"How the UK became one of the poorest countries in Europe"

[user1471452428]

www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-economy-disaster-degrowth-brexit/671847/

Article in The Atlantic. When people post about declining living standards, they're often shouted down- but I think it's pretty clear that it is real and here to stay.

You don't own AIBU and you can't dictate what others post here.

Yes, there is a section for politics. There are also sections for relationships, education, employment and all manner of other things that people post about in AIBU.

If you're not interested, find another thread, but please stop trying to police the boards.

“It would be better to do coal mining, offshore drilling and fracking in the UK, but you and your ilk has really decided otherwise anyway.”

It might be better for a minority in the short term, but for nobody in the long term. It used to have great currency as an idea, under the promise that the free markets would come up with cleaner, better alternatives, but the clock was ticking and it was decided there was more profit to be had in lying and spreading doubt about the risks involved, and in offshoring the risks (out of sight, out of mind), than in making timely changes and investments. Lifestyles were maintained by transporting the pollution elsewhere rather than actually dealing with the pollution caused by the things we like to use, as though it would somehow stay elsewhere and not actually come back to bite us. It was cheaper to close our coal mines, not because they no longer had coal, or because of the environment, but because we could get cheaper coal elsewhere. It was never for the sake of the environment. The same with steel. Then cheaper for pretty much everything else. So don’t pretend it’s environmentalists that ran the country down, it’s profiteers going for the lowest common denominator who did that. Now the same profiteers are coming back here because they’ve run things down enough and created enough inequality that they think they might be able to make a profit out of making a mess here again, especially given the inconvenient instability, pollution and climate problems in poorer countries (which were caused by their activities there).

We have a vast global population of humans and a rapidly diminishing habitable and fertile area of earth to live on. I don’t think fracking and coal mining in the UK are going to save us…

We have a vast global population of humans and a rapidly diminishing habitable and fertile area of earth to live on. I don’t think fracking and coal mining in the UK are going to save us…

Only 6% of the UK's surface are is built on. Fracking is doing the US a lot of good although it may be different in the UK. Nuclear power shouldn't be ignored, it is doing well in France. I agree that coal is a thing of the past (although Germany seems to be keen on it again).

An American journalist writing off the UK when the US is in just as much financial and political problems. The EU is also in turmoil with strikes, protests, high energy prices, etc, etc.

And it’s comments like “only 6% of the UK’s surface area is built on” that reveal a failure to understand the problem. What percentage can effectively be built on? How do we link up the built up areas? What does that do to the habitats of non-human species? Are we planning to rely on the rest of the world to feed us, or do we need unbuilt on, fertile earth and biodiversity for anything? Do we need floodplains? Or is it OK to be flooded frequently? Can we build cities in the middle of the Highlands? How about our coastlines? How close to the coast can we build and develop and how quickly will they be swallowed by the sea? Are we building in sustainable places, or in inappropriate places dictated by the current economic profile of the country? Are we building appropriate structures for the changing climate? Are we dealing with all our sewage appropriately? Can we deal effectively with more people creating more pollution as things stand?

Pillaging and plundering are politer terms for what the UK is capable of and renowned for

Well I think UK colonialism stopped a few decades ago, generally you are paying for those commodities now, and paying dearly for them btw.

Where have we found them? In Yorkshire? Devon? Norfolk?

Resource poor islands must trade in order to
get the basics, UK will live and die by it.

How are you defining standard of living? Yours? Or mine?

Typical Western myopia. Cannot stand this—you have decent standard of living. I have lived much of my life in China—I have seen what industrialisation can do to raise the living standards of one country. The most people raised out of poverty EVER. Industrialisation and open global markets did that.

Maybe we could have made bankers, cynics, sceptics, politicians, philosophers, poets, artists, entrepreneurs, writers or arseholes out of them instead?

Have a feeling the UK will be back in the kind of poverty where most of you will not be poets artists or writers …

Berries I appreciate your take as it offers a different perspective on these threads

Just getting back to something simple for a minute just to clear something in my mind.

I think the U.K. has its best productivity in the engineering, creative and finance sectors. (Feel free to correct if not). What would you add? Energy production? So the things listed below,.. oil etc

other?

I get what you’re saying about changing landscape, just trying to think in terms of basics to form a picture

Lifestyles were maintained by transporting the pollution elsewhere rather than actually dealing with the pollution caused by the things we like to use, as though it would somehow stay elsewhere and not actually come back to bite us

China is very happy to make and sell you these things. Don’t pretend that it was dastardly Westerners coming here and abusing the locals—this is the only way that China found its way out of poverty.

It was cheaper to close our coal mines, not because they no longer had coal, or because of the environment, but because we could get cheaper coal elsewhere. It was never for the sake of the environment. The same with steel. Then cheaper for pretty much everything else

Well there was also an ideological ideas behind this too, no one was thinking energy security when they shut these things down and imported them from elsewhere. After the energy shocks of the 70s, France started their nuclear energy push—too bad UK didn’t do the same.

So don’t pretend it’s environmentalists that ran the country down

They certainly didn’t help and are a big reason why we can’t have nice things like nuclear power.

it’s profiteers going for the lowest common denominator who did that. Now the same profiteers are coming back here because they’ve run things down enough and created enough inequality that they think they might be able to make a profit out of making a mess here again

Profiteers aren’t coming back because they’ve ‘run things down’ that makes no sense. If anything, China has become too rich for some of these industries to thrive. But that is a good thing.

especially given the inconvenient instability, pollution and climate problems in poorer countries (which were caused by their activities there)

China has had bad pollution since the hard-core communist days. What countries are you specifically talking about here? And how does the UK link to them?

I think the U.K. has its best productivity in the engineering, creative and finance sectors. (Feel free to correct if not). What would you add? Energy production? So the things listed below,.. oil etc

tbh I am not too familiar with British Industry per say, only that this idea that the UK went to China and ‘exploited’ it is really false. It was mutually beneficial arrangement (except for the working class but that’s a separate matter) and it really raised standards of living in China. In fact, it’s now getting so expensive due to higher wages etc that its not quite the good deal it was before!

@BerriesOnTop - I don’t think you can use China as an example of what the rest of the world could or should copy. I agree it was not just greedy Westerners who created the rise of China, it was a deliberate policy of the Chinese state to exploit the greed of the West. China clearly does not believe in leaving things to the markets, unless it can control the markets.

China does seem to be losing the plot somewhat now, though - no wisdom to follow on pandemics, no superior ability to deal with climate chaos (which could plunge huge swathes of its population back into poverty quite rapidly, not to mention the millions in China still living in huge poverty, anyway).

Here is the rest of the world waiting for China to show us how to clean up the environmental mess, now that China has so much wealth and power accumulated it should surely be able to invest in cleaning up its act and make a genuine improvement in the lives of all of its population, but instead it seems to be turning in on itself and losing the plot. What’s the point in drowning yourself in toxic pollution for years if you can’t clean up after yourself when you have achieved the great wealth you seek? China needs to find some other patsy to take on the pollution, now. In the meantime, it has a massive population to keep under its thumb, through fair means or foul.

It is in a much better position due to the petrodollar, and it’s essentially allowing the US to export inflation. Note that nearly all other major global currencies have plummeted against the dollar.

I don’t think you can use China as an example of what the rest of the world could or should copy

China followed the playbook of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Has there ever been a more successful way to raise standards of living? I think not. And if anything, China didn’t pick industry winners quite like Japan and South Korea did during their development.

I agree it was not just greedy Westerners who created the rise of China, it was a deliberate policy of the Chinese state to exploit the greed of the West

Odd way to phrase something beneficial to both parties.

China clearly does not believe in leaving things to the markets, unless it can control the markets

It cannot control global markets and did quite abandon or at least place state sectors on life support. These are not the dynamic companies out of China that you ever hear of.

China does seem to be losing the plot somewhat now, though - no wisdom to follow on pandemics

Totally agree. I’m also not a fan of Xi

no superior ability to deal with climate chaos (which could plunge huge swathes of its population back into poverty quite rapidly, not to mention the millions in China still living in huge poverty, anyway)

What are you even on about? China has spectacularly lowered climate-related deaths over the decades. You should see how many Chinese people used to die in regular flooding and famines. There was one particularly bad flood in the 1930s which killed at least 2 million people. You don’t see numbers like these in modern times, despite the huge population increase.

@BerriesOnTop - but all this expansion is based on past history (in fact, is history), like the British Empire is past history. Do we have to have another world war, so that we can all contract, destroy lives and then expand rapidly again, complete with rapid population growth? Or do we learn to accept we are now living in a different world requiring somewhat different solutions? Can Chinese, or American, or European technology keep up with the speed in change of the climate, growing world instability, and the rapid increase in environmental disasters? Can our countries afford to keep dealing with these issues and keep avoiding increasing death tolls? Or will we have to start abandoning communities, struggle with rebuilding infrastructure, and start requiring the mass movement of people within the country, not just into the country?

And there was me thinking that the West banning Huawei infrastructure was the result of a psychotic advisor somewhere.

😮

You don't really - broadly 50% is pensions, 25% housing benefit, universal credit and similar, 25% disability and incapacity benefits.

They are very much the cause, and rightly so because people need to be supported in their old age. If the state doesn't do this then families must, as they used to.

I understand that most NHS spending is on elderly people too - how many 30 year olds are having hip replacements?

What do the Irish figures say? Something proportionally similar, just smaller numbers I expect.

Here is my explanation.

Most poorer countries are corrupt. The corruption causes the poverty.

Take South Africa for example. In large parts of the country the electricity system regularly fails. Why? Because it's not managed properly. Why? Because the people in charge either aren't interested in fixing it or they've siphoned off the money. A failing electricity system means businesses can't function as well and generate tax revenue. Even if they are, they may be inclined to evade their tax because why should they line the pockets of fraudsters? And so there's no tax revenue to fix the electricity system and round and round it goes. In the meantime the politicians have every incentive to blame everyone but themselves and the obvious target is colonialism. The voters don't kick them out of office because they don't know any different.

They’re corrupt because of the mess left behind by empires in many cases. What has happened in a lot of cases is that the outgoing empire leaves a hot mess behind and then tries the double speak of “poor countries are corrupt”.

You need to read into the history of empire and colonialism. It’s easy to think “oh they were poor and shit, the British/Dutch/Spanish came along, held it together then when they left it turned to shit again”. That would be lazy thinking.

I have read plenty about the empire.

And you are flat wrong. Jacob Zuma and his pals the Guptas drained the SA exchequer. Please explain how that was anything to do with empire rather than greed.

Former colonies with decent public administration tend to be wealthy.

when you say “poor countries are corrupt”, it’s such a sweeping statement, that I can’t help but challenge it.

Plenty of post colonial countries have been screwed over due to the drain of resources by external corporations set up by foreign companies and further compounded by crippling debt obligations by the world bank etc. You make it sound like it’s an internal matter.

And governments who drain their nations resources will, no doubt, be able to do so because of the lack of decent governance left behind. South Africa is still not free of the structures left behind by apartheid. It can be no coincidence that in a racially divided country, those who are the poorest are black. Now, forgive me, but I think that is a legacy of colonialism.

I'm starting to think I know rather more about this than you. Your argument starts from pure theory, ie, the market exploits poorer countries. There is a problem with that theory anyway: if it were true, poorer countries would remain poor. But that is demonstrably not true.

Wheras it's more or less a fact that poorer countries do tend to have corrupt public administration. There's plenty of research on this.

South Africa in 1990 wasn't a poor country. Its wealth was very inequitably shared, and the apartheid government wasn't concerned with anyone who wasn't white. That explains why the majority of non-whites in SA are still poor (although the is some change.)

But this has really nothing to do with the organised looting that began 15 - 20 years after apartheid ended, and the 'but colonialism' argument is really just a useful fig leaf. If the local town council don't fix the roads because they've siphoned off the funds, that's on them. They are to blame.

(Incidentally this is why Johnson is so dangerous to the UK: he doesn't give a shit about rules and in other countries people just like him line their pockets.)

Ok, by poor, I mean vastly unequal countries where a huge number of the population do not have a decent standard of living. I would put South Africa in that bracket. I would be interested to know which countries you define as poor as I will go off and educate myself.

The structures in place were developed under apartheid and it casts a long shadow. To think that undoing the damage done would be possible within a few decades is naive.

I get the impression that you don’t think colonialism has anything to answer for. I think it does. Does it excuse corruption? Of course not, but it played a massive part!

Think of the things that happened in the UK, which form part of the fabric of the nation’s structures. They still have impact today and that’s how I see colonialism.

“(Incidentally this is why Johnson is so dangerous to the UK: he doesn't give a shit about rules and in other countries people just like him line their pockets.)” I agree with this. Decades prior to Johnson, however, the UK was becoming increasingly corrupt and unequal, so it’s not all down to Johnson. All it takes is those in power liking money more than they care for rules and regulations. Years of “light touch” regulation (and deliberate blind eyes being turned to the true sources of all the wealth pouring into the City) made banks and city financiers hugely wealthy, but far too much of that wealth was money illicitly removed from places like Russia, Kazakhstan, other former soviet countries, South Africa, etc, and laundered by countries hiding behind their increasingly undeserved reputations for not themselves being corrupt. The UK is a great facilitator of corruption.

I am one of those commodities.