Britain is a poor country pretending to be rich

[socialmedia23]

archive.vn/RhqFe#selection-1335.45-1638.0

'The problem is that it is not even remotely true. In fact, the opposite is the case: Britain is turning into a relatively poor country, and fast. In terms of GDP per capita, the UK is soon expected to fall behind Mississippi, traditionally the worst off state in the US. According to some projections, in less than 15 years we are even set to be overtaken by Poland, the country that used to supply us with an endless army of cheap workers.'

I don't agree with the reasons that the writer of the article gave for the current situation. But I think that it is very stark that even the Telegraph is admitting that we are a poor country. Guardian and FT have admitted that a long time ago.

some tax havens can be very rich in their own right. They are mainly small countries like Singapore, Luxembourg where a booming financial services sector can carry the whole country.

We are below countries like Germany and Austria.

No, l mean it’s that same London centric thing. Bus and train services are butchered in the north.

But London and SE had relatively good transport links.

Its not just what exists now, its also the trend.

UK can become an actually poor country very quickly if we don't do something. We should treat this as a warning sign.

After all poorer countries are becoming richer and if we are becoming poorer, then its inevitable that we may inevitably be surpassed.After all nothing is static.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow I’m 40 miles from London and I don’t even have one bus an hour to the nearest town. Public transport is dire around here. There is no school bus service for my son at secondary school because he goes to a school eight miles in one direction rather than seven and a half miles in the other. Yes, London has far better public transport than most of the rest of the country but there are plenty of places close to London where the public transport is not great. The East of England is awful. They have improved the road system between London and Cambridge recently but London to Norwich is ridiculously slow and single lane for much of the journey.

Yes I agree. Although the East India Company was a private company so the money it made went 100% into private hands. It’s link to the British Government was a licence fee due every 20yrs in return for a monopoly on trade, which was £400k in 1768.

This is hardly any money at all going into the Government. Part of the deal was that in return for the once every 20yrs fee, the Government would provide military support to the EIC. So this had to fund the occupation of colonies by British military and civil service types. It wouldn’t have been enough.

Especially when you think of the costs of the contemporary wars with France and then the revolution in the US. There was also the naval blockade of west Africa the British Government had to pay for. The wars in the Netherlands defending other Protestant rulers against French and Spanish invasion. Wars are expensive.

So I think the money the government got was spent and then some on the military. It was a vicious circle of spend on military to get the fee to spend on military to get the fee…while the real money went into making the EIC investors, the aristocratic “ruling class” fabulously wealthy. These were the good old days to the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg and is why he and his ERG are doing everything they can to replicate such wealth generation only through off shore tax havens and deliberately manipulating our economy and the value of the pound via their political law making power in order to increase their personal wealth.

@ArseInTheCoOpWindow and East of England is one of the few areas in the UK which generate more tax than it spends but it’s certainly not re-invested locally. The East of England ambulance is one of the worst in the country and has been for years. Never had any problem calling an ambulance for my mum when she lived in the North and then the Midlands. They would arrive within a couple of minutes. Here, they would take ages even as a category one and it’s more than ten years since she died so that’s not a recent thing.

equalitytrust.org.uk/news/equality-trust-finds-1000-increase-billionaire-wealth
I got sent this just a week or so ago.

We can say that a country is rich but this gives us no information about the distribution of wealth and opportunity within the country.
We have extremely high levels of inequality this is very damaging for any country so whilst we do have some very wealthy people most of us are poor.

If we are to prosper as a country we need people who are happy healthy well educated and freethinking so they can innovate, move us forward create new things etc.
Having a very wealthy ruling class means that everything stagnates because all their efforts are focused on suppressing the population (keeping the ever-present threat of pitchforks at bay) so that they can cling onto their wealth and privilege

I am fully aware of the disgusting state of things, I live 'up here'. I was asking which of the following you don't have :

average house,
electric,
clean water,
bathing facilities,
books,
food with a fridge
fruit and vegetables,
meat that has to be safe to be sold.
Free school
Shoes
Walking.

Because you made out like those things existed in a utopia and dont exist in your area. There's no denying things are shit but people aren't bathing in cholera water yet.

You're comparing the poorest place in Britain with the whole of Latvia and Greece.

What is the GDP per capita of the poorest area in Latvia?

china-cee.eu/2022/08/01/latvia-social-briefing-how-resilient-is-the-latvian-society-to-the-coming-recession/

Income distribution in Latvia is one of the most unequal in the European Union, and the proportion of the population at risk of poverty is one of the highest in the EU – approximately every fourth resident of Latvia lives on less than 330 euros per month.

Whereas the benefits cap in the UK is currently
£442.31 a week (untaxed)

@socialmedia23 what can we do about it though? I personally wish we had never left the EU but it doesn’t seem like we can reverse that now. Saying that the UK is poor is just silly though…

Step 1 is voting out the tories. And then introducing proportional representation to change the current two party system where no one takes responsibility for what they do because either party would be in power at some point.

We need a national conversation on how best to boost growth, reduce regional inequalities, invest in industry and education, build lots of state subsidized housing (not just for the poor but for the middle class who are very quickly becoming the new poor).

*I am fully aware of the disgusting state of things, I live 'up here'. I was asking which of the following you don't have :

average house,
electric,
clean water,
bathing facilities,
books,
food with a fridge
fruit and vegetables,
meat that has to be safe to be sold
Free school
Shoes
Walking.*

Why are you asking MN which has a pretty mc demographic?

People can’t afford to rent or buy a house atm
People can’t afford electricity
Clean water- yeah
Bathing facilities. People are reducing showers due to cost of power
Books? They are a luxury surely atm ( libraries all shut down)
Meat and Veg ( Aldi now most popular supermarket) people are struggling to feed families
Free schhol. Schools are in a dire dire state.
Shoes- Primark
Walking? Everyone’s walking to avoid petrol and transport costs.l see what pretends to be a hood train service has managed to raise it’s fares again.

So yeah. A lot of people in the U.K. don’t have the things you are talking about really.

What some of the above posters are saying is that Mississippi is wealthier than the 6th richest country in the world. So what you are saying is that the USA is incredibly rich. You have to be careful what you wish for though because the US is also incredibly uneven in terms of income - far, far worse than the UK and any other Western country. The fact that there is widespread poverty in Mississippi just reinforces this fact. At what cost are they do wealthy?

It is two different problems. Yes you can be wealthy and be unequal- thats not good. But its easier to redistribute if you already have that wealth as opposed to not having any. Traditionally, its the upper middle class who would face the bulk of the debt burden- people who have assets tend to be better at getting accountants to arrange their tax affairs.

But if you have a declining middle class and less wealth in general, it becomes more difficult to plug the public funding gap. The prevailing narrative in the US is individualism- it is a legacy of the Cold War where anything with vaguely communitarian tones was viewed with suspicion. This isn't the case in the UK; yes there is a part of the electorate (suburban SE, affluent) which has more libertarian tendencies but by and large, the electorate believes in investing in public services. The reason why they vote Tory is not because they don't believe in public services but because they believe in cakeism- having your cake and eating it- American tax rates and Nordic type services.

? 6th richest country is United Arab Emirates….
I think they were saying Mississippi is richer than the UK and we are now 25 richest country. We’ve not been 6th for years.

Overpopulation means slavery. We're going back to the days of medieval serfdom.

5 million from Hong Kong, untold millions from the rest of the world. Result - total wage collapse, people forced into tiny shoebox coffin flats, land/house seizures, no rights of protest, no healthcare or benefits, workhouses, violence, poverty, misery. Forget being paid your pensions.

It's all happened before to the British, and it will happen again. How quickly we forget. Only the Black Death set us free from literal slavery.

No thanks. If you've any sense, and skills, emigrate - I am.

@MissWired
I hope your post is hyperbole....but at the same time I know that once the elites get dug in it's very hard to get them out, they change all the laws to benefit themselves, we are too ill and stressed with the struggle to keep our heads above water to resist them.
I wonder where you plan to go though!

the irony of emigrating while bemoaning that immigrants are coming to the UK?

I don’t see the irony. She was bemoaning overpopulation, not immigration. And made no mention of immigrants shouldnt be allowed…she’s fine with immigration and also exercising her right to emigrate & be an immigrant as well?

Aldi now most popular supermarket

Aldi might be 'popular' but it still has less than 10% market share in the UK.

She mentioned 5 million Hongkongers leading to people living in overcrowded housing....

Morrison is marginally behind Aldi ...and Sainsbury and Asda have just 14% each.. whats your point?

Oh & Merry Xmas to all in the Clavinova household!

Well yeah, we have a birth rate below replacement so any overpopulation will be caused by net immigration. That’s just the facts. She’s not said close the borders she’s said she’s emigrating which is saying she is giving up her job and her home here for an immigrant. They want better and she wants better too. Nothing wrong with that.