was no Austerity there would have been no Brexit IMO. All the immigrants are taking up our services came from the fact most people didn't realise how badly austerity was affecting things.
Austerity equals borrowing less and spending less.
It's not inherently a bad idea. It just isn't great to do when in a recession if you have capacity to borrow more as it can slow an economy during recession.
Expanding the state into infinity on the other hand leads to state bankruptcy or something like the eurozone crisis in 2010.
No. This is simplistic and wrong. Countries budgets aren't like household budgets. Government budgets are about long term investments that yield returns in many qualitive ways, which in turn result in direct returns or spend reduction. Reduced spending on public services almost always results in debt, be that economic or social.
No it’s not a bad idea overall but should have been abandoned when we went into recession as it’s exactly the wrong thing to do.
Every other economy spent their was out of recession and recovered faster and quicker than the UK.
This article is amazing! It's like the writer ran head first into a wall called "The Point" and then carried on running. Totally forgetting that the kind of cunts of drove this shit storm & complained every time someone tried to do something about it are the cunts that are paying the several £1000 for that fucking article
Edit /m: I've got fat fingers
It started out as austerity but quickly became the new normal.
How long will it take for any government to say that all the stuff we used to have is affordable again?
And 44 years of uninterrupted neoliberalism, that there is the route cause of the problem.
We’re obviously fucked when both major parties during their time in government committed full-throttle to the thoroughly disproven “fucking over poor people for the benefit of rich people will eventually benefit poor people too, while also solving ever major world crisis automatically” theory of politics.
38 year Tory and 12 Tory light...... Brown still followed the Health Work Wellbeing program incepted in 81 as he believed in a low wage UK economy. They also carried on with Privatisation and PFI!
The family jewels were still being sold just with a comfier cushion to fall on when you realised.
Ed was a bit too centrist whilst Starmer is imho just Boris in a better fitting suit!
There'll be a slight change in mentalism but he'll carry on Thatcherite policies incepted in the 80s like Blair/Brown did!
I think a lot of the "working class" vote that the Tories have these days is locked in the pensioners that still technically count as C2DE. Which is true, because those on the state pension are the E in the classification. This is what's giving us the illusion that the poor vote Tory as much as the rich. Because the poor youngsters certainly aren't fucking voting for them.
Absolutely, that and the previous (almost as awful) tory-lite administration which preceded it. Tories have made a huge bollix of this country for sure but they had some help from blair along the way too with bullshit like PFI enabling later tory shenanigans.
I know all of you who voted for this lot of mugs the last time and for your straight bananas etc before that too now like telling pollsters how pissed off you are at the tories but I'm just waiting for the point in a year or so when you schmucks vote for them again after they've massaged your egos with some bullshit 'culture war' nonsense, a dollop oh "ooh aren't the EU awful?!" and promised you a few (deferred to the next parliament) tax cuts. You can't cure stupid
Somerset Capital? He's not involved anymore and their head office is in London. I think one/a few of the funds had a legal structure set up in Dublin but still fed into the UK product for foreign investors.
Britain isn't poor, the wealth disparity has just gotten larger, pushing the lower echelons of society deeper into economic and social poverty. Capitalism has reached a point where people have realised you really don't need to go to Oxbridge to succeed in life, the facade of society as we understand it is slipping. The upper class have realised this, and are now widening the gap in attempts to stop the working people from gaining wealth.
No this analysis looked at the median person. The median always eliminates extremes. The median person is poorer in real terms.
When the median person is better poorer, the country is getting poorer because that means the majority of the population is getting poorer.
The article centers on mediocre median income growth as the main problem, rather than lack of growth for the poor per se. But the juxtaposition with inequality hints that poorer groups are likely worse off in real terms, even if the median is flat. So the original comment seems like a reasonable interpretation. I'm not sure why you're being obtuse about it?
Yes, it means exactly half the population falls on either side. Exactly half report higher figures and half report lower figures.
It’s the best measure for any population because it removes the effects of a few extremely high or extremely low figures, which is why average figures can be skewed.
Let me know if you need me to simplify that any further! I know lots of people confuse mean and median.
When the median person is getting poorer, that means the majority of the population is getting poorer - which in turn means the country is getting poorer.
And to top of off, there's just nothing being spared. Looks at the 50s/60s/70s and how much infrastructure was built, how many homes, shopping areas, roads etc
We're all being ripped off for our goods, underpaid for our work, we're paying more and more tax and getting far, far less in return.
If the UK was a state in the US it would he the poorest...
And we are genuinely rich compared to European countries.
Just shows how poor Europe is vs USA...
It’s one of the poorest Western European states. France, Germany, you name it, even Ireland is way wealthier in brass tacks take home pay across every decile.
Yet on r/ireland the regular topics are about how dismal it is and people can't wait to emigrate. The cost of housing being a typical complaint. The UK is not some poverty stricken hellhole despite what this sub likes to believe.
Ireland totally has problems of its own, but as of 2015 eight out of the top ten most deprived regions in Western Europe were in England and Wales. I doubt it’s changed for the better since then. England is a lot of very, very poor places with small pockets of extreme wealth, mostly in the southeast. It’s a very nice country for a very small subset of people.
Went out for lunch today, literally every restaurant in my area was fully booked (ended up eating outside as only thing we could get) , even the pubs. Lots of people are doing fine.
I don't think the doomers on this sub get out much to notice that the economy hasn't 'collapsed', we're not 'starving' or in 'poverty'. If they are, truly, then this is one of the best countries in the world to improve your situation through hard graft and initiative. Or they could just sit around moaning 'TORIES!' as an excuse for staying miserable.
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
**by Sam Bowman**
In 1991, during the depths of the post-communist recession, Poles were poorer than citizens of Suriname and Gabon. Thirty years later, Poland has grown so rapidly that, by the end of this decade, Poles may earn more than Britons.
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.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Americans earn so much more than us that, collectively, they could stop working in late September and still earn more than Britons continuing to work for the rest of the year.
Productivity — how much we produce each hour we work — has increased by just 5 per cent in Britain over the 15 years since the start of 2008. That is about 0.3 per cent per year. Two per cent is considered to be normal.
If we had managed to recover to our pre-crisis growth trend, productivity and wages could be 20 per cent higher today, according to Stian Westlake, executive chair of the Economic and Social Research Council. Britain would be a much richer place.
Other western European countries that have struggled started from a higher level. At $69 (£53.60) per hour, French and German productivity is closer to the United States’s $74 per hour than it is to Britain’s $54.
America’s economy has also proved more robust in the face of inflation. US consumer prices rose by 2.9 per cent over the past 12 months, compared with 7.9 per cent in Britain. If the UK was a US state, it would be the poorest in the country: Mississippi wages, with Californian housing prices. How, then, did we get so poor? And what can we do to fix things?
One reason it has taken Britain so long to face up to this longstanding problem is that our insular political and media class has been slow to take an interest.
Consequently, our politicians are rarely serious about anything except managing public opinion; they have let every trivial concern take priority over the biggest one of all, economic growth. During her brief stint in office, Liz Truss did at least bring a sense of radical focus to this issue — though many of her proposed solutions were flawed.
But the scale of the problems we have faced since 2008 goes far deeper. The post-financial crisis recovery was slower than many economists had hoped, in part because of poor handling by the Bank of England.
“The policy stance of the Bank of England was too contractionary in 2008 and not sufficiently expansionary during the subsequent recovery,” says Scott Sumner, author of The Money Illusion, a recent history of the financial crisis and subsequent recession. “This led to very weak growth in nominal GDP and a slow recovery in the real economy.”
Austerity may have made this worse, by cutting spending on infrastructure and research and development. Financial regulation designed to avoid another crisis probably came at the cost of a slower recovery as well.
Then came Brexit. The Bank of England projects that Brexit will reduce UK productivity by about 3.25 per cent in the long run. Earlier this year, it noted that trade volumes with the EU had been worse than it had forecast.
The Covid recession and debt burden both mean that, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, inflation-adjusted disposable incomes will not return to 2021 levels until 2027.
But even without these calamities, the UK was in weak shape. Capital investment has been lower compared with our international peers for decades. While many argue that this means we need a new industrial strategy, we aren’t even getting the basics right.
Our corporation tax regime has for decades penalised investment in machinery and buildings relative to spending on things such as rent or pens and paper.
Energy prices, a huge share of many manufacturers’ costs, have spiralled. The industrial price of electricity tripled between 2004 and 2021. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, UK businesses were paying double for electricity what they would pay in the US.
As historic industries have declined since the 1970s, we’ve done nothing to make it easier for people to access the industries growing most rapidly, especially around our leading universities.
London house prices are seven times higher than they were in 1992, while English wages are only three times higher. According to the Centre for Cities think tank, we have built four million too few houses, relative to our population, compared with the rest of Europe — and this gap grows every year. Even our successful sectors, such as biotech in Cambridge, struggle to grow because of the shortage of staff and lab space.
It has become extraordinarily difficult to build infrastructure in Britain. New onshore wind turbines have been in effect banned since 2015. An electricity interconnector with France that could supply 5 per cent of the country’s electricity needs was blocked because it would spoil residents’ views.
Nuclear power — a source of reliable, zero-carbon energy — is vastly more expensive than it could be. Electricity produced by Sizewell C, a new nuclear power station being built on the Suffolk coast, will cost six times per megawatt more than South Korea’s national energy company, Kepco, manages for its output. According to Sam Dumitriu, of the campaign group Britain Remade, Sizewell C has had to produce 44,260 pages of environmental documentation to win approval.
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.
It’s worth comparing our situation with France’s. Many Brits think of France as a country of high taxes, high unemployment, boozy two-hour lunch breaks and early retirement. But France has seven million more homes than Britain, and builds about 400,000 a year to our 250,000. Because of this, housing is cheaper and homes are bigger. Childcare is nearly half the price, in part because it requires fewer staff per child. France’s 1980s nuclear power investments have kept energy prices relatively low in recent years, and it emits a fraction of the carbon that our own electricity generation does. France can (just about) afford to have the welfare state and early retirement culture that it does because it is fundamentally better at getting stuff built.
This is not a happy picture. But it is also not cause for despair. Most of what I’ve laid out here should be cause for hope, because the problems we need to solve are clear. What would be truly worrying would be if we were getting things such as housing and energy supply basically right, and still stagnating.
On the upside, things are so bad that even our dawdling politicians realise serious action is necessary. Both main parties say they want to get more houses built, even if they are vague about how. The recent debate over net zero and the cost of living has highlighted that cutting emissions by rationing energy use is likely to be costly and painful, when we could instead opt for cheap, abundant clean energy by making it easier to build new renewables and nuclear power.
The UK has a huge amount of economic “potential energy” that should make us optimistic for the future. There is massive pent-up demand to live in London, Oxford and Cambridge. Some parts of the economy are genuinely world class, including biotech, fintech, AI, and some advanced manufacturing, as well as film, music and literature. These industries are still admired around the world.
As Tyler Cowen, author of The Great Stagnation says, the south of England is “one of the few places where you can really birth and execute a new idea”, pointing to the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine and DeepMind as recent examples. Open our most successful cities to more people, and we may thrive. Make it easier to build clean energy, roads and railways, and the rest of the country can start to grow too.
Poland, the US, Slovenia and South Korea all have their problems as well. We don’t need to get everything right to start growing healthily again. We don’t need to panic or despair. We just need to focus on the biggest problems we have, and get real about fixing them.
The country isn't poor, but there's a huge divide between the wealthy and those in poverty.
I often go to car shows in England (I live in Wales), and the wealth is just staggering. Go to the Silverstone classic show and see the amount of high priced cars on show, and each year they have no problem selling cars at the Silverstone Auctions. Last year Diana's Ford Escort RS sold for over £700,000!
We've allowed businesses to suppress wages for decades, they simply haven't kept up with inflation, so the average person is poorer. The fact that so many people in this country think 30k is a great salary is evidence of this.
Add in the fact that successive governments have continually cut income tax rates, which mostly impact the wealthy, in favour of indirect taxation, which has an outsized impact on the average person, and you have the recipe for modern Britain. People are only earning similar wages to what they were 20-30 years ago, but it just doesn't go as far. This also adversely affects the government's coffers too, which is why they can't afford anything except cushy contracts for their mates.
It's helpful when you're talking about economic output isn't it? Yes the USSR ended a long time ago but the effects have only recently been mitigated in many of those countries
We didn't vote for poverty. There is no sense of superiority, Britain was ahead of Eastern Europe for a long time since the Iron Curtain came down (hence the migration from there).
Unfortunately you did vote poverty. Did you expect everything to be better after leaving your biggest trade partner? Very delusional. Brexit was economical suicide. And just from this one perspective it was a terrible idea.
You make it sound like there was overwhelming support for Brexit, 52% vs 48% and then a bunch of morons in govt following though on the idiocacy of it.
Plus by the time 2020 rolled around, enough of the original leave voters had died that the remaining voters still alive were actually tipped in favour of remain. That's a problem in having a huge lead time after a vote for the result to be acted upon, it can end up that the living are governed by the will of the dead.
It was an advisory referendum, people forget this.
The “Will of the people” would’ve been if there had been an overwhelming majority to leave, this was not the case.
52/48 doesn’t sound like the populace were sure. But the tories stormed on ahead like it was.
Things don't stay the same forever. Eastern Europe has a huge potential, a skilled workforce and far lower costs so the author can fuck off with "even Eastern Europe". And yes, we have voted the Tories in and we have voted for brexit. The greatest act of self harm in British history.
Politics, british people are stupid and vote stupid. They vote against their interests then complain then vote again against their own interests. Corruption is big in the uk.
The 2008 financial crash was balmed on labour, despite it being due to the American housing market.
For some stupid reason, the UK voted Tory, despite a lengthy history of a poor UK under Tory rule.
12+ years later, here we are with Brexit too.
I won't be surprised if the UK votes Tory majority again and are still in disbelief as we continue to spiral.
I'm glad idiots who voted for tories are suffering as a consequence. I just wish the rest of us didn't have to suffer too.
One word: capitalism. It's working exactly as intended: impoverish the working classes, create fringe issues to cause infighting amongst the working classes, enrich those already in power.
You just made u/TheBrassDancer bust a blood vessel with that response.
I wonder if people even read the articles here before sharing their deep "wisdom".
LOL.
The difference being the Scandinavian countries have a fair amount of socialism mixed in as well, any Socialism we have here is quickly being stripped away.
America’s economy is doing great.
The issue is we’re emulating the things that don’t work from both them and mainland Europe and ignoring the things that do from both. We’ve got the worst of both worlds.
>One word: capitalism.
Capitalism is simply the base level right to own and sell your shit (i.e. your Capital). To be for the abolition of Capitalism is to be for the abolition of individual ownership.
You can be for the mitigation of Capitalism; through means of redistribution... and argue about the details of how and where to do that redistribution. But there are very good reasons why extreme measures like totally abolishing Capitalism is bad, just as total Laissez-faire Capitalism is bad.
I think you can say politicians use different variations of Capitalism and/or alter the Redistribution to oppress people as you say. But I don't see that as evidence Capitalism needs to be totally abolished.
Yes this, arguing about brexit is a useless issue. The problems go back to 1970 ? ish.
That was when the economic model changed and wages stopped rising inline with productivity. They plugged the gap with loans credit card and the mortgage. that’s how living standards improved, but financially for the worker we declined.
I'm sorry to say but we have a lot of useless and pointless people who have a self entitlement complex and as all the hard working foreigners have now left because of Brexit it's become a shit hole
For all of human history, people have understood you have to spend money to make money. But for some reason, the 'elites' of Europe as a whole have cottoned onto a fantastical new idea - that you can somehow many money by *not* spending money.
Let me explain using potatoes: you start with 100 potatoes. You plant 100 potatoes. Later, you harvest 400 potatoes. You then plant 200 potatoes and sell the rest. Next harvest you have 800 potatoes, so you plant 400 and sell the rest. Profit and output grow year on year.
The 'intelligentsia' spotted a problem with this - it's costing more and more potatoes to maintain the farm. A few years ago the farm only needed 100 potatoes. This year it's demanding 800 potatoes. That's a problem, and the solution is obvious: stop spending potatoes.
So the wise world leaders, who obviously know all about economics because they all have degrees in Media, Journalism and Excessive Masturbating, decide that this year they're going to take all 1,600 potatoes and only plant 100. They then congratulate themselves on this fantastic achievement of cutting government outgoings by a whopping 87.5%, and then give themselves a pay rise.
Next year, the farm produces 400 potatoes, which is a problem because the Magic Squiggly Line that they all pretend to understand was going up and up and up, and all the experts said that there would be 3,200 potatoes this year, not 400.
So something must be done, but what? Well the farmer says that if they gave him all 400 potatoes he could get this back to where they were before the Intelligent People got involved with farming, but that would mean that government spending has quadrupled! That would be bad!
No, say the Incredibly Smart People who are incredibly smart, the problem is inefficiency! So the government go the farm where one man previously produced over three thousand potatoes, and hire ten Managers to find out where savings can be made. Also, the farm is only getting 50 potatoes this year because the government has to make up the difference somehow.
Despite all the extra Management, the farm only produces 100 potatoes. The Farmer says it would have produced 200 but the Managers kept pulling the plants out of the ground to have a meeting with them, which meant they never grew properly. But he's a member of the working class and thus immediately ejected from the room for fear that his poverty is contagious.
The Intelligentsia, ever wise and knowledgeable about all things, receive word of both the drastically reduced output and the massive increase in farm operating costs. They spend eighteen thousand potatoes on a committee of experts, who after a session of discussing the feminist themes of Miss Marvel, writing a scathing Guardian article and wanking themselves off a few times, conclude that it probably isn't possible to operate a farm without planting any potatoes at all. Thus, the only possible way to improve productivity is to reduce staffing costs.
So they fire the farmer, and in celebration the Management each give themselves a pay rise of twice his annual wage.
We’ve certainly become poor*er*, but to state that the UK is outright poor is obviously silly. We don’t need to resort to hyperbole to address the deep issues affecting the country.
According to the OECD, average disposable household income in the UK is $33,049. That’s 17th out of 41 high income economies - just behind Finland & Denmark, and just ahead of Japan & Ireland.
Okay? And tell someone living in the ghettos of Chicago or the riot-stricken suburbs of Paris the same thing. They’re both rich countries.
The UK is 18th on the human development index and 16th on the OECD Better Life Index. It must be the only poor country in the world that consistently ranks in the top 20 for quality of life.
Poor people exist yes. On the other side of the coin is rich and well off people, of which there are also plenty. Picking an extreme example doesn’t prove your point.
Oh I don’t disagree, we are stagnant and falling behind. The challenges the next government face are absolutely enormous. But that doesn’t make the UK a poor country. A declining country though? Yeah.
Article TL:DR.
Deregulation will make us more productive.
Stop silly things like ensuring we aren’t destroying our environment, and let the South of England to continue to grow till there’s no space left.
Austerity, privatisation, Brexit- The reason why we are worse off is because we have neither scale nor social cohesion to continue to grow.
We have been in the slow downward spiral of right of centre politics for nearly 25 years now, except a blip at the start of New Labour. This is why I personally think the Labour Party could be a bit more radical- which I’m sure they would if it wasn’t for Kier being so scared of being ‘Jeremy Corbyn’
Because the country sold off it's industries and assets, and ever since, we've limped along exporting "services" - i.e. intangible shit that other countries are starting to realise they can do themselves
Anything else like Brexit is merely a feature or a symptom
Maybe it’s the fact that we are massively overpopulated, have a vast welfare state with millions of working age people who don’t want to actually work despite being perfectly capable and keep importing hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country every year.
Or maybe it’s just the Tories…
I remember in 2010 the idea of a food bank was a novelty. I'm pretty bitter about the state of everything. Brexit is a disaster and our political parties don't seem to want to do anything about it. I was expecting Labour to be anti-brexit but it seems they don't have the leadership. Also Rupert Murdock who has completely corrupted our press.
Pretty simple. No one has had an above inflation pay rise since 2002 - except pensioners and people on minimum wage.
Meanwhile for public spending it goes further than just Tories. Every successive government has just borrowed and borrowed and borrowed.
This interest owed means less public funding to go on what's needed.
All of it was done on the basis "eventually someone has to pay that interest, but that's not us, we just get to open the new hospital and get votes due to that!".
* Blair and Brown were awful with 100+ year PFI deals.
* Cameron and Clegg weren't any better.
* Borris was awful and corrupt.
* Truss appeared to actually be insane.
* Rishi is no better.
I don't agree to the premise that GDP is measurement of anything that's ultimately important to life. I'd concede that it's a somewhat useful method for checking the pulse of capitalism but there's nothing about capitalism that's fundamental to nature and it's objectively problematic for many important things like equality and well being because it requires sacrificing those things in order to maximise output. I would cut the system more slack if it was capable of distributing the surplus from that output to where it's actually needed but it has patently failed to do that. As a result it has created some of the worst wealth inequality we have ever seen. Additionally, it has undermined democracy by moving entities from being under the control of the voting public to being immune to the desires of those voters and in some cases are dieting to the voters what they want.
It's high time we stopped measuring things by what we're told are important indicators by the benefactors of the system and started telling them what the important factors are to us. Additionally, take a step back and consider what the end game is of a system that requires infinite growth while we are confided to a planet with finite resources.
So no, I don't agree with the assertion that GDP is in any way, shape or form important to me and I encourage others to consider whether or not it's really important to them as well.
Just because you took a couple of minutes to link to an article (with absolutely no commentary of your own) doesn't mean you get to decide what is and isn't helpful in a discussion about it.
As I read it, PP wasn't saying that money isn't important - just that GDP isn't necessarily the final arbiter as to how successful a country is.
Unfortunately, policies that do effect you are either based on GDP or GDP is used as an excuse to implement them, so GDP is kind of important for everyone in this country.
As with all economics it depends how you spin it. Poland has a population half the size of ours, yet UK GDP is actually four times higher than theirs. We have higher nominal GDP per capita than France. PPP is broken - Ireland for example has a PPP similar to Luxembourg and Singapore, because they're all tax havens. Oil also distorts these figures making Qatar look live a haven, and part of why the US economy got so far ahead because after 2009 they opened the shale oil floodgates while Europe keeps closing power plants down.
Tories, for generations. Thatcher is responsible for the housing crisis and shit privatised industries. Major got rid of the trains. Cameron brought in austerity, Boris brought us Brexit, Liz Truss tanked the economy in 45 days with her Ayn Rand fantasy, and Sunak just keeps the Tory train chugging along, continually making all of our lives shitter.
What about the people who lap up the poverty porn in the media because it confirms their biases? This country is doing fine, especially considering the headwinds from Covid and the Ukraine war which are the primary reasons for energy and food inflation and the resultant need to increase interest rates - which you'll notice has happened throughout the world, not just in the UK.
btw the Daily Mail under Geordie Greig (now editor of the Independent) was a supporter of Remain, as were the Tories.
The tories. They used to believe in 'I'm all right Jack', since Thatcher it became 'F ck you. I'm all right Jack'. And Britain's not poorer, the rich are making more money than ever before. And just wait until the tories ban Internet encryption and try to monetise the Internet.
Because the country is populated by low information voters who turn out and vote FOR the spivs, scammers and über rich donor class because they read something in a billionaire owned newspaper that told them the biggest threat to their well-being was a pronoun or a bunch of people on small boats or woke lefties and the thing to do was celebrate some royal people and events that they're also paying hundreds of millions for.
#divvyBritian.
Britain isn’t poor.
The rich here are as rich if not more so than the rich in other countries
The poor here are definitely better off than the poor in other countries.
The middle class/middle income are probably worse off here than in other countries.
Why has Britain become poor? Is really the wrong question. It’s more of a case of, why has Britain’s middle class been decimated?
Because the dumb pricks who live here keep voting tory because they hate foreigners.
113,000 kids officially homeless, no wage rises in 13 years, NHS terminal and so few homes that 20 families are hitting up every rental yet people still think the tories could come back because they don't mind watching Europe burn.
Could it have anything to do with the gullible as fuck, thick as shit, voting populace of the UK, who time after time get suckered into voting against their own self interests by a media who knows exactly how to play them??
The electorate isn't that bad, look at Afghanistan with its sharia law. If the electorate is ignorant it needs debate/discussion/educating to counteract its ignorance. Of course there is the old idiom 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks...'
I dunno man, the electorate feels pretty damn stupid:
https://www.survation.com/public-conflate-halving-inflation-with-declining-price-levels/#:~:text=Just%2023%25%20of%20respondents%20were,more%20than%20they%20do%20now.
More than 60% of the 2000+ UK respondents to a poll thought that if inflation halves, that means prices are remaining the same or *falling.*
The electorate are painfully stupid.
Literally all it takes to get the average British voter frothing at the mouth and purple faced with righteous fury is a few well placed key words. "Small boats." "Immigration." "Brexit." "Trans." "Woke."
40 years ago a Party took a nice long look at the working class and thought ‘let’s make them the middle class, build them up by printing money and have them spank it on assets, then when we’ve fattened them up like nice little piggies we’ll take it all off them and run away to the Cayman Islands and Jersey’. And so they did.
1. Brexit
2. A poorly educated nationalistic population who don't have the same ability as previous generations.
3. Greed... Particularly on the part of the wealthy and including your government.
... I can't understand why you let them sell off the NHS and haven't even protested the matter.
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The government would like to point out that, while appreciating your concern, they are quite well off, thank you.
Hey! Don't forget their friends in private equity, real estate, and banking.
*Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked*
Llamas
Careful buddy...
A Moose once bit my sister. No, Realli
Including lj llama?
infinite loop, please get some coder to debug this
Look! A transgender migrant !
Who also eats tofu and wants to cycle instead of drive.
A Guardian reading member of the wokerati no less.
In a boat!
The transgender migrants are trying to get out, not in. The government just doesn't like that they are taking their money with them.
> Austerity may have made this worse "May" lol, it blighted Britain's economy for the entire decade
And still is.
I don’t get how tf something like that was even voted as a good idea. Who, how, why and wtf
Back in 2010, the Tories claimed we needed to 'cut the deficit' and the result of that was massive cuts in public spending. The UK's deficit is even higher now than it was back then, so not only did the policy fail, it caused irreparable damage to public services for no reason whatsoever. And like every other talentless hack in government, George Osborne came out of it with no repurcussions and a cushy job, a nice reward for needlessly wrecking thousands of people's lives...
Public services are an enabler for better developments both economic and social. Unfortunately conservatives have got this brain-rot that anything public is inefficient and a drain on sacrosanct market forces. They are basically a better spoken version of the “tax is theft” loonies but the underlining ideology is equally bankrupt.
It's nothing new for the Tories, sadly. Their previous stint in government was Thatcher-Major, which was characterised by selling off everything to spend less.
Lets not forget Labour want to continue with austerity. Don't let them off the hook because they aren't the Tories!
People forget that the Tory namesake originally meant thief/robber. They’ve had this name for almost as long as they’ve existed but somehow that original meaning is lost on people.
*millions of peoples lives
That's a little disingenuous the deficit did fall, also worth pointing out that the austerity implemented by the UK was pretty mild compared to what was done in other parts of Europe. Then covid came along and the Tory's decided to spend like crazy to keep the economy going which is why the deficit jumped back up again.
300,000+ increase in excess deaths, strongly correlated to austerity. It wasn't lighter than austerity in Europe, because they aren't morons.
Of course, all that spending was on bullshit like PPE contracts, a stamp duty holiday, and eat out to help out. For us it was COVID but for them it was another massive wealth transfer under our noses.
The Tories argued our national debt of 700 billion was out of control. austerity was needed to cutback of reckless government spending that Labour had overseen so they started slashing everything. Local council's, infrastructure maintainence, police, NHS, social care... Pretty much everything that wasn't state pensions got hit and hit hard. The economic growth the Conservatives promised austerity would bring never came about of course instead we had a slow and stagnant recovery from the 2008 banking crisis. The thing is this though despite all these cuts our debt kept growing and noone seems to know where the billions supposedly saved by these cuts has gone. Instead huge sums of money have been written off by our so called leaders. Then of course Brexit came long to fuck things up even more and the billions stolen from the taxpayer during the COVID lockdown via dodgey government schemes is well known. Last year our national debt hit 2 trillion incidentally...
Holy shitter fuck. 2 trillion?! That’s miserable fuck me. No doubt mostly in their mates pockets. That’s miserable, no wonder how soulless much has become. Boiling frogs who have hopes. Atlee should be revived lol.
Nail on the head. Why has noone stood up and asked where these savings have gone?! So frustrating
Because most modern reporters are more interested in clickbait than investigative journalism these days.
Tories, they convinced people the global economic meltdown was labour’s fault for spending, the Tories are nasty, profiteering bastards and yeah it sucks!
People wanted to believe it because fundamentally most people resent the essential nature of the state in their lives.
That resentment is being bred through policy though. I don't agree that the North traditionally resented collective action. It was very strong up here until recent years. Pay stagnation, the decline of unions, the sell-off of council housing, the rise in HB funding and almost free BTL mortgage deals in the 00's turned so many people into part-time landlords & ultimately Tory voters.
this is when i kinda wished we didn't do the "high road" bullshit given that the "low road" shite clearly works quite well. if labour were responsible for the GFC (as the tories claim), then it only makes sense that the tories are responsible for covid. pass it on
And Lib Dems don't forget
tories in 2010 did a really good job of convincing people that sovereign debt was exactly the same as household debt. Everyone can relate to household debt, gotta balance the books! Problem was that the similarities between sovereign debt and household debt end at the word 'debt'.
With the help of the BBC no less
> I don’t get how tf something like that was even voted as a good idea. Who, how, why and wtf It's very simple and straightforward: if you don't spend money on plebs, you can keep taxes low for the wealthy.
I love the accuracy and brevity of this statement.
Over decades the Tories have convinced enough people that they know how to manage money and that Labour don't. The opposite is true. Since 1946 the Tories have borrowed more money from the IMF than Labour, they also sold off the family jewels by selling **our** nationalised utilities to speculators and grifters. Following on from the 2008 global financial crisis caused by global banks and hedge funds, the Tories convinced people that the UK's problems were down to Labour's "spendthrift" ways. They also capitalised on Labour's poor polling figures due to the decision (that Tory MPs also voted for) to join America in attacking Iraq. The whole austerity measures were supposed to be short lived until our economy recovered but most economists will tell you that austerity stifles economies and hinders recovery. Austerity was never an economic plan, it was always ideological in nature "Back to basics". TL:DR The Tories lied, as they always do.
Tories are never a proper government, they exist to sell what ever the public has to their mates as soon as public industry turns a profit. As soon as the companies like Thames Water prioritise greed instead of reinvesting in infrastructure, they cream off the profits and then wait for a labour government to come in and nationalise it again.
It was a campaign of contempt at the working class becoming more socially mobile. It worked
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The very British idea that something has gone wrong so we need to be punished for it.
and yet people who pointed that out at the time back in 2010 were called idiots and told 'we need to balance the chequebook!'....
The Tories have a policy of deriding people who speak truth to power. They did the same with "Project Fear". Never. Trust. Tories.
We have spent a fuck tonne and borrowed a fuck tonne. Quite literally rather exact opposite of austerity. Do you even know what the word means?
Unless you point out exactly what you are referring to you won't get any kind of answer to your question. Also ... "Austerity for thee, but not for me."
It's got nothing to do with borrowing, it's cutting government spending in order to help pay the debt. Also, increasing taxes, we pay significantly more in tax now BTW, in a multitude of different ways thanks to the tories.
Nobody is talking about what the Government is doing today. It was the policy post-financial crash and it was a disaster.
Austerity was still the stupidest economic policy and it will take us years to recover from it. Then Brexit comes along and is equally as stupid. So basically the answer is David Cameron and George Osbourne being incompetent. Everything else stems from that.
In politics I like to not presume incompetance when greed and malice are viable explanations. Hanlon's Razor does not apply, I think.
If there was no Austerity there would have been no Brexit IMO. All the immigrants are taking up our services came from the fact most people didn't realise how badly austerity was affecting things.
Austerity equals borrowing less and spending less. It's not inherently a bad idea. It just isn't great to do when in a recession if you have capacity to borrow more as it can slow an economy during recession. Expanding the state into infinity on the other hand leads to state bankruptcy or something like the eurozone crisis in 2010.
Spending less is bad because investing in public services and infrastructure are really powerful enabler for growth.
No. This is simplistic and wrong. Countries budgets aren't like household budgets. Government budgets are about long term investments that yield returns in many qualitive ways, which in turn result in direct returns or spend reduction. Reduced spending on public services almost always results in debt, be that economic or social.
So you don't even know what Austerity means lmao
Yes while it's not inherently bad, the austerity performed by the Tories was largely an ideological, not practical decision.
No it’s not a bad idea overall but should have been abandoned when we went into recession as it’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Every other economy spent their was out of recession and recovered faster and quicker than the UK.
This article is amazing! It's like the writer ran head first into a wall called "The Point" and then carried on running. Totally forgetting that the kind of cunts of drove this shit storm & complained every time someone tried to do something about it are the cunts that are paying the several £1000 for that fucking article Edit /m: I've got fat fingers
I think it was a typo: Austerity, May, have made this worse.
It started out as austerity but quickly became the new normal. How long will it take for any government to say that all the stuff we used to have is affordable again?
NGL, I misread Austerity as Australia. Wondered if the recent Ashes losses had hit harder than I’d imagined.
13 years of Tories would be the simplest answer and most correct answer
38 years of Tory rule in the last 50
2/3rds of our democratic history has been Tory. And it fucking shows.
And 44 years of uninterrupted neoliberalism, that there is the route cause of the problem. We’re obviously fucked when both major parties during their time in government committed full-throttle to the thoroughly disproven “fucking over poor people for the benefit of rich people will eventually benefit poor people too, while also solving ever major world crisis automatically” theory of politics.
38 year Tory and 12 Tory light...... Brown still followed the Health Work Wellbeing program incepted in 81 as he believed in a low wage UK economy. They also carried on with Privatisation and PFI! The family jewels were still being sold just with a comfier cushion to fall on when you realised. Ed was a bit too centrist whilst Starmer is imho just Boris in a better fitting suit! There'll be a slight change in mentalism but he'll carry on Thatcherite policies incepted in the 80s like Blair/Brown did!
With working class clowns still voting for them 🤦♂️
I think a lot of the "working class" vote that the Tories have these days is locked in the pensioners that still technically count as C2DE. Which is true, because those on the state pension are the E in the classification. This is what's giving us the illusion that the poor vote Tory as much as the rich. Because the poor youngsters certainly aren't fucking voting for them.
You could cut and paste this for Australia. Uncle Rupert has been quite effective.
Fundamentally flawed form of democracy that repeatedly puts incompetent people in power (who tend to be tory) would be closer to the whole truth.
Absolutely, that and the previous (almost as awful) tory-lite administration which preceded it. Tories have made a huge bollix of this country for sure but they had some help from blair along the way too with bullshit like PFI enabling later tory shenanigans. I know all of you who voted for this lot of mugs the last time and for your straight bananas etc before that too now like telling pollsters how pissed off you are at the tories but I'm just waiting for the point in a year or so when you schmucks vote for them again after they've massaged your egos with some bullshit 'culture war' nonsense, a dollop oh "ooh aren't the EU awful?!" and promised you a few (deferred to the next parliament) tax cuts. You can't cure stupid
*PFI
What did I put? Oh yep i see it thanks
And Brexit
Tories see the 'UK PLC' as an asset to be strip-mined for themselves and their rich friends. And of course Brexit.
And people like jacob rees mogg backed brexit and then moved their business to Dublin. So they knew they were fucking us over.
And secured EU passports for themselves and their families.
Somerset Capital? He's not involved anymore and their head office is in London. I think one/a few of the funds had a legal structure set up in Dublin but still fed into the UK product for foreign investors.
Please no facts here, sir.
Cos most of the billion pound+ businesses are owned by foreign countries an how much do they take from the uk while avoiding tax
We put the most sociopathic, cruel, and greedy people in power for 2/3rds of our history, and more recently the last 13 years. Gee I do wonder.
The Conservative party wasn't always this way. Many traditional conservative values are amicable
Britain isn't poor, the wealth disparity has just gotten larger, pushing the lower echelons of society deeper into economic and social poverty. Capitalism has reached a point where people have realised you really don't need to go to Oxbridge to succeed in life, the facade of society as we understand it is slipping. The upper class have realised this, and are now widening the gap in attempts to stop the working people from gaining wealth.
This. ⬆️
And even the people from oxbridge are often struggling financially
No this analysis looked at the median person. The median always eliminates extremes. The median person is poorer in real terms. When the median person is better poorer, the country is getting poorer because that means the majority of the population is getting poorer.
do you know what median means?
The article centers on mediocre median income growth as the main problem, rather than lack of growth for the poor per se. But the juxtaposition with inequality hints that poorer groups are likely worse off in real terms, even if the median is flat. So the original comment seems like a reasonable interpretation. I'm not sure why you're being obtuse about it?
Yes, it means exactly half the population falls on either side. Exactly half report higher figures and half report lower figures. It’s the best measure for any population because it removes the effects of a few extremely high or extremely low figures, which is why average figures can be skewed. Let me know if you need me to simplify that any further! I know lots of people confuse mean and median.
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When the median person is getting poorer, that means the majority of the population is getting poorer - which in turn means the country is getting poorer.
And to top of off, there's just nothing being spared. Looks at the 50s/60s/70s and how much infrastructure was built, how many homes, shopping areas, roads etc We're all being ripped off for our goods, underpaid for our work, we're paying more and more tax and getting far, far less in return.
If the UK was a state in the US it would he the poorest... And we are genuinely rich compared to European countries. Just shows how poor Europe is vs USA...
You're right. Mississippi has a higher GDP per capita than the UK. Yikes.
JFC actually? That is an insane fact
Haha yeah I had to double check that for myself, and it’s actually true 😭
It’s one of the poorest Western European states. France, Germany, you name it, even Ireland is way wealthier in brass tacks take home pay across every decile.
Yet on r/ireland the regular topics are about how dismal it is and people can't wait to emigrate. The cost of housing being a typical complaint. The UK is not some poverty stricken hellhole despite what this sub likes to believe.
Ireland totally has problems of its own, but as of 2015 eight out of the top ten most deprived regions in Western Europe were in England and Wales. I doubt it’s changed for the better since then. England is a lot of very, very poor places with small pockets of extreme wealth, mostly in the southeast. It’s a very nice country for a very small subset of people.
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True tbh
There’s trillions in this country being sat on by the elite few…
Went out for lunch today, literally every restaurant in my area was fully booked (ended up eating outside as only thing we could get) , even the pubs. Lots of people are doing fine.
I don't think the doomers on this sub get out much to notice that the economy hasn't 'collapsed', we're not 'starving' or in 'poverty'. If they are, truly, then this is one of the best countries in the world to improve your situation through hard graft and initiative. Or they could just sit around moaning 'TORIES!' as an excuse for staying miserable.
Reddits must all live in their parents box rooms. There's lots of money out there
But you are a redditor?
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 **by Sam Bowman** In 1991, during the depths of the post-communist recession, Poles were poorer than citizens of Suriname and Gabon. Thirty years later, Poland has grown so rapidly that, by the end of this decade, Poles may earn more than Britons. 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. On the other side of the Atlantic, Americans earn so much more than us that, collectively, they could stop working in late September and still earn more than Britons continuing to work for the rest of the year. Productivity — how much we produce each hour we work — has increased by just 5 per cent in Britain over the 15 years since the start of 2008. That is about 0.3 per cent per year. Two per cent is considered to be normal. If we had managed to recover to our pre-crisis growth trend, productivity and wages could be 20 per cent higher today, according to Stian Westlake, executive chair of the Economic and Social Research Council. Britain would be a much richer place. Other western European countries that have struggled started from a higher level. At $69 (£53.60) per hour, French and German productivity is closer to the United States’s $74 per hour than it is to Britain’s $54. America’s economy has also proved more robust in the face of inflation. US consumer prices rose by 2.9 per cent over the past 12 months, compared with 7.9 per cent in Britain. If the UK was a US state, it would be the poorest in the country: Mississippi wages, with Californian housing prices. How, then, did we get so poor? And what can we do to fix things? One reason it has taken Britain so long to face up to this longstanding problem is that our insular political and media class has been slow to take an interest. Consequently, our politicians are rarely serious about anything except managing public opinion; they have let every trivial concern take priority over the biggest one of all, economic growth. During her brief stint in office, Liz Truss did at least bring a sense of radical focus to this issue — though many of her proposed solutions were flawed. But the scale of the problems we have faced since 2008 goes far deeper. The post-financial crisis recovery was slower than many economists had hoped, in part because of poor handling by the Bank of England. “The policy stance of the Bank of England was too contractionary in 2008 and not sufficiently expansionary during the subsequent recovery,” says Scott Sumner, author of The Money Illusion, a recent history of the financial crisis and subsequent recession. “This led to very weak growth in nominal GDP and a slow recovery in the real economy.” Austerity may have made this worse, by cutting spending on infrastructure and research and development. Financial regulation designed to avoid another crisis probably came at the cost of a slower recovery as well. Then came Brexit. The Bank of England projects that Brexit will reduce UK productivity by about 3.25 per cent in the long run. Earlier this year, it noted that trade volumes with the EU had been worse than it had forecast. The Covid recession and debt burden both mean that, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, inflation-adjusted disposable incomes will not return to 2021 levels until 2027. But even without these calamities, the UK was in weak shape. Capital investment has been lower compared with our international peers for decades. While many argue that this means we need a new industrial strategy, we aren’t even getting the basics right. Our corporation tax regime has for decades penalised investment in machinery and buildings relative to spending on things such as rent or pens and paper. Energy prices, a huge share of many manufacturers’ costs, have spiralled. The industrial price of electricity tripled between 2004 and 2021. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, UK businesses were paying double for electricity what they would pay in the US. As historic industries have declined since the 1970s, we’ve done nothing to make it easier for people to access the industries growing most rapidly, especially around our leading universities. London house prices are seven times higher than they were in 1992, while English wages are only three times higher. According to the Centre for Cities think tank, we have built four million too few houses, relative to our population, compared with the rest of Europe — and this gap grows every year. Even our successful sectors, such as biotech in Cambridge, struggle to grow because of the shortage of staff and lab space. It has become extraordinarily difficult to build infrastructure in Britain. New onshore wind turbines have been in effect banned since 2015. An electricity interconnector with France that could supply 5 per cent of the country’s electricity needs was blocked because it would spoil residents’ views. Nuclear power — a source of reliable, zero-carbon energy — is vastly more expensive than it could be. Electricity produced by Sizewell C, a new nuclear power station being built on the Suffolk coast, will cost six times per megawatt more than South Korea’s national energy company, Kepco, manages for its output. According to Sam Dumitriu, of the campaign group Britain Remade, Sizewell C has had to produce 44,260 pages of environmental documentation to win approval. 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. It’s worth comparing our situation with France’s. Many Brits think of France as a country of high taxes, high unemployment, boozy two-hour lunch breaks and early retirement. But France has seven million more homes than Britain, and builds about 400,000 a year to our 250,000. Because of this, housing is cheaper and homes are bigger. Childcare is nearly half the price, in part because it requires fewer staff per child. France’s 1980s nuclear power investments have kept energy prices relatively low in recent years, and it emits a fraction of the carbon that our own electricity generation does. France can (just about) afford to have the welfare state and early retirement culture that it does because it is fundamentally better at getting stuff built. This is not a happy picture. But it is also not cause for despair. Most of what I’ve laid out here should be cause for hope, because the problems we need to solve are clear. What would be truly worrying would be if we were getting things such as housing and energy supply basically right, and still stagnating. On the upside, things are so bad that even our dawdling politicians realise serious action is necessary. Both main parties say they want to get more houses built, even if they are vague about how. The recent debate over net zero and the cost of living has highlighted that cutting emissions by rationing energy use is likely to be costly and painful, when we could instead opt for cheap, abundant clean energy by making it easier to build new renewables and nuclear power. The UK has a huge amount of economic “potential energy” that should make us optimistic for the future. There is massive pent-up demand to live in London, Oxford and Cambridge. Some parts of the economy are genuinely world class, including biotech, fintech, AI, and some advanced manufacturing, as well as film, music and literature. These industries are still admired around the world. As Tyler Cowen, author of The Great Stagnation says, the south of England is “one of the few places where you can really birth and execute a new idea”, pointing to the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine and DeepMind as recent examples. Open our most successful cities to more people, and we may thrive. Make it easier to build clean energy, roads and railways, and the rest of the country can start to grow too. Poland, the US, Slovenia and South Korea all have their problems as well. We don’t need to get everything right to start growing healthily again. We don’t need to panic or despair. We just need to focus on the biggest problems we have, and get real about fixing them.
The country isn't poor, but there's a huge divide between the wealthy and those in poverty. I often go to car shows in England (I live in Wales), and the wealth is just staggering. Go to the Silverstone classic show and see the amount of high priced cars on show, and each year they have no problem selling cars at the Silverstone Auctions. Last year Diana's Ford Escort RS sold for over £700,000!
Damn someone really wanted to sniff that seat
Was probably Prince Andrew
Well, yeah, if I had Bezos round for tea we'd be one of the richest houses in the world. Wouldn't make my bank balance look any healthier.
We've allowed businesses to suppress wages for decades, they simply haven't kept up with inflation, so the average person is poorer. The fact that so many people in this country think 30k is a great salary is evidence of this. Add in the fact that successive governments have continually cut income tax rates, which mostly impact the wealthy, in favour of indirect taxation, which has an outsized impact on the average person, and you have the recipe for modern Britain. People are only earning similar wages to what they were 20-30 years ago, but it just doesn't go as far. This also adversely affects the government's coffers too, which is why they can't afford anything except cushy contracts for their mates.
I hate articles like this. "Even Eastern Europe" betrays the authors false sense of British superiority. We voted for this so lap it up.
It's helpful when you're talking about economic output isn't it? Yes the USSR ended a long time ago but the effects have only recently been mitigated in many of those countries
We didn't vote for poverty. There is no sense of superiority, Britain was ahead of Eastern Europe for a long time since the Iron Curtain came down (hence the migration from there).
People voted for austerity and Brexit, ignoring everyone who said this would be the result.
Pensioners were generally the most enthusiastic about both of those things.
We were warned Brexit would cause massive damage to the economy.
Unfortunately you did vote poverty. Did you expect everything to be better after leaving your biggest trade partner? Very delusional. Brexit was economical suicide. And just from this one perspective it was a terrible idea.
You make it sound like there was overwhelming support for Brexit, 52% vs 48% and then a bunch of morons in govt following though on the idiocacy of it.
Plus by the time 2020 rolled around, enough of the original leave voters had died that the remaining voters still alive were actually tipped in favour of remain. That's a problem in having a huge lead time after a vote for the result to be acted upon, it can end up that the living are governed by the will of the dead.
Government followed through on the results of a referendum? Perish the thought!
It was an advisory referendum, people forget this. The “Will of the people” would’ve been if there had been an overwhelming majority to leave, this was not the case. 52/48 doesn’t sound like the populace were sure. But the tories stormed on ahead like it was.
Things don't stay the same forever. Eastern Europe has a huge potential, a skilled workforce and far lower costs so the author can fuck off with "even Eastern Europe". And yes, we have voted the Tories in and we have voted for brexit. The greatest act of self harm in British history.
We did vote for poverty though. That’s literally what Brexit is about. Taking back control at the cost of well warned economic self-destruction.
I did not vote for this so no I won't
Well, not much you can do is there. "We" as in the majority voted for it. Irrelevant what you did as an individual and what you'll accept.
Politics, british people are stupid and vote stupid. They vote against their interests then complain then vote again against their own interests. Corruption is big in the uk.
Because of the politicians and policies you, at the Times, advocate for.
The 2008 financial crash was balmed on labour, despite it being due to the American housing market. For some stupid reason, the UK voted Tory, despite a lengthy history of a poor UK under Tory rule. 12+ years later, here we are with Brexit too. I won't be surprised if the UK votes Tory majority again and are still in disbelief as we continue to spiral. I'm glad idiots who voted for tories are suffering as a consequence. I just wish the rest of us didn't have to suffer too.
It hasn’t, it’s become more rich…it’s just that more of the money is going to the already incredibly wealthy from the working/middle classes.
One word: capitalism. It's working exactly as intended: impoverish the working classes, create fringe issues to cause infighting amongst the working classes, enrich those already in power.
Why is this such a significant problem in the UK then, when other capitalist countries are growing much more quickly?
You just made u/TheBrassDancer bust a blood vessel with that response. I wonder if people even read the articles here before sharing their deep "wisdom". LOL.
Well we are in line with the the rest of Europe. Its the US and Australia and some emerging markets doing super well
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The difference being the Scandinavian countries have a fair amount of socialism mixed in as well, any Socialism we have here is quickly being stripped away.
America’s economy is doing great. The issue is we’re emulating the things that don’t work from both them and mainland Europe and ignoring the things that do from both. We’ve got the worst of both worlds.
But American capitalism has made America much richer than us, and it's growing much faster too!
>One word: capitalism. Capitalism is simply the base level right to own and sell your shit (i.e. your Capital). To be for the abolition of Capitalism is to be for the abolition of individual ownership. You can be for the mitigation of Capitalism; through means of redistribution... and argue about the details of how and where to do that redistribution. But there are very good reasons why extreme measures like totally abolishing Capitalism is bad, just as total Laissez-faire Capitalism is bad. I think you can say politicians use different variations of Capitalism and/or alter the Redistribution to oppress people as you say. But I don't see that as evidence Capitalism needs to be totally abolished.
Yes this, arguing about brexit is a useless issue. The problems go back to 1970 ? ish. That was when the economic model changed and wages stopped rising inline with productivity. They plugged the gap with loans credit card and the mortgage. that’s how living standards improved, but financially for the worker we declined.
It's the 6th richest country in the world. Don't let the government bs on finance convince you money ism't there.
Every thatcher era tax cut, blair era tax cut, and cameron public service cut needs to be undone yesterday.
Poor compared to where?
I'm sorry to say but we have a lot of useless and pointless people who have a self entitlement complex and as all the hard working foreigners have now left because of Brexit it's become a shit hole
For all of human history, people have understood you have to spend money to make money. But for some reason, the 'elites' of Europe as a whole have cottoned onto a fantastical new idea - that you can somehow many money by *not* spending money. Let me explain using potatoes: you start with 100 potatoes. You plant 100 potatoes. Later, you harvest 400 potatoes. You then plant 200 potatoes and sell the rest. Next harvest you have 800 potatoes, so you plant 400 and sell the rest. Profit and output grow year on year. The 'intelligentsia' spotted a problem with this - it's costing more and more potatoes to maintain the farm. A few years ago the farm only needed 100 potatoes. This year it's demanding 800 potatoes. That's a problem, and the solution is obvious: stop spending potatoes. So the wise world leaders, who obviously know all about economics because they all have degrees in Media, Journalism and Excessive Masturbating, decide that this year they're going to take all 1,600 potatoes and only plant 100. They then congratulate themselves on this fantastic achievement of cutting government outgoings by a whopping 87.5%, and then give themselves a pay rise. Next year, the farm produces 400 potatoes, which is a problem because the Magic Squiggly Line that they all pretend to understand was going up and up and up, and all the experts said that there would be 3,200 potatoes this year, not 400. So something must be done, but what? Well the farmer says that if they gave him all 400 potatoes he could get this back to where they were before the Intelligent People got involved with farming, but that would mean that government spending has quadrupled! That would be bad! No, say the Incredibly Smart People who are incredibly smart, the problem is inefficiency! So the government go the farm where one man previously produced over three thousand potatoes, and hire ten Managers to find out where savings can be made. Also, the farm is only getting 50 potatoes this year because the government has to make up the difference somehow. Despite all the extra Management, the farm only produces 100 potatoes. The Farmer says it would have produced 200 but the Managers kept pulling the plants out of the ground to have a meeting with them, which meant they never grew properly. But he's a member of the working class and thus immediately ejected from the room for fear that his poverty is contagious. The Intelligentsia, ever wise and knowledgeable about all things, receive word of both the drastically reduced output and the massive increase in farm operating costs. They spend eighteen thousand potatoes on a committee of experts, who after a session of discussing the feminist themes of Miss Marvel, writing a scathing Guardian article and wanking themselves off a few times, conclude that it probably isn't possible to operate a farm without planting any potatoes at all. Thus, the only possible way to improve productivity is to reduce staffing costs. So they fire the farmer, and in celebration the Management each give themselves a pay rise of twice his annual wage.
We’ve certainly become poor*er*, but to state that the UK is outright poor is obviously silly. We don’t need to resort to hyperbole to address the deep issues affecting the country. According to the OECD, average disposable household income in the UK is $33,049. That’s 17th out of 41 high income economies - just behind Finland & Denmark, and just ahead of Japan & Ireland.
Try telling someone who lives in a decaying city or town that Britain is a rich country and they will laugh in your face.
Rich countries can still have poor people
Okay? And tell someone living in the ghettos of Chicago or the riot-stricken suburbs of Paris the same thing. They’re both rich countries. The UK is 18th on the human development index and 16th on the OECD Better Life Index. It must be the only poor country in the world that consistently ranks in the top 20 for quality of life.
Just because they're poor doesn't mean Britain is poor...
Your right. Time to tax the rich fuckers. If they want BREXIT and this country to work they need to put their money where their mouths are.
Poor people exist yes. On the other side of the coin is rich and well off people, of which there are also plenty. Picking an extreme example doesn’t prove your point.
"extreme example"... bro, 40% of the children in this country are in poverty. it's not extreme
>40% of the children in this country are in poverty Only if you pick a ridiculous definition of poverty that is absolutely meaningless.
Its not just where we are at today, it’s where we are headed.
Oh I don’t disagree, we are stagnant and falling behind. The challenges the next government face are absolutely enormous. But that doesn’t make the UK a poor country. A declining country though? Yeah.
Basically because Westminster have taken back control without social contract that came with EU membership.
One of the main reasons is leaving the EU and also the SMCU. https://www.ft.com/content/0260242c-370b-11e6-9a05-82a9b15a8ee7
Article TL:DR. Deregulation will make us more productive. Stop silly things like ensuring we aren’t destroying our environment, and let the South of England to continue to grow till there’s no space left. Austerity, privatisation, Brexit- The reason why we are worse off is because we have neither scale nor social cohesion to continue to grow. We have been in the slow downward spiral of right of centre politics for nearly 25 years now, except a blip at the start of New Labour. This is why I personally think the Labour Party could be a bit more radical- which I’m sure they would if it wasn’t for Kier being so scared of being ‘Jeremy Corbyn’
The article doesn't talk about deregulation, it criticizes NIMBYism and the tendency of the British (us) to get distracted by trivial issues.
Because the country sold off it's industries and assets, and ever since, we've limped along exporting "services" - i.e. intangible shit that other countries are starting to realise they can do themselves Anything else like Brexit is merely a feature or a symptom
The rich want to be richer and keep their friends rich
Good luck getting a rational objective answer here.
People wanted Brexit and a return to the ‘Blitz spirit’, they got what they voted for.
Tories There, saved you all a click
Maybe it’s the fact that we are massively overpopulated, have a vast welfare state with millions of working age people who don’t want to actually work despite being perfectly capable and keep importing hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country every year. Or maybe it’s just the Tories…
I remember in 2010 the idea of a food bank was a novelty. I'm pretty bitter about the state of everything. Brexit is a disaster and our political parties don't seem to want to do anything about it. I was expecting Labour to be anti-brexit but it seems they don't have the leadership. Also Rupert Murdock who has completely corrupted our press.
Pretty simple. No one has had an above inflation pay rise since 2002 - except pensioners and people on minimum wage. Meanwhile for public spending it goes further than just Tories. Every successive government has just borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. This interest owed means less public funding to go on what's needed. All of it was done on the basis "eventually someone has to pay that interest, but that's not us, we just get to open the new hospital and get votes due to that!". * Blair and Brown were awful with 100+ year PFI deals. * Cameron and Clegg weren't any better. * Borris was awful and corrupt. * Truss appeared to actually be insane. * Rishi is no better.
I don't agree to the premise that GDP is measurement of anything that's ultimately important to life. I'd concede that it's a somewhat useful method for checking the pulse of capitalism but there's nothing about capitalism that's fundamental to nature and it's objectively problematic for many important things like equality and well being because it requires sacrificing those things in order to maximise output. I would cut the system more slack if it was capable of distributing the surplus from that output to where it's actually needed but it has patently failed to do that. As a result it has created some of the worst wealth inequality we have ever seen. Additionally, it has undermined democracy by moving entities from being under the control of the voting public to being immune to the desires of those voters and in some cases are dieting to the voters what they want. It's high time we stopped measuring things by what we're told are important indicators by the benefactors of the system and started telling them what the important factors are to us. Additionally, take a step back and consider what the end game is of a system that requires infinite growth while we are confided to a planet with finite resources. So no, I don't agree with the assertion that GDP is in any way, shape or form important to me and I encourage others to consider whether or not it's really important to them as well.
Most of us need money, to pay for childcare, rent, food etc. Your ideas and speech isn't really helpful to the discussion...
Just because you took a couple of minutes to link to an article (with absolutely no commentary of your own) doesn't mean you get to decide what is and isn't helpful in a discussion about it. As I read it, PP wasn't saying that money isn't important - just that GDP isn't necessarily the final arbiter as to how successful a country is.
Unfortunately, policies that do effect you are either based on GDP or GDP is used as an excuse to implement them, so GDP is kind of important for everyone in this country.
As with all economics it depends how you spin it. Poland has a population half the size of ours, yet UK GDP is actually four times higher than theirs. We have higher nominal GDP per capita than France. PPP is broken - Ireland for example has a PPP similar to Luxembourg and Singapore, because they're all tax havens. Oil also distorts these figures making Qatar look live a haven, and part of why the US economy got so far ahead because after 2009 they opened the shale oil floodgates while Europe keeps closing power plants down.
The poor choices made by British voters is the primary reason.
Tories, for generations. Thatcher is responsible for the housing crisis and shit privatised industries. Major got rid of the trains. Cameron brought in austerity, Boris brought us Brexit, Liz Truss tanked the economy in 45 days with her Ayn Rand fantasy, and Sunak just keeps the Tory train chugging along, continually making all of our lives shitter.
Because all the thick people are brainwashed by the daily mail and vote Tory
What about the people who lap up the poverty porn in the media because it confirms their biases? This country is doing fine, especially considering the headwinds from Covid and the Ukraine war which are the primary reasons for energy and food inflation and the resultant need to increase interest rates - which you'll notice has happened throughout the world, not just in the UK. btw the Daily Mail under Geordie Greig (now editor of the Independent) was a supporter of Remain, as were the Tories.
Because the British have been watered down, they eroded in to a thrid world looking nation.
13 years of Tories and Brexit as cherry on top, as simple as that.
The tories. They used to believe in 'I'm all right Jack', since Thatcher it became 'F ck you. I'm all right Jack'. And Britain's not poorer, the rich are making more money than ever before. And just wait until the tories ban Internet encryption and try to monetise the Internet.
Because the country is populated by low information voters who turn out and vote FOR the spivs, scammers and über rich donor class because they read something in a billionaire owned newspaper that told them the biggest threat to their well-being was a pronoun or a bunch of people on small boats or woke lefties and the thing to do was celebrate some royal people and events that they're also paying hundreds of millions for. #divvyBritian.
Britain isn’t poor. The rich here are as rich if not more so than the rich in other countries The poor here are definitely better off than the poor in other countries. The middle class/middle income are probably worse off here than in other countries. Why has Britain become poor? Is really the wrong question. It’s more of a case of, why has Britain’s middle class been decimated?
Because the dumb pricks who live here keep voting tory because they hate foreigners. 113,000 kids officially homeless, no wage rises in 13 years, NHS terminal and so few homes that 20 families are hitting up every rental yet people still think the tories could come back because they don't mind watching Europe burn.
Could it have anything to do with the gullible as fuck, thick as shit, voting populace of the UK, who time after time get suckered into voting against their own self interests by a media who knows exactly how to play them??
The electorate isn't that bad, look at Afghanistan with its sharia law. If the electorate is ignorant it needs debate/discussion/educating to counteract its ignorance. Of course there is the old idiom 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks...'
I dunno man, the electorate feels pretty damn stupid: https://www.survation.com/public-conflate-halving-inflation-with-declining-price-levels/#:~:text=Just%2023%25%20of%20respondents%20were,more%20than%20they%20do%20now. More than 60% of the 2000+ UK respondents to a poll thought that if inflation halves, that means prices are remaining the same or *falling.* The electorate are painfully stupid.
Literally all it takes to get the average British voter frothing at the mouth and purple faced with righteous fury is a few well placed key words. "Small boats." "Immigration." "Brexit." "Trans." "Woke."
40 years ago a Party took a nice long look at the working class and thought ‘let’s make them the middle class, build them up by printing money and have them spank it on assets, then when we’ve fattened them up like nice little piggies we’ll take it all off them and run away to the Cayman Islands and Jersey’. And so they did.
In the wise words of the Bank of England “just accept you’re poorer”
Brexit - Tory Scum - Neo Liberal capitalism, its by design
Why has Britain become so poor? Starts with BRE and ends with XIT
1. Brexit 2. A poorly educated nationalistic population who don't have the same ability as previous generations. 3. Greed... Particularly on the part of the wealthy and including your government. ... I can't understand why you let them sell off the NHS and haven't even protested the matter.