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.
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.