To think it’s shocking how bad Britain has fallen apart compared to other European counties

[TheColourofspring]

I am in Spain at the moment in one of the big cities. It’s clean, modern, well maintained. Transport is cheap, food is cheap, healthcare seems to work pretty well (from talking to local). Parks are noticeably well maintained- even saw park keepers! Clean & tidy.

Pensions higher, if you lose your job you get a portion of your salary in unemployment benefits while you look for another and there are no penalties. Based on the premise that if you have paid in, you will get looked after if you are in need.

I am not saying it’s perfect- no country is but it was the same when I was in France last summer.

In Britain, everything is underfunded and close to the edge. Schools, the NHS, local authorities are all at breaking point. My local parks look shabby & there is very little maintenance. Roads have pot holes. Yesterday I read an article about pharmacies being the latest at ‘crisis’ point with major drug shortages (thanks to brexit). Queues at borders, people can’t heat or eat properly, food banks, housing is ridiculous for many people.

I think it’s just so noticeable when you go to other places just how run down Britain is.

Finding it shocking and a bit depressing - like I said, all countries have their issues but I think Britain really has been pillaged by the tories & Brexit really is a disaster.

Sorry but thats simply not true, i live part time in Southern France and young people can get part time casual work but we don't have ZHC.

Stats are calculated differently, the UK has some of the hardest rules to qualify as unemployed & easily removed from the stats too - we also have a very high number who go onto to FE/HE as they can't get work.

Also the EU do not set the rules on employment for member states, other than an extremely low bar, hence the UK, when in the EU could have ZHC, no fault dismissal, draconian rules on strikes etc etc.

In parts of the East and North of England, the Youth unemployment rate is almost 20%

Can't find it. Mainly because it was probably big misrepresentation of what was said. If anything like that was even said

I'd dispute that I was even slightly uninformed when I cast my vote @GPTec1 ! I've read everything, on both sides of the argument, since 1975 when I voted in the first referendum (pro-EEC for the record). And I changed my mind every single day, often twice a day, during early 2016; the decision was a razor's edge for me, and in the end I asked my 17-year-old DC which way they would prefer my vote to go, on the grounds that they would live with the decision for longer than me, so followed their request.

My point about innovation wasn't a reference solely to infrastructure. It's plain that Europe's is visibly superior to that in the UK now, because it's newer. Yes, there's much to admire in programmes like Erasmus and Horizon, and I do.

A few weeks ago I had to visit a client in Germany. On the overpriced, late, overcrowded German train I got chatting to the person sitting next to me. Her thoughts about the way things are going in Germany almost exactly mirrored a lot of British people's feelings about the UK. They think it's all going to rat shit too.

Stifles innovation?

June 2023
In an open letter to policymakers, over 150 European companies have stated that the proposed EU AI Act "would jeopardise Europe’s competitiveness"

The open letter to the European Commission, Parliament and EU member states — signed by a consortium including Airbus, Renault, and Siemens - claims that the draft legislation currently fails to properly address ethical challenges, while stifling business innovation...

https://www.information-age.com/eu-ai-act-met-with-claims-of-stifled-innovation-123505258/

August 2023
New IP rules will stifle medical innovation in Europe, Swedish life science leaders conclude during seminar

https://swedenbio.se/en/aktuellt/

Green MEP: EU’s gene editing framework stifles innovation
https://www.euractiv.com/section/agriculture-food/news/green-mep-eus-gene-editing-framework-stifles-innovation/

Anyone think this current bunch are going to be massively into/fund innovation- ?? No, me neither. Seems more targeted at the local corner shop owners and debt recovery companies etc! Anyway why would you invest here unless it's a totally uk centric business with a big enough market purely for the UK or one with dodgy practice trying to get round EU rules- I wouldn't.

We are not the USA with far larger internal markets- they are their own ''EU'

I don't think the EU is perfect but from a pure commercial/economic sense it makes far more sense to be in it - surely the point is we should have been far more dominant and steering things. We certainly were prior to Cameron coming in- and he was only less up front because he was trying to appease total unreal headbangers like Rees Mogg and Redwood etc

Too many people in the UK are basically delusional about the place of the country in the larger global sphere.

The UK needs to come to grips with the fact that its a poor country with a small slice of well off working professionals, and an even smaller slice of very wealthy people.

When people start going off into "innovate"....I just roll my eyes.

The UK is too small now to scale up any advantage that is gained via research & development.

Thats the main advantage of a large internal market (EU & US have this). You can effectively scale up start ups into larger companies.

The UK cannot do this anymore. The founders sell/move their company to the US (usually) or EU (less usually) because that is were the growth is due to the size of their respective internal markets.

I have friends who went to Oxbridge who developed great ideas and started a company. But once they got to start up size they simply needed larger markets to grow further. In the end, they decided to relocate to the US (this was in biotech).

Its the same story in many cutting edge areas. AI? Genetics? Etc.. Thats never going to be developed in the UK because we simply do not have the same access to funding that US/EU has. Same with market size.

What people need to understand is that pre-Brexit, the US used the UK as a gateway into the EU. Thats one of the reasons why the UK was doing relatively well.

With Brexit, that gateway (US - UK - EU) is materially smaller because the UK is a small market compared to the EU, so there is no reasons to deal with the UK as an intermediary for the US. The US simply goes direct to EU now.

Size always matters in international trade and until people understand the gravity of the mistake of Brexit, I don't have much hope for the UK. The country will simply end up poorer as the population ages because productivity will never improve.

I agree with all of this.

@TheThinkingGoblin you have summed it up beautifully. That is exactly the score. A lot of people who voted for it aren't in that sphere and hence are delusional about the possibilities. Some voted that way for self interested reasons- tradesmen wanting to get rid of competition , well off folks wanting to still hide assets overseas , 2nd generation immigrants wanting rules on non EU immigration relaxed , some thinking it would reduce immigration ( of course it wouldn't - just changed the type of immigration) - very few of these votes were cast taking account of the overall economics and competitiveness of the UK. My FIL who is 84 now admits he was totally out of touch with the reality of business and doesn't think anyone over 70 should have had a vote .

I think you need a serious reality check on the state of transportation in the UK.

https://on.ft.com/45v6TiA

See the below comparison.

Its the poor infrastructure for public transport and poor roads that is starting to impact the UK in a negative way.

In order to grow and prosper, cities need to be able to expand, and when you suffocate public transport (poor investment) and make road building difficult (NIMBYs) and/or do less maintenance (Austerity) on roads you end up with cities that never scale up.

Pretty much the only potential "way out" that I can see in the UK over the next 10+ years is investing in a massive public works program (trains, roads, buses, houses, insulation, solar, wind, electricity grid) that employs people (with new skills and better wages), creates cost effective public infrastructure, which can then result in increased productivity.

So the local planning permission laws that have existed in the UK since the 90s need to be removed. And then a proper industrial strategy with the entire country as a blueprint needs to to be designed and agreed to.

Until those things happen, the UK will be stuck in its low growth trap due to poor existing infrastructure and ageing population.

Yes! Size matters in international trade, as does regulatory alignment and proximity!

But of course we threw away all these concepts that we had introduced in the EU such as the single market and they still benefit from our excellent ideas.

We are stuck with a lot crummy politicos who will benefit from this mess. And they are not even clever enough to recognise that the very good ideas we had as an EU member regarding competition are still good.

I am not a Thatcherite but at least Thatcher understood about the need to access proximate markets with as few barriers as possible.

I doubt anyone left in the Conservatives would have the faintest clue of why the UK came up with the idea in the first place. Because they are morons

@TheThinkingGoblin absolutely

My feeling is that as well as all of the above, Brexit has also done untold damage to the political frameworks and outlook of this country, much as Trump has polarised the US.

Those who voted for Brexit for anti-immigration or other right wing reasons are realising that it has made no difference, and in fact has led to greater immigration issues and economic problems. However they are largely blaming this on the Tories for getting rid of Boris and not doing Brexit 'properly', so are looking to other right wing parties, such as Reform. The Conservatives realise that this could split their vote share, so to court them back are having to shift further to the right and employ more hard-line rhetoric.
Historically, economic and social deprivation can and does lead to extremism.

Totally agree Kangaroobrain 👏

i was in southern spain a few weeks ago and was frankly shocked how filthy it was and how run down - sorry think it really depends on where you go...spain is quite a poor country and not comparable

That graph just shows urban transit. It doesn't tell you anything about the experience of a passenger travelling further than a few miles. The rest of the article is completely irrelevant to a discussion on the quality of train services. It just says that the cost per mile of building HS2 is higher than for comparator countries. No shit, England has the second highest population density of any large country in Europe.

Anyone can cherry-pick statistics to suit an agenda. I suggest that you spend some time in Köln Hbf waiting for a train that is running half an hour late before you think that the UK is so bad. Maybe take a walk to the shops while you're waiting, it's grim at night.

Oh dear, poor UK, Spain, GDP per Capita, isn't much further behind the UK

$37k vs $40k, chuck in a better health service, far cheaper trains and energy costs, even the better weather (overall) and the difference evaporates.

Every country has its run down areas but some countries try and do something about them.

I don't disagree with your infrastructure programme as outlined above, @TheThinkingGoblin , and it is to be hoped that any incoming government makes a determined stab at delivering something similar to Roosevelt's New Deal. It's what's needed. Frankly, we needed it 20 or 30 years ago. However, the UK's default setting is that everything has to be done quickly and cheaply to generate an instant payback, which ain't possible. Many ambitious plans outside London get quashed/dismissed as unworkable because the Treasury mandarins' collective view is usually that they wouldn't yield returns on investment quickly. And local governments are starved of cash and can't even fill potholes much less build schools.

From where I sit in the Southwest, the M5 and A303 have needed additional capacity since I moved here in 1990. Getting in and out of the area is a nightmare in summer and at the weekends year round: the Exeter to Bristol stretch is a car park as often as not. When the GWR rail link collapsed for months after storms, it shut down, despite the goods line. We are still discussing a third runway at LHR... and have been doing so since 1994, when BAA was still British-owned.

None of this is partisan politics, and it has vanishingly little to do with the referendum, except to say that Remain were so blinkered to the reality of life outside the M25 that they ran a blithely complacent campaign and assumed all would be fine. Cameron quit rather than face the music, instead of going to the EU with the proof of discontent (with similar levels of scepticism in most EU countries, don't forget) and ever since we've had a parade of swivel-eyed loons, swindlers and fruitcakes. Plus Covid and Ukraine.

None of this is partisan politics, and it has vanishingly little to do with the referendum, except to say that Remain were so blinkered to the reality of life outside the M25 that they ran a blithely complacent campaign and assumed all would be fine. Cameron quit rather than face the music, instead of going to the EU with the proof of discontent (with similar levels of scepticism in most EU countries, don't forget) and ever since we've had a parade of swivel-eyed loons, swindlers and fruitcakes. Plus Covid and Ukraine

Brexit has made the country poorer, so any incoming Lab Govt now has less money to spend on much needed infrastructure - so yes Brexit has to take its share of blame along with those who backed it.

We don't need more road expansion, cars just fill the extra space & lets fix the ones we ve got, add more rail capacity first - A303 and M5 are fine, i don't want the countryside between Honiton and Ilminster dug up and ruined forever.

Remain never had more than a 5% lead, almost within the margin of error and if they were complacent, they were idiots, it was no surprise to me Leave would win, i was more shocked the gap was so narrow.

I can think of no other politician i hold in more contempt than Cameron

What scepticism in EU? a few far right parties that never saw Govt and polling shows the EU in almost all EU countries had strong support, even stronger now.

Pretty much the only potential "way out" that I can see in the UK over the next 10+ years is investing in a massive public works program (trains, roads, buses, houses, insulation, solar, wind, electricity grid) that employs people (with new skills and better wages), creates cost effective public infrastructure, which can then result in increased productivity.

who is financing this -Labours magic money tree?
We haven’t a chance of finding the money to finance this -we can’t afford eg the nhs as it is!
what we can do is try to get everyone working to full capacity, help businesss and companies to make more of what others want and use the tax from their profits to fund this but it will take a loooong, looong time.

I've just read in below-the-line comments for an article on Europe's demographic decline (in the Torygraph, contributed by the former French ambassador to Washington) that in 1990, the 17 members of the Common Market accounted for over one-third of the world's economy. By 2019, 27 members of the EU accounted for less than 17% of world economy, and the EU's own economic forecasters estimate that by 2050, it will represent under 10%.

The rise of Asia and the Pacific is tilting the balance away from Europe in general. Barack Obama wrote in the Atlantic in 2016 that America regards Asia-Pacific as being its future important relationships and interests.

Cameron did go to the EU before the vote to try and get reform - the EU I don’t think realised how serious it was.

Also we had a major stake in the EU and there was nothing to stop us taking a more active role to shape an EU that we wanted. Instead we wanted the EU to give us what we wanted with no effort on our part. Which seems to be an English thing - why won’t someone else sort our problems for us?

Agree with a PP re: ridiculous length of time it takes to get infrastructure built here. There are too many avenues for NIMBYs and vested interests to delay, delay and delay.

Yes. The share of EU & US is shrinking as developing countries grow in size.

The common error people make in projecting forward into the future is that they assume similar growth rates for those developing countries.

This is the wrong way to go as growth rates slow down as a country becomes more developed and the demographics turn against it.

China is a case in point right now.

So many people states again and again that it would surpass the US in size.

But that is simply not going to happen now because of demographics. It has stalled now and will not be recovering anytime soon because of growing internal economic problems which are also now creating high levels of youth unemployment.

The US will maintain its hegemony over the global economy (I dont see that changing because of its leading role in higher tech industries), with the real growth coming from some parts of latin america (Brazil) and some parts of Asia (India). Africa will never get out of its corruption problems (which are endemic).

https://capx.co/?p=222888 Another version of the FT article referred to above by @DdraigGoch , and selectively quoted by TheThinkingGoblin.