The FPTP system essentially means that elections are decided by a small number of people living in marginal seats, that usually straddle poor urban and wealthy rural areas and so that is who (successful) politician's messages and policies are targeted at. It's also how you get the weird situation that on a lot of social and economic issues both major political parties are often to the right of the public.
Add to that the dominance of the Oxbridge PPE brigade in both parties, and you end up with them all drawing on a small, outdated set of policy options (basically what they were taught as undergrads), that don't really work in the modern world.
Finally we still have a monarch, and it turns out the last one (God bless 'er) had a large number of kaws modified in her and her family's favour.
So yeah. Sclerotic socio polotical system
Post-WWII USA was both a period of big government and tremendous economic growth.
The government is just people deciding to come together and delegate power. It’s not something separate from people. Why can’t the “human spirit moving things forward” express itself through the public sector?
Power concentrates to a few. Sometimes very few, as in North Korea. Sometimes a slightly broader few, as in America. But it's always a few. The rest are acted upon by government.
Also it's pretty jokey to say that government is people delegating power. The only reason it needs to be delegated is because it was seized in the first place - by government!
The classical liberal movement was, throughout the Western world, a mighty libertarian “revolution” against what we might call the Old Order—the ancien régime which had dominated its subjects for centuries. This regime had, in the early modern period beginning in the sixteenth century, imposed an absolute central State and a king ruling by divine right on top of an older, restrictive web of feudal land monopolies and urban guild controls and restrictions.
The result was a Europe stagnating under a crippling web of controls, taxes, and monopoly privileges to produce and sell conferred by central (and local) governments upon their favorite producers. This alliance of the new bureaucratic, war-making central State with privileged merchants—an alliance to be called "mercantilism" by later historians—and with a class of ruling feudal landlords constituted the Old Order against which the new movement of classical liberals and radicals arose and rebelled in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
-- For a New Liberty / by Murray N. Rothbard
Today we have a much worse alliance of government and privileged monopolies, corporatism. The few have decided that the companies are "responsible" for doing the decisions for us. Effectively removing any personal freedom the people might have, freedoms that most countries had in their constitutions for centuries are today being removed by government-backed corporations, as-if they don't need to exist at all.
I forgot about the famously non-existent ancient Egyptian and modern Chinese governments.
We do know about the free economic zones in modern China, which had very very limited government. So these only reinforce my point.
It has been called the first command economy [1][2].
[1] https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-c...
[2] https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=318&v=DiG0LomEptE&...
Arguably it was the new power blocks associated with industry that destabilized Tsarist Russia, not that WWI helped.
Look at France and Germany: industry, tech, lots of "producing" businesses thrive. Paris has even overtaken London in finance. There's simply more ambition, innovation and energy.
Monetary exploitation is the most effective means of bondage and most widely accepted form to control over a population because it is required for any transaction that doesn't get solely resolved by violence, in doing so you can essentially tax, govern, and structure Society without the need or expense of an occupying presence just the occasional military operation to remind them of said colonization: up until 2020 or so the CFA was used in 8 African nations and had a dire strain on those nation's people [0]. You should listen to Francis Ngannou's talk about the effective bondage African nations were operating under French rule because of the CFA that made trade between even neighboring African nations impossible.
Colonialism takes on many faces, but as the saying goes: He who controls the money supply of a nation controls the nation.
> go and have a read about the CFA franc
Agreed, also look into why France has had continual conflicts in the Ivory Coast to see how it achieved this.
0: https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/23/africa/france-stops-use-of-cf...
citation please?
in terms of finacial centres: NYC is first, followed by London (and they swap places every so often)
down at number 15 or so is Paris
Apple's market cap alone is larger than the entire LSE, and Paris exchange
Using the Paris exchange overtaking the London exchange as a barometer for broader overtaking of the finance industry is akin to saying that a person is taking over the F1 title from someone after beating them in a bike race around their house.
London Loses Crown of Biggest European Stock Market to Paris - 14 November 2022
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-14/london-lo...
Ever noticed that the L in LIBOR stands for London?
Interest rates and money (FX) (money can also refer to short term rates but KISS) is very much still London's thing especially relative to other European cities.
Aside: French engineering talent is massively underappreciated.
Currently the UK system is not "pay to play", if this changed tomorrow someone will be happily own the asset sacrificing a true percentage. In fact Tax is an idea our bankers want to see more of, the outspoken ones that is.
Our UK assets are still worth a pretty penny and last I checked it's kinda difficult to annex physical property to an offshore country. The political classes job is selling this country to the highest bidder as fast the public allows them to get away with and they plan to be in power for a very long time with the help of the media.
Brexit was a disaster for their economy and it will take decades for the UK to stop feeling the pain.
They are a bit bureaucratic for sure.
I don't think UK people are inheritantly less ambitious than anywhere else, but the very low social mobility here has always dragged down potential for some, while the punishing austerity and lack of investment over the past decade has limited other people's opportunities further.
I do think it's a nation on the decline in many ways.
However, I met so many ambitious immigrants who came to the UK to work hard and make a good life for themselves.
I believe these people will continue to keep the UK humming along.
It might not be a mighty outsized county economically but they'll be fine.
In PPP, Paris, Warsaw and Prague are roughly on par. UK looks like a poor-ish country with one rich city.
It’s a big world out there with a lot of variety and the appropriate destination depends on a lot of individual factors.
Only one of these issue is UK specific tho; so either your fears extend to the rest of Europe and/or the western world, or you can pinpoint the cause of your anxiety.
Source:
https://www.ft.com/content/f752a1ad-4a23-408f-a549-4909974c6...
As for fears for the rest of Europe – I don't doubt that the rest of Europe has problems. My worries are confined to the UK because that's where I live. (To be clear, this isn't me saying I don't care about other countries. But there's only so many problems a person can concern themselves with.) I think the country could very well cease to exist unless we figure a lot of problems out.
The three reasons I listed are the ones that people keep citing. I actually suspect that the UK's problems are longer term and more fundamental. I don't think it's related to either party, either. The Conservative Party of the last few years has not been good for the country, but I'm not convinced Labour will be able to fix our deep, societal problems, either.
Do you mean something like Scotland going their own way? Or something more dramatic (think revolution)?
Yes, exactly this – the four countries of the UK going their own way and the UK ceasing to be.
(It's my personal opinion – people will of course have their own take, and good reasons for having their views – that such a happening would be a devastating event.)
But the severity of UK's problems are solely of their own making and are pretty much entirely due to Brexit, and the fallout from Brexit that caused by a string of ill-prepared "leaders".
That said, one reason I'm hopeful about the UK is that, compared to US politics, there is much less "tribalism", much more fluidity among how people will vote, and more willingness in your parties to vote for pragmatic policies when strict ideology fails. In the US most voters couldn't conceive of voting for the opposite party, such that most elections in the US come down to turnout and a small sliver of maybe 10ish percent of "swing voters".
In the UK, by comparison, after the sheer idiocy of Liz Truss, she was quickly canned, a much more realistic/pragmatic PM was installed (even if one disagrees with his overall political stance), and policies quickly changed. Also, at least in polling, there were huge swings in sentiment against Conservatives and towards Labour because Conservatives were (correctly in my opinion) being blamed for their massive fuckup.
I can't see the equivalent happening in the US.
Pretty much all the Euro Area (of which the UK was not a part of) sees similar numbers. According to [0], it was at 15.5% in October, from 13.3 in September.
You're making a very slippery argument here. You started by asserting that things are worse in the UK than elsewhere in Europe and this is due to Brexit, but you didn't name any specific way in which things are worse. So you were called out on it because this discussion is about a single data point - food price inflation - which is not different to elsewhere. Now you're saying well no, but if things were worse then it'd be the fault of Brexit.
HN discussions on anything UK related seem to always be like this nowadays. Intellectual curiousity is dead, killed by motivated reasoning. "Things are worse, I won't say what, but if anything is worse, then it's clearly Brexit and not anything else". That's not a valid argument, it's not even an attempt to lay the groundwork for an argument. We get it - you wish no country ever left the EU - but if you want to blame leaving then you need to show a causal relation, not simply assert that the EU can only ever make things better in any conceivable capacity.
The France CPI increase was 6.2% for the same period [2].
That is a huge difference for similar developed economies.
1. https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/bull....
2. https://www.rateinflation.com/inflation-rate/france-inflatio....
The difference is caused by France more heavily subsidizing/capping energy costs. It reflects a short term deviation in market policy triggered by gas shortages, not some fundamental divergence.
The UK is simply doing worse WRT inflation than any comparable country, and nobody, not even Conservative UK politicians, really debates this.
According to [0], the UK isn't doing that much worse than Germany (12.2 vs 12.6%). It's doing same as Norway and better than the Netherlands, Belgium, the Czech Republic and way better than Sweden. The latter being barely better than Ukraine, which is actually at war. Now I agree those are "smaller countries", so maybe not comparable?
Some "peripheral countries" are doing great (Romania), others terribly (Hungary). This is to say that values are over the place. I don't see any emerging trend that would allow easily to pinpoint the reason prices are going up in this or that country but not in the other.
The issue with Germany's decision, wrt to nuclear, is that it affects everybody because of the way electricity prices are set in the EU (priced for the most expensive production).
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/consumer-price-ind...
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/inflation-rate
Netherlands: 14.3%
UK: 11.1%
Germany: 10.4%
Euro area: 10.6%
Italy: 11.8%
etc.
"The UK is simply doing worse WRT inflation than any comparable country, and nobody, not even Conservative UK politicians, really debates this."
Nobody debates this because outside of the HN anti-UK bubble nobody is claiming it, and nobody is claiming it because it isn't true. This is what I mean by HN discussions about the UK being hot garbage for the last few years. Way too many posters are willing to simply make things up in order to attack the UK.
The leaders weren't just I'll prepared with Brexit, they head-on despite the consequences, since they were chasing the "EU-bad" popularity votes by pointing at the EU as the scapegoat for the UKs own self inflicted internal issues. Now the leaders have no more outside scapegoats other than COVID and Putin.
Well, arguably, they kind off got carried away by the thing they created; Brexiters pre-referendum were usually advocating some sort of soft Brexit (albeit often with conflicting demands which made it impossible; "single market access but we don't need to follow European rules" sort of thing), then there was May's Brexit which looked 'hard' at the time but soft compared to what actually happened, then Boris's Brexit, and then Truss wanted to make it _worse_. All of these things were worse than being in the EU, but the degree of badness intensified as the leaders of the movement were captured by the movement itself.
Well yeah, the population voted to jump off a cliff, and the leaders (Boris) cheered them on and promised them the most spectacular cliff jump ever just to shove it to the EU.
In a way this is populist democracy in action and is a lesson for future generations.
However, the next decade or two might be quite difficult. To be fair, there is some justice in it. You (collectively, as a country, not you personally) cannot keep voting for the same failed ideologies and then complain when the consequences come. This needs to be the end of Toryism as it currently exists. Conservatism in itself is fine, but the combination of chumocracy, alternative realities, and rabid nationalism is toxic and destabilising more than the UK.
[edit] just look at the peerage thing, or the way prime ministers have been chosen by party members. This just cannot go on for long if you want to keep the pretence of a democracy.
To me this seems to be the product of Blair-era Labour, which gutted the country by shipping jobs and industrial capacity to Eastern Europe and China.
Populist nationalism is rising throughout the western world. It’s a reaction to the failings of globalist liberalism, not the cause of those problems.
Blaming the decline of industrial capacity is correct, blaming globalism is wrong-headed. Continental European economies that have buckled the trend of deindustrialization have done so precisely because they are competitive on global markets.
No, that definitely was the 80s.
Eastern Europe wasn't open to any serious trade in the 80s because it was behind the iron curtain. What rayiner means is that the UK under Labor didn't engage transitional immigration controls like other EU countries did, which combined with being an English-language-first market meant that once the ex-Soviet states were able to join the EU much larger numbers of people migrated from eastern Europe to the UK than in other countries, and then started competing/taking the lower paid jobs. This was a deliberate decision by Labour.
They came to power 12 years ago when interest rates were <1% and they've cut investment in every industry, from Wind Power to Tidal energyto basic infrasteucture like an HDVC cable to iceland to import cheap geothermal power.
They have sold profitable state assets like the green investment bank, and essential security like gas storage.
The office for fiscal responsebility has calculated that these cuts have cost us hundreds of billions in the current energy crisis.
It has also been the most law-breaking government in living memory - they illegally deported thousands of british citizens in the Windrush scandal, had party in the middle of lockdown at number 10, to the PPE/covid eqipment contract handed out without tender to friends and family, Lordship titles for friends and dobors, breaking laws on political campaigns finance in Brexit referendum and taking godgy russian donations.
Combine that with the fact that they recently proposed a law to ankle tag 'repeat protestors' without a court process or any evidence of a crime.
I genuinely fear that UK is becoming like Russia or the inside, but with better marketing.
Was there any alternative to 6B people in the developing world offering to sell their labor and environment for less than the 1B people in the developed world? Arbitrage opportunities cannot go on forever without being outcompeted.
The alternative is to make sure that you provide a mechanism to bring the best and brightest to your country instead of coddling the least productive at home.
It’s not popular politically so we promise coal miners another generation of work instead.
Importing other countries’ elites seems like a bad thing for the proles both at home, and the country losing their best and brightest.
Seems like a better alternative would be to do the exact opposite: force elites to stay in their home country and make it better.
Absolutely not! We need people in position to make decisions to see the world and understand it, not be insular nationalists because they know no other country. We need more people high up in government who are familiar with the mainstream ideas and cultural quirks of other countries, and we need more contact between cultures. Having people go to other countries is vital.
You also want enough of them to come back home, ideally (though not all of them, expats are still useful from a soft power point of view), but keeping them and preventing them from going abroad in the first place is really bad and counter-productive.
There is a new book describing research that shows that even after four generations, immigrants retain about half of the attitudes of their home countries: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=35594.
A fundamental feature of American culture is that it idolizes the “common man.” When you allow elites from other countries to immigrate to the US, you’re importing the cultural elitism from those countries, and destroying American culture in the process.
My family immigrated from Bangladesh to northern Virginia in 1989. When I was growing up, it was an egalitarian, decent place. But we were a wave of elite immigrants, and now 30 years later it’s unrecognizable. Much wealthier, sure. There’s tech jobs and elite immigrants to fill them. But the culture has changed completely. And what’s the upside for the people who were already there? Do they really benefit from Google employees pricing them out of housing, etc?
New Labour was a short interlude. No, the problems did not start this decade. You can see the roots in the 1980s, when London was more or less set up as Europe’s financial district at the expense of the rest of the country. Of course, some roots run even deeper, like the Empire thing and the whole class structure.
> To me this seems to be the product of Blair-era Labour, which gutted the country by shipping jobs and industrial capacity to Eastern Europe and China.
They did not help, true (and the Iraq war was much worse in terms of consequences, it killed any alternative to the conservatives for a decade and amplified the divisions without the Labour Party). But it’s disingenuous to blame them for the country’s de-industrialisation.
> Populist nationalism is rising throughout the western world. It’s a reaction to the failings of globalist liberalism, not the cause of those problems.
Populist nationalism is really not a new thing, it’s a tool that is used quite regularly. What’s almost unique to the UK and the US is how it corrupted a mainstream party, thus creeping into the heart of government. True, it’s worse in Hungary and Poland (and Russia), but that’s not setting the bar very high.
They are not in the same place as the UK. I don't the UK did anything different than what was the liberal consensus of what to do at the time.
> UK manufacturing employment fell especially steeply in the early 1980s during a recession triggered by a high exchange rate and high interest rates. The job losses during these years were documented in particular by Townsend (1983) and Fothergill and Guy (1991) and the process of deindustrialization more generally by Martin and Rowthorn (1986). The recession of the early 1990s added further major job losses (Gudgin, 1995). Thereafter, manufacturing output largely stagnated and manufacturing employment continued to slide even though the UK economy as a whole enjoyed 15 years of sustained economic growth.
What’s notable about New Labour was how manufacturing job losses continued even during a long period of sustained economic growth. Finance and knowledge sectors grew while manufacturing sectors declined.
Moreover, as to China specifically, the UK had little trade with China until 2000: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53468925.amp
Likewise immigration really got turbocharged under New Labour: https://www.bbc.com/news/election-2015-32162123
When evaluating Blair's impact it's also important to look at regional shifts, with money and jobs becoming more and more concentrated around London at the expense of the periphery. You can argue about the causes of these shifts, but their existence is not in question.
I don't know for sure what the main cause of our current problems is, but I know that it's not a single issue. Brexit, Covid-19 and the war with Russia – not one of these issues alone is the cause of our problems.
My hope for the country rests in the fact that it still has wonderful, tough, resourceful people in it, and that it has survived worse catastrophes than this in the past, and come out okay.