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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

The UK is in a downward spiral. For the past decades, the bottom 90% of people have become poorer. It’s so bad now that 45% of adults say they are struggling to keep up with at least one bill or credit commitment [1]. Almost a majority of households are constantly on the brink of financial collapse.

The Conservative Party has been in power for 13 years and bears most of the responsibility. They’ve tried every trick in the right-wing playbook: cutting social services to the bone, blaming immigrants and Europeans, stoking internal divisions, and most recently Liz Truss’s record short-lived government tried to solve everything by cutting taxes for the rich. The country desperately needs new ideas and a complete purge of these clowns from government.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/524a7e1e-4ff0-48d6-b9b1-973a9dd4e...

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> The Conservative Party has been in power for 13 years and bears most of the responsibility.

UK's per-capita GDP displays the exact same pattern as France and Italy: growth until 2007, the bubble popping in 2008, and instead of a recovery, slow decline thereafter.

An alternative hypothesis to yours is that all of Western Europe drank the Kool Aid of globalization and financialiazation in the past few decades, and that messed up the fundamentals of their economies.

See: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... (UK) and https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location... (France)

One thing to keep in mind is that even if all else being equal, being poor in the UK is much worse than in a southern country due to the climate and the energy requirement of heating. UK's awful building standards from back in the day don't help.

Also, inflation and energy prices are worse in the UK than many European countries, compounding the problem.

As much fun as it is to blame the Tories, this is global economics at work, not bad social policies.

The UK no longer makes anything. We facilitate and service. But that type of work only works for certain people, with certain skills, in certain areas.

The same goes for many other western economies.

> The UK no longer makes anything.

The Tories are almost exclusively responsible for that. With education and long-term industrial policy, there could have been an enormous high-tech manufacturing sector underpinned by an educated workforce to replace the older primary industries like coal mining and "low secondary" like bulk steel.

These policies should have started in the early 80s, but instead at that time they started slashing and selling.

Germany has a lot of faults policy-wise, but they somehow managed to keep manufacturing despite spending trillions on reunification right in middle.

>Germany has a lot of faults policy-wise, but they somehow managed to keep manufacturing despite spending trillions on reunification right in middle.

To be fair Germany's manufacturing sector has no secret sauce that Germany invented, but is a sector that managed to survive mostly due to cheap energy from Russian gas, which is now gone, and is highly dependent on a constant stream of mass migration keeping wages in manufacturing low and therefore the cost of German exports competitive.

I didn't say it was miracle (or "secret sauce", as it now reads), it was a result of decades of deliberate (and pretty ruthless, geopolitically speaking) policy. Which wasn't something the UK was somehow innately incapable of.

One of the biggest German policy failures will probably turn out to be the lack of investment in nuclear power to underpin the next 50 years. Maybe their solar and wind efforts will be sufficient, or a battery revolution will fortuitously save the situation, but I have doubts.

Nope. Germany most definitely has a secret sauce: the education system. It is structured very differently from the UK system with a heavy emphasis on high levels of technical skills. Cheap Russian gas has nothing to do with it. But it sure helps of course.

And respect for engineering as a discipline. Tell a German that an engineer came to install your internet cable and they'll look at you like you've grown a second head. Actual quote: "what could be wrong with it that needs an engineer to come out?"

Meanwhile, someone British who heard I studied engineering: "are you going to do TV repair?"

Yep agree. You can measure how well a nation is doing by how it treats technical skills. The finance industry that the UK is so proud of is actually a negative thing for the nations prosperity overall. It looks good on paper but creates very little real value.

> But that type of work only works for certain people, with certain skills, in certain areas.

but this isn't a problem, unless people refuses to adapt and change to face this new economic reality.

There's something to be said about lack of up-skilling programs funded by the govt, but why does the responsibility of one's life and financial wellbeing fall onto the govt, rather than themselves?

On the other hand, brexit was a disaster, and is just pouring salt into the wound.

As the saying goes, if you owe the bank a million, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion, the bank has a problem.

If 45% of a country's adult population are somehow unable to "adapt to the new economic reality" then this is definitely a policy problem and not just a matter of "personal responsibility".

> why does the responsibility of one's life and financial wellbeing fall onto the govt, rather than themselves?

What is a government for if not that?

> What is a government for if not that?

to ensure that nobody but them has the force to interfere with another person's life, with the goal of maintaining order and peace.

>The UK no longer makes anything

What about Bentley, Rolls Royce, submarines, jet engines and other aero parts, luxury goods, Dr. WHO, Top Gear, short term politicians and more?

Also buckfast ;)

This would be a case where it's important to remember that in everyday conversations absolute statements should usually be interpreted as relative statements.

>> The UK no longer makes anything

≈≈ The UK has a weak manufacturing sector OR

≈≈ The UK does not manufacture much.

Nope. Germany is doing very well in the same global economy thank you very much. It is 100% the fault of the people continuing to elect brain dead politicians and voting for things like Brexit. The only question remaining is how bad it will be. Right now the UK is in a nose dive with the pilots MIA.

> The UK is in a downward spiral.

From "greatest" empire of the world to a small island no body cares besides for their funny politicians, in 100 years (speedun edition)

London is beautiful tho =)

Was. London no longer feels enjoyable to me since the pandemic. The high-street and hospitality/entertainment industry has been decimated, whatever's left is worse and more expensive. Transport is awful, even black cabs are hard to get nowadays where as before they used to be very reliable if you were happy to pay the price.

true I guess. I think everything is just more commercialized than it used to be. Expensive and poor quality

I think the UK ex. London is beautiful. I'm in no hurry to go back to London, which I think is like something Dickens warned you about. I grew up in New Hampshire and my understanding is that the geological structure the White Mountains is part of has the other part in Ireland and the UK and I would love to hike there someday.

Also I am an admirer of many British Youtubers.

Anyhow there is nothing unique about it being hard to get help for mental health in the UK. It's bad in the US too.

You say it with spite as if a 1000 year reich is more desirable?

> The UK is in a downward spiral. For the past decades, the bottom 90% of people have become poorer. It’s so bad now that 45% of adults say they are struggling to keep up with at least one bill or credit commitment [1]. Almost a majority of households are constantly on the brink of financial collapse.

This could describe many developed countries right now, especially the US.

> The country desperately needs new ideas and a complete purge of these clowns from government.

Problem is the slugs keep voting for salt.

My content-based recommender shows me a lot of articles from The Guardian and I must admit I get a perverse pleasure out of watching a train that keeps crashing and crashing. In the US we had Jan 6 but Brexit was a much more serious wound to the UK than anything the Trump administration or congressional Republicans have ever done. I am just waiting for the strikebreaker's union to go on strike!

Labor has some culpability in this in that Tony Blair stole Margaret Thatcher's playbook (just as Clinton did Reagan's) and then Labor was taken over by Jeremy Corbin who seemed to look to Cuba and Venezuela as role models. I like the current leader, Keir Starmer, who helped represent the defendants in the McLibel trial.

> In the US we had Jan 6 but Brexit was a much more serious wound to the UK than anything the Trump administration or congressional Republicans have ever done.

Globalism is really a remarkable belief system. How can the U.K. leaving a trade union generate such strong feelings across the Atlantic?

> Globalism is really a remarkable belief system. How can the U.K. leaving a trade union generate such strong feelings across the Atlantic?

You could turn that question on its head: Why did so many people inside the UK have strong feelings about an objectively beneficial trade union?

The answer is of course that this is not what the EU is.

There have always been the two poles about what the goal of the EU should be: The one extreme being a simple trade union between otherwise independent nations, the other being a full-fledged federal state like the US, with a single federal government and legislative body.

The reality is that it's neither of the two but some sort of hodgepodge compromise somewhere in the middle.

Ironically, the UK have been some of the strongest proponents of the "trade union" side in the past. But apparently for the brexiteers even that compromise was too much.

> The answer is of course that this is not what the EU is.

So all the economic justifications against Brexit are red herrings, right? Because when deciding about the fundamental nature of one’s country, people don’t really care if it’s good or bad for the economy. You have to be a pretty bloodless person to predicate the decision on that.

(1) It is has contributed to a general economic crisis, (2) It has been destructive to farmers and many other businesses because they no longer have easy access to the large EU market, (3) the EU provided a convenient answer to the problem w/ the Northern Ireland border that could keep everybody happy (come and go as you please!)

I know a lot of people in the finance biz in London which is particularly devastated. The UK pushed the EU into much more openness and transparency than they would have had on their own, "passporting" made it possible to sell financial services across the whole market. One reason why London leads the world in finance is the great talent it attracts and Brexit has sent many of those people packing.

> I know a lot of people in the finance biz in London which is particularly devastated.

Isn't that a good thing? At least in the long run?

> Isn't that a good thing? At least in the long run?

why is that? The move away from london didn't improve productivity, it's a pure cost.

Brexit was an own-goal, and none of the troubles it caused needed to happen, and having achieved brexit brought zero good outcomes to Britain.

> why is that? The move away from london didn't improve productivity, it's a pure cost.

I mean good for the UK. If the cancer cells voluntarily leave your body for somewhere else isn’t that a good thing?

Finance is what kept this country afloat. The UK is mostly a services & finance based economy and has little to no manufacturing.

So it sounds like there's a good reason to move away from that and Brexit will help?

Hasn’t helped yet…

> The new trading relationship between the UK and EU, as set out in the ‘Trade and Cooperation Agreement’ (TCA) that came into effect on 1 January 2021, will reduce long-run productivity by 4 per cent relative to remaining in the EU.

> Both exports and imports will be around 15 per cent lower in the long run than if the UK had remained in the EU. (OBR)

Trump never lowered trade by 15 per cent and most of what he did can be reversed. Brexit, which started on a cynical whim of David Cameron. can't be reversed.

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