5 ms·

"Brexit has delivered some deregulation, though: notably, the Conservative government ditched EU standards on effluent discharges, resulting in the (private) wa

"Brexit has delivered some deregulation, though: notably, the Conservative government ditched EU standards on effluent discharges, resulting in the (private) water companies discharging raw sewage into almost every river, and the seas around the UK coastline. So it is no longer safe to swim in UK waters." Holy crap! "the Bank of England are forecasting 13% inflation towards the end of the year." And we thought things were bad in the US. This article sounds absolutely dire, can someone in the UK comment - are things really that bad there?

puchatek 4y ago
That cannot possibly be the only thing it delivered. The likes of Farage have been working on this thing for decades. They must be getting a lot more it of it
- di4na 4y ago
  Yep. Less anti corruption
- skrtskrt 4y ago
  As much as I want socialized medicine in the US, I worry when look at Britain and see how a wave of regressive politicians can damage carefully built government institutions so quickly
  - TremendousJudge 4y ago
    >so quickly it's been 43 years, as the author points out
    - multjoy 4y ago
      But the last decade has been especially bad, and the last two years even worse than that.
- origin_path 4y ago
  There's plenty but obviously someone who sums up leaving the EU as literally sewage isn't going to give you a straight story on anything. This piece is basically just yet more anti UK propaganda from the Remainer set who never accepted that they lost for good reasons and will continue telling everyone how horrible the UK is until they die. It's a genre, ignore it.
actionfromafar 4y ago
It's starting from a decent place, but the delta is steep. (I'm not from the UK.)
ceeplusplus 4y ago
> And we thought things were bad in the US. That inflation is mostly driven by energy costs, which are a direct result of European policy failures on nuclear and fossil fuels. The US is mostly a net neutral producer/consumer of fossil fuels and energy, which is why it's insulated from the impacts of Russia cutting off gas.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Yup. A big thing in past decades was energy independence. The US actually achieved it but it didn't get the attention that griping about not having it got.
  - wffurr 4y ago
    I mean sort of. If fuel prices are still at the whim of global markets, does it matter if the country is a net importer or not? Electrification with domestic electricity supply seems like it would provide much greater security. Though there's still the global markets for all the electronics and materials and such for renewable generation.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      >If fuel prices are still at the whim of global markets, does it matter if the country is a net importer or not? But they are not completely at the whim. With a nontrivial lag time, as prices raise, local (especially North America as a whole) production will go up and NA will become a significant net exporter. The shale and tar sands production is considerably more expensive than other production methods and requires high prices (and predictions of long term high prices) to operate successfully. We are coupled, but not entirely dependent. The local price will be progressively lower compared to global price as global price rises. Being able to overproduce our requirements enables this. If high prices significantly (for some sufficiently high level of significance) threatened our local economy or supply actually limited people's ability to buy at any price, controls can and would be enacted to decouple the local price and economy from the global market.
- 4y ago
prof-dr-ir 4y ago
To answer such questions I always imagine transplanting a random citizen of country 1 to country 2 and vice versa. In other words, I guess you should ask the expats. Having lived in both the UK and the US, I would say that anyone not rich is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare, better infrastructure, cheaper education, etc. However, in my experience the UK living standards (again, for a non-rich person) are significantly worse than the rest of Northwestern Europe. And the UK's trajectory is not looking good.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare Is it? The NHS is completely useless since the pandemic for anything non-emergency (can't comment for emergencies). You go private or you go without. Whether it's still cheaper than US, I don't know - US healthcare is priced to milk out as much cash as possible out of insurance policies, so I'm not sure what the true price is when you negotiate and are paying privately.
  - oliwarner 4y ago
    > You go private or you go without. This is vastly overstating it. The third option is waiting. Many hours at A&E, months for non-urgent surgery, but it's there and it's still free. If you demand next-hour treatment, yeah, it's not that, but they're doing their best.
mnd999 4y ago
It’s pretty grim at the moment.
- TrueGeek 4y ago
  But where do you think it'll be in 10 years? Progress is being made towards renewable energy, people are taking trips by bicycle more, and although the change hasn't happened yet, public sentiment is that the NHS needs to be "fixed", whatever that may end up meaning.
usgroup 4y ago
I don’t think so —- it’s all a bit hyperbolic . Yeah tough times but most inflation forecasts have it going doing to near 0% by the end of 2023 — guy needs to breathe.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Those people have better crystal balls than mine. I would be very wary of such optimistic projections given the current situation.
- rcarr 4y ago
  Are they the same inflation forecasts that last year said it was 'only transitory'? And that inflation would "peak at 5%"? We're now at 10.1%. Meanwhile the private sector (Citi Bank), who tend to know what's actually going on in comparison to the public sector because their responsibility is to investor's profits rather than catering to politics and public perception, have now got inflation hitting 18% in early 2023. I would love to see how you square going from 18% to 0% in the space of 9 months. Especially when energy bills are forecast to go over £5000 in January unless the government intervenes. Pubs are warning of over 70% closure rates due to rising energy costs. 457,000 people are employed by pubs. If 70% of those jobs go that's 319,900 jobs lost, not to mention all the knock on effects. How many brewery jobs will be lost? Delivery jobs? Taxi driving jobs? How many communities will be damaged through losing one of the main socialising spaces? This is just one sector of the economy. Similar stories are being reported in restaurants, takeaways, manufacturing and retail. On top of this we now have barristers, postal workers, railway staff, teachers, refuse collectors, journalists and hospital staff all on strike. More professions will likely be joining the list in the coming months. How is any of this hyperbolic? There is a very real feeling that this is the calm before the storm and how it plays out is very much going to depend an awful lot on who gets elected next month and what they choose to do about the energy price rise in October. Sources: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-10645425/How-Bank-England-OBR-got-wrong-inflation.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-10645425... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflation-will-hit-18-per-cent-in-early-2023-says-leading-bank-citi-gas-electricity https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflatio... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/uk-had-early-warning-but-still-faces-industry-crisis-over-energy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/uk-had-ea... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/23/pubs-winter-energy-costs-soar https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/23/pubs-winter... https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8591/CBP-8591.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62632167 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62632167
pasabagi 4y ago
It depends on who you ask. If you ask any british person who has been out of the country for a few years, yes, it's absolutely going down the pipes. If you ask people who have lived there the whole time, they've been frog-boiled. The truth is somewhere in the middle: the current malaise is a continuation of pre-existing trends. There were always holes in british roads, now there are just more of them. There were always food banks, now they just run out of food before they run out of hungry people.
Nextgrid 4y ago
> are things really that bad there? UK resident here. I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. In the short-term, I can ignore the issue and pretend it doesn't exist. I wish it was only a short-term issue. Long-term however, most of what attracted me to the UK in the first place died with the pandemic. The high street in most places is a shadow of its former self (replaced by money-laundering fronts masquerading as gift/American candy shops), work in tech is stuck in a weird hybrid state where it's neither fully remote nor on-site and is the worst of both worlds, wages haven't kept up with inflation while housing prices have skyrocketed, businesses are struggling and will struggle even more as people don't even have the money to pay their heating/energy bills, let alone for discretionary spending. The NHS is basically a write-off at this point and your only option is to go private. Taxes on the other hand are still high. Now I don't know anybody who likes paying taxes, but it stings less when you feel like you get your money's worth out of them (in terms of infrastructure or services, such as the NHS) and the tax rate is adequately calibrated. However, the tax brackets have yet to adjust for inflation, so you must earn more (and thus pay more tax) even though your standard of living hasn't actually changed at all. Services that you used to be able to get for "free" (paid by your taxes) such as the NHS are no longer functional, so you must now effectively pay twice and go private instead. Politically, there doesn't seem to be any urgency to fix the problem either, from any side of the political spectrum. I haven't paid attention to them too much here (I can't vote anyway), but the feeling I got was complete apathy from the ruling class. It always felt like a plane flying on autopilot with nobody at the controls - we happened to luck out for a while and prosper despite that but now we're approaching a mountain and it will be really bad if someone doesn't change course. I have an EU passport, when my current lease expires I will be moving back to the EU and taking my business with me. At this point I am losing money by staying here, paying huge rents and taxes for sub-par value in return.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. Yet. But I'm not sure if that is something that has enough staying power to see you through to the end of this. Inflation is a fickle thing. So are bankruns.
- 4y ago

puchatek 4y ago

That cannot possibly be the only thing it delivered. The likes of Farage have been working on this thing for decades. They must be getting a lot more it of it

di4na 4y ago
Yep. Less anti corruption
skrtskrt 4y ago
As much as I want socialized medicine in the US, I worry when look at Britain and see how a wave of regressive politicians can damage carefully built government institutions so quickly
- TremendousJudge 4y ago
  >so quickly it's been 43 years, as the author points out
  - multjoy 4y ago
    But the last decade has been especially bad, and the last two years even worse than that.
origin_path 4y ago
There's plenty but obviously someone who sums up leaving the EU as literally sewage isn't going to give you a straight story on anything. This piece is basically just yet more anti UK propaganda from the Remainer set who never accepted that they lost for good reasons and will continue telling everyone how horrible the UK is until they die. It's a genre, ignore it.

actionfromafar 4y ago

It's starting from a decent place, but the delta is steep. (I'm not from the UK.)

ceeplusplus 4y ago

> And we thought things were bad in the US. That inflation is mostly driven by energy costs, which are a direct result of European policy failures on nuclear and fossil fuels. The US is mostly a net neutral producer/consumer of fossil fuels and energy, which is why it's insulated from the impacts of Russia cutting off gas.

colechristensen 4y ago
Yup. A big thing in past decades was energy independence. The US actually achieved it but it didn't get the attention that griping about not having it got.
- wffurr 4y ago
  I mean sort of. If fuel prices are still at the whim of global markets, does it matter if the country is a net importer or not? Electrification with domestic electricity supply seems like it would provide much greater security. Though there's still the global markets for all the electronics and materials and such for renewable generation.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    >If fuel prices are still at the whim of global markets, does it matter if the country is a net importer or not? But they are not completely at the whim. With a nontrivial lag time, as prices raise, local (especially North America as a whole) production will go up and NA will become a significant net exporter. The shale and tar sands production is considerably more expensive than other production methods and requires high prices (and predictions of long term high prices) to operate successfully. We are coupled, but not entirely dependent. The local price will be progressively lower compared to global price as global price rises. Being able to overproduce our requirements enables this. If high prices significantly (for some sufficiently high level of significance) threatened our local economy or supply actually limited people's ability to buy at any price, controls can and would be enacted to decouple the local price and economy from the global market.
4y ago

prof-dr-ir 4y ago

To answer such questions I always imagine transplanting a random citizen of country 1 to country 2 and vice versa. In other words, I guess you should ask the expats. Having lived in both the UK and the US, I would say that anyone not rich is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare, better infrastructure, cheaper education, etc. However, in my experience the UK living standards (again, for a non-rich person) are significantly worse than the rest of Northwestern Europe. And the UK's trajectory is not looking good.

Nextgrid 4y ago
> is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare Is it? The NHS is completely useless since the pandemic for anything non-emergency (can't comment for emergencies). You go private or you go without. Whether it's still cheaper than US, I don't know - US healthcare is priced to milk out as much cash as possible out of insurance policies, so I'm not sure what the true price is when you negotiate and are paying privately.
- oliwarner 4y ago
  > You go private or you go without. This is vastly overstating it. The third option is waiting. Many hours at A&E, months for non-urgent surgery, but it's there and it's still free. If you demand next-hour treatment, yeah, it's not that, but they're doing their best.

mnd999 4y ago

It’s pretty grim at the moment.

TrueGeek 4y ago
But where do you think it'll be in 10 years? Progress is being made towards renewable energy, people are taking trips by bicycle more, and although the change hasn't happened yet, public sentiment is that the NHS needs to be "fixed", whatever that may end up meaning.

usgroup 4y ago

I don’t think so —- it’s all a bit hyperbolic . Yeah tough times but most inflation forecasts have it going doing to near 0% by the end of 2023 — guy needs to breathe.

jacquesm 4y ago
Those people have better crystal balls than mine. I would be very wary of such optimistic projections given the current situation.
rcarr 4y ago
Are they the same inflation forecasts that last year said it was 'only transitory'? And that inflation would "peak at 5%"? We're now at 10.1%. Meanwhile the private sector (Citi Bank), who tend to know what's actually going on in comparison to the public sector because their responsibility is to investor's profits rather than catering to politics and public perception, have now got inflation hitting 18% in early 2023. I would love to see how you square going from 18% to 0% in the space of 9 months. Especially when energy bills are forecast to go over £5000 in January unless the government intervenes. Pubs are warning of over 70% closure rates due to rising energy costs. 457,000 people are employed by pubs. If 70% of those jobs go that's 319,900 jobs lost, not to mention all the knock on effects. How many brewery jobs will be lost? Delivery jobs? Taxi driving jobs? How many communities will be damaged through losing one of the main socialising spaces? This is just one sector of the economy. Similar stories are being reported in restaurants, takeaways, manufacturing and retail. On top of this we now have barristers, postal workers, railway staff, teachers, refuse collectors, journalists and hospital staff all on strike. More professions will likely be joining the list in the coming months. How is any of this hyperbolic? There is a very real feeling that this is the calm before the storm and how it plays out is very much going to depend an awful lot on who gets elected next month and what they choose to do about the energy price rise in October. Sources: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-10645425/How-Bank-England-OBR-got-wrong-inflation.html https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-10645425... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflation-will-hit-18-per-cent-in-early-2023-says-leading-bank-citi-gas-electricity https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflatio... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/uk-had-early-warning-but-still-faces-industry-crisis-over-energy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/uk-had-ea... https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/23/pubs-winter-energy-costs-soar https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/23/pubs-winter... https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8591/CBP-8591.pdf https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62632167 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62632167

pasabagi 4y ago

It depends on who you ask. If you ask any british person who has been out of the country for a few years, yes, it's absolutely going down the pipes. If you ask people who have lived there the whole time, they've been frog-boiled. The truth is somewhere in the middle: the current malaise is a continuation of pre-existing trends. There were always holes in british roads, now there are just more of them. There were always food banks, now they just run out of food before they run out of hungry people.

Nextgrid 4y ago

> are things really that bad there? UK resident here. I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. In the short-term, I can ignore the issue and pretend it doesn't exist. I wish it was only a short-term issue. Long-term however, most of what attracted me to the UK in the first place died with the pandemic. The high street in most places is a shadow of its former self (replaced by money-laundering fronts masquerading as gift/American candy shops), work in tech is stuck in a weird hybrid state where it's neither fully remote nor on-site and is the worst of both worlds, wages haven't kept up with inflation while housing prices have skyrocketed, businesses are struggling and will struggle even more as people don't even have the money to pay their heating/energy bills, let alone for discretionary spending. The NHS is basically a write-off at this point and your only option is to go private. Taxes on the other hand are still high. Now I don't know anybody who likes paying taxes, but it stings less when you feel like you get your money's worth out of them (in terms of infrastructure or services, such as the NHS) and the tax rate is adequately calibrated. However, the tax brackets have yet to adjust for inflation, so you must earn more (and thus pay more tax) even though your standard of living hasn't actually changed at all. Services that you used to be able to get for "free" (paid by your taxes) such as the NHS are no longer functional, so you must now effectively pay twice and go private instead. Politically, there doesn't seem to be any urgency to fix the problem either, from any side of the political spectrum. I haven't paid attention to them too much here (I can't vote anyway), but the feeling I got was complete apathy from the ruling class. It always felt like a plane flying on autopilot with nobody at the controls - we happened to luck out for a while and prosper despite that but now we're approaching a mountain and it will be really bad if someone doesn't change course. I have an EU passport, when my current lease expires I will be moving back to the EU and taking my business with me. At this point I am losing money by staying here, paying huge rents and taxes for sub-par value in return.

jacquesm 4y ago
> I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. Yet. But I'm not sure if that is something that has enough staying power to see you through to the end of this. Inflation is a fickle thing. So are bankruns.
4y ago