Britain is now in serious economic decline

JupiterKid

It should be pretty apparent that the UK is in economic free-fall with living standards plummeting, public services in total disarray, the political system is nearly broke with corruption, mismanagement, incompetence and a complete disregard/contempt for the average household who are increasingly struggling to pay for the basics of food and energy costs.

Britain is now the “sick man of Europe” in terms of its economy and society and these woes were largely self-inflicted, by successive British governments who did little to nothing meaningful to modernise its industry and enable it to be competitive. Instead it adopted a service based economic model, heavily reliant on the financial services sector during the Thatcher era, but outside of London, the rest of the country has fallen even further behind. The regional disparities in wealth, incomes and even health outcomes is increasingly stark. Britain is turning into a poor country.

There is a very good but sobering piece in The Atlantic by Derek Thompson on how and why the British economy is in a long spiral of decline, living standards are falling for the average Briton in comparison to the rest of the developed world and how Brexit has compounded these very serious structural economic problems.

Link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-economy-disaster-degrowth-brexit/671847/

What can be done to remedy this free fall apart from reversing the disastrous Brexit? Does the UK need a radical overhaul of its decrepit and dysfunctional political system?

xxxxxxl

Is what I found.

Boggles

Hang on I thought leaving EU was going to get rid of all those foreigners and would make them all rich?

Surely they weren't lied to, were they?

Mad_maxx

I bought GILTS in October when Liz Truss was turning everything to sh1t , I’m confident they will be a good bet by expiry in 2032

the Brits are a little different but are a resilient bunch , I wouldn’t write them off

Yurt2

Britain is a low to no growth economy from here on out, and they have no credible roadmap out of their predicament.

Their circumstances somewhat resemble Japan parked in the North Sea. Except unlike Japan, it doesn't have competitive export industries of scale to keep it ticking over, and it has far more severe societal cleavages, inequalities and problems that the Japanese don't have to contend with. It also generally owes money to people who they've pissed off over the last decade unlike Japan who hold their debt internally.

Nice knowing you Britain.

banie01

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120160357#Comment_120160357

UK productivity and by extrapolation it's GDP was revised in early January, drastically downward. The Tory line that the UK had the fastest/greatest recovery was wrong and the new ONS numbers confirm that the UK hasn't even managed a stand still or a return to pre-pandemic levels.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/uk-productivity-lags-behind-other-g7-nations-tb2vkvhwp

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-league-table-that-shows-we-need-to-raise-our-game-5hmkhp6k7

The before chart:

The revised chart:

The scale of the ONS correction is here

https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1617456191696764928?t=mYj7Q40y3atAh1UwpLgEQQ&s=19

The UK's economy and in particular it's GDP/GNP figure is grossly skewed by CoL and is perhaps even more skewed than Ireland's tbh. The UK is in decline, there are many reasons for it. Brexit is foremost and it will get far worse when the current deal or rather the current "as is" on services and financial services ends in the middle of this year.

ancapailldorcha

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120160357#Comment_120160357

So you've dumped an image with no context whatsoever. This doesn't really add anything.

It's important to be precise with words when describing this. The UK isn't on the way to becoming Somalia or Eritrea but it's definitely on the decline. It's a services-based economy which had ruthlessly exploited the European market for highly-skilled labour while dumping a substantial proportion of its ageing population onto the Spanish and French healthcare systems. Frictionless trade in goods meant that the UK never had to make much of anything.

Years of ideologically destroying the state has left the UK incredibly weak:

https://www.ft.com/content/e39d0315-fd5b-47c8-8560-04bb786f2c13

We're about to enter an age of Brussels, Beijing and Washington subsidizing select industries on an unprecedented scale. This poses serious challenges for a declining services economy which was the first country in history to elect to voluntarily and unnecessarily place tariffs on itself. The FT did a comparison with a fictional doppelganger UK which didn't Brexit:

The government could have invested in serious growth but there's a serious anti-growth culture here in the UK. It's a very fractious country with perhaps the NHS being the only real unifying banner. The government is more interested in promoting racism and culture war bollox than actually doing anything.

Can anything be done?

Of course. Starting proceedings to rejoin the single market would be ideal. It won't mitigate the damage already done but it should prevent most of the damage that's on the way. Throwing out the cultural tumour that is the Conservative party will also help immensely. Fortunately, they're on the way out. The question is what sort of damage they'll do between now and then.

Things will improve here but only relatively speaking. The UK is much poorer culturally, economically and socially than it ought to be. It didn't have to be this way.