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.
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?
feels like the government need to set the tone for the rental market first then both owners and builders can decide if they want to participate.
"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.
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?
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?
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.
>I've been to my GP half a dozen times in the last year, always same day.
Good for you, but I think that is absolutely not the typical UK experience.
> GP half a dozen times in the last year,
you going to GP every two months? Usually you get referred to a specialist if you are that sick.
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.
The local variation is incredible.
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.
It's the national religion.
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 may also be true that there's a national decline, I'm just saying to be very cautious about getting swept up in the idea. For instance, apparently America needs to be Made Great Again, facts notwithstanding.
> 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation
Its the same in USA if you want to see a specialist. There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.
> There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.
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.
Same in Scotland. And our tax burden is even higher (if you’re a middle or high earner at least)
> real stench of decline in England at the moment
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.
> incredibly restrictive rules.
Like what?
Are you referring to the self-regulation at Grenfell Tower?
OP is more likely to be referring to e.g. Green Belt planning restrictions.
The thames tunnel costing as much in planning as Norway spent actually building the longest tunnel in the world. Construction projects are so fraught with regulatory burden that most of these costs are going to legal fees. It's not that they're not spending money. It's that public infrastructure is a money pit of legal fees
It was regulations that made the cladding be installed in the first place, I thought?
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.
The US has a more robust system for supplying infrastructure through private investment - including in the energy sector.
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.
The US has one of the largest freight rail networks in the world. We don't have as big of a passenger rail investment because nobody would ride most of it
England is a small country, smaller than the US state of Georgia. It's much easier to maintain way shorter roads with its much higher population density. Nonetheless, the rural roads in the US are generally of good to excellent quality.
> You say that but the UK has not experienced the kind of energy disruptions that, for example, the Texans have since the 1970s.
The energy disruptions the UK had in the 70s were how Thatcher came into power.
The article you link to explains that the Three Day Week led to the collapse of the Conservative gov in 74, and while Thatcher became leader, she did not come into power until 79. If the power outages led to anything, it was to a Labour gov.
(this is unrelated to the correct statement that there were widespread outages throughout the 70s)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the census in 1921 there were over 150000 British Subjects in India. Over 40000 of them were women, so we are not talking just army.
In 1891 there were 238,409 with english as their mother tongue (before the census broke this out).
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.
It takes more than the civil service to run a colony.
It is quite curious both you and the other replier jumped to that conclusion, and says quite a lot about the current British malaise.
I’m not British, I’m just not ignorant of Indian history. At partition the entire British population of India was about 100,000 including the army, civil service, civilians and family of same.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence
As long as residential homes are a vehicle for investors rather than _living in_ (by the owner) you will have a problem.
Why not enable a dynamic rental sector so people can move around the country to better jobs? Feels mean to trap people.
Agreed. Thankfully we know what it takes to make housing a crappy investment vehicle. Build more housing. Build so much housing that returns on capital invested are flat, live Tokyo since 2000, or negative, like Seattle over the last five years.
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.
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?
The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. The head of state is the child of the previous head of state. The House of Lords is still a thing. Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal.
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.
> Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal
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?".
I suggest this exercise: Pick a random person from Queen Victoria's court. Look up where their descendants are today.
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).
Try Norman times:
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.
If you read that paper carefully (it's been a while so I might have this wrong), I think you'll see that while they're using Norman vs not-Norman surnames, the comparison is between Victorian and contemporary wealth and life expectancy data.
(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).
That's probably true, but it's a quite separate problem (it's about power rather than attitudes).
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.
I don't think people care what school you went to, but the fact remains that the UK has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in Europe.
I don't think that's actually a fact. I don't know what figures you're using, but eyeballing the Global Social Mobility Index puts the UK as pretty middling in Europe. Less mobile than France or Germany, more so than Italy, Spain, or Poland.
It's below average, and lower than all of Scandinavia, Austria etc. Yes, it beats Southern Europe and ex-communist countries.
My source was the Sutton Trust and Oxera.
> The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished.
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)
>> 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.
Isn't socio-economic status more heritable in the US than the UK? In the UK, inheritance tax is 40% and there's probably more redistributive taxation in general.
One of the exceptions in the US seems to be around the White House. For a while, when Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2008, it was possible that the US would have had a member of the Bush or Clinton families as either VP or President every year from 1981 thorough to 2017. Such political families are not unique to the US, of course, and the UK has a fair few, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family
With that, Bill Clinton has very humble ancestry, as does Hillary; both trace back to traveling salesmen, small business owners, coal miners, such kind of folks.
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.
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Hillary is not linked hereditarily to Bill, so really you’re talking about 3 people- Bush Sr and his 2 kids.
Political dynasties in the US are notable because they’re uncommon, rather than part of the law as in the UK.
Not sure who could be down voting you, because you're right. If your parents didn't send you to the right school to learn the right plummy accent, you don't stand much chance.
I don't think that's really true, outside some niche cultural arenas. Sure, if you're at a posh member's club or a party of aristocrats people might be impressed by your lineage.
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.
Revolutionary France never made it across the channel... On the other hand, this significantly dismiss the UK contributions to the world on global trade and during the industrial revolution.
Britain had multiple revolutions earlier on. There was The Anarchy, Magna Carta, Cromwell, and 1688 when Britain decided to be Dutch for a while. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, and a lot of that was English (or Scottish). The general mood was to look at the French as latecomers.
I've been here for 5 years and am almost thirty years old. I still have people regularly asking me where I went to secondary school. They are obsessed with class.
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I've been here for 30 years, and am 30 years old, and I don't think anyone has ever asked me where I went to secondary school.
What kind of people ask you that?
I somehow keep ending up working at places where 90% of the employees grew up with staff in the house. Dozens of people with wikipedia pages about their families.
So, people who grew up with staff in the house are obsessed with class. That's perhaps disappointing, but not really surprising.
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.
>Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up.
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.
The same last names are mentioned in the context of many US elections. US is not as far removed as you might think.
"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."
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.
We have fully embraced the parasite economy in the UK, however unlike big American tech we feed on one another. The safest business for a long time has been property, poor quality reno-flips and rentals, which adds nothing except burden to the people who might bring foreign income through being entrepreneurial.
Long essay.
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.
>it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area
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.
It's hard to find any European country that didn't have any government projects that went wildly over budget or were very much delayed.
So I don't think this is a UK specific problem, and it doesn't explain why Britain has stagnated compared to most of the EU.
Transport projects seem to be particularly expensive these days in Anglo countries compared to European countries. For instance, we currently have a planned short tunnel in the UK (under the Thames but not in London itself) where the actual planning process has so far cost $400m.
Stronger property rights tend to backfire in the 2020s as NIMBYs have emerged everywhere and do their best to block anything around them, usually by weaponizing environmental laws.
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.
As for Wales ... This pattern repeats itself all over Europe. Only a few places "made" the transition from industrial settings to current economy.
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.
You'd think that exactly because it's such a common pattern, there would be best practices how to help those communities overcome. Yet, the only pattern I see is mainstream politics ignoring it, locals struggling, and rightwing winning them over. It's so obvious that you really have to ask yourself whether there's some hidden agenda somewhere in there. Just like mainstream politics ignoring the younger generations - both as plans for them and as ways to communicate with them - and again who's winning? The rightwing. It's everything in the open.
The way rail project costs are totalled up is different from one country to another -what costs are included and excluded.
In other words this website is making enormous oversimplifications and not bothering to explain or justify them.
How can there be a 360, 000 page document to build something. That number seems so outrageously high. Is the font size massive or something?
If most of that are technical drafts going down to smallest details, I can imagine how it could be sort of reasonable. Large things like, say, nuclear power plants or huge ships have literally millions of parts.
Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
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.
The question is, why did it cost significantly more to produce that document than it cost Norway to just build an even bigger tunnel? Pages might be misleading, but cash is not.
> Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
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.
The main reason Britain is failing is it wiped out its industrial base.
Without that, it cant build anything effectively.
The UK's manufacturing sector is comparable to France's in size.
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The list of issues that the article list seems very ad hoc. Some are compared to EU countries, but apparently only where this makes the UK come out worst.
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.
"These are not just disconnected observations", says the article. Yeah, but they might be actually. For instance the one about France producing more electricity is because France famously over-invested in nuclear power stations and that's why its electricity price recently went negative. Meanwhile the UK probably needs to increase supply slightly, but the comparison is misleading.
The fact it's a whole site dedicated to this article means there's some angle to it. Would be interesting to know who paid for this.
One of the authors is from the center for policy studies, which is a thinktank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher and 2 others. The other two authors seem to be the founder and one of the main contributors to https://worksinprogress.co/ which describes itself as "a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world."
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.
This section really shows where they're coming from:
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...)
> who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects
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?
This is one of the worst comments I've read on HackerNews and engenders the decline in critical thinking that has become so pervasive here in recent years.
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.
What an ugly, impoverished view of the world. Someone sees that the UK is poorer than it would be if economic policy wasn’t a disaster and wants to publicise that so it can be improved and tens of millions of people’s lives improved and you’re looking for an “angle”.
Poverty is bad. There’s the angle.
Weird how Western Europe stagnated after 1990, only Germany get some more “gas” for growth thanks to CEE and cheap energy. now it seems that importing tens of millions of low skilled refugees and workers with high social benefits is killing any innovation while taxing middle class and all high skilled Europeans prefer to move to US or even east Asia.
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.
Europe failed to keep its bureaucracy at bay.
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.
On a tangent, what is astonishing to me as an outsider is the cultural stagnation. Even in times of economic decline Britain was a cultural powerhouse. Modern music, theater, cinema, tv, literature, sports, etc. were permanently shaped by post-war Britain (especially in Europe). Whatever the cultural norm dictated by the behemoth that is the USA, Britain always had something new, something fresh to give. There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.
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)
I don't think it's entirely off-topic, though I only have a vague sense of the connection. I knew 1980s Japan, a society of supreme confidence, and contrast it with modern Japan, a society that has really lost its mojo. What I think happened is that the depression of the 1990s so thoroughly shook their confidence that they still haven't recovered.
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.
I'm not sure 15 years is enough to look back. I'm struggling to think of a time since the 80s that some formerly strong areas of British culture were vibrant and interesting.
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.
Well, British TV in the 1990s was great.
I'd expect the cultural stagnation to lead the economic. The article is clearly political but it is pointing out some really obvious long term trends. The fact that the UK elite haven't been able to grapple with them at any point in the last few decades showcases that, as a culture, they've lost the spark of competence.
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.
Type of article: country X or company Y or city Z has it bad for such and such decisions, policies, culture. My rule of thumb for these kind of articles: if they don't mention external factors they are not worth reading.
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.
"But it remains doubtful that [Labour] will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were."
This one sentence in the introduction belies an article not entirely based on factual evidence.
If only there was some factual evidence to point to to suggest were wrong and Labour might do better than the Tories.
> With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison, France has double the area of UK, and more of it is usable.
But the UK is nowhere near full in terms of housing. The Netherlands is the densest large country in Europe, and rocks double the population density of the UK. Despite this, the two countries have a roughly equal ratio of people to homes (~2.2). It's not as if a country actually needs that much land to build homes - humans simply don't take up that much space in terms of housing.
But the Netherlands are in a huge housing crisis at the moment.
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.
This doesn't really seem relevant since no one is disputing whether the UK as a whole has enough space for more houses. The relevant comparisons are Paris vs London and then the various 2nd tier cities in the countries. Paris has a MUCH HIGHER population density than London, in part due to the housing mix, e.g. Parisian mansion blocks.
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.
Funny how everyone in the West was dependent on Russia si much. People weren't thinking at all?
They were thinking...about the backhanders. Look at Cyprus, gateway for dirty Russian money in to the EU, swimming in Russian money, all sanctioned by the government and EU thanks to all the bribes they receive
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14 years of Tory rule.
Which, since these people are from the CPS, they would have supported by the way.
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TL;DR: you need energy if you want to build/transform/produce/transport things
I once held a British passport, I'm glad I now hold another.
Have you renounced your British citizenship? Couldn't you keep both?
"Couldn't you keep both?"
Why would I want to? Did you actually read the story?
You can have British citizenship whilst holding another citizenship, unless that second citizenship prevents you from holding another one.
The treaties the UK has with Ireland even gift anyone born in Northern Ireland with dual citizenship off the bat.
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.
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].
[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 "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?
feels like the government need to set the tone for the rental market first then both owners and builders can decide if they want to participate.
"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.
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?
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?
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.
>I've been to my GP half a dozen times in the last year, always same day.
Good for you, but I think that is absolutely not the typical UK experience.
> GP half a dozen times in the last year,
you going to GP every two months? Usually you get referred to a specialist if you are that sick.
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.
The local variation is incredible.
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.
It's the national religion.
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 may also be true that there's a national decline, I'm just saying to be very cautious about getting swept up in the idea. For instance, apparently America needs to be Made Great Again, facts notwithstanding.
> 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation
Its the same in USA if you want to see a specialist. There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.
> There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.
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.
Same in Scotland. And our tax burden is even higher (if you’re a middle or high earner at least)
> real stench of decline in England at the moment
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.
(Edit: typos.)
Another factor is that Quantitative Easing (QE) kind of works for the US, but not for the UK: https://youtube.com/watch?v=goA9kkaDfTE / https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/goA9kkaDfTE
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.
> incredibly restrictive rules.
Like what?
Are you referring to the self-regulation at Grenfell Tower?
OP is more likely to be referring to e.g. Green Belt planning restrictions.
The thames tunnel costing as much in planning as Norway spent actually building the longest tunnel in the world. Construction projects are so fraught with regulatory burden that most of these costs are going to legal fees. It's not that they're not spending money. It's that public infrastructure is a money pit of legal fees
It was regulations that made the cladding be installed in the first place, I thought?
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.
The US has a more robust system for supplying infrastructure through private investment - including in the energy sector.
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.
The US has one of the largest freight rail networks in the world. We don't have as big of a passenger rail investment because nobody would ride most of it
England is a small country, smaller than the US state of Georgia. It's much easier to maintain way shorter roads with its much higher population density. Nonetheless, the rural roads in the US are generally of good to excellent quality.
> You say that but the UK has not experienced the kind of energy disruptions that, for example, the Texans have since the 1970s.
The energy disruptions the UK had in the 70s were how Thatcher came into power.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Day_Week
The article you link to explains that the Three Day Week led to the collapse of the Conservative gov in 74, and while Thatcher became leader, she did not come into power until 79. If the power outages led to anything, it was to a Labour gov.
(this is unrelated to the correct statement that there were widespread outages throughout the 70s)
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We ran the empire with a lot less civil servants than we have now: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/uk-government-did-we-ru...
In the census in 1921 there were over 150000 British Subjects in India. Over 40000 of them were women, so we are not talking just army.
In 1891 there were 238,409 with english as their mother tongue (before the census broke this out).
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Civil_Service
It takes more than the civil service to run a colony.
It is quite curious both you and the other replier jumped to that conclusion, and says quite a lot about the current British malaise.
I’m not British, I’m just not ignorant of Indian history. At partition the entire British population of India was about 100,000 including the army, civil service, civilians and family of same.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence
As long as residential homes are a vehicle for investors rather than _living in_ (by the owner) you will have a problem.
Why not enable a dynamic rental sector so people can move around the country to better jobs? Feels mean to trap people.
Agreed. Thankfully we know what it takes to make housing a crappy investment vehicle. Build more housing. Build so much housing that returns on capital invested are flat, live Tokyo since 2000, or negative, like Seattle over the last five years.
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.
Note that in France, unlike on your first home, you don't pay taxes on your second home. See e.g. https://chasebuchanan.com/property-tax-in-france-residential....
I loved this paper, it's full of new ideas.
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?
The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished. The head of state is the child of the previous head of state. The House of Lords is still a thing. Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal.
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.
> Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal
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/
I suggest this exercise: Pick a random person from Queen Victoria's court. Look up where their descendants are today.
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).
Try Norman times:
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...
If you read that paper carefully (it's been a while so I might have this wrong), I think you'll see that while they're using Norman vs not-Norman surnames, the comparison is between Victorian and contemporary wealth and life expectancy data.
(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).
That's probably true, but it's a quite separate problem (it's about power rather than attitudes).
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.
I don't think people care what school you went to, but the fact remains that the UK has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in Europe.
I don't think that's actually a fact. I don't know what figures you're using, but eyeballing the Global Social Mobility Index puts the UK as pretty middling in Europe. Less mobile than France or Germany, more so than Italy, Spain, or Poland.
It's below average, and lower than all of Scandinavia, Austria etc. Yes, it beats Southern Europe and ex-communist countries.
My source was the Sutton Trust and Oxera.
> The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished.
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)
>> 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.
It also helps to get an internship if your Dad is literally the editor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Mackie
Isn't socio-economic status more heritable in the US than the UK? In the UK, inheritance tax is 40% and there's probably more redistributive taxation in general.
One of the exceptions in the US seems to be around the White House. For a while, when Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2008, it was possible that the US would have had a member of the Bush or Clinton families as either VP or President every year from 1981 thorough to 2017. Such political families are not unique to the US, of course, and the UK has a fair few, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family
With that, Bill Clinton has very humble ancestry, as does Hillary; both trace back to traveling salesmen, small business owners, coal miners, such kind of folks.
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.
Hillary is not linked hereditarily to Bill, so really you’re talking about 3 people- Bush Sr and his 2 kids.
Political dynasties in the US are notable because they’re uncommon, rather than part of the law as in the UK.
Not sure who could be down voting you, because you're right. If your parents didn't send you to the right school to learn the right plummy accent, you don't stand much chance.
I don't think that's really true, outside some niche cultural arenas. Sure, if you're at a posh member's club or a party of aristocrats people might be impressed by your lineage.
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.
Revolutionary France never made it across the channel... On the other hand, this significantly dismiss the UK contributions to the world on global trade and during the industrial revolution.
Britain had multiple revolutions earlier on. There was The Anarchy, Magna Carta, Cromwell, and 1688 when Britain decided to be Dutch for a while. The Declaration of the Rights of Man was inspired by Enlightenment philosophy, and a lot of that was English (or Scottish). The general mood was to look at the French as latecomers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_coffeehouses_in_the_17...
I've been here for 5 years and am almost thirty years old. I still have people regularly asking me where I went to secondary school. They are obsessed with class.
I've been here for 30 years, and am 30 years old, and I don't think anyone has ever asked me where I went to secondary school.
What kind of people ask you that?
I somehow keep ending up working at places where 90% of the employees grew up with staff in the house. Dozens of people with wikipedia pages about their families.
So, people who grew up with staff in the house are obsessed with class. That's perhaps disappointing, but not really surprising.
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.
>Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up.
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.
The same last names are mentioned in the context of many US elections. US is not as far removed as you might think.
"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."
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.
We have fully embraced the parasite economy in the UK, however unlike big American tech we feed on one another. The safest business for a long time has been property, poor quality reno-flips and rentals, which adds nothing except burden to the people who might bring foreign income through being entrepreneurial.
Long essay.
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.
>it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area
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.
It's hard to find any European country that didn't have any government projects that went wildly over budget or were very much delayed. So I don't think this is a UK specific problem, and it doesn't explain why Britain has stagnated compared to most of the EU.
Transport projects seem to be particularly expensive these days in Anglo countries compared to European countries. For instance, we currently have a planned short tunnel in the UK (under the Thames but not in London itself) where the actual planning process has so far cost $400m.
Stronger property rights tend to backfire in the 2020s as NIMBYs have emerged everywhere and do their best to block anything around them, usually by weaponizing environmental laws.
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.
As for Wales ... This pattern repeats itself all over Europe. Only a few places "made" the transition from industrial settings to current economy.
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.
You'd think that exactly because it's such a common pattern, there would be best practices how to help those communities overcome. Yet, the only pattern I see is mainstream politics ignoring it, locals struggling, and rightwing winning them over. It's so obvious that you really have to ask yourself whether there's some hidden agenda somewhere in there. Just like mainstream politics ignoring the younger generations - both as plans for them and as ways to communicate with them - and again who's winning? The rightwing. It's everything in the open.
The way rail project costs are totalled up is different from one country to another -what costs are included and excluded.
In other words this website is making enormous oversimplifications and not bothering to explain or justify them.
How can there be a 360, 000 page document to build something. That number seems so outrageously high. Is the font size massive or something?
I live in the catchment area. The amount of consultations etc they have to hold to mollify the general anti-growth fanatics and newt-fanciers is insane: https://nationalhighways.citizenspace.com/ltc/lower-thames-c...
If most of that are technical drafts going down to smallest details, I can imagine how it could be sort of reasonable. Large things like, say, nuclear power plants or huge ships have literally millions of parts.
I believe this Map Men video has the answer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWZ9ZVRQ0Nw
Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
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.
The question is, why did it cost significantly more to produce that document than it cost Norway to just build an even bigger tunnel? Pages might be misleading, but cash is not.
> Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.
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.
The main reason Britain is failing is it wiped out its industrial base.
Without that, it cant build anything effectively.
The UK's manufacturing sector is comparable to France's in size.
The list of issues that the article list seems very ad hoc. Some are compared to EU countries, but apparently only where this makes the UK come out worst.
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.
"These are not just disconnected observations", says the article. Yeah, but they might be actually. For instance the one about France producing more electricity is because France famously over-invested in nuclear power stations and that's why its electricity price recently went negative. Meanwhile the UK probably needs to increase supply slightly, but the comparison is misleading.
The fact it's a whole site dedicated to this article means there's some angle to it. Would be interesting to know who paid for this.
One of the authors is from the center for policy studies, which is a thinktank that was founded by Margaret Thatcher and 2 others. The other two authors seem to be the founder and one of the main contributors to https://worksinprogress.co/ which describes itself as "a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world."
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.
This section really shows where they're coming from:
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...)
> who stands to benefit from government investments in largescale infrastructure projects
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?
This is one of the worst comments I've read on HackerNews and engenders the decline in critical thinking that has become so pervasive here in recent years.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulverism
What an ugly, impoverished view of the world. Someone sees that the UK is poorer than it would be if economic policy wasn’t a disaster and wants to publicise that so it can be improved and tens of millions of people’s lives improved and you’re looking for an “angle”.
Poverty is bad. There’s the angle.
Weird how Western Europe stagnated after 1990, only Germany get some more “gas” for growth thanks to CEE and cheap energy. now it seems that importing tens of millions of low skilled refugees and workers with high social benefits is killing any innovation while taxing middle class and all high skilled Europeans prefer to move to US or even east Asia.
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.
Europe failed to keep its bureaucracy at bay.
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.
On a tangent, what is astonishing to me as an outsider is the cultural stagnation. Even in times of economic decline Britain was a cultural powerhouse. Modern music, theater, cinema, tv, literature, sports, etc. were permanently shaped by post-war Britain (especially in Europe). Whatever the cultural norm dictated by the behemoth that is the USA, Britain always had something new, something fresh to give. There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.
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)
I don't think it's entirely off-topic, though I only have a vague sense of the connection. I knew 1980s Japan, a society of supreme confidence, and contrast it with modern Japan, a society that has really lost its mojo. What I think happened is that the depression of the 1990s so thoroughly shook their confidence that they still haven't recovered.
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.
I'm not sure 15 years is enough to look back. I'm struggling to think of a time since the 80s that some formerly strong areas of British culture were vibrant and interesting.
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.
Well, British TV in the 1990s was great.
I'd expect the cultural stagnation to lead the economic. The article is clearly political but it is pointing out some really obvious long term trends. The fact that the UK elite haven't been able to grapple with them at any point in the last few decades showcases that, as a culture, they've lost the spark of competence.
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.
Type of article: country X or company Y or city Z has it bad for such and such decisions, policies, culture. My rule of thumb for these kind of articles: if they don't mention external factors they are not worth reading.
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.
"But it remains doubtful that [Labour] will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were."
This one sentence in the introduction belies an article not entirely based on factual evidence.
If only there was some factual evidence to point to to suggest were wrong and Labour might do better than the Tories.
> With almost identical population sizes, the UK has under 30 million homes, while France has around 37 million. 800,000 British families have second homes compared to 3.4 million French families.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison, France has double the area of UK, and more of it is usable.
But the UK is nowhere near full in terms of housing. The Netherlands is the densest large country in Europe, and rocks double the population density of the UK. Despite this, the two countries have a roughly equal ratio of people to homes (~2.2). It's not as if a country actually needs that much land to build homes - humans simply don't take up that much space in terms of housing.
But the Netherlands are in a huge housing crisis at the moment.
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.
This doesn't really seem relevant since no one is disputing whether the UK as a whole has enough space for more houses. The relevant comparisons are Paris vs London and then the various 2nd tier cities in the countries. Paris has a MUCH HIGHER population density than London, in part due to the housing mix, e.g. Parisian mansion blocks.
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.
Funny how everyone in the West was dependent on Russia si much. People weren't thinking at all?
They were thinking...about the backhanders. Look at Cyprus, gateway for dirty Russian money in to the EU, swimming in Russian money, all sanctioned by the government and EU thanks to all the bribes they receive
14 years of Tory rule.
Which, since these people are from the CPS, they would have supported by the way.
TL;DR: you need energy if you want to build/transform/produce/transport things
I once held a British passport, I'm glad I now hold another.
Have you renounced your British citizenship? Couldn't you keep both?
"Couldn't you keep both?"
Why would I want to? Did you actually read the story?
You can have British citizenship whilst holding another citizenship, unless that second citizenship prevents you from holding another one.
The treaties the UK has with Ireland even gift anyone born in Northern Ireland with dual citizenship off the bat.
Why, and which one?