Are we heading into a major recession?

I wouldn’t be surprised. Productivity is low, interest rates are falling again, the dollar is strong and Trump is playing silly buggers in the global economy, the uK government is a bit clueless and business confidence and inward investment aren’t exactly great. Unemployment is high among young people and yet the proportion of productive citizens isn’t improving enough due to higher numbers of inactive/retired people post Covid. Health of the nation is poor and social welfare is crippling the economy. Oh and we left the EU and that’s all still a crappy old mess.

I don't know any pensioners who work in minimum wage farmland or warehouse jobs, maybe you do?

Brexit was the final nail in the coffin but we had plenty of issues before then.

@whatawonderfultime our economic isn't in the shitter because more people are claiming unemployment or disability benefits.

The whole economy is still blighted by having allowed the housing bubble to inflate well beyond sustainable fundamentals — ever since 2001, but particularly after 2010. There was a chance to allow it to continue to deflate after the financial crash; but instead the Coalition/Tory governments not only restarted the housing boom and pumped cash into keeping house prices high, but inflated them even further.

Now we’re entering a period where the collective salaries of younger workers won’t realistically be able to support current prices going forward, and there’s the triple whammy of extra pressure on the NHS, Brexit and an unstable world economy with stubbornly high energy prices at the same time. We’re likely looking at a decade or more of slow, painful unwinding, where the tax take is high but still isn’t enough to pay for crumbling services neglected during austerity; everyone gets squeezed and squeezed even more to no visible effect; Brexit strangles any economic growth at birth; and our living standards get lower and lower and lower while public services collapse.

The effect of the Tories’ misguided austerity policies, pumping money into housing assets (and encouraging even more landlordism), and the worst of all, Brexit, will take a long time to correct and we’re in for a lot more pain yet. These have been some of the stupidest, counterproductively short-termist, asset-stripping policies of the whole last century. I’m not a huge fan of Starmer so far, but the current direness of the situation is all squarely of the Tories’ making.

Yep. Low productivity, sky high net zero energy prices, sky high taxes to fund the unproductive parts of the economy, low consumer spending, over regulation......
A recession is nailed on.

On a GDP per capita basis, things are even worse.

My dad was a warehouse worker until he retired at 72.

I don't think there's much any party can do now to improve things. With Trump elected we can kiss goodbye to any progress on climate change, so unless somebody comes up with some excellent technical solution asap we're buggered on that front, then you have soil depletion... food is not going to get cheaper, pressures around immigration will grow and I suspect a much more radical swing to the right than we've already seen will happen - but they won't actually be able to deliver on their promises, removing all the immigrants won't fix the societal problems.

I don't know any pensioners who work in minimum wage farmland or warehouse jobs, maybe you do?

They can't get enough British citizens to work since that ended, which is why they burn huge amounts of perfectly good crops because they don't have the workers to harvest them. Now they try to entice people from abroad with higher wages than they were paying EU workers originally and can't even make it happen then because of too much red tape.

You could ban all immigrants from working in the UK, you wouldn't have British people filling the jobs. You'd have British people at home still claiming benefits.

And in terms of balance I am that way myself. I had a 50 year old lodger from abroad who got up at 4am every day to walk to a local warehouse for a well-known British high street retailer to see if they had any work for her that day (zero hours contract with work allocated on a day-by-day basis). No way in hell would most people do that.

Exactly.

The demographics of this country are weighted disproportionately towards a bigger (retired) older generation, who are taking a disproportionate share of the state budget due to over-generous pensions, public service costs (healthcare, social care, transport etc.), and who also own the majority of housing assets (including second homes and buy to lets).

There simply aren’t enough younger workers to generate enough money to maintain all these three things. That’s why previous governments turned to migration (which was actually a sensible choice when it was EU migration, as the benefits were worth more to us then the costs, and young EU workers were high-skilled and also went back to their home countries afterwards - something that Brexiteers never understood).

How do we support a disproportionate demographic of older people with fewer workers in the pyramid underneath, while trying to generate sensible economic growth?

Some suggestions:

1. rejoin the EU. Incentivise EU migration and investment whilst disincentivising migration from outside the EU;

2. heavy taxes on buy to let and landlords;

3. abandon the triple lock and force older generations to release some of their assets to pay for care/healthcare;

4. a short, sharp house price crash (otherwise we’ll only get a long, strangling one), which enables a readjustment of wages to asset prices as quickly as possible;

5. public borrowing specifically to incentivise green investment, high-tech industry, science R&D and education (especially higher education). Replace tuition fees with a HEFCE-style public grant for universities.

That’s a start. Anyone else want to join in?

@EasternStandard if that's your take away from my posts then I wish you luck too 😁