There is another excellent article in today's Irish Times by David
McWilliams who is highly respected as a leading Irish Irish economist,
writer, and journalist.
www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2022/10/22/david-mcwilliams-it-is-tragic-how-far-the-uk-has-fallen
"London's Science Museum is a monument to British invention in genetics,
chemistry and engineering, from the steam engine to space travel. British
schoolchildren can have sleepovers in the museum surrounded by stories of
some wonderful feats of human imagination and ingenuity. In this
magnificent building innovators, those brilliant but sometimes difficult
men and women, are celebrated and eulogised.
The Science Museum is a tribute to creativity, and also to the remarkable
ability of British innovators to commercialise their breakthroughs.
Innovation is the single most important factor propelling an economy
forward. For many years Britain was pre-eminent in its ability to support
and sustain creative scientific minds, via universities and public
institutes, and this also included commercial support. The City of London
took risks, betting on new companies and new household products, from
vacuum cleaners to cars and washing machines, products that sometimes
changed the world. The innovations may not have originated there but
Britain produced industrial champions, it employed engineers, scientists
and assorted tinkerers, the people who - through a process of trial and
error - update, remodel and make the economy tick.
Britain dignified the efforts of entrepreneurs, as it did with great
artists, musicians and writers. In return the canon of British art and
literature is diverse and brilliant. In pop or contemporary music,
this is possibly one of the most creative places on earth.
Walking through the main hall of the Science Museum earlier this week,
against a background of economic and political chaos in Westminster,
it struck me how far the UK has fallen. It is tragic, and it is difficult
to see how Britain gets out of the mess that successive governments have
created. It is also hard to digest the enormity of the fall from grace.
A country that used to be the workshop of the world is a beggar. Sure,
there are lots of nice buildings, legacies of empire largely, but beneath
the facades of Kensington, Knightsbridge and Chelsea, the country is
atrophying - regionally, economically, constitutionally,
socially and emotionally. A new prime minister is not going to solve
problems that have been festering for a generation or more.
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The roots of this crisis can be traced back to the Thatcher experiment,
which was nothing more than a heist by one class and one region over the
rest. The financialisation of the entire economy meant that the City of
London morphed from a provider of capital to those brilliant engineers and
creative minds heralded in the Science Museum to being a spivvy casino of
venture capitalists, asset strippers,
short-term speculators and other assorted highly-paid bottom fishers.
The resulting inequality, which we highlighted in this column a few weeks
ago, has been crystallised in one statistic. In most of Europe the gap
between the top earners and the bottom earners after taxes is about three
times, the richest earners taking home three times more than the poorest
ones. In Ireland the top 10 per cent take home slightly more than three
times that of the poorest. In the UK the richest 10 per cent take home six
times more than the bottom 10 per cent. This figure tells you all you need
to know about the nature of inequality across the water, and this gap is
entirely policy-driven."