This website makes some claims about what has caused both growth and decline that are pretty contentious.
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.
> 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 agree, this is pretty wild and made me immediately look up who was behind this. Conservative think-tanks gotta conservative think-tank.
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.
>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.
But we’ve imported millions of people that speak different languages since 2015 , why hasn’t line gone up?
One of the authors is from the Centre for Policy Studies. Another is from the Adam Smith Institute. These are the gang of shady right-wing think tanks that brought us Truss and Kwarteng. That tells you everything you need to know about their economic competence.
Their solution is to allow private funds to fund essential infrastructure, it seems.
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.
> From 2010 to the summer of 2024, Britain was run by Conservative-led or Conservative Governments. The Conservatives are the traditional party of business, and in the 1930s and 1980s they pushed through reform programmes that successfully renewed Britain’s economy. Virtually any Conservative minister from the past fourteen years would speak warmly about that heritage if asked, and would express the hope of being its inheritor. And yet, with honourable exceptions, the governments of the last fourteen years failed in this vocation. Failing systems remained unreformed, continuing to stifle Britain’s prosperity. Today Britain is ruled by a Labour Government that recognises this failure to build, and which has articulated high ambitions for changing this. But it remains doubtful that they will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were.
Of course, the second most upvoted comment is an ad personam dismissal that doesn't even engage with its arguments. How's that for HN-level intelligent discourse?
None of what the website says is actually contentious outside of Labour/left wing circles. Economic growth isn't that complicated when coming from behind - but as they say, it's hard if there isn't enough energy or housing.
> 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).
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:
I'm confused at your point - I look at the countries we typically view as more left leaning and both Canada and Europe as a whole has better water quality. If anything, it seems to be a delineation of first world status.
Which is interesting, because I can't believe anyone would say the US water is good when no one will drink water from the faucet, it has to be filtered.
It has always been either over chlorinated, or out of a well with all sorts of contaminants such as sulphur.
According to the graph on this site, ALL countries in the world have very bad water, at least after I move my mouse pointer around the map: all the countries turn orange.
> US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.
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.
"It may have been the greatest rapid expansion in a given economic sector in British history, and it was the key reason we didn’t experience a Great Depression while Germany, the USA, and France did. "
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.
It appears to have been produced by a right wing think tank, justifying its seeming lack of focus on how public funds could help build infrastructure vs the author's seeming obsession with private financing.
Also odd was the comparison to France, considering that France's great depression was arguably much less severe than in the UK, as it experienced less industrial decline, less unemployment and no financial crisis.
> Nor can austerity or the hangover from the financial crisis explain Britain’s malaise. The financial crisis was at least as turbulent in the United States as here.
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.
The financial crisis was a specific event and other countries had put it behind them within a few years. The UK's growth inflected around that time and never recovered since. It doesn't make much sense to argue a temporary event changed UK productivity or economic growth permanently, especially as the only reason to think that is rough temporal proximity. There were other things going on at that time too that are equally or more plausible e.g. mass immigration from eastern Europe was kicking into gear around that time as well, which created a glut of cheap labour. Cheap labour always kills productivity growth because there's no reason to invest in automation.
> 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".
This is pretty bleak reading for a resident of the UK! It's a good explanation for why there's stagnation (generally not allowed to build here). I'm a fan of their work (see the housing theory of everything [1] which is also good).
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].
The "new Government" has not yet been in power for 100 days. How exactly have they not "come through on their promise to address it"? Given the old government didn't come through on similar promises on planning for 14 years, I think we can give them another year or so to get policy and statutes in place, no?
Yes I hope they’ll find a solution and get re-elected. In some cases changes to frameworks require a 1 year consultation (planning permission to change planning permission rules!) so I am sure it will take years to see an increase. My point was their changes announced so far seemed bitty and wouldn’t address much of the issue.
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.
At this point in time I'm just jaded about the whole political discourse - it seems that 90% of the discussion is devoted to "what they did" and "what we could do", with almost none about "what we did, and here's how we believe it actually affected your life"
> Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants.
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.
I left the UK almost 20 years ago, and cannot imagine returning for any length of time.
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.
The Indian Civil Service was always tiny. There were so few British in India that in 1950 when the Indian government surveyed the populace to try and see if they knew the British had left they discovered the average Indian wasn’t aware there had ever been a British Empire. The British Empire in India and the British Army in India at all but the most rarefied levels were staffed by Indians and there weren’t even that many of them.
> 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.
I don't think this is about the number of civil servants so much as the attitude of running everything from the Imperial core. Becomes apparent when you ask questions like "now that there is a Scottish Parliament, what exactly does the Scotland Office do?". There's no California Office in the American government, no Jura office in the Swiss government, because those are federal systems with a clear division of power across different levels.
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.
I’ll need to sit down and read this properly, but I would say there is a real stench of decline in England at the moment and pretty much everyone here would agree. It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already.
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.
> It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already.
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?
Maybe but probably not by this point. If Starmer were engaged and keen to fix these problems, he would have clearly articulated the problems outlined on the website, stated a plan to solve them and now be doing things to advance it.
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:
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.
I've been to my GP half a dozen times in the last year, always same day.
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.
> Anyone living on their own sees all their income drained by landlords
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.
> And all whilst we have one of the highest tax burdens in our history.
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 don't agree, and your data points don't match my own. How is it readily apparent the new government won't "save us" when they haven't even got to 100 days in, yet?
Quack medicine products used to be sold (and sometimes still are) by asking in adverts "do you feel vaguely unwell?" and promising to vaguely cure the condition. Similarly, it's easy to sell the public on a vague sense of national decline, and this is a long-standing key part of populist politics.
British GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while the US’ has gone from $49K to $81K. The UK has declined in relative terms compared to what used to be a near peer.
It's hard to understand how people view the NHS. Some people claim it's the national treasure, but how does that work if service is as abysmal as what you describe ?
It's because the experience you get is completely random and heavily weighted towards the fatal. If you show up with something life threatening they're actually pretty good.
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.
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.
Main problem with systems outside the NHS and I'm really talking about the US here is if you have a major accident or a terminal illness you can easily be bankrupted if you make a wrong decision around insurance and that's not cool. I see far too many GoFundMe's for people with illnesses in the states and that is no way to run a country.
a) it hasn't always been bad (although it has always been a right-wing punching-bag); b) it has the potential to be a lot better than it currently is; c) a lot of the people actually in it care desperately about seeing that happen, and because of its size that's a surprising proportion of the population.
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.
Endoscopy wait times are kind of a notorious worst-case, right? There's something weird going on with them here. I had specialist care in Chicago (at Rush, not NWU) booked and delivered inside of a couple weeks.
I've been able to see a Dr on the day I've called several times in the last couple of years. Operations happen reasonably quickly if they are "required", it's the non urgent ones that now have ridiculous waiting lists. The economy/wages issue, seems to be worldwide since covid and the various recent wars.
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.
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.
Really interesting and well researched read. The main take away seems to be that Britain has seen a lack of state funded infrastructure development and it's paying the price for this, especially in the energy sector.
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?
The US has a huge internal market, with free interstate trade and no need for localization.
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.
I don't think "state funded" is the important part to take away from the piece, it's a shortage of infrastructure in general, both state and private, in part due to incredibly restrictive rules. These days you can easily trap a planned piece of infrastructure in court cases for years for largely spurious reasons.
Having recently visited the US, the infrastructure there (at least in the parts of California I visited) is noticeably worse than in Europe (including the UK). So I don't think it can just be about infrastructure.
US is energy independent and is desirable place for middle and higher class specialist.
Compared to overtaxed and energy starved England which live from legacy sectors and cheap immigration workers and is not desirable for anyone not working in finances.
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?
Since the crisis of 2008 the USA has had several trillion dollars in stimulus spending. Very roughly speaking, Europe pursued policies of austerity, whereas the USA followed a more Keynesian route of big spending. On this matter, the Keynesians have been vindicated. In 2007 the GDP of the EU was slightly larger than the USA, but now it has fallen far behind: $16 trillion ($18 trillion if it still had the UK) versus $25 trillion for the USA. And the most important policy difference since 2008 has been large stimulus spending in the USA, versus relative austerity in Europe. More recently, President Biden was able to push through some big infrastructure bills, which should power the USA through the 2020s. (There are some qualifiers to be added about weaknesses in the USA system of funding and allowing construction, in particular the aggressive system of "substantive due process" that allows for any project to be stalled by lawsuits, but despite that, the USA has done better than Europe.)
Most of the difference in GDP was because Dollar was a lot cheaper compared to Euro pre Recession.
Also EU just stagnate from 1990 until now it is yearly losing global share of GDP.
You say that but the UK has not experienced the kind of energy disruptions that, for example, the Texans have since the 1970s.
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.
An important aspect is that the US is that its economies and regional cultures are diverse and dispersed. The US is simply too decentralized to stagnate effectively. It is not a monoculture in any practical sense which creates a system that can respond quickly to evolutionary pressure. Everything good and bad you hear about the US usually only applies to a subset of the country and often only a handful of cities.
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.
Its also that its really expensive. The reasons given are the cost of planning but I also suspect given all that has been exposed over the past 40 years that widespread corruption by governments in power is actually a big part of the ballooning costs.
A lack of infrastructure development combined with a population being artificially increased by high levels of immigration, which is applying downward pressure on wages while pushing property costs (the source of most of the UK's problems) ever higher.
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.
> 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
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.
The French are richer than the British. They have more stuff and a higher quality of life. It would be good for more British people to have more stuff and a higher quality of life. Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence, and for more people to have a holiday home. Those are all good. Focussing on utilisation is Green Party, NIMBY, degrowth, pro-poverty thinking. It sees a fixed pie and thinks how to distribute it instead of trying to make everything better for everyone.
More housing. A holiday home should be an utterly normal thing for a middle class family like in Finland or Spain.
There are more 2nd homes in France because rural housing is relatively cheap and there are lots of land. However the way the employment market works in France has screwed the younger people, I think. It's easy to stay in a job once you have one but hard to get started as a younger person. If I had to guess, France, Italy, Spain etc are in way more decline than the UK as a whole and Germany is spending hard to prop up a lot of the EU.
Regarding housing (and land ownership) specifically, France is over twice the size of the UK with a similar population. So there are underlying constraints that cannot easily be papered over with policy.
I'm not so sure counting lights on at any given moment is a good measure of occupancy.
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.
Readit News
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.
I agree, this is pretty wild and made me immediately look up who was behind this. Conservative think-tanks gotta conservative think-tank.
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?
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 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#...
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.
It has always been either over chlorinated, or out of a well with all sorts of contaminants such as sulphur.
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.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
> 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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Civil_Service
It is quite curious both you and the other replier jumped to that conclusion, and says quite a lot about the current British malaise.
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.
In 1891 there were 238,409 with english as their mother tongue (before the census broke this out).
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.
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.
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 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.
you are going to GP every two months? Usually you get referred to a specialist if you are that sick.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.medicaleconomics.com/view/match-day-2023-a-remin...
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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.)
Like what?
Are you referring to the self-regulation at Grenfell Tower?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.