7 ms·

Fascinatng that `brexit` isn't mentioned once in that article. Making trading harder with your closest neighbour can't be a great move for the economy.

kmeisthax 2y ago
Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The people who were most screwed by Britain's prior mistakes voted for it in a vain attempt at fixing the problem by throwing misguided nostalgia at it.
- nikkwong 2y ago
  The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.
  - BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
    I wonder how Napoleon would react to finding out that British voted to impose the continental system on themselves.
  - curo 2y ago
    Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.
    - hadlock 2y ago
      The problem I see is that although the trend may have started before, Brexit caused the local financial services sector to effectively collapse and move to the Netherlands and Germany. London will never be able to recover that loss in ten generations. Had brexiters not ejected your finance industry, there was probably an opportunity to recover.
      - howerj 2y ago
        As far as I am aware, this is just straight up is not true. Do you have a source for this? Because if the financial sector in the UK halved and moved into the Netherlands and Germany the UK would be doing much, much worse, and Germany much better economically. See: https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-years-on-what-did-it-cost-for-the-financial-sector https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-yea... which is a source that is not going to be biased towards Brexit success, and instead against it (not that there was any success in it, but still).
      - sgt101 2y ago
        I looked this up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre#Global_Financial_Centres_Index_(2007%E2%80%93ongoing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre#Global_Financ... ) and I think you have got things wrong.
    - sgt101 2y ago
      This - the economy rode on financialisation and north sea oil for the two decades before 2008. Since 2008 there has been no real action to resolve the core issue of unlocking the potential of the North of England - everyone knows that that is low hanging fruit (human capital, regional infrastructure etc) but no one will actually take the risk and go for it.
  - Nursie 2y ago
    Not really, growth in the UK has effectively stalled since 2008, quite a few years before Brexit. I’m sure Brexit hasn’t helped, but it seems that the economic stewardship of the coalition and post-coalition governments was also lacking. I don’t know what the UK can do about it, but it’s been stuck in a spiral of economic stagnation for over 15 years now.
    - smcl 2y ago
      That’s the time the Conservative Party were voted in and imposed “austerity”. This involved scaling back government spending and scratching their heads wondering why growth is stalled.
      - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
        "Austerity is the idea that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton." - Alexei Sayle
        smcl 2y ago
        It is insane that not only has it lasted multiple Conservative governments and appears to be alive and well under Starmer's Labour, but also that the USA has now decided to embrace it too. I don't understand it, I thought these guys were all supposed to have studied economics (is that not the "E" in that Oxbridge "PPE" degree they all have) how are they fumbling the basics so badly
      - randomcarbloke 2y ago
        post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7, notably countries that imposed much more severe austerity fared even better - Ireland who are still wedded to the policy continues to thrive, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian economies all grew at a much faster rate than the UK (and by extension the rest of the G7)
        smcl 2y ago
  - drawfloat 2y ago
    We’d had a decade of zero growth and 30 years of industrial decline in the North. The country was not doing well, that’s the primary reason it was inevitable putting a big button marked “do not press, posh boy David Cameron says he doesn’t want you to but has no other solutions. Ignore the people saying it will fix the country” would result in the button being pressed. The economy was doing well for some parts of the country, but you can only ignore the rest for so long.
    - jajko 2y ago
      Well now its not doing that well anywhere, bravo. Thats the problem with populists - they easily find some real issue and point to it, blaming all even completely unrelated woes on it. So far so good. But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Like trump stop blaming immigrants or its (former) allies for all US woes. The cure? Nothing easy, intelligent moral population for democratic elections. Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good (ie refusing 6 weeks mandatory minimal paid vacation per year for workers). That's the population bar for true democracy.
      - drawfloat 2y ago
        Sure, I'm not saying Brexit was the solution to any of it, quite the opposite. But it wasn't a binary choice between X populist saying "Brexit will fix it immediately" and Y mainstream politician saying "here are the complex factors causing this issue, here's how we as a country can address them over so many years". It was a choice between "Brexit will bring sunlit uplands!" and "the country's doing well, don't ruin it!". It's not hard to understand why, given that choice, someone stuck in a Northern ex-mining town facing zero prospects, poor housing, no local amenities, massive regional unemployment or unstable employment would listen to the one pretending to be listening to their issues. Again, we'd had 30 years before that where FPTP allowed the main parties to more or less ignore huge parts of the electorate.
      - Tainnor 2y ago
  - graemep 2y ago
    It has preformed broadly in line with other western European economics. If you look at GDP numbers over time the big problem was COVID. The UK is richer relative to France or Italy than it was 25 years ago, but no European country has done as well as the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=slope&time=2001..latest&country=DEU~FRA~ESP~GBR~ITA~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
- rounce 2y ago
  What were those prior mistakes?
  - nxm 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - olddustytrail 2y ago
      Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas.
      - lawgimenez 2y ago
        My cousin migrated to UK to work as a nurse because it turns out UK’s hospitals are fucked up. Or, lacking manpower.
        rcxdude 2y ago
        yeah, because despite the UK training a huge number of doctors and nurses, the government doesn't want to pay them enough to stop them emigrating the the US or Australia, which have a lot of demand and much higher wages. So then they try to import health workers from elsewhere. Great plan.
        throwaway2037 2y ago
        Not to take the spotlight away from the UK, but I am pretty sure that all highly developed nations are struggling to find enough nurses amongst their citizens. Even Japan (gasp) has a special programme to help foreigners learn Japanese and immigrate as a skilled nurse.
      - gottorf 2y ago
        > Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas. "Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture. A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year indefinitely with no material change to its way of life. But it cannot accept, say, a hundred a year, especially if the hundred immigrants come from a substantially different culture, without fundamentally changing the entire social fabric. And when such massive changes to society occur without buy-in from a convincing majority of people?[0] Well, only idiots would wonder why people think it's out of control. [0]: In the UK, Brexit made it clear that in fact the buy-in was in the other direction.
- mmarq 2y ago
  The old, which have been ‘criminally’ favoured by Britain’s mistakes, have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. While the young, who have been royally screwed, voted Remain.
tacker2000 2y ago
Yes that’s really funny. Im not sure how you can write an article like this and never even mention it once. Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself, and the full effects are just starting to come to the surface now. I dont think the UK will ever fully recover from it.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself America: Hold my beer...
- marliechiller 2y ago
  > Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.
  - riffraff 2y ago
    from a non-economic standpoint it was just as stupid, the idea of "taking back control" is predicated on the concept that the UK was forced to accept rules imposed by others and would be free to stop doing that. But the UK had substantial influence on those, and it no longer does, while still having to follow them to be able to do business with the EU. And indeed, the UK has not really diverged from the EU in the last 8 years and voted a new government that wants to tighten the relationship. It was a generic protest vote "I don't like how things are going and I was happier when I was young". I can empathize, but it was still self-inflicted harm.
    - willvarfar 2y ago
      It always amused me that people were voting for the clowns in Westminister to have more say. Even before Brexit they were showing how inept they all were so it was crazy to have confidence in them
dboreham 2y ago
Oh, based on the title I assumed the article was entirely about Brexit.
JackYoustra 2y ago
It's not great, sure, but it's only something like a long-run 2% drag. 2% is a lot, don't get me wrong! But the loss from planning is pretty high double digits, well over 10% in the US, to say nothing about the gains from liberalizing migration
- rich_sasha 2y ago
  A recent estimation puts the cost of Brexit as 6% of GDP, since 2020 - because that's when the UK actually left. So over 5 full years. That's a lot. And it's not a one-off either.
  - JackYoustra 2y ago
    Oh yeah. Higher than I thought! I still doubt it's as high as housing or migration, but yeah probably the first thing after that.
cbeach 2y ago
Brexit. Making trading slightly harder with 27 non-English speaking countries in a stagnating political experiment (roughly 30-50th percentile of worldwide GDP growth rates) Making trading easier with 168 other countries, many of them English-speaking nations, and who comprise the largest and most dynamic economies on Earth.
gadders 2y ago
COVID had a bigger impact than Brexit.

kmeisthax 2y ago

Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The people who were most screwed by Britain's prior mistakes voted for it in a vain attempt at fixing the problem by throwing misguided nostalgia at it.

nikkwong 2y ago
The British economy was doing quite well before Brexit. Now it's absolutely crippled.
- BuyMyBitcoins 2y ago
  I wonder how Napoleon would react to finding out that British voted to impose the continental system on themselves.
- curo 2y ago
  Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.
  - hadlock 2y ago
    The problem I see is that although the trend may have started before, Brexit caused the local financial services sector to effectively collapse and move to the Netherlands and Germany. London will never be able to recover that loss in ten generations. Had brexiters not ejected your finance industry, there was probably an opportunity to recover.
    - howerj 2y ago
      As far as I am aware, this is just straight up is not true. Do you have a source for this? Because if the financial sector in the UK halved and moved into the Netherlands and Germany the UK would be doing much, much worse, and Germany much better economically. See: https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-years-on-what-did-it-cost-for-the-financial-sector https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/01/31/brexit-four-yea... which is a source that is not going to be biased towards Brexit success, and instead against it (not that there was any success in it, but still).
    - sgt101 2y ago
      I looked this up (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre#Global_Financial_Centres_Index_(2007%E2%80%93ongoing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_centre#Global_Financ... ) and I think you have got things wrong.
  - sgt101 2y ago
    This - the economy rode on financialisation and north sea oil for the two decades before 2008. Since 2008 there has been no real action to resolve the core issue of unlocking the potential of the North of England - everyone knows that that is low hanging fruit (human capital, regional infrastructure etc) but no one will actually take the risk and go for it.
- Nursie 2y ago
  Not really, growth in the UK has effectively stalled since 2008, quite a few years before Brexit. I’m sure Brexit hasn’t helped, but it seems that the economic stewardship of the coalition and post-coalition governments was also lacking. I don’t know what the UK can do about it, but it’s been stuck in a spiral of economic stagnation for over 15 years now.
  - smcl 2y ago
    That’s the time the Conservative Party were voted in and imposed “austerity”. This involved scaling back government spending and scratching their heads wondering why growth is stalled.
    - ndsipa_pomu 2y ago
      "Austerity is the idea that the global financial crash of 2008 was caused by there being too many libraries in Wolverhampton." - Alexei Sayle
      - smcl 2y ago
        It is insane that not only has it lasted multiple Conservative governments and appears to be alive and well under Starmer's Labour, but also that the USA has now decided to embrace it too. I don't understand it, I thought these guys were all supposed to have studied economics (is that not the "E" in that Oxbridge "PPE" degree they all have) how are they fumbling the basics so badly
    - randomcarbloke 2y ago
      post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7, notably countries that imposed much more severe austerity fared even better - Ireland who are still wedded to the policy continues to thrive, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian economies all grew at a much faster rate than the UK (and by extension the rest of the G7)
      - smcl 2y ago
- drawfloat 2y ago
  We’d had a decade of zero growth and 30 years of industrial decline in the North. The country was not doing well, that’s the primary reason it was inevitable putting a big button marked “do not press, posh boy David Cameron says he doesn’t want you to but has no other solutions. Ignore the people saying it will fix the country” would result in the button being pressed. The economy was doing well for some parts of the country, but you can only ignore the rest for so long.
  - jajko 2y ago
    Well now its not doing that well anywhere, bravo. Thats the problem with populists - they easily find some real issue and point to it, blaming all even completely unrelated woes on it. So far so good. But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Like trump stop blaming immigrants or its (former) allies for all US woes. The cure? Nothing easy, intelligent moral population for democratic elections. Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good (ie refusing 6 weeks mandatory minimal paid vacation per year for workers). That's the population bar for true democracy.
    - drawfloat 2y ago
      Sure, I'm not saying Brexit was the solution to any of it, quite the opposite. But it wasn't a binary choice between X populist saying "Brexit will fix it immediately" and Y mainstream politician saying "here are the complex factors causing this issue, here's how we as a country can address them over so many years". It was a choice between "Brexit will bring sunlit uplands!" and "the country's doing well, don't ruin it!". It's not hard to understand why, given that choice, someone stuck in a Northern ex-mining town facing zero prospects, poor housing, no local amenities, massive regional unemployment or unstable employment would listen to the one pretending to be listening to their issues. Again, we'd had 30 years before that where FPTP allowed the main parties to more or less ignore huge parts of the electorate.
    - Tainnor 2y ago
- graemep 2y ago
  It has preformed broadly in line with other western European economics. If you look at GDP numbers over time the big problem was COVID. The UK is richer relative to France or Italy than it was 25 years ago, but no European country has done as well as the US: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?tab=slope&time=2001..latest&country=DEU~FRA~ESP~GBR~ITA~USA https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
rounce 2y ago
What were those prior mistakes?
- nxm 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - olddustytrail 2y ago
    Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas.
    - lawgimenez 2y ago
      My cousin migrated to UK to work as a nurse because it turns out UK’s hospitals are fucked up. Or, lacking manpower.
      - rcxdude 2y ago
        yeah, because despite the UK training a huge number of doctors and nurses, the government doesn't want to pay them enough to stop them emigrating the the US or Australia, which have a lot of demand and much higher wages. So then they try to import health workers from elsewhere. Great plan.
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        Not to take the spotlight away from the UK, but I am pretty sure that all highly developed nations are struggling to find enough nurses amongst their citizens. Even Japan (gasp) has a special programme to help foreigners learn Japanese and immigrate as a skilled nurse.
    - gottorf 2y ago
      > Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas. "Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture. A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year indefinitely with no material change to its way of life. But it cannot accept, say, a hundred a year, especially if the hundred immigrants come from a substantially different culture, without fundamentally changing the entire social fabric. And when such massive changes to society occur without buy-in from a convincing majority of people?[0] Well, only idiots would wonder why people think it's out of control. [0]: In the UK, Brexit made it clear that in fact the buy-in was in the other direction.
mmarq 2y ago
The old, which have been ‘criminally’ favoured by Britain’s mistakes, have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. While the young, who have been royally screwed, voted Remain.

tacker2000 2y ago

Yes that’s really funny. Im not sure how you can write an article like this and never even mention it once. Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself, and the full effects are just starting to come to the surface now. I dont think the UK will ever fully recover from it.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ethbr1 2y ago
> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself America: Hold my beer...
marliechiller 2y ago
> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.
- riffraff 2y ago
  from a non-economic standpoint it was just as stupid, the idea of "taking back control" is predicated on the concept that the UK was forced to accept rules imposed by others and would be free to stop doing that. But the UK had substantial influence on those, and it no longer does, while still having to follow them to be able to do business with the EU. And indeed, the UK has not really diverged from the EU in the last 8 years and voted a new government that wants to tighten the relationship. It was a generic protest vote "I don't like how things are going and I was happier when I was young". I can empathize, but it was still self-inflicted harm.
  - willvarfar 2y ago
    It always amused me that people were voting for the clowns in Westminister to have more say. Even before Brexit they were showing how inept they all were so it was crazy to have confidence in them

dboreham 2y ago

Oh, based on the title I assumed the article was entirely about Brexit.

JackYoustra 2y ago

It's not great, sure, but it's only something like a long-run 2% drag. 2% is a lot, don't get me wrong! But the loss from planning is pretty high double digits, well over 10% in the US, to say nothing about the gains from liberalizing migration

rich_sasha 2y ago
A recent estimation puts the cost of Brexit as 6% of GDP, since 2020 - because that's when the UK actually left. So over 5 full years. That's a lot. And it's not a one-off either.
- JackYoustra 2y ago
  Oh yeah. Higher than I thought! I still doubt it's as high as housing or migration, but yeah probably the first thing after that.

cbeach 2y ago

Brexit. Making trading slightly harder with 27 non-English speaking countries in a stagnating political experiment (roughly 30-50th percentile of worldwide GDP growth rates) Making trading easier with 168 other countries, many of them English-speaking nations, and who comprise the largest and most dynamic economies on Earth.

gadders 2y ago

COVID had a bigger impact than Brexit.