The strange case of Britain’s demise • Hacker News Board

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#121

Post by sealeck » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

jmyeet wrote: post #39

The neoliberal publication fails to mention "neoliberalism" as a cause. Shocking. Probably the worst thing it says is this: > For both to do so at once—as happened when, amid recent Tory convulsions, Labour was led by Jeremy Corbyn, a hard-left throwback—is a calamity. Corbyn was only "hard-left" in the sense that he wasn't anti-labor. Lots of people like give lots of different reasons why Labor was eviscerated in th…

Well Corbyn is also a completely hopeless politician. They really should have kept him safely tucked away in Islington north. It's not his political ideology which was the problem, it's that he (not to put too fine a point on it) lacked any modicum of political ability).

One of the problems is that the UK democracy is not very strictly encoded (which Tory politicians will happily tell you is one of the wonders of the British consitution and then a whole bunch of drivel about freedom vs tyranny) - whereas e.g. Germany and France have things encoded that politicians shouldn't be allowed to do (bribery, corruption, etc.) the UK has this very weird theory that politicians should be allowed to self-police and have this ludicrous "no rules were broken" based on investigations carried out by civil servants (e.g. Sue Gray report) which in reality should be carried out by the courts (although I guess Dominic Raab has managed to blow such a big hole in the justice system that we should just be thankful that we at least still nominally posess one).

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#122

Post by skippyboxedhero » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

mmarq wrote: post #113

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardening eviction rules is economic suicide. The problem with unsuitable housing is a side-effect of lack of supply. If you make it harder to evict, you make it harder to foreclose, make it harder to buy houses (because landlords can only sell to other landlords)...it is very bad news. This happened almost immediately after Scotland brought in their rules...because politicians there have been blocking new builds for…

> Hardening eviction rules is economic suicide. No, it isn’t. The current state of affairs in England (even Scotland and Wales have different regulations) only causes misery and an immense waste of resources on housing. Or do you think Germans or Frenchmen spend 3 months a year doing house viewings? Nowhere in the civilised world you can evict a family that doesn’t have rent arrears and nowhere in the civilised world…

The reason you spend that time is because of the rules.

Actually, the homeless rate in Edinburgh (which actually has an eviction ban and, even, rent controls now) is 3x the rate of SF...the reason why is that most of the rental market disappeared because eviction control meant that landlords could only sell properties at the end of rental periods (and when these came up in September, they all just removed properties from the market because house prices are going to be lower next September).

The law of unintended consequences. The govt tried to take control, and it has made the problem significantly worse. This is the economic problem that the UK faces in a nutshell: voters want things that are economically damaging (the situation with housing is probably 10x Brexit), they don't understand why they are damaging, and when the damage comes they blame someone else (and btw, the most amazing thing is that if you look at a city like Edinburgh...the people are VOTING for the people who are promising not to build any housing WHILST they are complaining about a lack of housing...it is the kind of thing that makes you realise that people are getting what they are asked for).

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#123

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

recuter wrote: post #38

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes…

[deleted]

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#124

Post by notahacker » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:36 PM UTC

hermitcrab wrote: post #109

justin66 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> undeniable neo-Nazi element One of the things I've learned as an outsider while trying to distinguish between propaganda and reality vis a vis Ukraine is that the Nazis are pretty deniable.

It would be weird if Ukraine didn't have any neo-Nazis, given that pretty much every other European country does.

Speaking of weird, I don't think there's a single person banging on about how the presence of neo-Nazis in Ukraine justified the invasion that wouldn't have enthusiastically defended the actual Nazis in the 1930s...

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#125

Post by tailspin2019 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:38 PM UTC

hermitcrab wrote: post #51

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #18

Remarkable article. 2000-odd words, goes into great detail talking about politics, psycho-analyzing the Tories...it is all because they went to Eton...of course...the Brexit, the bankers...it is all so simple. A brief sentence is expended on planning, no mention about supply-side problems, the productivity crisis in govt (which is now 50% of the economy)...nothing. I will say this another way, you can measure the int…

>not a failure of voters I disagree. That Brexit was a massive con was obvious to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention. But the electorate voted for it anyway.

I disagree. I voted against it, but to properly have an informed enough opinion on it really required a good understanding of our economy and how it interacted with that of the EUs.

I believe Brexit was such a complex issue that most normal voters could not be expected to be able to be informed enough to actually weigh up the decision by any useful means other than relying on superficial emotional decision making or their historical political leanings.

I think there were possibly advantages of leaving had we made the most of them. (Not enough to persuade me, but the outcomes didn’t have to be all bad). Clearly we didn’t make the most of these potential upsides though and we were never going to because the gvnt was clearly not competent enough to see such a complex transition through successfully.

Having said that, after some cursory reading on the topic, outside of the normal media spin, I believed that we were better in then out. But I disagree that it was trivially obvious for the average voter to determine this. Especially with the ridiculous campaign promises and misdirection of the leave campaign (and I think the remain campaign didn’t do great either).

And even with my background reading, my vote to remain was based largely on a gut instinct rather than a deep conviction or understanding that I was taking the correct side. I think a lot of voters would say the same.

And I know many leave voters who almost immediately regretted voting that way. Such was the “coin toss” decision making for so many people.

Saying that Brexit was obviously a massive con (and the associated implication that leave voters did not sufficient inform themselves) is to risk drastically oversimplifying it.

I will agree that it is very obvious in retrospect that it was a terrible idea.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#126

Post by BMc2020 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:40 PM UTC

recuter wrote: post #38

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes…

Thank you for reading that meandering near stream-of-consciousness bit of fluff so the rest of us don't have to.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#127

Post by makomk » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

petesergeant wrote: post #4

I feel like the article lays it out pretty well? It’s a government who’s been in power too long, whose talent base was massively thinned by a Brexit Purity witch hunt and the impossibility of delivering the Brexit fairy-tale, and who weren’t simply ejected at the last election because of Corbyn’s overwhelming unpopularity.

The article is part of the problem. UK politics and the media narratives around it have beeen utterly wrecked by the fight over Brexit and the attempts to give its creators the boot. For example, take this claim: "Investment is down and inflation higher than it would have been inside the European Union." The UK's inflation in the year to November 2022 was 10.7%, compared to 10.1% in the Eurozone. It just doesn't seem at all plausible that the UK would somehow have substantially lower inflation if it were in the EU, based on what countries actually in the EU have experienced, yet it's treated as so obviously true that only lying Brexiters would reject it.

This belief is boosted by the fact the British press only ever compares our inflation with France, which has the lowest inflation in Europe due to substantial nuclear generating capacity and energy subsidies funded through borrowing. Our government was attacked for attempting even a fraction of those energy subsidies to the point they did a U-turn because ultimately the public pays for it, but that downside is ignored when talking about France. They also also have substantially more national debt for obvious reasons... but luckily the UK national debt is usually only compared with Germany's.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#128

Post by grog454 » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:43 PM UTC

recuter wrote: post #38

Ben Page, the boss of Ipsos, a global research firm, points to what he terms the “loss of the future”, common across the West but acute in Britain. In 2008, as the financial crisis struck, only 12% of Britons thought youngsters would have a worse quality of life than their parents, Mr Page notes. Now that figure is 41%. As elsewhere, people worry about immigration and feel threatened by globalisation. All this makes…

> this is day 0. Only looking forwards, how do you thrive economically in the 21st century under these current conditions with the cards you have to play

Counterpoint: how do you avoid repeating the mistakes of the past and learning from them by pretending they never happened?

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#129

Post by JetSetWilly » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:44 PM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #22

I’m going to name the English language as one of the suspects. A common language with the US makes many of the political and business elite focus on the U.S. It also makes them less inclined to put the effort in to engage with Europe politically and culturally. That in turn helped to fan the flames of Euroscepticism that in turn led to Brexit. It’s no accident that the focus of trade deals post Brexit has been with E…

English is the lingua franca within Europe as well. And last I checked Europe displays a similar obsession with US politics as the UK does. How many Germans bother to learn Polish or Greek or whatever, who do not have family ties there?

The reason british people don't learn languages is that it is not economically beneficial for them to do so. But otherwise, I don't think it is the case that in Europe everybody is enlightened and aware of each other's national politics and culture and Britain uniquely is somehow ignorant of other countries.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#130

Post by jtrip » Sat, Dec 17, 2022, 8:46 PM UTC

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #48

Havoc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Economic reform" is just the latest soundbite. Half hearted acknowledgement that current tory policies have failed so by necessity the next thing being pushed must be branded as a change. Hence "reform". I have yet to see anything of substance fly under that banner.

It isn't (the indicator for this is that Reeves is saying exactly the same thing). It is hard to be brief but: * Financial services - totally fucked, most of the VC funding in the UK comes from overseas investors because pension and insurance rules (that were largely adopted from Europe) mean that they have to own large amounts of govt bonds...the recent problems indicate how wise that was. Everything isn't working:…

> (if people from outside the UK can believe it, some local councils are introducing rules which mean you will be fined if you exit your neighbourhood in a car to go to another part of the same city).

Can you give an article or city name for this?