Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated
ukfoundations.co
ukfoundations.co
I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment in public services like creating the NHS and the building of council housing.
They baffelingly attribute yhat growth to the Conservative Govrernment of the 1930s rather than the post war labour government.
Similarly this page attributes growth in the 80s to the Conservative government privatisation program. Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.
I think a perfect example of this is our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders and now we have a disaster with shit being poured into all our rivers and costs to households rising dramatically.
Edit: I read on and they use the drop in passengers in the railway in 1965 as an argument against nationalisation of the rail service, somehow neglecting to mention the beeching cuts! That is incredibly missleading given 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure at that time.
Don't get me wrong, a budget that cuts taxes without cutting spending is no good. But the idea that what happened was a direct consequence of that doesn't make much sense as it had been telegraphed a long way in advance, giving the markets plenty of time to adjust. The central bank changed monetary policy a day before the mini-budget, and changes in that are kept secret until the moment of announcement. Additionally, UK spending has since blown through what the mini-budget would have created without any sudden market turmoil.
https://www.ft.com/content/4701b6ac-851e-43fd-a2b2-b38dd07c7...
Regulators failed to anticipate the dangers that borrowing by pension schemes posed to the stability of the UK’s financial system, according to a parliamentary report into the turmoil that hit the gilt markets following Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini” Budget in September last year.
Pension schemes suffered multibillion-pound losses after they were forced to sell assets to ensure that complex derivative-linked strategies — known as liability driven investments (LDI) — did not implode when gilt yields jumped as investors rejected the then prime minister’s economic strategy.
Also, Truss is basically correct that the UK needs more growth. Disagreeing on her tactics is reasonable, disagreeing on her goals isn't. She was unfortunately attempting to create growth from a position of weakness: in a party that didn't want to do anything hard like cutting spending, and with a fragile/over-leveraged financial sector.
His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.
It's more likely a sincerely held belief than an attempt at misdirection.
> His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.
That theory is predicated on the market being composed of buyers and sellers of broadly similar financial power. This is no longer the case in most markets, certainly not in the UK as far as ordinary people or most small companies are concerned.
Which to me just rings hollow, or at best, only a part of the answer. They're correct on some aspects of it, other parts they just gloss over. IE They say that there has been an "erosion" of the industrial base in the UK, while actually the blame could be laid at the feet of Thatcher's service-led policies.
I agree, this is pretty wild and made me immediately look up who was behind this. Conservative think-tanks gotta conservative think-tank.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/water-qua...
US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.
It is not as black and white as you imply.
Huh? This is a map of the industrialized countries - western Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. Not sure how "left leaning setups do bad", the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.
We certainly do here in Norway. And it's provided by the kommune (the local authority) not a private company. Where I live it is what I dilute my Scotch with. It's easily as good as or better than any bottled water.
It has always been either over chlorinated, or out of a well with all sorts of contaminants such as sulphur.
It's growing steadily through the 60's-2000's, has a notable dip[1] at the 2008 financial crisis, then starts growing again until just about 2015. And it's been flat since.
The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.
[1] More pronounced than comparable nations, to be fair. The UK was always more dependent on finance.
But we’ve imported millions of people that speak different languages since 2015 , why hasn’t line gone up?
(without even getting into the more obligatory areas of immigration like refugees and marriages)
> I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment
I don't think anyone with a strong grip on economics or British history would argue that. The fact is that post-war rationing continued longer in the UK than it did in Germany, the country that actually lost the war, and Germany recovered far faster in other ways too. Decades of very left wing governments left the UK in a terrible state by the 1970s relative to its peers - it was called the sick man of Europe and needed an IMF bailout - a situation fixed only by Thatcher. This history is well known not only in the UK but internationally. The website provides supporting evidence if you aren't familiar with this.
> our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders
That this sort of absurdly false belief gets repeated unchallenged so often in Britain is exactly why it's falling behind. Thames Tideway, one of the largest engineering projects in Europe and the biggest upgrade to London's sewage system ever, is organized and financed by the private sector (pension funds, Allianz, Amber IG, Dalmore Capital and DIF).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Tunnel#Funding_...
It's literally being built right now and yet you claim the private sector hasn't invested. The reality is the opposite. As the website points out, British governments have historically struggled to do capital investments because the moment money becomes available the unions always take it all. Only the private sector has sufficiently good labour relations to actually build things and the water industry is a good example of that in action. Compare to the NHS where the government has regularly tried to ringfence money for capital investments (repairing leaking hospital roofs etc), only to see its direct orders ignored and the money used for pay rewards instead.
> 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure
The stations were axed due to long term decline in passenger numbers, a situation that reversed immediately upon privatization:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...
But Great Britain (as it was then) did experience a great depression. 3.5 million people were unemployed in 1932.
Ok - one could say that the depression in GB was less pronouced vs. the situation from 1918 on, but I think that there is a lot of cherry picking & spin in this article. Comparisons are not made consistently and the context from history mean some things matter less in the UK and matter more, and have happened for particular reasons. For example folks often talk about reservoirs, but fundamentally the UK's reservoirs were largely built to support an industrial demand that is simply not there - and this capacity remains despite the loss of demand.
There are some good points, but I think they are obscured by the polemic.
Yes it can. For the UK the financial sector was a dramatically important one, more so than practically for any other major country. London was the undisputed financial center for whole Europe and beyond, a legacy of Empire days, the pound as reserve currency etc. This had serious distorting effects: Abysmal center-periphery inequalities; the fatal attraction of talented people to lucrative but mostly pointless financial engineering games; the neglect of "bricks and mortar" etc.
The financial crisis and Brexit demolished this fragile, hyperconcentrated economic posture. Not in the sharp and seemingly recoverable fashion that, e.g., COVID damaged the tourism industry of various countries but in a chronic, gentle decline kind of way.
In the long-term one would think that the immense cultural heritage of Britain across pretty much the entire knowledge spectrum would somehow translate into a way forward. But as we increasingly get to know all too well, the problems of modern societies are self-inflicted and they reflect fundamental breakdowns of social contracts. Yes, despite what that British lady said, there is an emergent phenomenon called "society" and if you deny its existence you will get devoured by demons of its own creation.
> Yes, despite what that British lady said, there is an emergent phenomenon called "society" and if you deny its existence you will get devoured by demons of its own creation.
Thatcher was responding to people who asserted that for any given problem, "society" should solve it or pay for it. Her answer made the obvious point: when it comes to taxation, there really is no such thing as society. To complete the quote: "they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families".
The Finance Curse: Britain and the World Economy
• Outlines harms caused to countries hosting an oversized financial sector
• Argues Britain is subject to a Finance Curse, which carries many similarities with the Resource Curse, afflicting mineral-exporting countries
• Provides a narrative and framework to analyse the political economy of finance and financialisation
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/136914811561279...
The Resource Curse:
I'd be interested to read what they think can be done about the planning issue. The new government hasn't really come through on their promise to address it. They ran out of low hanging fruit pretty quickly. They're focusing more on rental reform rather than on supply. Gov modified the NPPF in odd ways (e.g. reduced targets in London, where need is highest). They set up a panel to look at new towns which will report back in a year.
This bit at the end made me laugh:
> it need simply remove the barriers that stop the private sector from doing what it already wants to do
Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants. The average 50+ voter thinks demand is too high and should be cut until supply catches up (in 33 years) [2][3].
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every... [2]: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/trackers/the-most-import... [3]: At the current rate of house building it would take 33 years for the UK to reach France's current dwelling to person ratio, assuming UK's population growth stops.
The problem is hard! Even if you do build 500k homes a year (2x current) in places people don’t want you to build, it will still take 15 years to catch up, and they might be voted out before then because voters don’t want it.
This is basically it. The pensioners don't want change. They might theoretically want some nebulous "improvement", but only if it doesn't cost anything, doesn't involve building anything, or even a change of use, doesn't make any noise, doesn't increase traffic, and doesn't involve any immigration.
The people demand stagnation.
My personal take on this is the UK got so used to having an empire, and specifically India, which could absorb more British bureaucrats than the UK could possibly produce. Consequently when Indian independence occurred this massive pipeline of producing people for running colonies had nowhere to go, and a large number moved back to the UK. What you have now is a class of people have been trying to run the country as a colony of itself with rather predictable results.
The UK has a broken culture, and until they start valuing things appropriately they will stay that way.
In 1891 there were 238,409 with english as their mother tongue (before the census broke this out).
> At the time of the partition of India and departure of the British, in 1947, the Indian Civil Service was divided between the new Dominions of India and Pakistan. The part which went to India was named the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), while the part that went to Pakistan was named the "Civil Service of Pakistan" (CSP). In 1947, there were 980 ICS officers. 468 were Europeans, 352 Hindus, 101 Muslims, two depressed classes/Scheduled Castes, five domiciled Europeans and Anglo-Indians, 25 Indian Christians, 13 Parsis, 10 Sikhs and four other communities.
It is quite curious both you and the other replier jumped to that conclusion, and says quite a lot about the current British malaise.
Even if you round up to 1,000 the number of ICS officers and dectuple to 10,000 you get a trivial number of returnees to the UK. The British Army in India returning would have had nugatory impact considering the British had just fought WW2.
Leaving India was bad for the British upper classes because there were fewer jobs as officers that would keep a man in the store to which he had become accustomed on salary in the army. The ICS was less important than that in terms of numbers and its peak social impact was as an inspiration for the British civil service. The ICS is the only organisation in British India that might plausibly have had a large impact on the culture of the British civil service and it was too small to have had an impact by numbers alone as you originally posited.
Why are we obsessed with restricting discussion to ICS? The bureaucracy is not just that, but extends throughout the entire service sector these people rely on, such as banking, schooling, transportation, manufacturing management and so on.
There is real denial going on here as to the extent of what happened.
There is no plausible mechanism by which these people could have effected a radical change in the general British culture or the culture of the British civil service. The culture of the British in India was an expatriate one, not one of colonial settlement or intermarriage (certainly not after 1900).
They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect even though in class composition the civilian element was elevated in education and social class compared to the general population.
The pied noirs in Algeria were settlers and they were distinctly different in terms of ethnic composition, being disproportionately Spanish, Maltese and Italian in ancestry compared to French from l’Hexagone and it’s still a matter of debate if their descendants are noticeably different from other French. The British in India were just that. Not a lot more culturally influential in the home country than the British in the UAE. As of 2015 there were A quarter of the million Britons in the UAE. That’s more than twice as many people from Britain in a petrostate then were ever in India.
These people were somehow capable of running India and yet at the same time could not cause a change in the UK if they returned en masse?
> They weren’t different enough from the British population to have any noticeable effect
You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
>You have a very odd view of life in the UK if you believe this.
If all 250,000 Britons in the UAE returned to the UK in the next three months I would expect it to have no noticeable effect a year from now. By the same token I wouldn’t expect much from 100,000 Brits moving from India to the UK in 1947. West Indian migration starting in the 1960s or Ugandan Indians in the 1970s are movements of people who are genuinely different in important ways.
Those had no great effect on the civil service culture either.
Those 250k Britons in the UAE are not state supported colonists, and so do not have the attitudes and culture of state supported colonists.
Edit: specifically the colonial attitude that the inhabitants of a colony exist as a natural resource to be exploited purely for the benefit of the colonists. This is now the attitude that exists throughout the UK state towards the inhabitants of the UK.
See also terrible attitudes to local government. Part of London's recovery is getting its own governance back after the abolition of the GLC. Ihe Assembly is also slowly imposing sensible ideas like Regent Street pedestrianisation on London's councils. Andy Burnham is doing great as mayor of Manchester.
Public services in particular: 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation, unlikely for the police to attend your call out, stagnant economy, high cost of living and low wages. And all whilst we have one of the highest tax burdens in our history.
Last time I went I was sent for a chest x-ray, which wasn't done at the GP, I had to drive to the place and wait 40 minutes for that, bit of a pain.
Main problem I see is housing. It drags the entire economy -- people are living in overcrowded, people in their 30s living with parents etc.
Anyone living on their own sees all their income drained by landlords, who then pump it into ever increasing housing costs as they out-bid each other. Anyone else never becomes an adult and pumps their money into things like onlyfans and coke.
Good for you, but I think that is absolutely not the typical UK experience.
The problems are mostly concentrated in the poorer areas where they struggle to attract staff.
you are going to GP every two months? Usually you get referred to a specialist if you are that sick.
The entire country's economy feels like a property-indexed Ponzi scheme, with everyone (including the government) rather keep fueling the ponzi as long as possible rather than breaking it up.
Real GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while official population figures show population has increased by 10m. Total failure to grow the economy in 14 years of Tory rule and Labour aren’t exactly showing signs of having ideas to grow either.
Where I am from the village health services act as gatekeepers for the more central services. Just in my direct circles I know of several situations where the central services gave the village services an earful for failing to refer people faster, in at least one case directly leading to death.
Those central services also seem to get further away every few years.
But your experience of non-life threatening can be anything from good, to indifference/boredom to aggressive dismissal. This also applies to things that could be markers of something fatal, analogy would be they do little when smoke is coming out from under the door but do jump into action when the flames are coming out from under the door. Most of the interactions start on off the foot that you're assumed to be a timewaster too.
Keep begging my parents to just go private because I don't like trusting their lives to the random chance they have a good doctor when I can instead have one incentivized by their continued existence.
>>Keep begging my parents to just go private [...]
Except for this difference as we don't have the option to choose private care except for a out-patient services (e.g. physical therapy) and certain drugs & therapies. I'm speaking primarily about Ontario and British Columbia, but I think the other provinces and territories are similar.
Hospitals, diagnostic services and physicians are all funded by public taxpayer dollars at both the provincial and federal level, but it is indeed a single healthcare system.
There have been some workaround attempts in BC (such as the Cambie Surgery Centre, which lost a court case recently-ish) and AB's recent move to give contracts to Catholic health care providers, but the only true "private" option in Canada is the airport.
I could go on about this at length and how it makes me a pariah amongst a flood of anti-American conspiracy theories, but this is a thread about the UK (of which I'm also a citizen) so I'll resist.
Legitimately was a worse and slower service than I would have had at my grandparents' place in Eastern Europe, it's a disgrace. It still makes me angry that it's the experience I get after paying 1000s of £ in NHS contributions.
Its the same in USA if you want to see a specialist. There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.
I waited about 1.5yrs to get a routine endoscopy at northwestern hospital in chicago. We've gone to northwestern in downtown for decades and have never seen waits this bad.
I'm not sure you can extrapolate that it's worldwide because things are the same in UK and US.
FWIW, I had surgery in Spain recently and had to wait like two-three months tops. Probably depends a lot on the type of surgery and how urgent it is.
Total cost for surgery, follow-up, and 3 days in hospital (he lives in a French Overseas Department so he gets reimbursed): 18,000 Euros.
https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/match-day-2023-a-remin...
I’ve been able to get an orthopedic surgery issue diagnosed and booked in weeks (Rush). But routine care with my pain specialist (Northwestern) can need months long lead times.
It took 6 months to get into neurology there, and they rescheduled my 6 month follow-up to be a 14 month follow-up
(I don't know why I hadn't placed you as a Chicago person before; you should come out with us sometime!)
I dont follow this line of reasoning too well. The conservative party was in power for fourteen years, 2010 to 2024. The new Labour government has been in power for less than fourteen weeks. Isnt it too soon to make any claims about their performance fixing the structural issues identified in this report?
What he's actually done is the opposite. For example, the website makes the point that British governments often don't do enough capital investment so state-controlled infrastructure rots away. Instead spending rises get used to buy off unions. Sure enough, within just months of Labour coming into power it's already handed out around £10 billion/yr worth of pay rises:
https://inews.co.uk/news/public-sector-pay-deals-cost-323074...
This type of behavior led to pay spirals in the 60s and 70s.
We see this problem elsewhere. Labour's plan to build new prisons is simply to override local councils that are blocking planning applications, but that won't yield funds for actually building them. Where's the capital going to come from in a government that capitulates immediately to union pay demands, and which is already financially over-stretched? To do this they would need to make major cutbacks in other areas, but they have no plans to do this.
The new Government has had no real time to do anything yet everywhere on twitter/fb I see hundreds of people complaining, who didn't do enough complaining in the last 14 years. What happens with the current Government is yet to be seen, but it's certainly difficult to make any meaningful change in a single term.
It's easy to have a low tax base when you subsidise the state spending with North Sea Oil from the 80s onwards... Prior to that we had really bad balance of payments crises from the Second World War onwards as the empire fell apart.
Low and middle earners in the UK pay pretty much the lowest taxes in Western Europe. We've eroded our tax base all over the place and somehow expect European services.
I'm obviously oversimplifying, but I think that's an ok rough summary. I think it's well argued and evidenced in the article, but I'm interested in this question: why isn't the US stagnating?
My understanding is that it has had a similarly low infrastructue development, but conversely is doing well economically. What's the deal?
Let’s also not forget the railroad problems you face. You’re probably the only country that makes Britain look good for its rail infrastructure.
Having driven on both American roads and British roads, I’d say UK rural roads are to a much higher standard. However that I can give America a pass on that particular issue because the vast distances in some rural parts does change the problem somewhat. But it is another example of how private investment doesn’t reach all parts of the US infrastructure.
Internet access in rural communities is much better in the UK.
Mains water quality is to a higher standard and available to more rural communities.
And let’s not even get started on the sorry state of US healthcare. The NHS might have its problems but at least it’s not leaving people choosing between medical treatments and bankruptcy.
The problem is, whenever the US government tries to step in to improve things, the ultra conservatives and libertarians then compare those policies to communism. Which is absurd.
The energy disruptions the UK had in the 70s were how Thatcher came into power.
(this is unrelated to the correct statement that there were widespread outages throughout the 70s)
The disruptions in Texas are because their power grid and associated infrastructure is shite.
Entirely different things.
A point I made in my post.
You give the US a pass on roads due to great distances, but not on rail? Rail is even more expensive than roads.
On the subject of roads, it is important to remember that US roads vary greatly in quality based on geography, weather, and economic conditions. Every state gets some federal money and fuel taxes to pay for roads.
>Internet access in rural communities is much better in the UK.
The US had plans to subsidize Starlink for rural communities but the current administration interfered with it for petty political reasons. Again with this, the distances involved matter a lot.
>And let’s not even get started on the sorry state of US healthcare. The NHS might have its problems but at least it’s not leaving people choosing between medical treatments and bankruptcy.
NHS has problems like, you might not get treatment in a timely manner despite the high taxes you pay for that service. The US has issues with cost. We pay more than practically any other country including on medication. I think that is due to corruption. The issue is not that the state does not pay for it. It often does end up paying exorbitant prices for people without insurance, or on government benefits, to be treated. A majority of elderly people in the US are collecting government benefits and healthcare. It's not much but it does cover a significant amount of stuff.
>The problem is, whenever the US government tries to step in to improve things, the ultra conservatives and libertarians then compare those policies to communism. Which is absurd.
It is true that government can invest in worthwhile things sometimes, but when the government messes things up on a regular basis then you instinctively reject whatever it proposes. Neither the UK nor the US can afford our existing social programs. Yet here you are proposing that we here in the US spend even more so we can be like the UK. No thanks, we have enough problems as it is without higher taxes and more government scams.
I'm not entirely sure that doubts about handing fistfuls of cash to a corporation headed by an increasingly politically extreme CEO whose 2nd generation satellites are leaking so much radio energy that radio astronomy in that band of the spectrum looks doomed is "petty".
If you watch the video, you'll see they replaced Starlink with a solution that cost 10x as much. I'm sure whatever minor inconvenience comes to those scientists can be fixed somehow. We have far bigger things to worry about in any case.
\1. It's not a "minor inconvenience" at all.
\2. Problem started with Starlink 1.0. The fix was Musk promising better shielding and attention to leaks in Version 2.0 and to turn off Starllink sats over Murchison Radio Quiet Area etc.
\3. Starlink V2.0 has 30x more noise (Musk lied | didn't deliver) and remains noisy over quiet areas (Musk lied | didn't deliver).
> The persecution of Elon Musk is entirely political
It's more due to Musk lying and not delivering.
What's your solution? This kind of satellite system is going to get built and improved over time regardless of what you think of it.
>It's more due to Musk lying and not delivering.
No, it's not. I think you know it too. Biden and a bunch of EU politicians have literally threatened Elon over Twitter, as recently as last month. Everyone was cool with his hype game until they cashed out and/or discovered that Elon has the views of a liberal from about 2010.
Let's look at Elon's accomplishments objectively. He oversaw a new and inexpensive reusable rocket program, cutting-edge electric cars which libs begged for, solar systems for houses, and satellite internet. Not to mention his original online payment system in the early days. All of those projects are very competitive and widely used. Did he promise more? Sure, he did. But he also delivered more than any of the naysayers. I have some sympathy for a man trying to do what was considered impossible, like developing autonomous taxis.
Why have sympathy for anyone trying to do something stupid? Why do we need autonomous taxis? What problem is this solving, other than helping the already richer get a bit richer?
I actually don't want autonomous taxis or autonomous vehicles in general but some people do. When new technology is developed, usually most people experience benefits. It makes sense for some of the spoils to go to investors. Stop hating on people who make money. They are what funds everyone's pensions after all.
That's your opinion. It's wrong.
There is a list of papers as long as an arm going back to the start of Starlink that measure the noise spectrum and point out exactly why it's a real problem for pre existing programs that have had billions invested in new science programs.
There are proposed work arounds which have been ignored.
Unless you are actively working on this issue I will consider your opinion no more valid than mine. There may be papers about the issue but that does not in itself prove how bad the issue is. I don't have time to find and read "a list of papers as long as an arm" anyway and I would bet good money that you didn't read them either.
>There are proposed work arounds which have been ignored.
Do you know if there is a legitimate technical reason why those might not have been implemented? Will any of those billions going to radio astronomy go toward reengineering the technical marvel that is Starlink? Doesn't the FCC inspect and approve all of our privately-owned satellites?
I'm not an astronomer or a rocket scientist but it seems to me that emitting continuous "noise" aka a radio signal is fundamental to the operation of satellite internet on such a scale. You don't have to respond with another pompous "Nah uh" because I don't care anymore.
I was the 2nd employee at Amazon. It's not like I hate people who make money. And people making money is not what funds everyone's pensions, other than in some glib 8th grade sort of way.
Do feel free to continue on with your defense of incredibly rich people who don't actually give a damn about any of the things you do and do not need your assistance.
> What's your solution? This kind of satellite system is going to get built and improved over time regardless of what you think of it.
So you've reversed your " opinion " and tacitly admitted it's more than a a minor inconvenience then?
As I outlined above the solution proposed was that the Ver 2.0 sats be better shielded and set to turn off over Radio Quiet Zones such as the Murchison as discussed and agreed to when this was raised some years back.
>> It's more due to Musk lying and not delivering.
> No, it's not.
Yes. It is. At least so far as the radio telescope community and this Starlink issue is concerned. He made promises and didn't keep them.
> Biden and a bunch of EU politicians ...
Has nothing to do with Starlink noise.
> Let's look at Elon's accomplishments objectively.
Sure. He promised to fix Starlink noise. He did not. He delivered a Ver 2.0 that's noisier than the the first.
He promised Full Self Driving cars "next year" for a decade. Still hasn't happened.
No I didn't. I heard about some noise a long time ago and it did not sound like a devastating development. I am merely putting forward a conditional argument: If the noise is a problem, then the problem will likely affect other satellites which are already being built. In any case I expect the problem to be solved.
>Yes. It is. At least so far as the radio telescope community and this Starlink issue is concerned. He made promises and didn't keep them.
I was not aware of these promises. Without context I cannot say whether he had a legitimate reason to not implement that proposed solution. Can you at least admit there might be a technical reason for it to not be done?
>he promised[...]
He does tend to promise more than he delivers but nobody has delivered better satellite internet, EVs, or autonomous driving to the public. Your gripes are extremely uncharitable.
Again I must point out that Elon's habit of overhyping things was well-tolerated by all for years, until he revealed views slightly to the right of the most extreme leftists and questioned their pet issues. Then the media and all liberals acted like he's the devil. I have a coworker who has been affected by this propaganda campaign. He is extremely environmentally conscious, yet refuses to buy anything from an Elon company. He will not buy a Tesla despite the fact they are practically the best and most proven EVs on the market. Instead he bought a Leaf or something, which is objectively worse than a Tesla. This mentality is totally irrational and I would say un-American. But this bad attitude is common, unfortunately.
It is extremely American to use commerce for political ends.
Boycotting people with political views you find problematic is as American as apple pie (and actually, maybe more so). The right and the left do it, and have done for ages.
His hype was well-tolerated by the people you read and listen to, perhaps, but in the stuff I read he's been criticized for more than a decade for his empty bullshit. Tesla also lots of issues with their cars, more than most other EV makes, but it is true that they do have more time in the market and have done some cool stuff.
The problem with the NHS is due to the amount of budget cuts from the Tory government.
The problem with the American health system is the exact opposite, it costs too much because private entities are greedy. Government intervention would be more legislative than financial.
>The problem with the NHS is due to the amount of budget cuts from the Tory government.
I don't know all about UK politics but I know that the current social programs and government spending are unaffordable. The US and other Western countries can't afford it either. The problem is not that spending is not enough, the problem is that our countries are not competitive or productive enough on the world stage for this exorbitant spending.
You can consider Europe all together but it is still a smaller and denser area than the US as a whole. You need to look at places with similar population densities (and perhaps geography) to have an accurate comparison.
Once Thatcherite neoliberalism (specifically: market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers" and reducing, especially through privatization and austerity, state influence in the economy.) took hold and wealth transfer from the many to the few became increasingly common the Conservative contributions to the NHS steadily decreased and eroded the service.
At this point, cutting spending is the right move in general. But that isn't going to happen because it's too unpopular. And whether we do cut spending or not, hard times are ahead.
Your first sentence isn’t true and your conclusion isn’t true either. Then there’s the issue that American healthcare is massively disproportionally more expensive than the rest of the world. So even if your first two points were correct, they still don’t account for your cost of healthcare.
> I don't know all about UK politics but I know that the current social programs and government spending are unaffordable. The US and other Western countries can't afford it either.
The problem isn’t that they’re unaffordable. The problem is that people don’t want to pay for it. Or more specifically, people in the higher tax bands don’t want to because they view public services as an expense (which for them it is, because they’ll often be using private services instead). But this is another example of the self sabotage I was talking about in my earlier comment.
> You can consider Europe all together but it is still a smaller and denser area than the US as a whole. You need to look at places with similar population densities (and perhaps geography) to have an accurate comparison.
To be honest it doesn’t matter how accurate the comparison, you’re just going to argue that the free market fixes everything. Because that’s exactly what you’ve been brainwashed to believe. Capitalism is Americas #1 religion after all.
To be fair, I don’t think public services are the answer to everything either. There does need to be a balance between government oversight and spend; and of leaning into the private sector. The UK hasn’t found that right balance either. ButAmerica is waaaay of the mark and it’s destroying your country from the inside.
My first two points are correct but if you don't agree we can stop talking because I am not gonna sit here and prove the obvious to you. I can't say we pay more for everything on average than literally anywhere else, but we do pay more on average for everything than most other places. As for why our healthcare is expensive, yes some of it is due to regulations and lack of competition. But the simple fact that it costs so much to live well in the US means that people must be willing to pay way more than elsewhere. That translates into higher pay for doctors. If you can pay $8 for a coffee then paying a couple hundred for a doctor's visit is not out of the question. If you can pay $50k for a basic boring car then paying $50k for a life-saving surgery is not unreasonable.
>The problem isn’t that they’re unaffordable. The problem is that people don’t want to pay for it. Or more specifically, people in the higher tax bands don’t want to because they view public services as an expense (which for them it is, because they’ll often be using private services instead). But this is another example of the self sabotage I was talking about in my earlier comment.
No it's not the fault of the rich that we can't afford it. Privately held wealth in the US is only about $130 trillion. Meanwhile there was $210 trillion of unfunded liabilities in the current system: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmauldin/2017/10/10/your-pen... as of 2017! So even seizing everything from everybody would not solve our problems. It would also destroy our quality of life, make the best and brightest (and richest) people run away, etc. You need to do some rudimentary research before trying to tell people stupid shit like they can enslave the rich to get free stuff.
>To be honest it doesn’t matter how accurate the comparison, you’re just going to argue that the free market fixes everything. Because that’s exactly what you’ve been brainwashed to believe. Capitalism is Americas #1 religion after all.
You're assuming an awful lot here. I haven't been "brainwashed" any more than you have. I just know that lots of things the government does are scams. Free markets do require some regulation to prevent certain breakdown cases involving unfair competition. But letting the government do things instead with no competition won't be an improvement. America is #1 in many things but budgeting and protecting our own interests aren't among those things.
I can’t think of anywhere else in the developed world where the train system is the slowest form of motorised transport around.
This is another example of how it is almost always a mistake to use a unitary description of anything when it comes to the USA. Yes, certainly where I live (New Mexico), population density is extremely low and long-haul rail transportation likely makes little sense. But talk about that as if it applies to "the united states" is a category error.
Or avoid that entirely by driving your own car.
There are some European cities that are still car dominated, however quiet a few are easier to navigate via public transport and some have even gone as far as entirely banning private cars from the city centre.
The only reason why passenger rail doesn’t exist today, is because the U.S. chose to stop investing in rail, and instead chose to only invest in car infrastructure. There’s was a huge period where auto manufacturers were buying up local rail and trams systems, for the sole purpose of running them into the ground, and forcing people into cars instead.
There’s absolutely no reason you can’t build high speed passenger rail today. High speed rail takes up less space than a highway, for far higher speeds and capacities. And building high speed rail using highway style construction in one of the most cost effective ways of building passenger rail (it’s how countries like France can build high speed rail at such low costs).
For some reason nobody thinks it’s silly to link up U.S. cities with highways, but for some reason, rail is too hard (despite being the faster, higher throughput, and more economical, form of transportation).
Yes, but why? There was a theory that massive stimulus spending would weaken the dollar because of the additional debt, but instead, the opposite happened. The USA did more stimulus spending and the dollar became stronger. Many people were surprised by this. Those people need to revisit their initial assumptions.
Like what?
Are you referring to the self-regulation at Grenfell Tower?
And the regulations are really not that different here in Norway. What is different is that there is a less adversarial society. We are a little more inclined to thrash out the problems in discussion rather than litigation.
But there are plenty of infrastructure projects here that take longer and cause more disruption than they should. For instance the upgrade to the E18 between Oslo and Drammen on which 17 billion kroner (1.7 billion USD) has already been spent without getting halfway and the southern half of the project has been scrapped because of the cost of buying out the people who live in the way of the new route.
https://www.nettavisen.no/okonomi/ny-nasjonal-transportplan-...
The list of organisations that can by law be required to be consulted on any development is insane: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/consultation-and-pre-decision-ma...
Environental impact assessments now run to millions of pages. Every big infra planning application tries to anticipate any possible complaint, and the whole cost balloons.
Difficult to see anybody but piggy sticks trying to get away with building with highly flammable materials.
Our planning system is literally designed to maximally empower NIMBYism. There are no well defined planning rules, or zoning, or planning process. Every council develops their own planning policy, and broadly has the power to block any project. The result is building anything requires millions of pounds, and years of effort, to work through a councils arbitrary, and ever changing planning rules, with no guarantee of any kind of success.
Most of the rest of the world operates some kind of permitted development zoning policy, where planning policy tends to provide clear rules around what can always be built in a specific area. So it possible to start a development process knowing that certain aspects of your project must be approved, as long as you follow the rules. Unlike the UK where you project might be approved if you managed to somehow follow all the undocumented, arbitrary, and changing local rules.
Consequences are quite simple, only projects that are absolutely guaranteed to return large profits if successful are built. And for those projects there’s very little incentive for high quality building, because there’s no competition in the area, and costs of getting permission are so high, that a developers unique selling point is their ability to get permission, not their ability to actually build well.
With regards to Grenfell, that’s the consequence of have shambolic building regulations (I.e. regulations on the quantity and safety of buildings), and a construction industry that can only make money by cutting corners, because the supply of actual work is so low.
Although zoning in the USA does work to a degree as you say ("must be approved if you ..."), in reality lots of projects that seem as if they ought to be a sure thing for approval face years of process-based objections from local groups, leading to them never being built at all, or having to be significantly revised due to changes demanded or created by circumstances shifting.
If you want to understand why building infrastructure in the UK is so difficult, then you need to look no further than our planning system. It has uniquely managed to completely strangle infrastructure building. Sure NIBYism exists in the U.S., and there’s lots of planning red tape, and plenty of very poorly considered planning rules (such as single use zoning, and a strange obsession with single family homes). But in comparison to the UK, it’s practically pleasant to work with.
Of course it helps that the U.S. has a crap ton of spare land just handing around. Much easier to build a new shopping mall, highway or suburb on a completely empty plot with no neighbours in sight. But in the UK you, you can’t swing a cat without hitting an existing building, or actively worked farm.
Finance is a legacy sector now?
> energy starved
Importing energy while ramping up your own production with wind and tidal, and importantly, nuclear, is not "starved". Is there a lack of energy in the UK? Blackouts like the ones in Texas?
(It's also an oddity that the Conservative government presided over a lot of green transition in the energy sector, but can't take credit for it because of their base)
Finance in UK is indeed legacy it is mostly big old banks there is still a bit of fintech and ofc. head funds, but UK is bleeding both talent and market share to CN and US. Not even speaking about tech salaries 10 years ago London was one of the top paying places for finance tech, now it is (ofc.) USA and CN (especially with cost of living).
Many fintech b2c innovators come from the UK. Revolut and Monzo provide features with a UX and API that US banks couldn't even dream of.
> Man blackout != energy starved, you can have blackouts cause your infrastructure is attacked or just random natural disaster, look at energy prices compare it to China or even US not even speaking about oil rich countries.
Yes you can, but that's not why Texas has blackouts. The UK has expensive electricity, imports a lot, but on what planet is it "energy starved"?
No?
The US has accumulated colossal scientific and R&D resources, which regularly produce industrial breakthroughs. Lower taxes help, too. (Lower taxes is what a country can afford for general benefit, not a sloppy pro-rich policy.)
But most importantly, USD is effectively the world's reserve currency, so the US can literally print money, and much of the rest of the world would gladly take it; it's like gold, only buttressed by the US's economic and military might.
The UK has none of these advantages. The British Empire had some of these, but it's gone. Another large factor is that the US emerged from WWII relatively unscathed, while Britain was badly hit, and could not grow as fast.
(Edit: typos.)
And Poland got occupied anyway. Truly Metternich-level stuff.
A population increase of around 1% per year may not seem huge until you consider what 1% of the UK road network or 1% of the NHS actually looks like, and what it'd take to build infrastructure and expand services at that rate year upon year.
The reality of building infrastructure in the UK is HS2 - a 20+ year project to build a little over 100 miles of high speed railway (with future northern phases predictably cancelled), at a cost over over half a billion quid per mile - it'll likely put any government off attempting any significant infrastructure construction ever again.
There is a high degree of regional specialization in the US as a consequence. No matter what happens in the world, some part of the US is perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. Combine this with general American risk tolerance and business acumen, and you have a country that is unusually organically adaptive to changing global economies.
Why the focus on second homes? I would care more about utilisation of homes by home-owners: walk around London at night, so many apartments are dark. The locals say investors own them.
More housing. A holiday home should be an utterly normal thing for a middle class family like in Finland or Spain.
As long as residential homes are a vehicle for investors rather than _living in_ (by the owner) you will have a problem.
Make building housing legal again.
Also. Renters deserve housing too. Restricting housing to the owner occupied is a great way to hate things by social class but I see no reason to further favour a population that’s richer and more powerful than the rest of the population already.
https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F59/per...
The resident might be at work, at the gym, out for dinner or at the cinema, at a friend's house, in another room, might have good blackout curtains and only use lamps for ambience instead of the ceiling light, on holiday. I bet if you stood outside one of these buildings where "most of the lights are off" for the entire evening, you'd see lights come on and off, and in aggregate find that most of the flats were in fact occupied.
By the same logic, I could look outside my window right now, count zero cars driving down the road and declare it a useless waste that nobody uses.
The UK has a cynical view on progress, likely leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. The US seems to have a contrasting view with an optimistic by default outlook.
Design docs and drawings obviously (easily 1k pages more if you fit it on a4), since each trade needs it's own views. Specifications are included, as a legal document that calls out which regulations every possible system will follow and calls out exceptions (proof they apply). All possible testing from receiving it (and documentation including pictures), proof of setup, proof of commissioning (IE construction essentially needs to do what a tech bro would do with automated testing, by hand with with each step documented and signed for, and each possible state the system could be in). Any other type of test report NETA/material quality/thermography/whatever (a single breaker easily comes to two pages of test report, a voltage/current meter easily comes to three pages per phase). Pictures are likely kept to only two per A4 page.
Basically it's a "declaration from ignorance", since big numbers sound scary and wasteful to others who haven't worked in the field.
No it doesn’t. It’s an outrage and a powerful argument against the entire system that produced it. There is no sane way that spending more money on stakeholder consultation for a comparable tunnel than Norway spent on building one can be defended.
TL;DR the UK planning system is too restrictive and is stopping investment.
However, some of the comparisons made don't really stack up.
Yes. France has a better housing supply, and roughly the same area. But France has over twice the area, and under half the population density, even before you account for the almost uninhabited mountainous areas in Wales, Northern England and Scotland. So our populations are squeezed into smaller areas.
There are some good points made though. The gold plating of a lot of projects is ridiculous. And don't get me started on the Elizabeth Line. I get it, it is clearly hugely beneficial and I have no doubt it pays for itself. But then you visit places like Maerdy in the Welsh valleys, devastated by the closure of the coal mines, and it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area.
The remedy will probably consist of a combination of legal changes and a change in attitude; YIMBY must become a thing. People respond to social pressures.
Does the UK have stronger property rights than, for instance, Norway that was mentioned by another contributor here as being so much more efficient? Yet Norway has abandoned, for now at least, the south western half of the Oslo to Drammen E18 road upgrade because buying out the owners of expensive houses on the route would be too expensive.
Are you claiming that other comparable democracies have such weak property rights that this significantly affects infrastructure projects? Which ones?
I am from a former mining city of Ostrava, CZ. It is not completely dead, and it has been slowly improving lately, but it sorely needs something like high-speed rail to become relevant again. (The location is favourable: almost equidistant from Prague, Vienna, Warsaw and close to Krakow; a major railway hub.)
But the pattern really repeats itself all over Europe. Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Germany, Czechia, Poland - former heavy industry hotspots tend to collapse in a very similar fashion. As far as I have seen, Bilbao (ES) and Katowice (PL) were able to rebuild and reinvent themselves the best. Everyone else struggles or gave up the fight entirely.
Greater London has a population nearly three times that of Wales. So the bang-for-buck in this small area is much greater. I completely agree that we under-invest in areas like Wales. But that doesn't mean that under-investing in the most productive part of the country is a good idea.
In what sense is London productive? What are the products?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/economicoutputandproductivity...
If you compare population density maps of France vs the UK, you can see that it's pretty similar - there are clusters of population in certain locations, and wide areas with barely any inhabitants.
there is no poor energy rich country. with the U.K having expensive energy it means they're slowly becoming a poor country. it already feels poor as it is. But this will accelerate the rate
Without that, it cant build anything effectively.
In the US and other parts of Europe it’s very different. People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were. If you have a rich daddy most people don’t care. If you’re rich because you inherited wealth vs earning it that’s see as “less” than those who are self made. While there are certainly exceptions, most of our richest people are in the self-made category and that’s a source of pride. “The American Dream” while a bit of a glossy story is generally a very real thing.
Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up.
Until the UK truly does away with its still quite hereditary ways and focuses a lot more on valuing individual achievement it will likely only continue to stagnate against other economies that have long since broadly moved on from such archaic mental models.
Are you in the UK? The monarchy and House of Lords are an obvious anachronism and they need abolishing [1], but I would say it's a very small minority who care who you parents are/were (mainly people who think their own parents are/were a big deal) — and a similar small minority who might also ask "which school did you go to?".
[1] e.g. https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/
Chances are, they're still running the country in some capacity. (The example I'm thinking of was a Duchess. Her descendant was a beak at Eton who taught Boris and the haunted pencil).
Also, Victoria is only about 100 years ago. I suspect power and wealth are pretty strongly hereditary over that time span in many other democracies.
People with Norman names wealthier than other Britons
People with "Norman" surnames like Darcy and Mandeville are still wealthier than the general population 1,000 years after their descendants conquered Britain, according to a study into social progress.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/842...
(Obviously the discrepancy has to start with the Conquest, I'm just saying that strictly speaking you can't use that paper to support that conclusion).
(Alec d'Urberville in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" is a nouveau riche person who adopted the name rather than a descendent of the original d'Urbervilles. Probably that happens in real life, too, though I expect the people who did the study have taken that into account and have done the best they can in the absence of reliable public ancestry data.)
My source was the Sutton Trust and Oxera.
In Japan there's an old saying that the success of a family is determined with the third generation.
The first builds the family empire. The second grows up seeing the first build it up and thus knows how to maintain it. The third grows up already having the empire and doesn't know how to maintain it, whether he can pass it on is essentially a dice roll. The fourth generation onwards, if the third succeeded, can refer to the family records and keep things going mostly indefinitely or realizes it's time to hand it off to different blood at that point.
Parental families of, say, Nigel Farage or Margaret Thatcher were somehow more sophisticated, even though not tracing back to some nobility.
Not that coming from a well-off family is bad; I just would like to emphasize that the "American dream" of coming to high social positions based in merit, not lineage, worked for Clintons.
Political dynasties in the US are notable because they’re uncommon, rather than part of the law as in the UK.
I would concede that in politics a degree from Oxbridge has an outsized cachet, and those universities traditionally recruited from elite private schools. However, this is diminishing over time, both because those institutions are proactively recruiting from a wider base, and because people are pointing out the unrepresentitive composition of political parties, which then self-correct to stay politically relevent.
The hereditary parts of the House of Lords are increasingly unimportant, and the Lords is of minor importance to the political process anyway. Royalty has been politically vestigial for more than a century.
But in industry and most business spheres your lineage is unimportant. Just like those other parts of the world you mentioned, it's personal accomplishment that matters.
Britain has big problems, but I think archaic veneration for family lineage is only a small force within them.
Maybe on individual level, but as far as economy goes, mainland EU is still stuck with very old corporations and rarely generates some interesting startup (not just in IT). There has been a notable dearth of new European corporations since the 1970s at least. The old guard controls everything.
And London is full of European youngsters who came there to study and do some business, because the possibilities are broader there, including some VC culture. Try founding a new company in Germany; you will be met by a merciless paper storm that can only be weathered with help of a professional specialized in dealing with bureaucracy, and may take several months to overcome.
The UK is too complicated to fit into one neat box. It has its peers in medieval gowns, but at the same time, London is a very modern 21st century city, more modern than many metropolises on the continent. Perhaps Warsaw is more modern than London.
What kind of people ask you that?
I'd bet, in the US, you'd find the same among people who grew up with staff in the house. The difference may be that, in the US, it's a lot harder to find people like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
I think this statement's accuracy depends heavily on how you're defining things.
If I go up to the average Brit and tell them my father is the deputy editor-in-chief of some newspaper? They won't be impressed, they'll think I'm a prick.
On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers.
Does "UK culture strongly value" who my father is, if 99.99 % of brits don't care, but the remaining 0.01 % can have an outsized impact on my career?
(Of course if I've inherited a hundred million quid some people will think I'm important / suck up to me due to the power such wealth confers - but there's nothing uniquely british about that)
It also helps to get an internship if your Dad is literally the editor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Mackie
Like, there's work to do here, but by European standards the UK is doing pretty well.
An entity's situation is influenced by much more than its agency. There's competition from other similar entities, historical circumstances, geography, weather, happenstance, the list goes on and on and on. We like to think that everything depends on what we decide when in reality it's far from it.
These observations have been triggered in myself by reading history. Leadership is always blamed in difficult situations even if they were not (or not completely) responsible for the situation.
One thing I will never forget from my short time living in London is how un-insulated the homes there were. Single or thin double-glazed windows, full-brick homes without a hint of thermal insulation. Sure there were exceptions but not many. At the time in Central Europe the movement to heavily insulated, nearly-passive homes was already in full swing. Many central European countries were much poorer than the UK, not even mentioning London, and energy prices were lower, so, naively I thought, everyone with an old house in the UK should be busy insulating it. It would pay off in a few years. Why didn't they?
And I think one of the reasons is that the governments, indeed the ruling class as a whole, just didn't care that the commoners are paying over their heads for energy and are freezing in moldy houses, because the class divide is just so big. It would be interesting to live in an alternate universe where Karl Marx would live in a different country - perhaps his theory would place a smaller emphasis on social class.
I think Karl Marx only serves as an expensive lesson in what destructive ideas look like. Everywhere that has implemented any version of it has ended up impoverished, unfree, and frequently with millions killed. China's success came only after they junked Marxism, and Xi Jinping's quasi return to it has seen Chinese prosperity slowly drop.
Yes, but there are ways to handle that. Even the insulation can let water vapor through, of course you can't in that case use the cheapest styropor.
> I think Karl Marx only serves as an expensive lesson in what destructive ideas look like.
I fully agree implementing his dumb ideas mostly from the Communist Manifest led to huge tragedies, but they were implemented partly because he was a hugely influential philosopher and that was not some random success. His critique of capitalism is worth reading, or at least reading about.
In other words this website is making enormous oversimplifications and not bothering to explain or justify them.
That's Britain.
What happened in the last 15 years is a mystery to me. I doubt it's economic stagnation (been there before) and I doubt it collapsed under the weight of US culture (which is still enamored with anything British). Maybe the modern internet and social media diluted everything. I don't know, but I miss it. (sorry for the off-topic)
The UK media and upper class have failed to identify energy, housing or infrastructure more generally as requiring serious responses too. Their entire system appears to be off the rails. Their failure relative to countries like China really is quite astonishing, although it doesn't set them far apart from the greater western bloc. It makes sense that we aren't seeing cultural leadership out of them; where would they lead us too? Nowhere good.
See eg. BritPop, a vacuous derivate outpouring of jumped-up pub rock relying on waving the flag to justify it's existence.
Some areas have still produced decent stuff, eg comedy (The Office, Borat, Peep Show), etc. Our twists on black American music (eg grime, drill) seem ok.
But it's a real struggle to think of much that is vital and original as a culture from Britain in the last 30 years I'd say.
I've only observed English culture from abroad, but my sense since the late 1990s is that the English have become somehow ashamed to be openly proud of their culture. I don't have a feeling for what brought this about.
Four of them, if you include Ringo.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison, France has double the area of UK, and more of it is usable.
If you want to compare the UK against the Netherlands, you'd have to compare the numbers in the article: how many Dutch own houses, how many have second homes. And adjust the numbers to be relative to population size of course. I'm not sure how well the Netherlands would come out of that comparison.
Prosperity comes from cities where densification is allowed (far too much of inner London is only 2-storeys) and being able to affordably put in supporting infrastructure.
My main question/challenge would be: if the problems have been constant since the 1950s-1980s - e.g. planning and failure to build - then how come we were doing so well until 2008? Why did problems only start biting then?
It also ignores the fact that the UK might do better in some area's than other countries, it would be fair to lists these as well. Otherwise you could make a list like this for any country in the world.
Also some issues seem irrelevant. E.g. the crime rate was given, and it was mentioned that this had been actually going down in the recent years. But then it was compared to the crime rate after WO2, and yes, compared to that it went up.
So I'm going to guess it's gonna be that sort of thing. Someone with a neoliberal economic perspective who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects.
Privatisation, tax cuts, and the curbing of union power fixed important swathes of the UK economy. Crucially, they tackled chronic underinvestment in sectors that had been neglected under state ownership. Political incentives under state ownership encouraged underfunding – and where the Treasury did put money in, it tended to go on operational expenditures (e.g., unionised workers’ wages rather than capital investments). This problem has immediately reemerged as the Department for Transport has begun to nationalise various franchises (which it promises to do to all of them).
It is bizarre to me that they can claim that under government ownership the incentives were towards underfunding, implying that somehow the incentives are any different under private ownership (although admittedly, there's been great investment in ticket barriers...)
You find a bunch of ways to frame the authors as the out-group, then cast a totally baseless aspersion. Presumably so you don't have to engage with any of the actual points in the article.
I care a great deal about the actual points in the article. It's just important to understand this is not in any sense a neutral analysis.
I'm unsure if there's anyone in the country who wouldn't benefit from that. Hell, you can even wipe "government away", the essay talks at length about re-enabling private infrastructure investment too.
And who doesn't like infrastructure investment?
There is unquestionably a large swathe of the UK (in particular the North, North East and most of Wales) which would benefit tremendously from improved infrastructure.
Poverty is bad. There’s the angle.
Which makes whole industry lag behinds and UK is probably biggest example of that it is just big banking and service hub with no money for any investments in infrastructure outside London making it more and more depending on single city with legacy service sector. Even Poles are coming back to Poland a country that was 7-10 times poorer 20 years ago.
There were times in the 1990s when people like the Dutch commissioner Frits Bolkenstein sincerely tried to liberalize and open the internal market.
But at least since Brexit, possibly earlier, the EU has made a turn towards protectionism and closedness (at least economically; as you mention, it is way, way easier to ship people from Africa into the EU than bananas), a French attitude so to say.
Frankly, we the Czechs are missing Britain in the fold. It was a balancing power against the Franco-German attempts to micromanage and regulate absolutely anything. Together with NL and DK, they were a force for economic freedom within the Union.
BTW other nations are threatened by the very same development, see the shenanigans around FAA and their überlengthy process of licensing of space launches. But I am more optimistic about the US being able to cut red tape than the EU.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/09/...
Good luck with removing "red tape".
Standards are useful. To be outside a large population area of standardization and regulation only means, that nobody cares about your small-country standards and that the population gets the worst of both worlds: inferior local standards and very little influence in international standards.
This one sentence in the introduction belies an article not entirely based on factual evidence.
However. The report is thin on recommendations "What is to be done now?", or did I miss them really!? That really surprises me. If I were to define it in two sentences: UK central gov is ultra centralised in Whitehall (#1) (almost Stalinist in that respect!!), and then that centralised power is further held in a strangle hold by the Treasury Brain - Deep State - OBR complex (#2). So together they are like Centralisation^2.
Atm that ensures - #1 nothing can be done by anyone else, and #2 they've settled on "do nothing" b/c everything costs money, and #2 care disproportionally more about that cost, and much less about what capability assets etc that cost buys UK. Once nothing tangible is done, laziness is naturally encouraged, activity punished, and every promotion every jostling in the hierarchy becomes entirely a beauty contest, divorced from any real-word results. All this seen afar by outsider without any insider knowledge. Just listening to Rory Stewart and Dominic Cummings relying info about the inner workings of UK gov machine.
So any intervention would have to come (walking backwards) into point #2, and or at point #1.
Point #2 means smashing the power of the Treasury. They are good servant, but a bad master. No.10 (the PM) needs to re-assert itself over and above No.11 (the FinMin) by 1st-ly taking decision powers out of No.11 hands. No.10 would have to work much more on getting things done, take interest in that, and leave behind the media PR Circus it's totally devoted to atm. Just assume you will serve 1 term (or less!), drop the "permanent electioneering mode" (that nowadays the position goes into while in gov??), don't think of re-election and try get stuff done, assuming you've run out of time. Can't see how a change like that can come but directly from the top, from the PM. Supported by legislation and votes to dismantle the 1000 roadblocks, via the political power of MPs voting in Parliament.
Point #1 means decentralisation of power. UK for a long time used to have vigorous local authorities that could innovate in various ways. Admired once at the riches of local gov building in Birmingham (UK 2nd largest city). The idea that some pimply fresh graduate 20yo SpAd 120 miles away in London would be telling these people how many pencils they should buy I presume would have seemed to the people running the City gov absurd, like a Monty Python sketch to us.
Mid-term UK needs to build another 10mil strong cities agglomeration, e.g. Liverpool - Manchester - Leeds - Sheffield - Hull, by connecting them with transport links, and building housing along the links for commuting whichever way people fancy. With Birmingham half-way between this new MegaCity and the old London. So London gets some competition, and raises its game too. Atm feels London is coasting because TINA.
The treaties the UK has with Ireland even gift anyone born in Northern Ireland with dual citizenship off the bat.
Why would I want to? Did you actually read the story?