Britain poorer than Mississippi

[BritishMississippi]

Our GDP per capita has now dipped to the level of America’s poorest state. It’s not dipped below due solely to London. We’ve been on a spiral for the last twenty years that means our children are facing not being able to find jobs and even the jobs they can find have miserable wages attached to them. AIBU that we need to engage quite seriously with how to bring the country out of this spiral in a meaningful way?

Exactly. There are now more than 9 million workless adults aged 18-64 in the U.K. Source : ONS.

That is completely unsustainable. The policies of successive governments have made a life on benefits a viable alternative to working for a living & contributing to the economy. People being allowed to claim long-term sickness & disability benefits for mostly spurious reasons of anxiety, depression etc is a racket which is bankrupting the country. It also creates gaps in the labour market which governments have addressed by allowing uncontrolled mass immigration of unskilled workers & their dependents from third world countries. This has created the social tensions which we can all see are incubating extremism & tearing this country apart.

It is inevitable that the government will be forced to take real action to tackle these issues soon. The alternative is that the financial markets will do it for them, the consequences of which don’t bear thinking about.

State benefits need to be wound down and eventually abolished.

You should have been born 200 years ago, you’d have felt completely at home.

Serco certainly does well out of them.

Not if they can cut hair or build a wall.

This is I think the future. Employment royalty will be people with jobs that can only be done by humans.

The poster even said we had been in a downwards spiral for 20 years. 24 of those Tory. Including Brexit. Try again.

And soon there won't Be m/any benefits. Benefits need working people - no jobs no taxes not benefits. Then what? I don't know.

Taxes would have to be raised differently. If AI replaced human jobs taxation would have to be reengineered so the companies benefiting from having little or no wage bill were more heavily taxed on their profits.

In Britain ours is shocking!!

Education in its knees (im
a state school teacher / it’s horrendous)

Zero public services/ long ambulance waits, no nhs dentist. Hard to see a doctor

Prison population full and it doesn’t work

england is not a good country to live in at the moment. It’s been run to the ground. Taxes to the max , poverty is increasing . A lot of people are suffering from the cost of living.

I'm not sure why people keep going on about brexit and the tories. Well i am sure actually, but it's erroneous to do so in this case (and others but now isn't the time or place). If we look at the rest of Europe GDP it wouldn't be Much different, Germany, Italy, France etc they're going through the same things as the UK, it's not just the UK (no surprises why). How do They compare to Mississippi? I don't know. They didn't look at life quality at all.. pretty sure the UK and rest of Europe has a higher Quality of life than Mississippi. Which for eg. leads the USA in gun deaths (that's the usa where the most likely cause of death for a person under 19 is guns). The Atlantic loves slating GB..

Yes yes that stat is brought out a lot but it’s meaningless. It ignores the massive wealth inequality of the state, cost of living differences ,and UK’s massive social safety nets (NHS, for example.
The exact same thing can be said of Germany, France and even Japan. All have GDP per capita less than Mississippi.

Ha ha - yeah. Good luck gvt getting taxes from big companies to pay people benefits

It doesn’t surprise me.
It is awful that there has been a massive lack of investment in many areas, then writing the people off as lazy when there are no manufacturing roles or jobs available in the areas.

Yup, this.
Once you start on that road it’s difficult to dial back from, as has been shown.

If society is upended because there are very few jobs there will be no option. If big companies want to survive, ie sell their products where else will the money to buy them come from? Profits would be astronomical with no wage bill to pay.

It's not a good vision but people just won't have money. ubi (no other benefits) maybe and just general poverty, except those with inherited wealth. Europe wide.

Austerity. Framed as an unavoidable economic necessity, but in reality, it functions as a policy tool that safeguards elite interests. And here we are, rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting poorer. And Thatcher of course.

Why are you surprised people? We had the whole of our industries shut down within about 15 years from 1980.
Only making things from raw materials generates real wealth- call centres don't generate wealth, they just provide low paid unstable work- now even that is going due to the ridiculous frisson about AI.
The only reason we didn't become 3rd world immediately is the loosening of the financial rules in the big bang at the same time- It made London the centre of international finance, Brexit loosened our hold on this and we began to circle the plughole again.
Mass immigration was used purely to bolster tax revenue and keep wages as low as possible- it has nothing to do with multiculturalism bringing in new skills or entrepreneurship. It was used by politicians as a cynical tool to keep wages low and income taxes high, giving them the opportunity to get rid of taxes on wealth- which enriched them personally, encouraging a new breed of wealth hungry politician who have no interest in helping their constituents.
They gave no thought to the wear and tear on the infrastructure- which is now critical, or housing which is a national scandal in so many ways.
Welcome to Britain in 2026.

Yes but not just the UK. Germany, France, Italy, Greece etc too.

GDP per capita is only one metric... on virtually every other social metric that matters for quality of life not only is the uk a better place to live than mississippi but also on average better than USA... GDP growth is incompatible with living a a world that has limits both with respect to resources but also ability to pollute...we live on a space ship rather than inhabit the endless plain of the cowboy

This. If you look beyond GDP at things like life expectancy, educational outcomes, maternal mortality and child mortality, social and economic inequality and access to healthcare, the UK will come out considerably better than Mississippi - and than most of the US, in fact.

I've just looked up life expectancy for a giggle - in Mississippi it sits between 71 and 72.5. In the UK it sits between 79 and 83.

The premise of this thread is ridiculous - it's another transparent effort at UK and Labour bashing.

Agree we have all been sold out, but it is further on here, and more acute. Most of those other countries don't have the same problems with mass immigration or housing, or international investment driving property prices- but substantially the same yes.

It's got nothing to do with Brexit.

France and Italy have also dropped below Mississippi.

It's due to high taxation and high spending.

The serious decline started in the early noughties.

And it's really sped up in the last two years.

What the hell? How is this possible? I wish you would have included a link, because this just seems so implausible. Also wish you would have posted it in Politics, which makes more sense.