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Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part

Does the UK have anything going for it? It is very hard for me to see the UK having a better quality of life in future than they had in the past. Not being part of the EU means they will mostly be squeezed in trade negotiations. And the UK does not have any industry going for it, so sooner or later the living standards would catch up with the rest of the developing world at the middle.

madeofpalk 3y ago
Compared to where? It's a large-ish, English speaking country, with plenty of other countries nearby, that isn't North America.
- tinktank 3y ago
  The rest of the G8 I would presume.
  - eterm 3y ago
    It's not been the G8 for almost a decade now. If you really meant the G8, well, the UK for all it's faults is still somewhere I'd rather live than Russia.
    - oska 3y ago
      And I would take Russia over the UK, even though my roots are British and I would enjoy delving into historical sites, etc, much more in the UK. But from looking on from Australia, the UK seems to be going downhill very rapidly, and has had a 'clown world' government for some time now. Russia, in contrast, only seems to be improving. (I didn't feel this way 5 years ago. My views on the current state and future trajectories of both the UK and Russia have changed significantly over the past few years.)
      - madeofpalk 3y ago
        You would rather live in Russia than the UK?
        eterm 3y ago
        They're trolling, surely. No-one thinks Russia has a more stable government than the UK. They had a failed coup not even a month ago!
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        Failed coup attempts are signs that someone wants the government to be unstable, but less so that it actually is. Russia’s government has been very stable for the last couple decades, with little change in substantive authority even in the inter-Putin period when Medvedev was nominally President; certainly much less substantive change than in the UK. (One might reasonably suspect its the kind of stability produced by a brittle regime that does not bend and is thus more likely to catastrophically break, though.)
        twixfel 3y ago
        Truly stable countries don't have coups at all. A coup of any kind is a sign of instability.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Truly stable countries don’t have coups at all. A failed coup attempt is not a coup.
        twixfel 3y ago
        Truly stable countries don’t have attempted coups at all, then, if you really insist on being pedantic.
  - twixfel 3y ago
    It's not the worst country in the G8 for immigrants at least (if we are considering where one might like to move to). The UK for all its (countless) faults is still a far more welcoming place to immigrants than the likes of, for example, Germany.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    This why it's such a weird question. What does any country "have going for it"? Where you live is heavily loaded towards your personal preference, rather than any sort of objective economical measure. Personally, I only want to live in an English speaking country (I don't want to be a language-guest in a country). I want to live somewhere where there's "lots" going on - plenty of work opportunities and fun things to do outside of work. I don't want to live in North America because I just don't like the aesthetic.
    - rchaud 3y ago
      > What does any country "have going for it"? Military importance is a big one. Part of the reason Japan and Korea industrialized so quickly after 1950 was because the West supported them economically as they were needed as a reliable bulwark against Communist expansion. The US also tolerates dictatorships worldwide (incl S Korea until 1988) if the regime is friendly to the US.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Compared to Australia, NZ, and Canada (the traditional bellweathers), the UK seems to have a lower QoL with much higher prices and much lower wages. That said, even when I was a kid on Vancouver Island (the 2000s), we always had plenty of UK transplants working at VIHA, schools, corporate jobs, and blue collar jobs, and I've heard similar stories from coworkers of mine in Australia and NZ (eg. our head of Sales for ANZ was a First Class Honours LLB grad from a Russell's Group uni, but felt the wages and opportunity working for a Magic Circle firm were less than that if he went to Australia)
spenczar5 3y ago
Top UK universities are still globally elite. I don’t know how important that is.
- tommypalm 3y ago
  But most people in the UK can afford to go to them, which is maybe by design.
  - freilanzer 3y ago
    Can or cannot?
  - mhh__ 3y ago
    In normal circumstances everyone can afford to go to university. Doesn't necessarily mean it's a profitable decision but the scheme we have at moment basically taxes you if you do well and not if you don't.
  - glcheetham 3y ago
    Uni is capped at £9000 a year and is free in Scotland
  - ashconnor 3y ago
    The UK has a student loans system that acts as a graduate tax. This is a regression though, university used to be free from 1976-1998.
OliveMate 3y ago
Surprisingly we still have a few things that could be sold off for a fraction of the price. Think about the long term savings in not having to put effort into continuing costly services and letting someone else do it instead!
golergka 3y ago
As someone from an actual developing country, I see a lot of very talented people moving there, and they are very happy with their transition. Most of those people could easily get into FAANGs through leetcode interviews, but US visa system drives them to Canada, UK and Germany instead.
secondcoming 3y ago
It must do since people are risking their lives to get here. It has problems for sure, but other EU countries have the same problems. Seeing the continental Europe is currently being baked dry, I'm kind of glad that the weather in Scotland is miserable.
- switch007 3y ago
  By that measure it’s just somewhere someone from a devastatingly bad/troubled country wants to come to. That’s a low bar.
- rchaud 3y ago
  I come from a developing country. Our football league recruits players from African countries. That doesn't mean that things are good in my country, just that they're less bad than some other places.
grej 3y ago
The UK still has a strong military, a particularly strong Navy, plus whatever remains of their portion of North Sea oil and gas. But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed, and now any trade deal they make will probably be under quite unfavorable terms.
- theironhammer 3y ago
  Re: no trade deals post Brexit. That was always going to be the case. Brexit fantasists thought they were going to recreate the empire with UK at its center. They also thought they could do a deal with USA. What does UK offer USA if they're not in Europe?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    It's hard to see, in any case, how any UK<>US trade deal (unless it was a colonial-style deal which greatly favoured the UK, or alternatively unless the UK was effectively subsumed _into_ the US; neither were ever on the cards) could possibly replace EU market access.
- rchaud 3y ago
  They didn't miss the opportunity, it was never offered. Trading partners like the US advised them to stay in the Bloc, which is the same as saying "there's no bilateral deal coming if you leave". Trade deals are multi-year projects and the terms you can get depends on how much leverage you have. Its noy the kind of thing you jump into after leaving a bigger trade bloc. The UK wasn't going to be able to negotiate anything without the bargaining chip of duty-free access to 500m customers.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  > But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed It's unclear that there ever was such a window, given the _sort_ of Brexit they did. By far the most important trade goal for Britain would have been maintaining access to the European market on similar terms to previously (or at least similar terms to, say, Switzerland); everything else paled in comparison. But the form of Brexit chosen made that impossible.
aetherson 3y ago
This seems like a deeply off-the-wall take. Why would the UKs living standards increase? Because the world continues to get richer. Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? That's a heck of a claim. Has any country that was among the richest in the world regressed to developing nation status? This is supposed to happen on the basis of being marginally disadvantaged in trade negotiations? Get real. This is sentiment because people are mad that the UK rejected their political beliefs. Could the UK suffer negative consequences versus the counterfactual as a result of Brexit? Sure. Is it going to regress to being the equivalent of, like, Peru? Obviously no.
- Sai_ 3y ago
  Argentina. India. It doesn’t take a lot for a country to go down the tubes.
  - unmole 3y ago
    I'm sorry, on what timeline has India gone down the tubes?
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Devil's advocate, but India did see a significant collapse in quality of life during Covid and in it's immediate aftermath. This is party independent as this collapse was seen in all states. Based on HDI (both Niti Aayog and UNDP calculated), India regressed to the same developmental indicators as in 2015. Silver lining is that institutions still exist, and if managed correctly in the next decade, could ensure rapid economic development. That said, if this is mismanaged, we'd be in a similar boat to the Philippines - strong fundamentals and institutions but horrible execution leading to it lagging well behind it's peers. The next 10 years are crucial for India's development.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? Lexically, tats an oxymoron, if you are regressing you are clearly not developing. Empirically, living standards have been falling in UK for a decade, while developing countries are developing. Clearly, eventually they will intersect. Logically, you seem to claim that a developed economy cannot collapse no matter how badly it's mismanaged?
walthamstow 3y ago
The past UK standard of living was based on pillaging the colonies, then after divestment of Empire it was briefly propped up in the 80s by North Sea oil and in the 00s by financial deregulation. No shit we're not going to have the same standard of living as the past.
- Georgelemental 3y ago
  And how did the UK acquire the strength needed to take those colonies? Would-be conquerors are a dime a dozen, empires as successful as the British not so much
  - theironhammer 3y ago
    Good topic for a book me thinks.
    - ibrahimsow1 3y ago
      There is a book on precisely this. Uncommon wealth: Britain and the aftermath of empire.
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    What you refer to as strength is not potent anymore: you can surprise uncontacted peoples only once, and nowadays there's UN, the Geneva Convention etc. to stop such dehumanization that enabled the colonizations.
    - kaycey2022 3y ago
      Most colonies back then had no big picture view of the world. They had no idea what tactics were being used against them and were hyper focused on their local situation. Internecine warfare within Europe and trading across the world gave the merchant companies training and advantages that no one else in the world had. Things are quite different now.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
mhh__ 3y ago
Lots of good engineering talent in the UK - all the good F1 teams are based in the UK for example. The UK has always been a merchant, trading economy - partly why Brexit was so stupid regardless of the EU's flaws, but nonetheless London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on.
- rchaud 3y ago
  > London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on Yes, the libel laws have been especially helpful in allowing despots and oligarchs to move their wealth into the country and build contacts with No. 10 while suing journalists reporting on it. Chelsea FC, major football club, was owned by a Putin pal for 20 years. He was forced to sell only in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. Prigozhin, Wagner CEO, was able to hire a UK law firm to sue a journalist for reporting on his link to Wagner. This was after sanctions were placed on him by the UK government [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jan/31/russia-ukraine-war-reveals-englands-draconian-libel-laws-says-lawyer https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jan/31/russia-ukraine-w...
curiousllama 3y ago
London. London sans the UK is Singapore. This article is valid for UK-sans-London, but we shouldn't pretend that London is suddenly Warsaw
- Gunnerhead 3y ago
  Isn’t Warsaw on the up and up?
  - curiousllama 3y ago
    Yea for sure, just not London yet
    - asdadsdad 3y ago
      probably will never be
- theironhammer 3y ago
  Agreed. There are two UKs: London and the rest, like u said. Just like USA. There's Silicon Valley and NYC plus some other enclaves and there's the "flyover". UK has become like USA with yawning gaps between the have and have nots.
jsmcgd 3y ago
The UK actually has a lot of industry: https://www.ibisworld.com/united-kingdom/list-of-industries/ https://www.ibisworld.com/united-kingdom/list-of-industries/ Most people are ignorant about businesses that are not international consumer brands. However this only represents a tiny fraction of the total number of businesses out there. This visibility problem goes back to even Napolean's time, when he dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers". In a way he was correct, but he failed to appreciate what such a nation was and is capable of.
psd1 3y ago
Easy bureaucracy. AIUI, American citizens must eat broken glass once a year under the name "filling taxes". Many nations in Europe require businesses to eat broken glass just to do basic business functions - Spain is astonishingly non-functional. By contrast, most British citizens have very little red tape to contend with, and what form-filling does exist can be done easily online. Creating a company takes an hour and has a very light annual burden.

madeofpalk 3y ago

Compared to where? It's a large-ish, English speaking country, with plenty of other countries nearby, that isn't North America.

tinktank 3y ago
The rest of the G8 I would presume.
- eterm 3y ago
  It's not been the G8 for almost a decade now. If you really meant the G8, well, the UK for all it's faults is still somewhere I'd rather live than Russia.
  - oska 3y ago
    And I would take Russia over the UK, even though my roots are British and I would enjoy delving into historical sites, etc, much more in the UK. But from looking on from Australia, the UK seems to be going downhill very rapidly, and has had a 'clown world' government for some time now. Russia, in contrast, only seems to be improving. (I didn't feel this way 5 years ago. My views on the current state and future trajectories of both the UK and Russia have changed significantly over the past few years.)
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      You would rather live in Russia than the UK?
      - eterm 3y ago
        They're trolling, surely. No-one thinks Russia has a more stable government than the UK. They had a failed coup not even a month ago!
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        Failed coup attempts are signs that someone wants the government to be unstable, but less so that it actually is. Russia’s government has been very stable for the last couple decades, with little change in substantive authority even in the inter-Putin period when Medvedev was nominally President; certainly much less substantive change than in the UK. (One might reasonably suspect its the kind of stability produced by a brittle regime that does not bend and is thus more likely to catastrophically break, though.)
        twixfel 3y ago
        Truly stable countries don't have coups at all. A coup of any kind is a sign of instability.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > Truly stable countries don’t have coups at all. A failed coup attempt is not a coup.
        twixfel 3y ago
        Truly stable countries don’t have attempted coups at all, then, if you really insist on being pedantic.
- twixfel 3y ago
  It's not the worst country in the G8 for immigrants at least (if we are considering where one might like to move to). The UK for all its (countless) faults is still a far more welcoming place to immigrants than the likes of, for example, Germany.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  This why it's such a weird question. What does any country "have going for it"? Where you live is heavily loaded towards your personal preference, rather than any sort of objective economical measure. Personally, I only want to live in an English speaking country (I don't want to be a language-guest in a country). I want to live somewhere where there's "lots" going on - plenty of work opportunities and fun things to do outside of work. I don't want to live in North America because I just don't like the aesthetic.
  - rchaud 3y ago
    > What does any country "have going for it"? Military importance is a big one. Part of the reason Japan and Korea industrialized so quickly after 1950 was because the West supported them economically as they were needed as a reliable bulwark against Communist expansion. The US also tolerates dictatorships worldwide (incl S Korea until 1988) if the regime is friendly to the US.
alephnerd 3y ago
Compared to Australia, NZ, and Canada (the traditional bellweathers), the UK seems to have a lower QoL with much higher prices and much lower wages. That said, even when I was a kid on Vancouver Island (the 2000s), we always had plenty of UK transplants working at VIHA, schools, corporate jobs, and blue collar jobs, and I've heard similar stories from coworkers of mine in Australia and NZ (eg. our head of Sales for ANZ was a First Class Honours LLB grad from a Russell's Group uni, but felt the wages and opportunity working for a Magic Circle firm were less than that if he went to Australia)

spenczar5 3y ago

Top UK universities are still globally elite. I don’t know how important that is.

tommypalm 3y ago
But most people in the UK can afford to go to them, which is maybe by design.
- freilanzer 3y ago
  Can or cannot?
- mhh__ 3y ago
  In normal circumstances everyone can afford to go to university. Doesn't necessarily mean it's a profitable decision but the scheme we have at moment basically taxes you if you do well and not if you don't.
- glcheetham 3y ago
  Uni is capped at £9000 a year and is free in Scotland
- ashconnor 3y ago
  The UK has a student loans system that acts as a graduate tax. This is a regression though, university used to be free from 1976-1998.

OliveMate 3y ago

Surprisingly we still have a few things that could be sold off for a fraction of the price. Think about the long term savings in not having to put effort into continuing costly services and letting someone else do it instead!

golergka 3y ago

As someone from an actual developing country, I see a lot of very talented people moving there, and they are very happy with their transition. Most of those people could easily get into FAANGs through leetcode interviews, but US visa system drives them to Canada, UK and Germany instead.

secondcoming 3y ago

It must do since people are risking their lives to get here. It has problems for sure, but other EU countries have the same problems. Seeing the continental Europe is currently being baked dry, I'm kind of glad that the weather in Scotland is miserable.

switch007 3y ago
By that measure it’s just somewhere someone from a devastatingly bad/troubled country wants to come to. That’s a low bar.
rchaud 3y ago
I come from a developing country. Our football league recruits players from African countries. That doesn't mean that things are good in my country, just that they're less bad than some other places.

grej 3y ago

The UK still has a strong military, a particularly strong Navy, plus whatever remains of their portion of North Sea oil and gas. But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed, and now any trade deal they make will probably be under quite unfavorable terms.

theironhammer 3y ago
Re: no trade deals post Brexit. That was always going to be the case. Brexit fantasists thought they were going to recreate the empire with UK at its center. They also thought they could do a deal with USA. What does UK offer USA if they're not in Europe?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  It's hard to see, in any case, how any UK<>US trade deal (unless it was a colonial-style deal which greatly favoured the UK, or alternatively unless the UK was effectively subsumed _into_ the US; neither were ever on the cards) could possibly replace EU market access.
rchaud 3y ago
They didn't miss the opportunity, it was never offered. Trading partners like the US advised them to stay in the Bloc, which is the same as saying "there's no bilateral deal coming if you leave". Trade deals are multi-year projects and the terms you can get depends on how much leverage you have. Its noy the kind of thing you jump into after leaving a bigger trade bloc. The UK wasn't going to be able to negotiate anything without the bargaining chip of duty-free access to 500m customers.
rsynnott 3y ago
> But they missed their window after Brexit to strike the trade deals they needed It's unclear that there ever was such a window, given the _sort_ of Brexit they did. By far the most important trade goal for Britain would have been maintaining access to the European market on similar terms to previously (or at least similar terms to, say, Switzerland); everything else paled in comparison. But the form of Brexit chosen made that impossible.

aetherson 3y ago

This seems like a deeply off-the-wall take. Why would the UKs living standards increase? Because the world continues to get richer. Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? That's a heck of a claim. Has any country that was among the richest in the world regressed to developing nation status? This is supposed to happen on the basis of being marginally disadvantaged in trade negotiations? Get real. This is sentiment because people are mad that the UK rejected their political beliefs. Could the UK suffer negative consequences versus the counterfactual as a result of Brexit? Sure. Is it going to regress to being the equivalent of, like, Peru? Obviously no.

Sai_ 3y ago
Argentina. India. It doesn’t take a lot for a country to go down the tubes.
- unmole 3y ago
  I'm sorry, on what timeline has India gone down the tubes?
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Devil's advocate, but India did see a significant collapse in quality of life during Covid and in it's immediate aftermath. This is party independent as this collapse was seen in all states. Based on HDI (both Niti Aayog and UNDP calculated), India regressed to the same developmental indicators as in 2015. Silver lining is that institutions still exist, and if managed correctly in the next decade, could ensure rapid economic development. That said, if this is mismanaged, we'd be in a similar boat to the Philippines - strong fundamentals and institutions but horrible execution leading to it lagging well behind it's peers. The next 10 years are crucial for India's development.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> Is the UK going to regress to developing world status? Lexically, tats an oxymoron, if you are regressing you are clearly not developing. Empirically, living standards have been falling in UK for a decade, while developing countries are developing. Clearly, eventually they will intersect. Logically, you seem to claim that a developed economy cannot collapse no matter how badly it's mismanaged?

walthamstow 3y ago

The past UK standard of living was based on pillaging the colonies, then after divestment of Empire it was briefly propped up in the 80s by North Sea oil and in the 00s by financial deregulation. No shit we're not going to have the same standard of living as the past.

Georgelemental 3y ago
And how did the UK acquire the strength needed to take those colonies? Would-be conquerors are a dime a dozen, empires as successful as the British not so much
- theironhammer 3y ago
  Good topic for a book me thinks.
  - ibrahimsow1 3y ago
    There is a book on precisely this. Uncommon wealth: Britain and the aftermath of empire.
- tuukkah 3y ago
  What you refer to as strength is not potent anymore: you can surprise uncontacted peoples only once, and nowadays there's UN, the Geneva Convention etc. to stop such dehumanization that enabled the colonizations.
  - kaycey2022 3y ago
    Most colonies back then had no big picture view of the world. They had no idea what tactics were being used against them and were hyper focused on their local situation. Internecine warfare within Europe and trading across the world gave the merchant companies training and advantages that no one else in the world had. Things are quite different now.
- rsynnott 3y ago

mhh__ 3y ago

Lots of good engineering talent in the UK - all the good F1 teams are based in the UK for example. The UK has always been a merchant, trading economy - partly why Brexit was so stupid regardless of the EU's flaws, but nonetheless London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on.

rchaud 3y ago
> London is still an extremely attractive legal proposition and so on Yes, the libel laws have been especially helpful in allowing despots and oligarchs to move their wealth into the country and build contacts with No. 10 while suing journalists reporting on it. Chelsea FC, major football club, was owned by a Putin pal for 20 years. He was forced to sell only in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. Prigozhin, Wagner CEO, was able to hire a UK law firm to sue a journalist for reporting on his link to Wagner. This was after sanctions were placed on him by the UK government [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jan/31/russia-ukraine-war-reveals-englands-draconian-libel-laws-says-lawyer https://www.theguardian.com/law/2023/jan/31/russia-ukraine-w...

curiousllama 3y ago

London. London sans the UK is Singapore. This article is valid for UK-sans-London, but we shouldn't pretend that London is suddenly Warsaw

Gunnerhead 3y ago
Isn’t Warsaw on the up and up?
- curiousllama 3y ago
  Yea for sure, just not London yet
  - asdadsdad 3y ago
    probably will never be
theironhammer 3y ago
Agreed. There are two UKs: London and the rest, like u said. Just like USA. There's Silicon Valley and NYC plus some other enclaves and there's the "flyover". UK has become like USA with yawning gaps between the have and have nots.

jsmcgd 3y ago

The UK actually has a lot of industry: https://www.ibisworld.com/united-kingdom/list-of-industries/ https://www.ibisworld.com/united-kingdom/list-of-industries/ Most people are ignorant about businesses that are not international consumer brands. However this only represents a tiny fraction of the total number of businesses out there. This visibility problem goes back to even Napolean's time, when he dismissed England as a "nation of shopkeepers". In a way he was correct, but he failed to appreciate what such a nation was and is capable of.

psd1 3y ago

Easy bureaucracy. AIUI, American citizens must eat broken glass once a year under the name "filling taxes". Many nations in Europe require businesses to eat broken glass just to do basic business functions - Spain is astonishingly non-functional. By contrast, most British citizens have very little red tape to contend with, and what form-filling does exist can be done easily online. Creating a company takes an hour and has a very light annual burden.