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Why does Britain feel so poor?

• password54321 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • timerol 2y ago
    Is Britain really in such bad shape that the main way to conceptualize their problems are to say "look at America"? I know the memes about Civ-style America's Total Cultural Victory, but I'm kind of surprised to see it in the wild like this.
  • oa335 2y ago
    > ... Communism and globalism is now taught in schools ... > ... funding LGBT propaganda overseas ... > Everything else is more or less a scapegoat for the real issue. Unintended irony.
    • password54321 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • arp242 2y ago
      Tories in power for 15 years. "The Communists have taken over!" I don't even...
• sixothree 2y ago
  Not sure I saw the cost of housing mentioned but I can’t imagine that helps the situation being described.
  • moritonal 2y ago
    Really should read the article if you choose to comment on it. Especially given they joke about how "It’s a cliché that every other policy problem in Britain resolves to a housing problem,"
• Apreche 2y ago
  Let’s see how many comments are from Gary’s economics followers.
  • samiv 2y ago
    What's exactly wrong with Gary's economics? I'd say he does bring pretty convincing arguments to the table and his logic does make sense. if you take all the wealth and give it one group of people who don't put it back into the circulation but rather just invest it, it makes sense that there's no resources left for anyone else and "everyone" else is comparatively poor.
    • greener_grass 2y ago
      I've definitely noticed more anti-gary astro-turfing recently. He seems to have rattled someone...
      • samiv 2y ago
        You know that when the public media and the elites start attacking him personally by attacking his credentials or his background or work history he's onto something. And this will happen because they cannot refute what he's saying with facts so they must try to silence by undermining his credibility.
        • 8note 2y ago
          typically theres also plenty of literature refuting things, but "easy to consume" isnt the same thing as "true"
      • AlexandrB 2y ago
        How do you know it's astroturfing?
    • mytailorisrich 2y ago
      > I'd say he does bring pretty convincing arguments to the table and his logic does make sense. That's a typically successful but dangerous social media recipe.
• InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  feel - devalued the audience reality as subjective before it even started.
  • tremon 2y ago
    If you want to know what the author intended with that headline, you need to read the first line of the article.
• jwhiles 2y ago
  It's because we won't build things. Writing from a part of zone-2 London which is full of two story detached and terraced houses.
  • blitzar 2y ago
    All build 100-200 years ago.
• bigyabai 2y ago
  > HS2 Chair Sir Jon Thompson said: “To build a railway between Euston and Curzon Street in Birmingham, I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England. They don’t care whether parliament did or didn’t approve building a railway.” I dunno, that strategy worked fine for Americans. Am I supposed to believe that liberal use of eminent domain will turn Britain into an overnight utopia?
  • sanderjd 2y ago
    It isn't working fine for Americans at all...
  • alabastervlog 2y ago
    The US is, infamously, nearly incapable of quickly completing major public works projects at any cost, and when they eventually do get done they cost double or more what they would have in other developed countries. It's, among other things, part of the body of evidence that Civil Law may be notably more efficient than Common Law. Britain's also unusually bad in this department, though not as much as the US (the Civil vs Common thing probably isn't the whole story anyway—it's rarely that simple)
    • diordiderot 2y ago
      >infamously, nearly incapable of quickly completing major public works Unless it's roads
      • alabastervlog 2y ago
        Provided there are no tunnels or bridges involved, yeah.
• jmyeet 2y ago
  Oh that's easy: it's because it's poor. Why? - Not taxing the wealthy; - Austerity measures that do nothing but destroy government services; and - Housing prices. You see this kind of disconnect all the time. For example, in the Biden administration, people would point to how well the NASDAQ is doing to say "the economy is doing great", which says nothing about the job market or living standards. These economic measures really tell you nothing about wealth and income distribution. House prices all over the developed world have to come down. This is arguably the biggest problem. But voters will resist that because it's their nest egg. At this point, this only goes one of two ways: fascist police state or socialist revolution. Hoarding or denying shelter or food is violence.
  • boxed 2y ago
    > Not taxing the wealthy There aren't enough wealthy to cover the shortfall. Doing this is a moral issue, not a national economy issue. But yea, the rest I think I agree with.
  • diordiderot 2y ago
    Taxing wealthy > This is because average tax rates rise more quickly with income in the UK, and are already higher at the top relative to the median, than in most of the European countries that raise more revenue overall. > Austerity Tories spent more on government than 2000s labour as % gdp
    • tirant 2y ago
      Not only that. By increasing income taxes so steeply the State is incurring in perverse incentives or negative incentives, so people decide to not work a 20% more time to earn 20% more if that extra money is going to be taxed at a 50% rate. Perverse incentives are an absolute disaster for the economy of our countries. Recently the socialist party approved in Germany an income limit for parents to receive income replacement benefits when being on parental leave. What was the result? From my group of friends in all cases the lesser earner from the marriage (the woman most of the time) has stopped working in order to not reach the income limit. This results in less income tax collection for the State, a poorer family and a less productive company. No one wins.
• scrlk 2y ago
  British elites essentially gave up trying to rule after the Suez Crisis, when Britain's ejection from the superpower club was confirmed. The country has been aimlessly bobbing around since under a general policy of "managed decline", and matters have now come to a head. "How did you go bankrupt?" "Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly." Lee Kuan Yew commented upon it in From Third World to First: "As Britain’s worldwide influence shrank, so did the worldview of its younger parliamentarians and ministers. Some old friends, British commanders who had fought in the last world war and had served in Singapore defending us against Sukarno’s Confrontation, compared the old generation British leaders to oak trees with wide-spreading branches and deep roots. They described their younger leaders as “bonsai oak”, recognisably oak trees, but miniaturised, because their root area had shrunk."
  • api 2y ago
    Seems like one of the dangers of empire is that losing it, which is inevitable, leads to a hard-to-shake condition of feeling like a has-been society. It makes it hard to just be a good nation, a good place to live. I fear the same thing is coming for the USA as it, inevitably, loses its standing as the world's sole great superpower (which it only had for maybe 20 years at most!). We could easily get stuck in a permanent cycle of demagogue after demagogue promising to, well, make us "great again." You see it in individuals too. The root of the word celebrity is celebrate. Make someone a celebrity and put them on a pedestal, and it often ruins them forever. It's a fickle thing. When they inevitably go back to being just a regular person, the effect is often to leave the person permanently feeling like a has-been. They flail around for the rest of their lives trying to recapture something that is fleeting instead of enjoying the fact that (1) they achieved something few people achieve and (2) they have the rest of their lives ahead of them. Success is more psychologically dangerous than failure. There's a saying: "whom god wishes to destroy, he first makes mad." I think a better version is "whom god wishes to destroy, he first raises up."
    • gjm11 2y ago
      > The root of the word celebrity is celebrate. Actually, that's not quite right. The root of both "celebrate" and "celebrity" is a Latin word whose original meaning is something to do with crowdedness. Celebrity (in the older sense of "being famous") means being someone that people crowd around. The original meaning of "celebrate" was to hold a religious service, attended by crowds of people. Later "celebrity" evolved to also mean a person who has the quality of celebrity-in-the-old-sense, and "celebrate" evolved to also mean to hold some other kind of event that attracts crowds. But "celebrity" didn't ever primarily mean "person who is admired", it was always "person who attracts attention". (It is still true that people who are famous and then not famous can find it hard to adapt to the change, of course.)
• diordiderot 2y ago
  > lowest rate of investment High costs of 1. Energy 2. Transport 3. Housing Are the cause of low private and public investment. The author treats the lack of public productivity growth as separate from the lack of public investment but the latter causes the former Excellent piece about it here. https://ukfoundations.co/ https://ukfoundations.co/ TLDR: "it is difficult to build almost anything, anywhere. This prevents investment, increases energy costs, and makes it harder for productive economic clusters to expand. This, in turn, lowers our productivity, incomes, and tax revenues." Housing is probably the biggest culprit. More on that here. https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
  • pjc50 2y ago
    Funny, because the high costs of energy and transport are .. due to lack of investment. A vicious circle. Blocking green energy investment is the biggest area of frustration. You cannot demand to never see a pylon and then turn round and complain about your electricity bills. The press/public are fundamentally unserious about this. I got mildly radicalized when I read that someone was trying to block an offshore connection using the presence of "grade 2 listed concrete anti-tank cubes" on the beach. Edit: example of listed cubes https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1393398 https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1...
    • diordiderot 2y ago
      Beyond parody
    • arp242 2y ago
      IMO the way Britain deals with listed buildings is excessively over-protective in general; sometimes it seems like every other building is a listed building. That alone wouldn't be so bad, but the number of restrictions that are placed are then often too much: preventing things like double glazing or other common sense modern improvements. I'm not against protecting historical heritage, of course, but society should serve the people currently living there. Just because something is over a few decades old doesn't mean it's worth bending over backwards to protect 100% intact without any changes. Would it really be so bad if a building from 1910 gets some double glazing, changing the appearance slightly? I'd say it's not.
• p0d 2y ago
  I am a walker and walk around most of my city, Belfast. The affluence I encounter does not seem to match the news narrative. I am concerned that I have become hard-hearted. Alternatively, I wonder if I just see the world differently to others. I have not determined how to come to a conclusion on the matter.I have lived and worked in some of the poorest regions and housing estates of the UK. If anyone has insight I would love to hear it.
  • roenxi 2y ago
    You're not really saying anything there. It is a city. There are buildings. How are you judging how affluent an area is by walking through it?
    • FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      >How are you judging how affluent an area is by walking through it? Probably seeing a lot of new/upper segment cars and well maintained houses.
    • badlibrarian 2y ago
      How deeply your asshole puckers at dusk when you hear a loud noise is one sign. Artists, musicians, survivors of trauma are clued into such things. Also parents with children, merchants carrying sacks of cash to the bank. You know, humans.
      • roenxi 2y ago
        That is crime, not affluence. Poor people aren't automatically criminals.
        • badlibrarian 2y ago
          It is called "street smarts" for a reason and there are many aspects to it.
          • 2y ago
• regularization 2y ago
  Maintaining imperial outposts like Thiepval and Holywood in the north of Ireland, Mount Pleasant in las Islas Malvinas etc. ain't cheap.
• zabzonk 2y ago
  It's not so bad. Yes HS2 is a disaster, yes military procurement is beyond a joke (those daft aircraft carriers, and the horrible US F35s!) and other stuff. But pretty much what nonsense happens compared with other places. I still like living here more than other countries I've lived in - friendly people, lovely countryside, NHS. But I must admit housing is, and always has been, an issue.
• gchadwick 2y ago
  I think a key part of the 'poor' feeling in day to day experience comes from councils' inability to do maintenance, things like pot holes, children's play equipment, public toilet, general upkeep on public spaces and services like libraries. In the grand scheme of things this isn't too expensive but it's been cut to the bone due to way local government funding works. This is explored in the article: > in large part because they’re mandated to write blank cheques for social care with no support or strategy from central government. Individual cases in Central Bedfordshire are now costing up to £750,000 per year, a quarter of the entire libraries and leisure budget and an amount that is rising rapidly with no apparent ceiling. As I wrote previously, “In a single year, residential care costs for children have increased by £2,000 per child… per week,” taking the average cost for a single case from ~£200,000 to ~£300,000 per child per year, again with little explanation as to where the money is going or how this is even possible. > Similarly, “school transport costs have increased by over 100% - from £9m to £20m - in just 4 years” - that’s driven by an unexplained rise in the number of SEND pupils eligible for support and it amounts to roughly the same as - deep breath - the transport, roads, parking, libraries, leisure, housing benefit, public protection and safety budgets combined. Central Bedfordshire Council is not an outlier here - collectively, council overspends on SEND services are set to hit £2bn in the next year, risking further bankruptcies. Again this is not about pitting children against libraries, but asking if we seriously believe we’re addressing either of these things well? Local councils have to pay the very large bills for social care and supporting SEND children but have basically little control over how it's spent or levers to help control the bills. Fixing this so councils can once again spend relative minor amounts of money improving the public realm could go a long way to improving day to day experience. Definitely some other large structural problems (see the huge costs of HS2) but it would provide a noticeable improvement in people's lives and potentially isn't too hard for a government willing to make some bold changes around taxation, local government funding and providing proper national strategy and funding on social care.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    The unfunded mandate system for councils is extremely stupid. Local democracy has long been bad in the UK, but mandating policy centrally and then letting that destroy any connection between local taxation and local budgeting is even worse.
• varispeed 2y ago
  Article misses crucial and always overlooked point. Working class have lost stake in the economy, by government changing IR35 legislation to prevent worker owned businesses from making profit. This was lobbied by big corporations who were losing talent (it was easy to start own company and offer services directly to clients) and contracts (small business could undercut them and offer better quality) and was falsely sold to the public as "anti-tax avoidance" measure. In an environment where working class became a captive workforce, they no longer have interest in getting better at what they do, because it will only benefit corporation they work for. They can't use their talent in their own business, because they can't run it. Add wage compression and the fact the government allowed big corporations to import even cheaper workforce from overseas, compounded the problem. Same with public sector - we had an ecosystem of small businesses delivering services and that was destroyed. Any public sector body buying these services got fined and "nudged" to buy from more expensive big corporations. So you get no productivity, brain drain and big corporations taking massive profits overseas, where small business would spent the money locally stimulating the economy. It's a slow car crash, nobody is paying attention to.
  • Nursie 2y ago
    IR35 is not really about the working class though is it? It's about the professional class of contractors, tv presenters etc, who at various times were doing things that looked suspiciously like regular jobs, but somehow were paying a lot less tax. I agree the implementation of IR35 is an absolute, grade-A clusterfuck, and leaves workers having to do things like buy IR35 insurance, and make in/out determinations themselves, only for HMRC to come up with new ways to try and classify them as 'managed service companies', or a myriad other ways to undermine the entire sector, such that financial ruin can be dangled over people's heads like the sword of damocles... But working class? Pull the other one!
    • varispeed 2y ago
      It's a common misconception that IR35 only affects a narrow group of high-earning professionals - TV presenters, consultants, and the like. But that framing misses the wider picture and, frankly, suits the narrative that was used to sell the legislation to the public. In reality, IR35 has had a broad and damaging impact on a much wider group of skilled workers - IT contractors, engineers, healthcare professionals, tradespeople - many of whom built small, legitimate limited companies as a way to work flexibly, compete fairly, and build some financial security. It was one of the few viable paths to independence left, and IR35 has made it effectively unworkable for many. Large corporations didn't like losing contracts and talent to smaller, more agile competitors. IR35 conveniently removed that competition by making small operators too much of a compliance risk to hire. Meanwhile, public sector bodies were discouraged—sometimes even penalised—for engaging small suppliers, further consolidating the power of the big consultancies. The media focus on celebrity cases wasn't accidental. HMRC gained free publicity and public support by targeting high-profile individuals - knowing it would reinforce the idea that IR35 was closing tax loopholes rather than quietly dismantling a thriving small business ecosystem. The result is a workforce with less autonomy, less incentive to go above and beyond, and fewer opportunities to build something for themselves. This isn't just about tax - it's about economic structure, incentives, and who gets to participate in the rewards of their own labour. And when those opportunities disappear, so does productivity, innovation, and local economic resilience.
• Nursie 2y ago
  Because it is. Something I heard on BBC Radio 4 recently is that everywhere in Britain that's outside of London is now poorer than any given state in the US. Partly this is because of the myopic policies of the coalition and then conservative governments, which didn't invest in growth and what seems like a blindingly obvious consequence of this is that there was then no growth. > Britain’s houses are cramped, ancient and in the wrong places Ain't that the truth. And actually you're better off getting the ancient ones because they're less cramped. I think I agree quite a lot with this article, as someone now watching from overseas - something needs to be done as the state just seems to soak up ever more money for ever less benefit to the average person. Things are getting worse and more expensive over there. Time to change tack and at least have them get better if it's going to cost more!
  • pjc50 2y ago
    > And actually you're better off getting the ancient ones because they're less cramped. Yup. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Morris_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Morris_Committee
  • mytailorisrich 2y ago
    > everywhere in Britain that's outside of London is now poorer than any given state in the US. This is true of Europe in general vs the US because economic growth in Europe has been low compared to the US since at least the financial crisis. At the time GDP of the Eurozone was comparable to the US' now the US is almost twice as big. As a consequence every European country ranks low compared to US states on GDP per capita: "Italy is just ahead of Mississippi, the poorest of the 50 states, while France is between Idaho and Arkansas, respectively 48th and 49th. Germany doesn't save face: It lies between Oklahoma and Maine (38th and 39th)." (2023) [1] [1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp-gap-between-europe-and-the-united-states-is-now-80_6123491_23.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2023/09/04/the-gdp...
    • Rexxar 2y ago
      > At the time GDP of the Eurozone was comparable to the US' now the US is almost twice as big No, You're just comparing change in the EUR/USD exchange rate here. In 2007, the euro was at a high point of 1.48, and in 2024 it's at a low of 1.02. Inflation has not been higher in Europe than in the USA over that period. If we look at GDP at purchasing power parity from 2007 to 2023 we have this: - European Union: 31,162 → 61,217, +96% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=EU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...) - USA: 48,050 → 82,769, +72% (https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=US https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...) Which shows a slight catching-up by the European Union over the period.
• nothercastle 2y ago
  This essay reads like a rant on the inefficiencies of government talks about direct cause problems but never tackles the big WHY.
  • ChrisKnott 2y ago
    It’s totally superficial rage porn. Solutions offered include “a total rethink” and “an integrated strategy”. Brilliant…
• jmathai 2y ago
  I don't agree with everything on this channel but Gary's Economics does a good job articulating a perspective that the lowered quality of life is directly related to growing wealth inequality. Gary's angle is mostly based on wealth being a zero sum game. I think new wealth does get created but I agree that the vast majority of wealth is existing assets and their growth probably dwarfs any net new wealth creation. Some links: Gary's Economics on Youtube - whether or not you agree, he articulates his economic view: https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics https://www.youtube.com/@garyseconomics This podcast where Gary debates with Daniel Priestly who has opposing views. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yohVh4qcas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yohVh4qcas
  • riehwvfbk 2y ago
    New wealth "creation" is a lie. It only looks that way because of devaluing currency and population growth. No conspiracy theory beliefs required to see this one. At the end of the day, what we are buying and selling is compute time on our brain CPU cluster. We can reshuffle what gets our attention, and the relative cost of things can change, but ultimately the only way to increase "wealth" is to get more underlying resource: human brainpower. I see the counter argument coming from a mile away: yeah, but your poor is not your grandfathers poor. You have an iPhone, gramps did not. My counter is again simple: relative value. Electronics were a frontier at the time, and are a commodity now. They are now cheap, and this is compensated by a huge increase in the cost of basics like housing.
    • spacebanana7 2y ago
      > New wealth "creation" is a lie. Perhaps the bigger issue is old wealth destruction. We live in a world of effectively infinite low cost electronics, clothes and food, but the things which used to be abundant are now actually quite scarce. Housing is most obvious example here - but the costs of driving (excluding vehicle purchase), childcare, wedding, and energy are now radically higher than ever before. In these areas it feels like we've gone backwards in productivity.
    • jddj 2y ago
      Leaving wealth to one side, do you think value creation is a lie?
• pclmulqdq 2y ago
  Britain is poor. If you remove London from the equation, it's one of the poorest countries in Europe.
  • zabzonk 2y ago
    I live outside of London (I did previously live there for 30 years or so), in Lincoln about a 100 miles or so away to the north. It's OK. Got two universities and all sorts of other stuff. Certainly not "poor".
    • zelos 2y ago
      The median income in the UK is 10-20% below comparable EU countries.
      • zabzonk 2y ago
        Yes, but tax and other stuff? And which comparable ones? The UK is paying more than most EU nations into NATO (I think Poland the only other one), for example.
        • pas 2y ago
          how much is that 1-2% of GDP of UK? Poland spends 3+ % data for 2024 https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/7EF2/production/_133489423_ws_nato_defence_spending_map_v4_640-2x.png.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/7EF2/production...
      • IncreasePosts 2y ago
        By comparable, do you mean comparable countries that also had their most economically important region removed?
    • graemep 2y ago
      I live in Cheshire. Definitely not poor. I used to live in Warwickshire. Not poor either.
    • 2y ago
• potato3732842 2y ago
  I wonder how many of these check and balance systems that were created once but have grown so big they're now more of a ball and chain than the problem they were intended to mitigate. Environmental impact assessments, engineer stamps, etc, etc, for minor projects that wind up prescribing some petty stormwater solution which adds up to more cost than if the Taj Mahal of stormwater solutions had just been fired from the hip in the general direction of the problem. Graft reducing procurement processes that have grown over time to cost more to run on an annualized basis than the graft they were intended to prevent. At least if we took best guesses when implementing solutions to ancillary problems and awarded contracts based on favor trading at least we'd have the solutions and the stuff to show for it even if the solutions and stuff aren't perfect.
• Danieru 2y ago
  Everyone appears to agree that Britain is broken. The author recognizes that the issue is not a lack of taxes, but lack of care at where the money goes. Sadly the author I think is getting distracted by specific issues. Focusing on school or social costs. Or specific large project over runs. While I do not agree with him on many things, I think Dominic Cummings's treatment of the subject digs deeper: https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/q-and-a You need to read through a ton, but it paints a picture of a government chasing newspaper headlines. And an overall ineffective method of running a country from the top down. How could it be that an act of parliament is being held up by local councils? Parliament's orders used to be the law of the land. Now it is but one of many. Often treatments of British decline read as if the authors wished Britain had been fire bombed to smithereens, and benefited from the Marshel Plan. Yet this undersells the British people. They know how to build new houses. They know how to build trains. Yet Britain as a whole is still searching for that win-win. The path to fixing problems without compromises. Meanwhile Britain's managerial and governing class is so incompetent, it is hard to imagine replacements who would perform worse.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    Dominic Cummings got to be inside Number 10 and entirely blew it with Brexit and everything else. He belongs in the "discredited" pile with the Trussnomics lot.
    • mytailorisrich 2y ago
      No, actually his plan for Brexit was the most coherent, and Truss/Kwarteng were on the right track but executed appallingly badly. If you go for Brexit the "hard way" as the country did then your way forward to compensate and to create growth is to find new competitive advantages and there are not many options apart from going low tax low regulations. This never happened. Truss/Kwarteng made a bad and short-lived attempt and that was it. I am not saying Brexit was a good idea but this is one of those massive changes of course that require "going big or going home" instead of trying to keep things as they were when that's impossible, and slowly fail (it does not mean that it would necessarily succeed but at least you're going for it).
• JohnCClarke 2y ago
  It's worth keeping in mind that the same week the government cut £5B from supporting the sick and disabled they also started selling bonds bought during QE for £100B less than they paid for them. Swings and roundabouts: life expectancy for the poor will fall, but we will have another handful of billionaires. TL;DR: It's not by accident that Britain feels poor.
• bell-cot 2y ago
  American here, relatively well-read. My sense is that post-1945 Britain took a sharp turn - from "let's all work together for the common good" to "let's pretend that our country has a decent future...while quietly looting its not-dead-yet body for our own individual benefit". Well, not quite that simplistic. And WWI was also pretty brutal for both Britain's situation and outlook. IIR, Adam Smith was very clear about the differences between healthy, virtuous capitalism, and the evils of maximize-how-much-the-self-serving-rich-can-squeeze-out-of-the-little-people feudalism.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    Not quite immediately post-45. That was when the modern welfare state was being put together. Winning a war was the peak of state capacity. Things were still going OK around 63 and the "white heat of technology" speech (why can I not easily find a full transcript of this?). Wheels came off in the inflation era leading to the "winter of discontent", followed by a massive and explicit backlash against socialism and in favor of individual profit. Thatcherism. North Sea oil solved the money problems, but papered over the more structural problems. Blairism managed a second financial services boom, but then .. 2008. And we've never recovered.
    • geye1234 2y ago
      Here's Wilson's White Heat speech: https://web.archive.org/web/20131006142325/http://nottspolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Labours-Plan-for-science.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20131006142325/http://nottspolit... I agree it's concerning that major speeches like this are so hard to find.
• samiv 2y ago
  If it already hasn't been said I'd really recommend anyone interested in this topic to checkout "Gary's Economics" on YouTube. Even if you don't agree with him (and I know many don't for various reasons..) You have to admit that he does bring a new perspective to the table and (as a layman economist) it just makes logical sense. Regardless, the main stream economists have not been able to either predict the economy or improve it (for the general majority of people) and it seems that every western economy is following the same trajectory where - governments are broke and pulling back on their services to the public (health care, education etc.) - working class is broke, living pay check to paycheck barely scraping by - middle class is shrinking and financing their lives with ever increasing amounts of debt (mortgages) All the above then begs the question, who has all the money? Who has all the wealth?
  • blitzar 2y ago
    Classic grifter - 95% of his backstory is made up. You can achieve far greater enlightenment by simply droping your preconceptions about rich and poor people and understanding the very basic day to day things happening around you than you will achieve listening to him.
    • bostonwalker 2y ago
      Source on his backstory being made up?
      • blitzar 2y ago
        https://www.ft.com/content/7e8b47b3-7931-4354-9e8a-47d75d057fff https://www.ft.com/content/7e8b47b3-7931-4354-9e8a-47d75d057...
        • James_K 2y ago
          He has addressed this numerous times. His statement was that he was Citi Bank's best trader in 2011, which is true. The dispute is an attempt to discredit him by suggesting that him not being the best trader in other years debunks his 2011 figure.
• Sam_Odio 2y ago
  Related: Why Britain doesn’t build (worksinprogress.co) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36477481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36477481
• ChrisKnott 2y ago
  His examples of “feeling poor” are nothing to do with being poor and are in fact mostly signs of largesse or affluence. Councils expanded the number of SEND pupils eligible for free school transport, increasing spending from £9m to £20m - how is that being poor? It’s an improvement in quality of life…? Ok, it might be a waste of money (or might not be) but it’s not a cut is it. Being poor is like your country sends 10 athletes to the Olympics and they all get eliminated in the heats. No Western nation is actually poor. All Western nations are roughly the same, there’s nothing notable about the UK other than it is towards the richer end and is a cultural superpower.
  • Nursie 2y ago
    > Councils expanded the number of SEND pupils eligible for free school transport, increasing spending from £9m to £20m - how is that being poor? Because the money is sucked out of the council coffers and they then can't provide a lot of the basics. It's not an improvement in quality for people who are, for instance, not SEND pupils. The point being that more and more expenses like this appear each year and then the budget is gone when it comes to looking after the library, fixing potholes etc, Small every day things that make the country look and feel like it's functioning are ignored until everywhere just feels a bit grim and broken.
    • physicsguy 2y ago
      I'm interested to see what Labour have in store for local government reform overall. Where I live will be affected since I'm just into Derbyshire and they're consolidating all boroughs into unitary authorities, which I'm in favour of since I have four tiers of local government where I live. I hope this will just be the first step.
  • n4r9 2y ago
    Intuitively, the richer and more productive a country becomes, the better care they can take of the populace. Education, transport, welfare etc... . Yet it feels like the opposite is happening. We're seeing transport costs and tuition fees endlessly rising, cuts to disability payments, and broken promises to lift caps on welfare. All in the name of "stimulating the economy".
• tremon 2y ago
  From what I've seen, it's because the last 20 years (at least -- I wasn't politically conscious before then) of policy have only focused on London. The rest of the country has mostly been left to fend for itself, but have the additional burden of dealing with nation-wide policies that really only apply to single metropolis. And because Parliament over-allocates funds to London, that leaves most other municipalities to fight over funding scraps left on the table.
  • pas 2y ago
    isn't London still paying more taxes than what's spent there? though of course it's not surprising, productivity is vastly higher in cities. but that's an argument for allowing and helping them to grow more. urbanization started many hundreds of years ago, it's nothing new. in fact, instead of committing to economically (and ecologically) sustainable high-density cities (and withdrawing from the crazy American Dream/Nightmare suburbs) letting people piss away their lives in shitty none of the above places
    • Nursie 2y ago
      London does pay more taxes, but it also disproportionately sucks in the nation’s talented youth, investment etc. The government could and should make an effort to spread growth around more.
      • pas 2y ago
        ... the birthplace of the railways cannot seem to build railways anymore, unfortunately. Growth requires economic/business opportunities, infrastructure that can serve said growth, like-minded people to help manifest said growth, and ... that silly corporate thing, what was it, ah, synergies! Spreading all these things out leads to kick-ass local music scenes, but otherwise helps no one.
• spaceribs 2y ago
  I'm a big believer that the reason for the level of government bureaucracy and busywork described in this article is not a bug, it's a feature. Government's job within a capitalist country in a lot of ways is to ensure stability, a stable populace and stable society leads to stable markets theoretically. But what do you do if there is not enough jobs to go around to ensure that stability? Simple: you just make jobs up, you make busywork up, you increase the bureaucracy to subsidize people who would otherwise be destitute and rioting on the streets. Technical innovation has driven out so many people from jobs at this point that we're reaching a true crisis against the cultural expectation that everyone that's "useful" works a job.
  • aaronbaugher 2y ago
    You also have to ramp up the propaganda, because you need people to believe that things are fine, and that working hard can improve their lives just as much as it could in their grandparents' day. That becomes a harder sell all the time.
  • typewithrhythm 2y ago
    See I suspect that the problem is not taking any sort of capitalist return concept when implementing a socialist policy... Even if you assume that the government needs to create jobs, it's like nobody has ever done a cost benefit, at any stage. You see hundreds of thousands being spent on one individuals care needs, something that is essentially never going to have a positive return, while productive initiatives either lack funding, or have triple thier cost added by pointless additional steps (that nobody has ever done a cost benefit of either).
• negamax 2y ago
  Was it ever rich to begin with if the colonies are removed? It's simply going back to its natural state. Although worse off because of the socialist policies that can't be sustained
• docdeek 2y ago
  > To build a railway between Euston and Curzon Street in Birmingham, I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England. They don’t care whether parliament did or didn’t approve building a railway. Google suggests that line would be about 127 miles long, or about 200 kilometers. That’s one different consent form for every 25 meters of track. Mind boggling.
  • devsda 2y ago
    > I need 8,276 consents from other public bodies, planning, transport, the Environment Agency or Natural England > That’s one different consent form for every 25 meters of track. Mind boggling. I can easily imagine Sir Humphrey lecturing Bernard on why 8276 is not enough consents and why they need more of them. Our country inherited/modeled our civil services and bureaucracy based on the British system. We know the effort it takes to get things done.
• light_hue_1 2y ago
  For the same reason that Americans and Canadians feel so poor. And the same reason why Trump is in office. A total failure of the field of economics. Just like economists insisted that the economy is doing badly because of vibes, they also insist that many people are part of the middle class based on an arbitrary threshold that isn't what it used to be. Housing, energy, and education have increased astronomically compared to 30 years ago. The cost of housing doubled in 10 years in my city. All while the schools got worse and the cost of college is astronomical. The cost of childcare doubled in 10 years as well. Energy bills also doubled in just 4 years. What used to be a great stable income, we're even above the official line for what counts as middle class, is now just scraping by. Being middle class used to mean that you were financially secure and could say have kids and a house. By that metric many people have fallen out of the middle class.
  • dalyons 2y ago
    The categorization of middle class, whether it’s right or wrong, has nothing to do with why things are expensive and life is harder.
• cantrecallmypwd 2y ago
  "Poor" is relative, and maybe conflating relative functionality of services on one axis with economic inequality on another. See also: Detroit, Rio de Janeiro, highway sides of Silicon Valley.
• gghhzzgghhzz 2y ago
  Everything that provides any service or assistance to normal life has been sold off and rented back to us at enormous cost, often with many of extra financial scalping included in the systems we are forced to rely on. And a percentage of the extracted wealth is used to push political and public narrative to incentivise the selling off more. Local authorities are forced to sell off assets and fire direct employees, then get charged a fortune to provide basic services and child and adult social care. And for contracts and outsourcing, the ownership of the contract itself is the thing that gives value, not providing the actual service. Creating a whole set of perverse incentives. A council should look at a pot hole in a road as a massive opportunity. Here is a chance to provide good quality work for local people and local resources, but the opposite happens. We have a whole layer of service retailers e.g. for electricity and gas and communications, who are not more than a spreadsheet speculating on long term prices, a call centre and a web site. Their entire business model being based on a) not messing up the spreadsheet calculation b) enough people being lazy and not renewing or switching their contract every year. Our financial services industry has massive positive PR, seen as a net good for the country. When in reality it is focused not on basic things like providing banking and direct insurance, but in attracting our best and brightest individuals from around the country and instead of having them put their talents to something productive. Instead reward them for creating and maintaining complex systems to move wealth around, asset strip regions, hide it from tax and create a layer of gambling and financial products on top of these systems. I could go on.
  • fads_go 2y ago
    So you mean that Britian has pioneered the US's Project 2025 plan?
    • ceejayoz 2y ago
      Nah. The push for both plans originates at least in part from elsewhere.
      • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
        Capitalism, to oversimplify. The powers that be realised there was money to be extracted and they did it. Packaging it as beneficial for the people; the usual line is "healthy competition will lower the prices for consumers" but I have never seen this work in practice. We have a few areas with competition, like cell phones or health insurance, but the cost and service level differences between them is minimal and there is no competition. Or if there is, it's lower prices at worse service / quality - the race to the bottom. Reprivatize shit and put it in the hands of someone competent. Also, increase wages so that government agencies don't depend so much on expensive consultants / contractors.
• matthewmorgan 2y ago
  Because a very few rich people are eating all the pies.
• fuoqi 2y ago
  A really great video from Tom Nicholas which discusses the same topic: "How Britain Became a Poor Country" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vry5deT8lc0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vry5deT8lc0
  • 8note 2y ago
    its less good than https://youtu.be/b5aJ-57_YsQ?feature=shared https://youtu.be/b5aJ-57_YsQ?feature=shared
• petercooper 2y ago
  I think about it in a naive way, but one that seems to vibe with what I see: Britain is rich. It has huge amounts of capital wealth, property, culture, etc. It just trails in productivity and income. It's like a comfortable, house paid off retiree with a part time job, mostly living off accumulated wealth and prestige.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    > comfortable, house paid off retiree with a part time job, mostly living off accumulated wealth and prestige. That's the median voter. Or at least the picture of the median voter all the parties are chasing. Which is very bad news for the working population, because policy gets heavily influenced by clueless retirees.
  • Starlevel004 2y ago
    > It just trails in productivity and income. It's like a comfortable, house paid off retiree with a part time job, mostly living off accumulated wealth and prestige. Britain is a retirement home with a handful of warships attached.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• MrMcCall 2y ago
  I think it can be best summed up in Craig Ferguson's joke he made when chatting with Robin Williams that he liked to go to London and do to the English what they had been doing to his people (the Scots) for hundreds of years. Much was made of the double rainbow that appeared when the queen died, and I say that was God saying, "Things are going to be better now, now that that evil bitch is dead." Maybe if the royals weren't spending their world rapings on 13 pomeranians (or whatever), there'd be more money for the poors. I do like Harry, though, he's got enough of his awesome Mum in him to counteract his father's evil. And now King Donald is decimating America. Such is the way of kings, my friends.
• LightBug1 2y ago
  Trickle Up Economics. Sucked the life out of the middle and lower classes. A progressively weakening economy. Then Brexit delivered the KO punch. It's not difficult. You're welcome.
• grumpy-de-sre 2y ago
  The post 1970s financialization of everything [1] is probably behind most of Britains decline. The UK was just an early adopter [2]. Embracing that nonsense (including rampant neoliberalism) has really rotted the backbone out of our society. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization 2. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-GDP-share-of-finance-sector-Note-In-2010-the-finance-and-insurance_fig2_303999912 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Evolution-of-the-GDP-sha...
  • HPsquared 2y ago
    The UK did kind of ride the wave though and profit from it internationally. It's one of our few big industries (if you can call it that) bringing money in.
  • vishnugupta 2y ago
    Exactly. I’ve commented here on similar topics before. Britain’s success was in large part due to being able to combine financial innovation with daring voyages and physical innovation. But beginning from 70s they over indexed financialisation at the cost of building physical things. In comparison, China has actively suppressed over financialisation and results speak for themselves.
    • grumpy-de-sre 2y ago
      Visiting China earlier this year broke me, left the place dismayed about the situation back home. I'm no communist, just someone who recognizes the social and economic benefits of abundant housing, cheap energy, and forward thinking transport policy. I have no idea how we'll get back on the track of improving human development but it's not going to be easy.
• IndianITGuy 2y ago
  I run an IT consultancy and often work in both commercial buildings and private residences across the UK. When it comes to the latter—trust me, the elites (and even the upper-middle class) still have an extraordinary amount of money. What’s changed is that no one cares about the public sphere anymore. You wouldn’t believe the contrast between Britain’s crumbling high streets and the lavish interiors of some of these homes. I’ve seen marble floors, $10K TVs, $100K kitchens, $150K bathrooms. Home offices decked out with $50K worth of gear. Wine cellars, indoor spas, private gyms—you name it. Even on the commercial side, it’s wild. It’s not uncommon to walk into a privately-owned or government-owned building and be greeted by a $5 million art piece in the lobby. Then you start looking around and adding up the costs—“they probably spent $10K just on that fancy trim around the doorframe.” Or you notice a particularly heavy door, Google it, and realize it costs $15K per door. Then you start counting the doors—there are thousands. The rabbit hole goes deep, and the amount of wealth becomes staggering. It’s just hidden in plain sight. But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity. So yes, Britain feels poor—but it’s not because the money is gone. It’s because it’s been withdrawn from the commons and buried behind closed doors.
  • YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
    That's it in a nutshell.
  • anon291 2y ago
    > But all of this wealth is cloistered. No one’s investing in the public-facing world. There’s a broad cultural resignation—from the elites to the average person: “Why bother fixing the outside world? Just survive the workday and retreat into your private kingdom.” The mindset has shifted toward building personal fortresses rather than shared prosperity. Because we've been fed a narrative that there's only "one right way" to care for the external world. For example, in my city of Portland, they recently revamped the public library. Was it done to make the beautiful building up to code so that people could enjoy books for a hundred years more until the next renovation? Oh no... that would have 'exacerbated inequality'. Instead, we removed the books, shortened the bookshelves, and got rid of seating so that homeless men would have a place to walk around drugged-out and not be found masturbating behind tall bookshelves. That was the 'one true way' of using public funds, according to those in charge. Don't disagree or you might get labeled a fascist. We see this all around the world. Just look at the reaction to Ezra Klein's book 'Abundance'. Such obvious solutions, things we can all agree on (I consider myself a conservative and enjoyed the parts of the book I've read). But if you look at the reaction it's getting, it's the same tired rhetoric. We are not allowed to have nice things. Wanting nice things is apparently chauvinistic, racist, classist, something supremacist, some other -ist, etc. In the meantime, anyone who has not followed the 'one true path', has basically resigned themselves, and many have become actively resentful of the system writ large.
• James_K 2y ago
  I doubt Britain's problems will ever really be solved. We only seem interested in making them worse. I blame the media, mostly. They're not interested in telling people the truth as much as getting Nigel Farage on every other week to argue about immigration. The issue with news is that you can only really report on new stuff, whereas the problems we face are chronic and old. My faith is our political system is utterly crushed, and I suspect the same is true for many other people. The ground is ripe for fascism.
• cess11 2y ago
  From the title I expected to see some mention of privatisation or foreign squatters owning real estate for credit and tax purposes rather than use or friction and waste in the NHS due to corrupt IT procurement, and things like that. The proposed recommendations to Starmer et al are also very vague, at least to me, Labour insiders or public affairs consultants might have obvious context to fill them in, I don't know.
• henry2023 2y ago
  Only two major factors in play here: - GDP Per Capita at the same level as in 2018. - Number of British Billionaires increased by 20% in the same period. Markets are not zero sum until they are.
• Ladywood 2y ago
  GB needs to shift some of the overheating in London to it's second cities (Leeds, Manchester etc). Young, ambitious people in London are doing fantastic in their jobs and bring so much energy into their careers but are increasingly getting nowhere in their personal lives without help from bank of mum and dad. For many I know, it's driving increased rates of burnout and most are simply checking out of the country for the likes of Dubai/Singapore et al. because they see no desirable alternative. Those that continue to grind on in London have to choose one of the tradeoffs between getting a home within an hour of their work, getting married or starting a family. To do any of these means drastically cutting back your expenditure, and as a result local independents/ pubs etc start to close down and get replaced by your clone town shops. Planning, gentrification and other reasons also contribute to all of this, but it means grassroots in the country are just getting stamped out and it makes it hard to ever really imagine a 'garage startup' in a cheap part of town being a realistic image. The problem is though, that because a vast majority of the jobs, institutions and national infrastructure revolves around London, it's hard for any other cities to rise up to provide an alternative. So you get graduates who are ambitious flocking to the city, which attracts their friends and their friends friends. This overflowing workforce attracts more companies, more industries more investment. It creates an unbreakable cycle. Ultimately the only constraint that faces any city growing like this is physical space. Once that runs out you get all of the negative externalities which are driving productivity. Dislocation of community, 1hr+ commutes wasting 10hrs a week of your most productive populations time, price spikes, increased crime, loss of identity, community and culture, the commercialisation and financialisation of everything and the feeling of everything is at breaking point everyday. It's a troublesome place to be in. Your creatives and engineers don't have the physical space to tinker with things or to mend stuff, and to hire the space is extremely cost prohibitive. So they end up getting jobs in design agencies or investment banks. They aren't really dealing with physical things anymore and you start to lose sparks of innovation or inspiration. Everyone gets stuck in these bubbles and it impacts the rest of the country. It's a massive shame, because a good life can be found elsewhere in the UK. Those I know in Manchester earn a combined income of £70-80k, own a 4 bed semi-detached (£350k) in an increasingly popular part of the city. They have a garden and a garage where they tinker with ideas. They learned how to use tools whilst renovating their property. They know their neighbours. They get to the national parks and swim in waterfalls within an hour of their home. Their friends live in adjacent streets and mend cars, join local community groups, share an allotment etc. I'm sort of rambling, but what I'm trying to say is the lack of pressure and the space to breathe is giving them access to experiences and opportunities that a London 5 year qualified grad earning 100k living in a 2 bed high rise flat couldn't even fathom (yet would benefit immensely from). In fact they probably pay £££ to do some basic household tasks in a controlled environment, but it's packaged up as a boozy [insert skill like painting] social event. What actually needs to happen? - We need to get our most energetic, creative and inspired people into some of the emerging areas across the UK regions. We need to de-stigmatise 'not moving to London does not mean you're a failure'. We need to drive cultural change through stories, film, music etc to help people imagine what a life elsewhere might feel like. To give them the confidence to revitalise areas in the UK. This will make the move more desirable. - We need to fundamentally get more jobs and opportunities into our second cities. This will make the move more financially viable. - To get more jobs into cities, we need to boost populations within 30-45 minutes of the CBD so companies can actually hire for the roles they need. To do that you need to invest in intra-city transport (trams/metros, cycle lanes, bus systems). You could also lean into hybrid more, build HS2 in full, so people can live in the North and go to the office in London twice a week within 1hr 30. You also need to regenerate old mill land thats derelict in the inner city areas, build easy to rent affordable flats so people can move to a city easier and get their bearings before buying. Make it more feasible. We basically need to realise that the country is nearly 70m people, and to rely on/ only invest in just 8m in the London region to pick up the weight is always going to end badly. I truly believe London is now overheated, and the Richard Florida theory of agglomeration effects is probably now getting diminishing returns. Tom Forth gets closer to the structural reasons in here: https://tomforth.co.uk/whynorthenglandispoor/ https://tomforth.co.uk/whynorthenglandispoor/ The best way to get young ambitious people to give a shit about the UK again is to make them feel like they have a stake in society. That's becoming more impossible everyday in London due to house prices (the traditional route). Get them into our next cities, founding start ups with less risk (lower costs) or joining local grad schemes with fresh energy, combined with investment into transport, get those cities productivity up and I promise Britain will turn a corner in a decade.
• LukeB42 2y ago
  Agitation by community-based agents leading to honest people dropping out and wicked people doubling down.
• incomingpain 2y ago
  I havent checked on UK in awhile. Lets look at it together. objective observer pov. GDP growth: basically 0% for years. You're stagnating and losing economic time. Bad news. Unemployment looks to be rising but overall not terrible. Participation rate seems high, grandma and grandpa still working it seems? Interest rate of 4.5% is rough. Housing is problematic. Balance of trade is negative, you're getting poorer. Govt debt to gdp is up against the 100% barrier. Looking at central bank balance sheet, it does look like you just avoided bankruptcy. Consumer confidence hasnt been positive in 10 years. corporate tax rate of 25%? personal income tax of 45%. sales tax of 20% Yikes. Seems to me the UK government is holding the economy back with far too high taxes.
  • gghhzzgghhzz 2y ago
    > Govt debt to gdp is up against the 100% barrier. Looking at central bank balance sheet, it does look like you just avoided bankruptcy. A country cannot go bankrupt. After the war the debt to gdp ratio was 250%, and from that position the government nationalised 20% of industry, built houses, create the NHS and welfare state and developed a nuclear programme. > corporate tax rate of 25% on profit yes, but if you are big enough you declare as little profit as possible. > personal income tax of 45% that's the highest band there is, payable only on income over £125,140 > sales tax of 20% Yikes. well it's a tax on added value on every step thorough the retail chain, collectable by the end retailer. It's zero rate on food and child clothes and some other things. Taxes are indeed on the wrong places in many cases: e.g. dividend tax on unearned income should be equalised with income tax, income tax thresholds should be increased in line with inflation / wages and not frozen as they currently are. but I don't think overall tax burden is the issue here.
    • incomingpain 2y ago
      >A country cannot go bankrupt. After the war the debt to gdp ratio was 250%, and from that position the government nationalised 20% of industry, built houses, create the NHS and welfare state and developed a nuclear programme. Correct that there isn't a bankruptcy legislation, but there's a factor of cant pay the creditors and you just stop. Which mostly implies that retirees go back to work. If you'd like to invent a new word for it, fine but bankrupt is what many western countries are right now. >but I don't think overall tax burden is the issue here. This is without talking about property, tv, etc taxes. The total tax burden is probably over 100% and you're feeding people into specific tax free things like food. Definitely total tax burden problem. The problem comes up against thermodynamics. The longer you run taxes at these high levels, the worse things get. That includes roads and everything. Even though in theory taxation should at least maintain those things. So your country becomes poorer and poorer. Not sustainable.
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  Visited UK recently, wandered around south-east counties. Didn't feel like a poor country. In poor countries, things are cheap. In UK, things are expensive, so people have money.
  • Nextgrid 2y ago
    UK is the most expensive third-world country I've had the displeasure of visiting (and before that, living in). If you want the extreme of "cheap and run down", some Eastern European countries fit the bill. If you want the other extreme of "expensive and well-kept", Switzerland. But Britain is in a unique place of both "expensive and run down".
    • NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
      Yeah...a sad combination of low salaries, high costs, and the English.
  • kypro 2y ago
    Repeat this experiment in the North of England, or anywhere but the South-East
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
• olcragg 2y ago
  [dead]
• YeGoblynQueenne 2y ago
  Given the title of the article I thought it would start by pointing out the high rate of child poverty in the UK, relatively higher than most EU and OECD countries [1], the soaring rates of child homelessness and overall homelessness [3]. I thought it might lead with the sorry, no, the tragic, state of English railways [4,5]. Or the postcode lottery and the constant under-funding of the NHS, or its hemorrhaging of skilled workers [7,8]. The sorry, no tragic state of the nation's teeth (!) [9,10]. The absolute forlorn misery that is the high street in most English towns [11]. The boarded up shops. The desperate people. The dysfunctional everything and everywhere. But, no. >> The big picture is pretty simple: we have a huge debt burden sucking over £100bn out of the budget every year (more than the entire education budget and nearly double the defence budget); and that would be okay-ish if the economy were growing, but it’s not. No no. The economy is not growing. That's the problem. It's a bottom line on a spreadsheet. And do you know who is responsible for all this? Well according to the author of the piece above that's all the useless public officials and quangos (maybe we should take ... a chainsaw at them?) and the crazy overspending the must obviously be responsible for (or at least that seems to be the allusion in the article, though never stated directly like that). Sorry but given all of the above I have very serious doubts about the article. I mean it's clear there is an agenda here and it's not about poverty, or not about reducing poverty anyway. It sounds more like it's all about increasing richess, the richess of people for whom poverty doesn't mean a trip to the local food bank, but a trip to the Greek islands in a friend's jet because you can't afford the fuel for your own. And maybe that's the reason why the UK is a rich country but so many of its people are poor. It's not a matter of quantities of money, it's a matter of distribution. ___________ [1] https://cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-01/CPAG-Poverty-176-poverty-in-the-uk-and-other-countries.pdf https://cpag.org.uk/sites/default/files/2024-01/CPAG-Poverty... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/68574869 https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/68574869 [3] https://england.shelter.org.uk/what_we_do/updates_insights_and_impact/record_child_homelessness_and_soaring_rough_sleeping_figures https://england.shelter.org.uk/what_we_do/updates_insights_a... [4] https://theconversation.com/rail-disruption-in-the-uk-is-so-common-that-the-economic-damage-it-causes-is-barely-noticed-but-change-is-possible-245515 https://theconversation.com/rail-disruption-in-the-uk-is-so-... [5] Personal experience: 3 out of 5 of all train journeys during my four-hour commute would be cancelled or delayed. Fortunately I could WFH. [6] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clynvjgynp8o https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clynvjgynp8o [7] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/staff-shortages-in-the-nhs-and-social-care-sectors/ https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/staff-shortages-in-the-nh... [8] https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2024-079474 https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj-2024-079474 [9] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62253893 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-62253893 [10] https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/hundreds-queue-around-the-block-for-nhs-dentist-appointment-368227/ https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/news/hundreds-queue-around... [11] Personal experience. I live in an affluent student town by the sea but outside this affluent enclave it's like another country and you can see why people would jump at the chance to bury the current political class and piss on their graves.
• masfuerte 2y ago
  > It’s a battle between people who think we can do both, better; and people who seriously believe that a bat tunnel is the best way to spend £120m to support wildlife, a proposition for which no compelling evidence has ever been provided. Nobody believes that about the bat tunnel. HS2 designed the most expensive thing they could think of because that maximises the profit. They say Natural England approved it but why wouldn't they? In a non-government project the contractors would negotiate with Natural England to agree on the cheapest thing that complied with the law. HS2 presented the most expensive thing and said can we do this? And they got the answer they wanted.
  • ChocolateGod 2y ago
    No one involved in building HS2 has any incentive to actually do it on time, there's so much benefit (to the companies) to drag it out. The longer it takes the more the companies involved in making it receive, because the government will cover the bill.
• HenryBemis 2y ago
  There are snakes. And there are vicious snakes. And then there is Boris Johnson. It looks like (just like everywhere else in the world) the rich become waaaayy richer and the rest are taxed/inflated to death. It's not that a house that 'was priced' at GBO 200k is 20 years ago is worth GBP 1.5m. It's not that a house that is 20 years older than before has turned to gold and its value has grown. It is the constant devaluation of the GBP. Brexit simply accelerated an already bad situation. I still wait for Boris Johnson and his team to show us the GBP 350m per week to be redirected to the NHS. I think that "you will own nothing and be happy" is happening in the UK already with below 35 to never own property (unless inherit it) and by then they have to sell it to have a 'modern' lifestyle.
• WalterBright 2y ago
  Economist C. Northcote Parkinson's 1960 book "The Law and the Profits" notes the decline of Britain started in the early 20th century with the rise in the bureaucratic state and the commensurate rise in taxes.
• NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
  You have to understand, in modern Britain bureaucracy is the point. Everybody is lazy, nothing works, and nobody is going to do anything about it because doing something would require fighting an army of bureaucrats. And, dear reader, who would blame you for not doing that? I had British Telecom around to fix a wiring issue. The rental agency said they'd be coming by on Thursday or Friday and I should pick. Simultaneously, I get a text from BT that they'll be by on Wednesday. The gent shows up Tuesday. I ALSO get a call on Friday (while I'm at work): "Mate, I'm about 15 minutes away from your house...". Everything is like this. Everything.
  • physicsguy 2y ago
    Nothing you've said is abnormal in other parts of Europe though, I've been in Germany for work a lot, and bureaucracy there is a significantly higher. Yet it's still wealthier.
    • NoImmatureAdHom 2y ago
      Maybe letting it get so top-heavy it collapses is the only way forward. Peter Turchin writes about this and similar things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Turchin
  • lnsru 2y ago
    We waited once for German Telekom‘s technician 4 months to get a stupid confirmation, that wiring is ok. So we got dvd player and lots of dvds from flea market.
• alarak 2y ago
  All the colonialism and racism apologists coming out of the woodwork.
• nand_gate 2y ago
  Modern Britain is just a rentier economy. Huge income taxes on low wages and limited wealth tax is not exactly enticing compared to welfare or moving overseas.
• proaralyst 2y ago
  I don't see planning mentioned much in the article or comments. The Town and Country Planning act is a large cause of high development costs in the UK. Roads, rail, public works, nuclear power stations, onshore renewables and above all housing have all suffered significantly because getting things approved is so difficult. Most other affluent nations have some form of zoning instead, which make planning much much easier. Most other affluent nations have more central control over planning too, which makes consensus over megaprojects easier to reach.
• buyucu 2y ago
  because it is increasingly poor.
• Tycho 2y ago
  It’s worth noting that - UK poverty has been falling continually for decades - UK real disposable household income (median) after housing costs is higher than ever Part of the reason the UK “feels” poor tbh is because people keep saying it is without justification.
  • bendigedig 2y ago
    Citations required plz
    • Tycho 2y ago
      https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2024/households-below-average-income-an-analysis-of-the-uk-income-distribution-fye-1995-to-fye-2024#main-stories https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-av... (the latest report came out a few days ago and actually the latest year is a slight worsening of household income, but not far off the high from 2022)
      • bendigedig 2y ago
        +1 for the citation, thanks. The numbers do paint a picture of a fairly anemic 5-10% increase between 02/03 and 23/24 in 'inflation-adjusted' median household income. However, I note that that the data is 'equivalised' which to me somewhat muddies the waters; the numbers are inherently tied into the population's demographics, and I'm not confident that I understand what effect things like demographic shifts (which are obviously ongoing) would have on these numbers.
        • Tycho 2y ago
          I think the equivalisation actually ‘unmuddies’ the waters. It means you can’t say something like “the numbers are only higher because more adults are living together”, as that is already being adjusted for. In theory. It’s still a travesty that the UK has not gotten much richer in the last 20 years than it has, but the constant refrain of “living standards are collapsing” and “no one can afford a house” just doesn’t match the data IMO.
• aixpert 2y ago
  it's a self-isolated participant of the old world, back water of the back water so to speak
• bradley13 2y ago
  Honestly, as someone who lived in Britain for a little while: it is a poor country. First, there are a lot hooligans, drunks and layabouts. In recent years, add in lots of illegal migrants. Many people on social welfare, living in social housing, with either no ability or no desire to better their lot. Then you have the NHS. Anecdote: one friend with severe back pain from a herniated disk waited a year for surgery. When she was put off again - make due with hot baths - she went out of the country and paid for it privately. That is not first-world health care. The infrastructure feels like it's crumbling. I particularly remember the rail system, because I commuted weekly by train. They claimed something like a 95% punctuality rate ("excluding conditions not in their control"). In the course of one year, my train arrived on-time exactly once. Not very much is under their control. Being a DIY type, I was appalled at the building standards. First anecdote: Visiting a friend whose bathroom has just been professionally renovated. They had another electrical plug installed, so the electrician just strung a loose wire across the wall. Then the painter painted over it - not behind it, just over it - so if it shifted you saw the old color. Second anecdote: the apartment we lived in was in an old building, and water was added later. To get the water pipe into the apartment, they had just bashed a hole in the brick wall above the front door. When we lived there, decades after this had been done, it was still exactly that: a pipe going through a hole bashed in the wall. Oh, and the wallpaper was installed upside-down. All this grousing shouldn't be taken the wrong way. Britain is a great place to visit, and I enjoyed temporarily living there. But for the average Brit or Scot? By Western standards, Britain is poor.
  • switch007 2y ago
    > Being a DIY type, I was appalled at the building standards Yup. It's no understatement to say a good tradesperson is extremely difficult to find. They all charge the inflated going rate regardless of their skill level, as people are desperate. They often get pretty shiry/nasty if you demand things or want to check their work - to keep you afraid and to accept their very subpar work. Materials are shockingly terrible across the board too I've been putting off renovations because I've had so, so many bad experiences with tradespeople in the past.
• AtlasBarfed 2y ago
  It's like the British Empire heights. The peasants in England were still incredibly poor. The British Empire was the largest empire in history, and the nobility and elites sucked up all the imperial wealth. Because remember, being rich isn't about the amount of money you have, it's about the amount of money you have more than the average person. The goal of capitalism under oligarchical control is the maximization of the gap. What has made everyman's life better has been technology. It was never capitalism and finance.
• amai 2y ago
  "Britain is a wealthy country, but the gap between our richest and poorest 10% is now, the US excepted, the highest in the developed world" https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/20/britains-wealth-gap-is-growing-its-malign-effects-seep-into-all-aspects-of-life-its-a-national-disaster https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/20/britai... "For those born in the 1940s and 1950s, incomes would typically double from their late 20s to their early 50s. However, those born in the 1960s only saw income grow by around 50% over that period, whilst those born more recently look set to see weaker growth still as they age." https://ifs.org.uk/articles/income-and-wealth-inequality-explained-5-charts https://ifs.org.uk/articles/income-and-wealth-inequality-exp...
• Straw 2y ago
  See https://ukfoundations.co/ https://ukfoundations.co/ Similar argument to the article, but in much more depth. In a nutshell, the UK has made it legally difficult to construct new housing and many forms of infrastructure- electricity plants, roads/tunnels, railway, hospitals, etc. As a result, these things take up a larger fraction of ordinary people's budget and also limit mobility and hence productivity, resulting in poverty or effective poverty even for someone with an income that would make them globally rich.
• silexia 2y ago
  Surprise, shocking surprise... Socialism doesn't work? Who could have predicted it?
• timka 2y ago
  Britain was never rich in natural resources (coal was an exception, but its importance faded). Its strength always lay in: * Naval and trade dominance (a legacy of Venetian methods, transferred through the Netherlands). * Financial systems (London as the hub of insurance, lending, and later offshore banking). * Intelligence networks and manipulation (from the East India Company to MI6). * Colonial exploitation (enclosures, the Opium Wars, the Bengal famine of 1943, suppression of the Sepoy Rebellion, the exploitation of Ireland, etc.). This wasn’t "honest" wealth but the result of systemic plunder and control over global flows. And the British elite has never prioritized the well-being of its people: * Enclosures (16th–18th centuries) – Peasants driven off the land for landlord profits. * The Irish Famine (1845–1849) – Grain was exported to England while millions starved. * "Divide and rule" policies – From India to Northern Ireland, preventing unity among the oppressed. * Austerity – Post-2008 budget cuts Some may say this is in "distant path" but I think this is the root cause while the author focuses just on modern symptoms. The current crisis is the inevitable result of a model where wealth was built not on labor and innovation, but on exploitation and manipulation.