The UK can go back to being the richest country in the world
tomforth.co.uk
tomforth.co.uk
Disclosure: former UK "subject".
Oh, and I forgot: allowed their country to become the "host" for Rupert Murdoch while he developed his Jedi Mind Tricks for getting folk to vote against their own interests.
Aren't political leaders from most democracies from an elite background?
> Money can be magically made by...shuffling money around
I assume you're referring to UK's financial sector. What's wrong with it being one of the leading drivers of the economy? It's not as if manufacturing pays well in a high cost-of-living country.
For the non-British readers here, Eton is a boarding school [0] west of London. It's where nearly all the elite members of British politics and society attend from ages 13 to 18. Like, all the royalty go there. And Harry Potter is like just cribbing from what these boarding schools do. When you hear some British actor in a movie or something say '... Old Boy, ...', they are referring being very wealthy and graduating from one of these boarding schools.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, they are nearly all child abuse nightmare zones, Eton especially. Like, there's a wiki page dedicated to the controversies there [1].
I got into looking into Eton when I was researching the history of the various football codes. Eton was the birthplace of two of the nascent footballs: The Field game [2] and the Wall game [3]. I'll skip the history lesson here and the rules briefing. The thing that stood out to me about the Wall game was the ceremony around it. Specifically, that it's played on St Andrew's Day (November 30th) by the Collegers (rich boys) and the rest of the school (slightly less rich boys). Now, the Collegers have this tradition (500+ years old) where they all get roaring drunk the night before and are trying to play this wall game really hungover, which makes it all a bit more 'fair'. They traditionally get so drunk that the little headmater-y person in charge just up and leaves for the night. So, you have 13-18 year olds, all drunk as hell, all alone, all night long, and they all kinda hate each other. Like, come on dude.
That little bit alone is just astounding to my non-British eyes and condemn the whole enterprise. But then you read a bit more about the place and it's just ghastly. Then these tortured and abused kids go on to repeat the cycle onto each other, for like hundreds of years, because tradition.
Oh, and then they all go on to run Britain.
So, next time you see some mention of Eton, just imagine Hogwarts but with just brontosaurs levels of abuse and abusers.
Britain is mental my dudes.
[0] The Limeys call them 'public schools', because something something Anglican (?) church something
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College_controversies
It’s public in the sense that a public bar is public - you still have to pay.
It comes from an era when the options were private tutoring, or being sent to school “in public”.
Not sure these are comparable. Britain’s shift was led by its elites. Europe’s is closer to a dumping of its elites. Taken to their logical ends, the Britain after its threatened political revolutions will still look recognisable. France post RN or Germany AfD would be completely remade.
What does that mean? How is a political party funded by a bunch of generational rich right wingers dumping elites? None of these right wing parties would exist without rich people funding them. They're not grassroots movements, regardless of how they try to portray themselves.
It’s a new set of elites. Starmer is still connected and conversant with the present batch of elites.
> None of these right wing parties would exist without rich people funding them
This is true of practically every revolution outside fairy tales. (It’s why fairy tales need divine intervention and/or superpowers to be believable.)
As far as I can tell, it's all the same donors and special interests. The only difference is in the rhetorical window dressing.
You might as well be comparing Lidl and Aldi.
They’re in different social circles! They don’t socialise with each other. That’s the difference. Bardella is a college drop-out, for instance.
> it's all the same donors and special interests
If you aren’t looking for how subsets in that group align and reälign you’re missing the entirety of politics.
That's at most a 25 degree turn IMO, but in reality it's probably going to be crazy steering and hoping not to hit the guardrails or run off the cliff.
I don't.
As the gaps and differences between people grow in all kinds of dimension, keeping the chimp troupe together is a non trivial issue.
Thats why over the top luxury, leisure, compensation levels etc emerge. People of all kinds lap that shit up when they get a taste. But since its a superficial quick fix solution to the root problem of social cohesion lots of new issues get created.
The creative classes are not spending enough time on root cause (especially once they get a taste of luxury and leisure).
The best tools I've ever used as a woodworker have all been English. I really miss that time hanging out in my grandfathers shed using all his British, American and German hand tools. I sort of lost track of them after his death because I thought that period would just go on forever...shame :(
I don't mind Chinese stuff, I have "some" of it, but to this day, nothing can compare with the stuff I own from the UK.
Disclaimer: Not British.
I'm British, born in England.
What does that say about what they teach at places like Eton?
Then the article presents no arguments on how the UK can achieve such a feat other than having a bit better public transport. Public transport does certainly help and it’ll increase GDP; but I highly doubt it’s the determinant in creating the richest country per capita in the world.
As for “can”, any country theoretically can become super-rich. Singapore did. Whether it will or not is another matter. The UK had particular circumstances in the 1700-1900. It does not have the same circumstances today. Lots of countries are also racing toward this goal. The UK is certainly better positioned than most countries in the world but not the best positioned out there.
The UK is geographically blessed. That hasn’t been an advantage recently, because the EU seemed to be working, but Alexander Hamilton’s arguments against loose political unions seem prescient as ever amidst Europe’s present rightwing lurch [1].
If Britain can get its infrastructure in line and press its inherent energy-cost advantage relative to Europe, it could reasonably supplant Asia based on proximity, capital market depth and “friendshoring” advantage in many high-value supply chain elements. The problem is Britain has American-style public services and European bureaucracy; that prevents it from being the Singapore it reasonably aspires to be.
Because the U.K.’s role wouldn’t be identical to Singapore. The analogy is fine. Singapore exists between China, Southeast Asia and the world; Britain between America, Europe and the world. Singapore has a logistical advantage in its proximity to the Straits; Britain a financial advantage in the City of London.
If you look at the US, there are always complaints about the public transport being way behind the UK/Europe. But they value creators/makers. Why not look to the US, which is the leading economic country? If not, then which other leading economy should the UK emulate? Certainly not China.
Those creators cluster around urban centres with good transport. You can’t remote found a battery plant.
I doubt Britain’s salvation is in public transport alone. But remote work doesn’t obviate the need for human infrastructure. (At the very least, it hasn’t been demonstrated at scale.)
Sure. Yet we aren’t seeing a wave of remote-only upstarts pressing their cost and recruiting advantage. (We are seeing massive agglomeration effects in the Bay Area.)
Remember that “software is eating the world” is a quip by a then-financier, no longer coder [1].
This sounds very arrogant and wishful thinking considering the trajectory of UK in the last 20 years.
At the global stage, UK is as irrelevant as countries like Canada and Australia, but at least Canadians and Australians don’t openly claim they can be the richest country in the world.
The UK is the world’s 6th largest economy [1]. It clocks in next to India, the 5th. It is twice as large as Russia, the sick man of Europe and neighbourhood pest, and one of the other nine nuclear powers of the world [2].
The decline you cite is also the opportunity; if Britain could get its shit together, it could reasonably grow an entire Saudi Arabia (1%) or even Canada or Russia (2%) in a generation. (If it really clicked and maintained 3% growth for a generation, it would add to itself the entire economy of India.)
Never underestimate the advantage of starting ahead.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_...
That is how it feels to the rest of the world when they hear UK thinking they want to reclaim the top spot again.
Uk used to be top of the list for countries millionaires move to. It's rapidly fallen down that list over the last 10-20 years below those others mentioned now it's an exporter of wealthy individuals. That's big capital flight happening today
Many countries used to be wealthiest, and are no longer. uk is the one of the few arrogant ones that keeps thinking they will make a come back.
Exploiting and stealing always makes you rich. An empire doesn't make sense if you don't get rich with it (Also see the connection of Slavery and the British Industrial Revolution). The only problems: It's amoral stealing and exploiting others and it's not infinite, people don't want to be exploited so the empire gets more and more expensive to run.
Colonies have Britain an edge, but plenty of nations had colonies at the time (and have throughout history). Britain became rich because it industrialised first.
Second: "Cotton Capital: a special investigation 2023 Cotton Capital how slavery made Manchester the world’s first industrial city"
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/apr/03/...
"We can be rich again!"
"But the wealth was based on slavery, that is no longer"
"Others had slaves too!"
"We can be rich again!"
"But the wealth was based on slavery, that is no longer"
"Others had slaves(-trade) too, but we were the richest, so I doesn't depend on slaves?"
> so I doesn't depend on slaves?"
One, don’t fake quote others. Two, nobody argued this. American wealth depends on agriculture and energy (and having taken that from our Indians); that doesn’t mean betting on corn and fracking is a good economic plan, or that Argentina is a surefire bet for sharing those same strengths.
Regardless of how it was acquired, Britain sits of a massive pool of capital. That capital gives it opportunities others cannot access. The argument from its previous prowess is not one for returning to colonialism, but for the existence of the social and economic infrastructure for commanding production past what you’d expect from its population in the way America, China, Japan and Germany do. (Economies Nos. 1 through 4. And yes, we see the same common histories in the set.)
I'm not faking quotes, I want to understand your argument about slaves/other people had slaves too/we can be rich again, so I asked if you've meant that. I asked "Or is it:" - which makes it clear this is not a quote.
Your "fake quotes" shows me we have different logic and a different understanding of rhetorical terms, and won't come to any agreement on that basis.
The point is Britain had slaves. But so did other powers that it dominated economically (and occasionally militarily). Slaves didn’t make “North England’s economy as a whole…among the strongest in Europe and thus the world”; slaves merely made it rich. Britain is already rich. Its future prosperity doesn’t need to come from exploitation.
Like, Britain also had trees. And mailboxes. And black pudding. But trees and mailboxes and blood sausages aren’t why it had one of the strongest economies in the world. Similarly, yes, Britain had slaves, but slaves weren’t why it had the strongest economy in Europe, a continent with several slavery enthusiasts.
> The construction of the Bridgewater canal provided regular, cheaper coal supplies to power the new machinery and improved transport links to Liverpool. The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 proved crucial in shaping Manchester’s future.
And then because a lot of the raw cotton was supplied from slave plantations it implies the slavery caused the cotton gins, whereas I expect it was the other way around. If there had been no slavery they probably would still have got cotton from paid farmers overseas with much the same effect.
The Watt Steam Engine is from 1765.
The "Scramble for Africa" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scramble_for_Africa
hit peak pitch following 1870 or so and saw 90% of Africa "claimed" by 1914, the Great War and the rise of the Vickers Machine Gun (which evolved from the Maxim).
The Germans, in particular, began to show great commercial interest in the Samoan Islands, especially on the island of Upolu, where German firms monopolised copra and cocoa bean processing.
leading to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoan_Civil_War
Profit is revenue minus cost. Cost of colonisation is vastly reduced if the target nation is infighting. Cocoa was absolutely valuable, but Samoa’s attractiveness may have also been in its inability to defend itself. (Particularly against European weapons.)
There's a robust pattern of increased infighting wherever the European colonists went .. almost as if they delibrately sowed discontent and sold weapons at discount to all sides.
Stock Exchanges evolved from Dutch and London Coffee Houses and the Maxim Gun is also famous in cementing the "No Compete" clause into law ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordenfelt_v_Maxim_Nordenfelt_...
Nordenfelt cemented severavility; non-competes were already commonplace. (In that case, the blue pencil was used to restrict the scope of the non-compete. But that’s not why it’s important.)
where she argues advances in capitalism predated and caused the industrial revolution and scientific progress. It's an interesting hypothesis.
Relevant bit in vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRPHp2EjNR8&t=275s
The first British government bonds and companies going public were about 1693 and a little after and we had a proper market bubble and crash in 1720 so that stuff was well developed by the time of steam engines.
The original title is a question, not a statement.
Maybe, we have, as a country all agreed the Brexit was terrible, and things can be done better and maybe we've handed power to the right people.
Let me start with the Eton/Posh thing, the new cabinet is not that. The new parliament is not that. 80% of the cabinet are comprehensive educated:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/07/05/most-state-e...
The head of health had Kidney cancer and was saved by the NHS. The head of housing grew up in a council house, the head of prisons is a well known employer of ex-prisoners, the head of science used to be the head of R&D at GSK. The list could go on. As Starmer would say, it's people with "skin in the game" having the power.
And the fact they are bringing in non-politicians to get jobs done, superb.
Specifically on the splitting of the country between north and south to do an analysis, I do think that is valid, and instructional. We have seen various countries over the last 150 years achieve high growth when they have got focused on catching up to the better countries. The US grew quickly when it was catching up to the UK after the industrial revolution, and the UK grew quickly when we were catching up after WWII. China grew quickly when it was catching up to the west. Then, once it's done, growth goes back to a normal 1-2%. Well, perhaps, the UK can have the North catch up to the south and provide the growth. I look at what Manchester was 15 years ago, what Leeds was 15 years ago, and I think, sure, that's completely do-able.
Basically the government needs a lot of money and there are not many places to get it from, rich people have big houses so such wealth taxes would be more popular with the average voter - so I think they will do this out of a combination of necessity and ability. I wonder how I would find evidence in support for this belief in the data or train an algorithm to make similar predictions. I guess I'm sampling a model of my beliefs of how governments work. Reverse wealth effects have not happened in the west for a very long time so there are not many modern examples to template on - especially at a time when inflation of the money supply is an option.
London reminds me of Constantinople, in that as a capital of a former empire it amassed and concentrated great wealth even as its empire shrank. It’s just that Constantinople’s wealth was more tangible.
I found the book "Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World" interesting which has a large junk on this topic. The tax havens don't have data centers or any infrastructure, the banks of tax havens of the former English Empire have their money with banks in London.
As for the UK, to get into such a position they're going to have to recognise that to get to this sort of state they can't have had pro-prosperity governance for decades. It takes 20-40 years for a lack of investment to start to show up in reality.
Is there any doubt? If you spend less than you earn (for example by running a current account surplus) you naturally accumulate capital, and vice versa.
The high cost of labor and the abundance of coal deposits created an incentive for automation and that led to unprecedented technological innovation.
This brought an era of prosperity and also created a power asymmetry. But that power asymmetry did not make it into the 21st century.
The Suez canal crisis was officially the end of the UK as a world superpower.
The UK has strong partnerships, is a member of many important institutions like the G7, UN security council, NATO and others, but is not a world superpower anymore.
Economically it is in decline and politically is in crisis.
> So why doesn’t the Greater South East feel richer than the Netherlands, Denmark, or Austria? And why don’t the people Matt speaks to there feel that they’re already living in a place as economically successful as the USA?
I mean, for starters, isn't the fact that the strongest region is lower still than the full aggregate of those other countries a really bad sign?
Their chart is 2019 GDP per capita in 2015 dollars, compare with 2019 California-alone GDP per capita in 2012 dollars: https://www.statista.com/statistics/304615/california-gdp-pe... which is still a pretty damn large and heterogenous region (roughly twice the size of the part of England they selected). 70k 2012 dollars for 2019 California, what looks like ~57k 2015 dollars for that region of 2019 England. Possibly the PPP adjustment brings that closer, but it's not exactly a cheap region.
They then talk about the worse-off parts of England... and a lot about infrastructure specifically (trains especially), but of course the train infrastructure in California is pretty awful! And train infrastructure in some of the countries lower on that list than the UK is better than California's...
So what else is going on? This doesn't seem like the right lens to look through to try to right that ship at all.
What’s missing is the social analysis here - ambitious people in the UK go to London where they can make more money, and ambitious companies that want ambitious people go to London because that’s where the staff are. London and the SE don’t just fund the rest of the country, they also drain the talent and workers from those areas.
London does not have that great economy in isolation from its regions, it has it at least in part by feeding on them.
Growing the northern economy (and really anywhere outside the London dormitory belt) is also going to require finding a way to break the low-pay, low-productivity, low-expectations trap that exists across most of the British economy. And doing that will to some extent limit London’s talent pool.
It’s not a zero sum game, but also - TAANSTAFL.
1. Shuffling money around 2. Socialist-level ponzi government spending 3. A combination of property flipping and high-end property overseas sales used for tax evasion
Innovation-wise, always looking for the easy wins without the hard work, unlike the US.
As a Brit and former resident, happy to have emigrated and escaped the >50% (soon to be increased) tax rates.
Hah. So you don't believe in the Scandi high-tax economy, or the Dutch one?
Resentment of taxation is a perquisite of the rich, overwhelmingly. In fact, most people who are not rich pay reasonable rates of taxation except they pay far more percentage of their income as VAT/consumption taxes, which is of course nothing like 50%
"nineteen for you and one for me" was George Harrison whining about super tax in the 60s. This isn't new.
I don't think that's true, unless you assume rich people either a. spend a lower percentage of their income (in which case, what's the point in having money) or b. they avoid VAT when they do spend.
The point in having money is indeed NOT to spend it. It is to build a hoard so large you can live comfortably off the dividends and investment returns, or even to save most of that again and grow your hoard even faster, creating "fuck you" levels of money and intergenerational wealth.
When people say "tax the rich" they don't mean "deprive the neurosurgeon or City banker off his biannual new Mercedes". (These people DO indeed spend a smaller share of their income than poorer folks but that's not the point) When people say "tax the rich" they mean "tax capital returns" so that the country can benefit from the wealth currently amassed and extracted by the hyper wealthy that couldn't spend all their annual portfolio gains if they bought ought all of Paris Fashion Week every year.
Now, how exactly this translates to VAT when a lot of essentials are zero VAT I’m not sure.
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/D4D22AQFfh_jg66bW1A/feedsh...
Yes, because they had the world's biggest navy and effectively controlled the sea route to the East. That would make anyone rich.
> And unlike in Germany where these transfers have been shrinking for decades as the East of the country grows its economy, in Britain we become ever more reliant on the Greater South East and London in particular every year.
Uhh... Outside of Leipzig (and obviously Berlin), things aren't going very well in the East of Germany. And even in Leipzig things were super shitty until property fever hit in 2017. Everybody with prospects still moves West in Germany, and the East remains relatively poor as a result (and unheard, which is why the AFD has gained a foothold here).
Know what makes countries rich (besides conquest)? Long rivers big enough to pass container ships through without locks - connecting your resources and industrial bases to your markets with super cheap transport costs. The Mississippi. The Yangtze. The Rhine.
Except I believe you can't break the bank, its forbidden to locals. You can't be "the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo" after all.
If you can drive a pile driver or construct sea walls Maybe you could be french, and drive in? I suspect they have a tax treaty with France to limit these opportunities, but they do need construction workers to increase the size of the state: reclaimed land from the sea is their principle mechanism of peacefully gaining lebensraum.
Edit:
I consider this being flagged as grossly unjust as the original headline has a Can ... ?
The fact of the matter is that it is absurd to think that the England (UK) can be anything be a diminishing nation.
Something about bicycle front wheels and sticks, under the sound of tiny violins.
The same problem exists in the USA where in a red state a county representing a large city votes Democrat but the rural areas or surburban enclaves vote Republican. Take Texas in 2020, Austin, Houston and San Antonio voted for blue rather than red.
People like to joke that democracy is a tyranny of the majority, but the FPP system is more like a tyranny of the largest minority.
English people will implicitly change the context, and other English people will follow but this can be confusing for other readers since they might assume the north of the UK (Scotland) when they are really talking about the middle of the UK (north of England).