Blaming “Toryism” is pretty odd. You think the economic problems affecting the UK started in the last decade? To me this seems to be the product of Blair-era Labour, which gutted the country by shipping jobs and industrial capacity to Eastern Europe and China. Populist nationalism is rising throughout the western world. It’s a reaction to the failings of globalist liberalism, not the cause of those problems.
>Populist nationalism is rising throughout the western world. It’s a reaction to the failings of globalist liberalism, not the cause of those problems. Was there any alternative to 6B people in the developing world offering to sell their labor and environment for less than the 1B people in the developed world? Arbitrage opportunities cannot go on forever without being outcompeted.
> Was there any alternative to 6B people in the developing world offering to sell their labor and environment for less than the 1B people in the developed world? Arbitrage opportunities cannot go on forever without being outcompeted
The alternative is to make sure that you provide a mechanism to bring the best and brightest to your country instead of coddling the least productive at home.
It’s not popular politically so we promise coal miners another generation of work instead.
The UK is declining, and people are starting to notice it. People are blaming the government, and clamouring for more support and money, but unfortunately I suspect it’s not that simple. The elephant in the room, in my opinion, is that we simply don’t have the money to maintain the standard of living we once enjoyed. Almost all political conversations here are contingent on this fact, but this underlying problem is r…
Maybe because all economic surplus is absorbed by landlords [1] government contracts go to Tory party donors with no relevant experience, and public services are run by contractors and "consultants" who cost 10x of what maintaining in house talent would.
By the logic of the person I was replying to: Britain has a weak currency and also Brexit. America has a strong currency and also no Brexit. So perhaps these things are related?
Every currency is weak against the usd right now due to flight into us treasury bonds for safety. Spain who is self sufficient on food will post between 7,5 and 10 inflation this year.
> Spain who is self sufficient on food will post between 7,5 and 10 inflation this year.
I left the UK for the US in 2019. My I-485 was approved this week. I haven't been able to travel back to the UK since 2019 first because of Covid and then because of the pending I-485 petition. I'll be going back for the first time once my card is delivered. Reading about what has been happening over the past years in the UK while sitting in the US is really strange. Sometimes it feels like reading about a cartoonish…
So you traded our bananas republic for a gun toting corporatocracy with low employment protection and comedy healthcare and no food standards. I'm not sure who's worse off.
I don't love the US system but our NHS isn't anything to shout about, I got quoted a 4 year waiting period just to see an ADHD specialist.
The UK CPI increase year-over-year was 11.1% in October [1]. The France CPI increase was 6.2% for the same period [2]. That is a huge difference for similar developed economies. 1. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bull... . 2. https://www.rateinflation.com/inflation-rate/france-inflatio... .
Now compare to Germany. The difference is caused by France more heavily subsidizing/capping energy costs. It reflects a short term deviation in market policy triggered by gas shortages, not some fundamental divergence.
Exactly, that's specifically why I pointed out the issue of Germany's poor energy decisions. Germany is getting killed due to their decision to hook their wagon pretty much entirely to Russia for energy, and their inflation rate of 10.4% in October still was lower than the UK's.
The UK is simply doing worse WRT inflation than any comparable country, and nobody, not even Conservative UK politicians, really debates this.
The UK is declining, and people are starting to notice it. People are blaming the government, and clamouring for more support and money, but unfortunately I suspect it’s not that simple. The elephant in the room, in my opinion, is that we simply don’t have the money to maintain the standard of living we once enjoyed. Almost all political conversations here are contingent on this fact, but this underlying problem is r…
This happened due to Brexit, voting in Tory's again and again, a broken media, a starved educational system.
But voting to put trade barriers on oneself.. to stop immigration... Is going to lead to pain, no matter what way you cut it.
I think the plan has always been - let London grow and let everything else wither away and die.
Sure, and people have been saying this for quite literally 1000 years. The country has been geographically "unbalanced" for most of its history, and if you understand preferential attachment, you'll see why. There's been nothing one can do to "rebalance the UK" for several hundred years at least. 20% of the population lives in london, and it often has ~1/3 of the people in the country in the area -- as tourists, trav…
The UK has only existed for about 300 years, so "millenium" is an exaggeration.
The UK is declining, and people are starting to notice it. People are blaming the government, and clamouring for more support and money, but unfortunately I suspect it’s not that simple. The elephant in the room, in my opinion, is that we simply don’t have the money to maintain the standard of living we once enjoyed. Almost all political conversations here are contingent on this fact, but this underlying problem is r…
> It’s not clear to me _why_ this has happened I always assumed it was a combination of WW II, collapse of the Empire and then a series of terrible governments since the 1960s.
Single common thread has to be poor governance. Certainly in politics and the civil service and also, from what I hear, amongst business leaders. They are mostly selected from a very small pool, ie public schools via the class system, so it makes intuitive sense that those chosen would on average be less talented / capable (and even motivated) than other countries. Certainly many of those I know who went to private school were not as competent as their grades or standing would suggest.
Add to that a lack of life experience (career politicians, sheltered lives, oxbridge bubble) then it’s hard for them to even know what the real problems are, never mind caring or have a vision for fixing them. Simple examples: the productivity gap, the state of infrastructure, chronic underinvestment in the north at the expense of where the upper class live, etc
Fallback has been decades of “managed decline”, which is actually - kicking the can down the road to maintain the status quo for as long as possible before people realise the state of things. Thatcher saw the city and selling off national assets as a quick fix, Blair pumped student debt into the regions to borrow from the future. Combine that with infighting and the Tories’ destruction of industry and local government for class war purposes.
I don’t see a way out beyond a revolution, but that will take surely many more decades of decline. Best hope is break up of U.K. perturbs the political sufficiently to open it up to the rest of the country. Things are realistically ok for most people (but not for millions living in poverty and literally relying on food handouts to live), but far more worrying is the trend. It’s plain to see things will get very very bad without wholesale reform and long term vision.
Some stuff in the media today about a Swiss style deal with the EU.
after all this the UK is seriously proposing free movement of people (among a pile of other things) again?!
We swapped ~300 million EU citizen with similar (often greater) workplace rights and living standards for a soon-to-be trade deal with India that will only happen with the mass migration of far poorer Indians to the UK. Indians which are used to much fewer workplace rights.
The working visas that are created for this will remove the rights UK citizens have to make the visa holders "more attractive" to employers.
Good luck to native workers in the UK competing with an Indian on a work visa that has no working time regulations, holiday allowance, etc. and very little leverage to complain in case their visa gets revoked.