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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

It will take a while to get a full picture of what is going on but the trends I've been watching:

- The UK has been sliding into political irrelevance for decades.

- Since around the mid-late 2000s, big chunks of Europe (like the UK) seem to have been sliding towards having much less available energy to fund their lifestyles.

- They shot their own economy during COVID, as many nations did.

They're doing pretty well to hold together as a political unit. I was worried it would be worse and I'm glad to be wrong so far.

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> They're doing pretty well to hold together as a political unit. I was worried it would be worse and I'm glad to be wrong so far.

Most western countries have got very good at internal security since the War On Terror, and anyone trying to do direct action or work outside the political system tends to get squashed very quickly.

(Obvious exceptions: France, which has much more of a riot tradition, and the Jan 6 events, which had insider assistance of some unclear sort)

Surprisingly, I don't think COVID has caused too much lasting damage due to being offset by the economic stimulus, although the number of dead or sick workers is probably enough to be significant. It does seem to have been Brexit: https://www.newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-day/2022/06/uk-eco...

> It does seem to have been Brexit...

That graph looks pretty suspicious. Why was the UK growing at exactly the average rate for an EU country before Brexit?

Wikipedia suggests [0] that the UK's GDP growth in 2019 is in line with & superior to Germany and France. It isn't really very illuminating to look at the UK vs the EU - there isn't any reason apart from that remarkable co-incidence in the graph to think the the UK would perfectly mirror EU trends.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_...

That would have to be the null hypothesis, surely? In a globalized economy, the more two or more economies are linked, the closer you'd expect their GDP growth rates to be. Because trade between them shows up in the GDP of both. The business cycles of countries around the world are linked.

(Your [0] shows UK 1.26 between France 1.49 and Germany 0.59, which is not what you said?)

> That would have to be the null hypothesis, surely...

No, it wouldn't be. The null hypothesis for me would be that the UK would under-perform the average, because they a huge economy relative to the rest of the EU and have less room to grow what with the various energy problems Europe is having.

I mean, maybe the graph in that report is weighted by GDP or something and the UK was holding growth in the EU back pre-Brexit. The match between the lines is really suspicious. The odds that the economies in the EU are that synchronised is low.

> (Your [0] shows UK 1.26 between France 1.49 and Germany 0.59, which is not what you said?)

Oh, whoops. I was looking at a couple of different webpages with different years data, maybe it was one of them. I default to wikipedia for linking. My bad. Anyway.

> sliding towards having much less available energy to fund their lifestyles.

How does that look different from "needing much less energy to fund their lifestyles" (due to efficiency gains and out-sourcing)?

The UK economy has grown substantially in the past 20 years, while energy consumption has decreased:

https://www.climatechangenews.com/2015/08/03/uk-total-energy...

For decades? When are you starting that statement exactly, end of World War 2? Seems like the UK is politically very relevant given the huge quantity of ink spilled over its political decisions in recent years. Note: "relevant" doesn't mean you like what it's doing, just that lots of people care.

The issue here isn't really energy, the issue is the huge economic costs of lockdowns, costs that simply weren't considered at all in the general mass hysteria created by epidemiologists.

Are you saying that UK inflation is actually caused by the cost of lockdowns?

How does that compare with inflation other countries are also experiencing?

Well, cost of anti-COVID measures in general, not just lockdowns. Vaccines, masks, mass testing etc is all very expensive.

Everywhere printed money like crazy to pay for fighting COVID. Look at graphs of inflation. They are all very similar. They start taking off right at the start of 2021, i.e. just months after governments open the taps to fight COVID and that happens everywhere. Tradingeconomics.com has good graphs to see this.

It seems very plausible that money printing has had an effect on inflation.

It also seems likely to me that supply constraints are also working to push up prices.

I'm not sure how to disentangle all the different effects, but I'm sure there's more than one cause. It's all interconnected I guess.

Worth noting that UK developers are paid substantially more than other European developers, with the sole exception of Switzerland.

UK is one of the western country that did the least to shut down their economy and lifted all restrictions up very very quickly. That doesn’t seem to be as relevant to let’s say something else having a very long term impact called… Brexit.

As a British Citizen who lived in Finland throughout the pandemic, the UK's restrictions and shutdowns were several orders of magnitude higher, and longer lasting, than what I experienced there.

the netherlands were in lockdown until this february, by then most people in uk were not even taking about covid

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