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The strange case of Britain’s demise

economist.com

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Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#161

Post by namdnay »

rsj_hn wrote: post #154
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The end of the fossil fuel era is going to hit everybody. Making sure you are ready for that seems like a good start.

It will only hit those nations in the West that succumb to it. Eurasia is doing fine with stable and reliable power, continuing to both increase fossil fuel usage and build out nuclear power at the same time. Africa is ramping up. Latin America is the wild card. Most of the world is going to keep on using fossil fuels, looking at what happened to Europe as an object lesson of becoming so rich that you forget what is…

I don’t see what religion has got to do with it? Europe is hardly the most religious part of the world

Maybe Europe is just rich enough to be willing to sacrifice some of that to help others by reducing their emissions (or at least not harm them as much). Maybe Europe feels a certain responsibility, having started emitting carbon in the first place

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#162

Post by namdnay »

mmarq wrote: post #88
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

> * Housing - separate from just planning, there are specific rules within the housing market that cause distortions above the planning system failing to produce enough supply. For example, rent controls in Scotland...that caused a 40% drop in rental supply in two weeks, this is economic mismanagement on a grand scale. Umpteenth reminder that England is the only place on planet Earth where people earning a top 10% sa…

I assume you’re talking about London? I doubt that 70k£ is top 10% in London

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#163

Post by petesergeant »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #111
mytailorisrich wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corbyn and McDonnell were essentially communists and therefore unelectable. Blair took the realistic route: Socialism does not work, let's have a market economy create wealth that can then be used to finance social programs. A flavour a social democracy. I think a reason Corbyn was so popular among the young is that enough time has passed so that this generation has no idea what socialist countries in Europe were act…

The problem with Blair was that he lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else. Brownites sound good but say nothing specific...often the specific stuff is bad too. I agree with you in that there is a route in the centre, but Labour aren't. The party is fundamentally broken. Starmer isn't it, Reeves isn't a leader, Streeting is a joke. Obviously, they have moved to the centre on immigration…

> Blair ... lost the right on EU/immigration and lost the left on everything else

Blair won three sizeable outright majorities in the three elections he lead Labour in

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#164

Post by hermitcrab »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #140
notahacker wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are quite a few, it's just that none of them learned it from two hours a week between the ages of 11 and 16. (Mostly they learned it because their parents and many members of their local community speak Welsh or Punjabi or Urdu...)

Two hours a week between 11 and 16? I love this place. People speak with total authority about stuff they clearly do not understand.

>Two hours a week between 11 and 16?

That pretty much describes my foreign language education (learning French in England, 1970s/1980s).

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#165

Post by mmarq »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #122
mmarq wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In continental Europe it is practically impossible to evict a tenant without arrears, yet the rental market is larger and there is less homelessness (and, yes, there is plenty of public data on homelessness).

Real world outcomes aside, that is less homelessness and a better functioning private rental market, evicting families with children is just uncivilised and should be allowed just because of that.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#166

Post by nonrandomstring »

jrumbut wrote: post #134
nonrandomstring wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A competence gap is a very polite way to put it. In Britain we live in an inverted meritocracy which rewards smug stupidity, elevates bullshit, while punishing and marginalising our most talented people. I thought this was going to be another cynical Economist hit piece like the earlier "Europe not pulling its weight" [1] but was surprised how on-the-money it is. Some well chosen quotes; "A family with the wrong memb…

From the outside, the most painful part of UK politics to watch is this instinctual reaction of "well, that didn't work, so let's do anything else." It takes a lot of luck to do that and land on a good idea. Again, from the outside, the UK looks like a country that has a lot to lose but it's acting quite desperate and it's hard to see why. > What worries me is that, if tomorrow our country came to its senses and aske…

> worries me... the appetite seems to be for sweeping measures.

Yes that is concerning. Desperate voters will follow any crazy with bold promises.

> I think there is a lot of room for incremental improvement in the UK

Way I see it, I've lived through about 30-40 years of decremental decline, so if we started "incremental improvement" tomorrow, we'd be back where I started in the 1970s just by the time I die. I suppose that's better than watching ones country decline through all your life, like for Russians. Or disintegrate, as for ex-Yugoslavians for example.

However, in the era of climate crisis, and myriad other threats, a sense of urgency is in the air which we cannot ignore. Unless rational and courageous minds take the lead someone else will.

> the dull work of growing in competence.

Knowing where to even start... how to counter the conditions that are causing us to lose competence... we need to plug the holes in the ship before charting a new course.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#167

Post by hermitcrab »

tailspin2019 wrote: post #125
hermitcrab wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>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.

I agree with that and a lot else you say. But the crazy promises being made by 'leave' (£350 million per week for the NHS, being only one of many) were just obvious lies (a con) from day 1.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#168

Post by mmarq »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #139
mmarq wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No-one evicts a good, rent paying tenant in England. Issue #1 is that the supply does not keep up with demand so rents keep going up. Issue #2 is that tenants don't know the law.

If somebody can be evicted with a 2 month notice, are they going to complain about the lack of repairs? The answer is in the abysmal quality of the English housing stock. I mean, would you risk making your child homeless when the law says you are right but there’s nothing you can do to enforce it?

I’ve rented in London for 12 years and I wouldn’t wish that experience on a serial killer. In Italy or Germany, not even people on the dole live as bad as a private tenant in the UK, regardless of their income. (Thankfully the company I used to work for completed its IPO 3 years ago and now I can live like a normal person).

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#169

Post by jemmyw »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #148
jemmyw wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't essentially communists, that is taking the Tory press talking point. They were further left than any other recent popular politicians. Left in the form of worker rights, unionism that sort of thing, not communism. Given how far we've gone into a low wage and poor rights economy I don't think a hard left leadership would have been that bad, especially as it would have been tempered by the rest anyway. How…

Not at all. They even wrote it in their manifesto. What do you call nationalising companies and handing control to the workers? (It's in the 2019 manifesto) That's my point: people, especially the young, don't even recognise it when described under a microscopically thin veneer. That's very worrying. They didn't hide it, either. McDonnell did say clearly that he was a Marxist [1] and Corbyn is a socialist in the very…

I guess I'm communist then. I want the railways to be nationalised.

Re: The strange case of Britain’s demise

#170

Post by vsareto »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #54
prof-dr-ir wrote: post #35

As a former inhabitant of England, I always thought that those in charge suffered from a uniquely wide 'competence gap' which I would like to define as the difference between someone's self-perceived competence and someone's actual competence. (The term is probably useful more broadly...) Maybe it is the historically class-based society alluded to in the article, but it always stunned me how those at the top, and in…

A competence gap is a very polite way to put it. In Britain we live in an inverted meritocracy which rewards smug stupidity, elevates bullshit, while punishing and marginalising our most talented people. I thought this was going to be another cynical Economist hit piece like the earlier "Europe not pulling its weight" [1] but was surprised how on-the-money it is. Some well chosen quotes; "A family with the wrong memb…

Pretty sure if you went to school with folks running a country, you're probably in the big club he talks about regular people not being in, so you're unlikely to wake up in terror
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