The gathering crisis in the UK
antipope.org
antipope.org
A cat and a mouse decide to team up and store up some surplus food for hard times. They agree during abundant times to both put a little extra fat into a shared pot. They then store the pot in a safe place. The cat, however, is overcome by hunger even in the abundant times. Every few weeks the cat sneaks to the pot and takes just a little bit, maybe just a few licks at a time. Over the course of a couple of years of sneaking and small stealing the cat manages to completely deplete the pot. Then hard times hit, as both expected. The cat and the mouse both go to the pot together to divide their savings. But when they lift the lid they both gasp in surprise that the pot is empty. The mouse slowly realizes what must have happened. The cat is guilty but won't stand being accused and so it turns on the mouse and eats it.
My whole life I had heard of the rich upper-classes described as "fat cats" but I didn't really understand the message until I read the story. From at least 2008 we were supposed to be saving for the next crisis. Yet here we are at the next crisis and low and behold the pot is empty.
The reason we fall for this over and over again is that the short-term memory of civilization is shorter than the cycles these things happen over.
The mouse is participating in the positive sum game of joint savings, and the cat is robbing it blind (very negative sum as it's also robbing its future self).
There's a lot of that happening across society (healthcare, education, addiction-fueled tech companies, ...), and the people who do it oftentimes do end up (at least short term) better off (= rich), but we as a nation end up poorer (the whole negative sum thing).
There are however plenty of ways to become rich doing positive sum things (though lord knows it's harder than it looks), so there will be rich people who don't deserve the blame so to speak.
But the clearly visible, media-amplified cases will of course be cartoonish villains, all too eager to sell you the rope to hang them with so to speak.
I really like your metaphor, but it is misleading.
[1]https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3068/cat-a...
(edit, this isn't for the UK, but fat cats abound!)
It doesn't matter how public it is. It matters whether the public actually knows about it and understands it.
Holy crap!
"the Bank of England are forecasting 13% inflation towards the end of the year."
And we thought things were bad in the US.
This article sounds absolutely dire, can someone in the UK comment - are things really that bad there?
Having lived in both the UK and the US, I would say that anyone not rich is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare, better infrastructure, cheaper education, etc.
However, in my experience the UK living standards (again, for a non-rich person) are significantly worse than the rest of Northwestern Europe. And the UK's trajectory is not looking good.
Is it? The NHS is completely useless since the pandemic for anything non-emergency (can't comment for emergencies). You go private or you go without.
Whether it's still cheaper than US, I don't know - US healthcare is priced to milk out as much cash as possible out of insurance policies, so I'm not sure what the true price is when you negotiate and are paying privately.
This is vastly overstating it. The third option is waiting. Many hours at A&E, months for non-urgent surgery, but it's there and it's still free.
If you demand next-hour treatment, yeah, it's not that, but they're doing their best.
UK resident here. I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. In the short-term, I can ignore the issue and pretend it doesn't exist. I wish it was only a short-term issue.
Long-term however, most of what attracted me to the UK in the first place died with the pandemic. The high street in most places is a shadow of its former self (replaced by money-laundering fronts masquerading as gift/American candy shops), work in tech is stuck in a weird hybrid state where it's neither fully remote nor on-site and is the worst of both worlds, wages haven't kept up with inflation while housing prices have skyrocketed, businesses are struggling and will struggle even more as people don't even have the money to pay their heating/energy bills, let alone for discretionary spending. The NHS is basically a write-off at this point and your only option is to go private.
Taxes on the other hand are still high. Now I don't know anybody who likes paying taxes, but it stings less when you feel like you get your money's worth out of them (in terms of infrastructure or services, such as the NHS) and the tax rate is adequately calibrated. However, the tax brackets have yet to adjust for inflation, so you must earn more (and thus pay more tax) even though your standard of living hasn't actually changed at all. Services that you used to be able to get for "free" (paid by your taxes) such as the NHS are no longer functional, so you must now effectively pay twice and go private instead.
Politically, there doesn't seem to be any urgency to fix the problem either, from any side of the political spectrum. I haven't paid attention to them too much here (I can't vote anyway), but the feeling I got was complete apathy from the ruling class. It always felt like a plane flying on autopilot with nobody at the controls - we happened to luck out for a while and prosper despite that but now we're approaching a mountain and it will be really bad if someone doesn't change course.
I have an EU passport, when my current lease expires I will be moving back to the EU and taking my business with me. At this point I am losing money by staying here, paying huge rents and taxes for sub-par value in return.
Plus the UK is a mini tax haven, being one of the best places in Europe for the self-employed.
Yet. But I'm not sure if that is something that has enough staying power to see you through to the end of this. Inflation is a fickle thing. So are bankruns.
If you ask people who have lived there the whole time, they've been frog-boiled.
The truth is somewhere in the middle: the current malaise is a continuation of pre-existing trends. There were always holes in british roads, now there are just more of them. There were always food banks, now they just run out of food before they run out of hungry people.
Pubs are warning of over 70% closure rates due to rising energy costs. 457,000 people are employed by pubs. If 70% of those jobs go that's 319,900 jobs lost, not to mention all the knock on effects. How many brewery jobs will be lost? Delivery jobs? Taxi driving jobs? How many communities will be damaged through losing one of the main socialising spaces? This is just one sector of the economy. Similar stories are being reported in restaurants, takeaways, manufacturing and retail.
On top of this we now have barristers, postal workers, railway staff, teachers, refuse collectors, journalists and hospital staff all on strike. More professions will likely be joining the list in the coming months. How is any of this hyperbolic?
There is a very real feeling that this is the calm before the storm and how it plays out is very much going to depend an awful lot on who gets elected next month and what they choose to do about the energy price rise in October.
Sources: https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/markets/article-10645425...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12196322
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/22/uk-inflatio...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/uk-had-ea...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/aug/23/pubs-winter...
https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-...
it's been 43 years, as the author points out
That inflation is mostly driven by energy costs, which are a direct result of European policy failures on nuclear and fossil fuels. The US is mostly a net neutral producer/consumer of fossil fuels and energy, which is why it's insulated from the impacts of Russia cutting off gas.
From a market perspective I would have thought a decrease in supply (say sanctions on Russian oil) would up the price of oil. This would effect domestic oil prices as well since either the domestic producers also participate globally or other sources of oil available domestically are also available globally (higher global price would decrease domestic supply and thus increase domestic price).
If domestic policies are put in place which limit access to the global market then that would change things.
Furthermore, a super strong dollar when US oil production is sold in, of course, dollars makes other parts of the world that want to purchase more US energy in lieu of Russian energy pay top dollar for it compared to domestic customers.
To a large degree, yes [1]. The US is affected by oil prices globally, but if OPEC decides to cut off the US it wouldn't have the same effect that Russia is having on the EU right now.
> also participate globally
In crises, the US has the option to restrict exports. The EU does not have that option because it is not a net producer of fossil fuels.
[1] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/natural-gas-p...
The US as an economy is mostly not effected by fuel prices anymore.
But the average US consumer is - that's probably the important part.
That being said, I can't agree with the parent post, it's not that symmetric.
Its very hard to be really insulated from higher fuel costs, even if it's produced locally. You still need to ship it to a refinery, and then ship it back out to gas stations. Unless you run a farm where you get all your inputs locally and they are also trying to use only local inputs, you're going to see these price increases. Many of the economic inputs people use for production, whether that be food or built items, have gone up, and often there's only so much they can do to insulate from that.
Electrification with domestic electricity supply seems like it would provide much greater security. Though there's still the global markets for all the electronics and materials and such for renewable generation.
But they are not completely at the whim.
With a nontrivial lag time, as prices raise, local (especially North America as a whole) production will go up and NA will become a significant net exporter. The shale and tar sands production is considerably more expensive than other production methods and requires high prices (and predictions of long term high prices) to operate successfully.
We are coupled, but not entirely dependent. The local price will be progressively lower compared to global price as global price rises. Being able to overproduce our requirements enables this.
If high prices significantly (for some sufficiently high level of significance) threatened our local economy or supply actually limited people's ability to buy at any price, controls can and would be enacted to decouple the local price and economy from the global market.
The standard approach for the government now seems to be to look for short term wins in the tabloids and ignore the long term.
And this is on top of the huge distraction that Brexit has been.
Was this ever not the case?
* There were additional long-term government projects, such as ARPA's Network (aka: the internet).
* Strategic supercomputer initiatives as well.
* The debate over USA's social security is all measured in the year 2040 or later. People constantly use social security as an example of "short term thinking", but policies from the 1980s have been forward looking for at least the next 50 years.
-----------
I dunno much about UK politics, but I imagine that similar forward looking projects and/or decisions / debates have occurred.
I don't know if it it was or not, but a few counter-points is not proof.
I am sure you could find millions of counter-points that the US and the UK are currently long-term thinking (even though I think most of us can agree that isn't the subjective truth).
Literally no one in politics thinks about purely short term issues actually. I *disagree* with my political opponents, but that's because my vision of the next 30 years is grossly different than their vision of the next 30 years.
-----
This isn't about "counter-examples". This is about you failing to provide even the first example of short-term thinking. What exactly is your "short term" problem that was messed up here?
Brexit, in particular, was never supposed to be a quick-and-easy process. I think it was an idiotic idea, but everyone knew it'd have short-term pain. You can call the UK Brexit crowd stupid perhaps for misreading the future. But they weren't thinking "short term" at all.
I've got criticisms of the Brexit crowd, and that has more to do with xenophobia, europ-phobia, self-centered thinking, etc. etc. But it doesn't actually have to do with "short term vs long term" thinking. If anything at all, the Brexit crowd was very forward looking (just wrong / incorrect about it, if anything, misjudging the short-term effects of Brexit's decision)
It still stands that these short cited representatives and officials champion policies that come from without, not within, their own scheming.
Governments often did things which failed and then tried to paint them as wins. They also often went for short term wins. But they were real wins (in the short term) even if they failed to get them. I think it's new to have a government run by someone so thoroughly a bullshitter that they don't care about the actual effect of their policies, just how the announcement makes them look. Because, fundamentally most politicians, that get to the top positions, actually want power and to do something with it, even if it's not something you'd agree with.
Newspapers have a VERY long history of being owned and operated by the rich with a healthy portion of PR / propaganda.
The approach now is to announce a non-feasible hard-right policy in the right wing tabloids, wait for The Guardian to react the next day, denounce that, then the day after forget the whole thing (like Liz Truss' civil service paycuts)
I believe the same things that fueled Brexit persist as malaise today in England. In the US. Probably everywhere else where regulations allow unregulated profit to be squeezed from the less well off. Rent seeking cultures morally bankrupt and rot from the core.
If you look at Britain historically...coal is dead. Wool is dead. The island itself is fairly small for much agriculture. There aren't a whole lot of natural resources. They had power and resources through their empire, but that is gone. Their one shot, so to speak, was like many developed nations - services, including financial. But Brexit was signaling, and companies saw that there was little incentive to stay and do business there vs. Frankfurt, Zurich, New York, etc.
So... yeah, a lot of us pre-Brexit saw this malaise not only for what it was, but what it was going to become. It isn't a pretty picture and the utter void of competent political leadership means this is probably a protracted decline.
>According to a new report from the International Publishers Association (IPA), UK publishers released 184,000 new and revised titles in 2013. This equates to 2,875 titles per million inhabitants, and places the UK an astonishing 1,000-plus titles ahead of second-placed Taiwan and Slovenia (1,831). Australia is considerably lower, at 1,176, while the US published just 959 titles per million inhabitants.
Also music, universities, financial services, tea rooms etc.
(Part of the answer to why Labour has been out of power for 13 years is the Corbyn disaster, it explains half of that time span).
[0]: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
That's why you got stuff like his face getting greenscreened onto a clip of voldemort on the BBC.
One thing that people underestimate is just how far to the right of the general population the media and political class is. They tend to be private school dominated, overwhelmingly drawn from southern england, and personally wealthy.
The situation is not irretrievable in theory, at this point.
The problem is that in practice a solution requires the political elite to collectively admit the falsehood of the axioms they built their entire careers on.
If an individual political leader defects from the nationalist-neoliberal consensus, then they get treated exactly the way Jeremy Corbyn was. Corbyn was a soft-brexiter -- his distrust of the EU was based on it having emerged from the EEC, as a capitalist institution: what they hated him for was for being an unreconstructed hang-over from the 1970s when Labour was actually a left-wing party.
Neoliberal politicians can't admit that the crisis is rooted in neoliberal policies.
Tories have done well to court the people that show up at the polls with things like keeping the Triple-Lock pension guarantee[1].
Like the Democrats, Labour's demographics have started to shift more to the well-educated (though I suspect this will swing back massively, come the next election). This alienated their traditional working class base who care more about their own economic realities than whatever social crusade is the flavour of the week.
Young Labour went out of their way to paint pro-Brexiters as racists and bigots. The dirty secret is that even Corbyn has been a long time Euro-sceptic. Because of the in-fighting on the correct position, Labour didn't take a hard stance on Brexit until very close to the end, IIRC. At which point, anti-Brexit votes were being siphoned off by the Liberal Democrats, with pro-Brexit votes going to the Tories.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)...
I'm pretty sure that a reason Labour did much better than expected in the 2017 general election is that Brexit voters suspected that Corbyn had secretly voted for Leave.
London has a Labor major and it is the economic Center, so maybe there was a lot of Labor influence on the economy after all?
Desperate balkanization coming for many, I think.
This is precisely why problems that affect the whole world are so hard to solve: we are not that well organized at that level, there are no sanctions for bad actors that are effective and with veto power and various power blocks not in alignment with each other the stage is set for a lot of misery.
It's not like we can appeal to the union of planets to bail us out.
Except for the accelerationists, of course.
I'm not for dictatorships, but we already have too many countries in the world. And provinces and states within these countries. Too many little fiefdoms. Too many wannabe lords. Too many presidents, premiers, prime ministers, governors, chancellors, kings, emperors. Too many parliaments, congresses, too many senators, deputies, representatives. Too much division. Hell, we're going to have American, Chinese, and European bases on the Moon and Mars. No wonder we can't tackle collective challenges. We'll be traveling through other galaxies and still call ourselves based on the particular piece of land we were born in on this particular planet called the Earth.
I fully acknowledge that this is a privileged point of view on my part. I am lucky enough to live in an industrialized and peaceful enough country to be able to hold this opinion without having to worry about my basic survival.
I think all that diversity - sure, even competing bases on the Moon - is the sign of a healthy society. Monoculture is much more perilous. Centralization gives you NASA, market chaos gives you SpaceX.
Countries with lowest homicide rates: Least diverse.
US States with lowest homicide rates: Least diverse.
There are some exceptions, however in general this statement is true when we look at the entire data set.
Market chaos also gives you walled gardens like Google/Apple App stores with outlandish fees and company policies like this one: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/09/06/eff-urges-apple-abandon...
Counterpoint: no we won't lol.
And what does "local" mean? London to Brussels is only 200 miles direct, that's closer than Belfast, Edinburgh, or St Davids which are all places more or less ruled by London as "local" to the UK.
Distance does not matter. It should not matter.
Europe has been in an energy war with Russia for the past year, we have a drought affecting hydro power and the French nuclear fleet is just out of service
The government action up to now has been almost nothing, basically amounting to announcing a few LNG import projects and updated 2030 targets. Nearly nothing has been done to the demand side nearly six months into this crisis
What needs to be done that can help 0-6 month time scale:
Gas supply
* Ramp up of Groningen (with payments to affected people living there)
Electricity generation
* Restart of all possible coal plants (only two have announced restart in Germany!)
* Removal of any restrictions limiting oil and diesel fired gensets from operating
* Extension of the three reactors in Germany, and likely also the three shut down reactors
Demand
* Have utility field forces inspect every gas boiler, starting with the vulnerable population, to set the correct flow temperature on condensing boilers (saves 5-10% !), check for easy fixes (e.g., leaky drafts that can be plugged)
* Mandate utilities to pay for avoided gas/electricity use for people on fixed retail tariffs - everyone need to be price responsive, not only large industrials
* Mandate commercial customers to raise AC setting to 25C
* Mandate everyone to lower thermostat to 18C
* Cash payments to households (at least vulnerable customers), but do not link it to the consumption levels and do not lower the price indirectly by other means (e.g., VAT reduction)
This will also require that permits, supply chains, labor etc. get fixed. Apparently that's stopping some of the coal restarts in Germany. That would not be a restriction if this was a shooting war...
> * Restart of all possible coal plants (only two have announced restart in Germany!)
> * Removal of any restrictions limiting oil and diesel fired gensets from operating
are really bad ideas. The current crisis is nothing compared to the looming climate crisis. What we need is a hard sustained break in energy consumption. We can have a good quality of life with a lot less energy, if we stop wasting so many resources on things that don't matter or are not required. We should buy (and produce) less non-essentials and travel should be limited to things that really require physical presence. Home office should be offered whenever possible.
Sure, everyone is struggling but there are some unique twists and turns in the UK right now, and some have been made worse by own goals.
US seems bonkers in its own way, Germany is buckling under the gas crisis, France... lovely place but i can't understand how it stays afloat. Poland is just about in free fall. Italy and Spain seem (?) perpetually in the grip of a political crisis. Other countries i know less about.
Switzerland? Netherlands? Denmark?
Isn't it just temporary due to the heatwave? Thus they'll be able to power them back on as winter hits (which coincides with extra demand for heating)?
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/economy/article/2022/04/24/french-...
And I would add: a very large industrial effort to create heatpumps on such a scale that we can convert all of Europe in two years tops.
Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_...
I think the relentless scapegoating by Western elite of Russia/China/Iran/COVID/$CURRENT_BOGEYMAN/etc. is the real problem. They are avoiding responsibility for a collapsing system, which is only going to allow that collapse to continue.
This is a far cry from having a coordinated disinformation campaign to cause political instability in a foreign country. The evidence of Russia doing this to any effect with Trump or Brexit is extremely scant and circumstantial. Such a campaign would be massive, well beyond the capacity of a hidden conspiracy. It would involve entire media companies and NGOs. There would be far more smoking-gun evidence than the current standard of "guilt by association with someone who spent some time in Russia".
EDIT: found a source https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-61782578
It's not seen by anyone I know as scapegoat either; they're fanning existing flames. No more, no less.
If they fail this, and are left in the breeze, they'll eventually have to beg for a seat at the French lead EU (if the EU survives), and things won't be as nice.
The world is deglobalizing, because the US won the cold war, and it's no longer in our interest to keep subsidizing the rest of the world's free trade. If you're not in our trade group, things are going to be about as rough as they were for your nation prior to WWII.
"And feel free to use the comment thread to discuss what's coming next for the UK as the vector sum of Brexit, COVID19, the energy crisis from the Ukraine war, and the worst inflationary bubble since 1980 punches us in the face."
What does "bring down nations" mean though? Replacing a government? Violent overthrow and then writing an actual constitution? Because a bunch of the challenges being faced would still be issues under any regime right? A different government isn't going to magically get more potatoes this year, or significantly more energy from strained European countries this winter.
The state is the rulers and rules?
Every tyrannical regime in the past had a constitution. Rendered mute by a uni-party system, captured media and judiciary. Now you can add big tech collusion to the fray.
The problem with that simplistic analysis is that it relies on the unspoken assumption that if it weren't for those sneaky, all-powerful, conniving [members of whichever out-group is being blamed] then the whole world would be peaceful and prosperous and free.
Having said that, I absolutely agree with the rest of your comment about what's ahead of us.
It's really not. This is some pretty sad FUD.
Unsafe to swim in waters. Trash not taken out. Crop failure. Inflation. Low heating fuel reserves (in a country that doesn't even get snow). Strikes. Absent politicians.
This is basically an average week in many countries.
1. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2016/10/facts-o...
Thank God he was wrong about all that, it's hard to imagine what the UK would look like with close to 20% inflation.
Wait...
Or is democracy too dangerous to be left in the hands of the people.
Central planning has been extremely successful in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in China, and making China a superpower. And, I shall add, a superpower that's now remained in existence (73 years) longer than the Soviet Union did (70 years).
I'm all for local experimentation, but not for local authority to block progress for all, like countries not doing anything about the climate crisis.
And, you point out the (economic) success of China, and then complain about countries not doing anything about the climate crisis. Have you looked at China's CO2 emissions? Yes, they bootstrapped their economy. The environmental cost has been pretty steep, though...
That's a bit of a tall order, though, to be fair.
Need to remove red tape, stop controlling prices, de-regulate business, establish free trade agreements, and do all manner of things to increase real productivity and not the government-pretend kind of productivity.
Reality is a tough pill to swallow and it will likely take several years of misery before the obvious solution becomes the only solution.
These facts may interest you:
"the [French Environment and Energy Management Agency] ultimately concluded that the renewable energy sector actually barely uses such materials."[0]
"A large amount of uranium is in rare earth deposits, and may be extracted as a by-product."[1]
> Need to remove red tape, ... de-regulate business
Another quote for you, about the Fukushima disaster:
"There is a growing body of evidence that suggests the accident was the result of failures in regulation and nuclear plant design and that both were lagging behind international best practices and standards."[2]
[0] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-...
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...
[2] https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p...
Is there any historical evidence of this approach leading to positive change?
Just theoretically, I don't see it--energy is a public good with tons of externalities (both positive and negative).
Also, surely the problem at the moment is that energy prices are controlled by series of regional monopoly energy providers, the only thing stopping them from putting bills up astronomically is price controls. If you removed the regulation stopping them from raising prices energy bills will be so high that you will have rioting in central London that would make the poll tax riots look like a church fete. I think that would be a rash move.
Where do I begin?
- Stop setting prices by government diktat for medical professionals' salaries and procedures. Stop preventing private enterprise from building competing clinics and hospitals. Enable public health insurance to go towards the cost of private treatments in order to reduce lines.
- Stop requiring licenses for all manner of jobs that don't need them. You shouldn't need a license to cut hair, be an interior decorator, and all manner of work that expensive licensing requirements do nothing to help
- Radically increase the speed to approve new housing and transportation development. Do a single environmental review, get 1 round of feedback, then move forwards
- Reduce import taxes and establish free trade agreements so goods breeze through customs from trading partner countries
- Increase legal immigration to expand the consumer base, expand the labor supply, and allow entrepreneurial foreigners to come in and start new businesses
- Drastically reduce corporate and income taxes to promote productive economic development
Or do the opposite of all this and be surprised when economic activity stagnates and people get poorer year after year
Our system doesn't work like that, but we see that system in action in other countries and it doesn't seem to work very well, our health care costs are 1/5th of the US for better outcomes (e.g compare infant mortality) and we had the one of the fastest Covid vaccine rollouts in the world thanks to our centrally controlled health care system which is free to everyone at the point of use.
> - Stop requiring licenses for all manner of jobs that don't need them. You shouldn't need a license to cut hair, be an interior decorator, and all manner of work that expensive licensing requirements do nothing to help
You don't need a license for any of those things in the UK. Pretty much the main things you need actually need a 'license' for are Electrician, Doctor. Gas plumber. Many other professions are regulated and in some cases you legally can't call yourself a member of that profession without registering and passing exams etc, but you often don't need to use a regulated professional.
> - Radically increase the speed to approve new housing and transportation development. Do a single environmental review, get 1 round of feedback, then move forwards
Whatever it is the French and Spanish are doing, we should copy that. Their costs are about 1/10th of what we are paying for HS2 and they get things done really fast. I think that the French Government has a dedicated department for building high speed rail lines that has been doing it continuously since the early 80's so they have a lot of institutional knowledge on how to get this done which we don't have here. Their rail lines are still built by private contractors but in relatively small sectional contracts to increase competition in the construction market and I think the French government exercises more control of the overall design process than ours has the capacity or knowledge to do.
> - Reduce import taxes and establish free trade agreements so goods breeze through customs from trading partner countries
I believe the UK government hasn't yet imposed border controls on items coming into the UK from the EU yet, because they have failed to set up the system, so this is already happening. But you are right that it would probably make sense to rejoin the EU customs union, then we would get all the free trade agreements back that we just lost. Then you might as well rejoin the EU to get a say in how those deals are negotiated...
> - Increase legal immigration to expand the consumer base, expand the labor supply, and allow entrepreneurial foreigners to come in and start new businesses
Agreed. There are shortages of skilled workers in many sectors of the economy at the moment. There's a huge shortage of people to look after the elderly. A lot of companies I deal with are struggling with shortages, people have given up even answering their emails in many cases. Things that used to take one email or phone call are now taking 10 calls and 10 emails over the course of months.
> - Drastically reduce corporate and income taxes to promote productive economic development
This won't affect a lot of people who are already not paying much in tax and who can't or soon will not be able to afford their electricity and gas bills, you would need to abolish income tax for a significant proportion of the working population (say everyone earning under £20k so what's that about 25-30%?) to offset just the rising energy costs. If you want to stimulate the economy you need to have workers earning enough money to have some disposable income. E.g. the NHS employs about 1/10th of the working population of Britain, they have received real terms pay cuts over the last 13 years, therefore 1 in 10 workers has less disposable income to spend in small businesses like pubs and hairdressers thereby depressing the economy; Britain's economy has been stagnant since 2008 this is one of the reasons why. Thousands of years ago, in a crises, the Mayans dispensed grain for the population from their central repositories. The government needs to do the same thing (metaphorically) now to prevent economic hardship. Also, reducing corporate income tax doesn't stimulate growth, it suppresses it because it makes it easier to take money out of businesses instead of reinvesting it in making the business more productive; If a business buys something, it doesn't pay tax on the money it earned before it buys things it pays tax on profits after the cost of the things it has bought have been deducted. Buy new machines; tax free. Pay out to shareholders; not tax free.
It is unfortunate that the poor will likely die at a higher rate in the next three years from reduced economic output, ESG induced famine, inflation and that Germany is back to coal and firewood in the short term. But realize it is for a greater future.