"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.

This has given me the best laugh 😆

I don't believe it's quite as catastrophic as some might claim.

Inflation is a huge problem, as it is across large parts of Europe and N America: the UK is mid-range.

Rising interest rates: ditto.

Property is far too central to our yardsticks of wealth, but housing is a universal requirement and it has provided a more secure place to protect the value of money than banks during QE, provided you were fortunate enough to be buying a property.

We need to do much, much better at directing investment into productive and growing areas, plus training. Green energy is possibly a good example of the last 20 years.

However, even old school metal-bashing can pick up. Without being PollyAnna-ish, our micro-business has grown a lot since the pandemic ended, and some of this growth is the direct result of Brexit. We have new customers who have searched us out popping up almost daily because they want the security of a UK supplier. DH just wishes he was 40 again!

How exactly - and do please be precise - are Remainers preventing anything to do with Brexit?

You got your Brexiter PM, your Brexiter government and your hard Brexit. There have been no Remainers anywhere near government for years. The Tory Remainers were almost all purged from the party in 2019.

Unless you can explain the mechanism by which Remainers are somehow spoiling your precious Brexit, this just sounds like whinging about the EU by proxy.

If only we could trade easily with our nearest neighbours...

I made the mistake of taking guests from Switzerland on a bus ride through London (my DCs love buses). The guests spotted a small rust patch beside the opposite seat where the paint have peeled off. They took out their phones and started taking photos of it, presumably to send to their friends back home. They kept asking me what had happened to our country. I never told them that it was far from being the shabbiest bus I had been on recently.

I love that they went for some sort of attempt at calming, therapeutic, relaxing spa back-ground music lol

Brexit isn't "Done" and is, by almost any measure, a complete failure.. in that it has and will not deliver what it promised.... other than some meaningless "Sovereignty" nonsense... didn't see much of that going on in the last few months?

When Sunak talked about Brexit Freedoms, he really meant low regulation, low wages, poorer public services - for us lot :( for them... low taxes and big profits.

IF he really wants growth, he'd re join the Single Market asap, easiest way to boost growth... the reasons why Thatcher was such a fan are as real today as they were then.

O would love to participate in a Brexit Whodunnit game experience.

Romania. Bulgaria . Slovakia , Greece etc etc. Are you serious? Thé too countries in their list are all tax havens, anyway.

more oikiophobia from the usual suspects.

@sst1234 "Brexit is done. Lots of us didn’t want it, but it’s down. If you don’t accept it, you continue to make the country poorer. The problem is that we have all the bad bits of Brexit without any of the benefits, because those who voted remain will not accept the structural change that has to happen to grow the economy. Brexit should be an enabler of lower corporation tax and less regulation. Singapore on Thames or whatever you want to call it. You may not like it, but fighting against it means that you cut your nose off to spite your face. Unless the remain side accept this, the pain of Brexit is yet to be felt"

I voted Remain. I didn't want Brexit. However, more people voted to leave than to remain, so we got Brexit. I don't actually understand what you mean by 'fighting against it.' what are you on about? What the hell difference do you think it'll make if I say 'oh actually I wanted Brexit all along?' We've got it, whether we voted against it because we thought it would be a shit show or whether we voted for it because we thought life would be wonderful.
Sounds like you're making excuses for the outcome which presumably you wanted

Watch out for bus if you play that game lol

It's oikophobia
If you are going to use big words it's best to check your spelling

😂

I think we need to remember that overseas can buy our businesses and property.

If you have a clever business that you sell overseas the profits end up elsewhere

This^. We have had an economy built on debt, money printing, high house prices and mass unskilled immigration for the past 20+ years to keep the mirage of a healthy GDP, exacerbated in 2008 by the financial crash. The only reason the economy has seemed normal is that both NuLabour and the Tories printed billions in QE (which gives the illusion of everything being fine when interest rates are suppressed and inflation is low) and a huge portion of the country is unproductive and propped up by benefits, paid for by the ever dwindling PAYE taxpayers who are being taxed more and more to pay for it all. It is all a mirage (and Europe has done similar).

Why are mortgage-holders so much more important than renters who have been paying high rents for years? Why is there never any help for renters who see 10% rent increases, far higher than mortgage increases? The holy cow of this country is high house prices which are completely destroying society.

Because mortgage holders are more likely to vote Tory of course!

its a good question. My mortgage might rise by £700 but that just means it reaches parity with market rent in 2 years time. It costs £700 more to rent the same flat in my part of london. I guess its because homeowners and mortgagors outnumber renters . Even people who own their house outright are often angry when their house goes down in value as they may want to pass it down to their kids or release equity or downsize. Also a lot of landlords have mortgages too and if they can't pay their mortgage, renters would have to leave when the house is repossessed even if they paid their rent on time every month.

But more importantly, its because Mortgagors are more likely to vote tory

@VeniVidiWeeWee
Wow, just wow!

😂😂😂

It's not a very well thought out article;

British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one.

The predictable results are falling wages and stunningly low productivity growth. Although British media worry about robots taking everybody’s jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. “Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent...

That might sound like a quirky example, because the British economy is obviously more complex than blokes rubbing cars with soap. But it’s an illustrative case.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, the U.K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovakia.

Where does the author think many of these "blokes rubbing cars with soap" come from? e.g.

June 2022
Couple who trafficked more than 40 Slovakian orphaned 'slaves' into Britain and forced them to work at their car wash while stealing £300,000 from their accounts to blow on gambling and cars are jailed.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10942395/Couple-trafficked-40-Slovakian-slaves-work-Bristol-car-wash.html

cakeorwine
Top 10 Richest Countries in Europe by 2020 GNI per capita (Atlas Method, current US$ - World Bank)
...
Ireland - $64,150

Multinationals make Ireland’s GDP growth ‘clearly misleading.’
Ex-Central Bank chief: In real world, Irish nowhere near top of EU wealth table.

www.politico.eu/article/ireland-gdp-growth-multinationals-misleading/

A helpful contribution.

I think the UK could be doing better and for some (many) people, it's an expensive country to live in, wages don't go far, housing is expensive and parts of the country are doing very well compared to other parts.

They like to pretend they have no money those Irish. 😉

You let your manufacturers get sector die and became a literal casino (financial services). The UK deserves every bit of this, as does Europe
for not securing energy supplies through oil drilling, etc.

At least America can muddle through due to their heavy industry and energy independence. Europe won’t. Enjoy the decline