This website makes some claims about what has caused both growth and decline that are pretty contentious.
I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment in public services like creating the NHS and the building of council housing.
They baffelingly attribute yhat growth to the Conservative Govrernment of the 1930s rather than the post war labour government.
Similarly this page attributes growth in the 80s to the Conservative government privatisation program. Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.
I think a perfect example of this is our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders and now we have a disaster with shit being poured into all our rivers and costs to households rising dramatically.
Edit: I read on and they use the drop in passengers in the railway in 1965 as an argument against nationalisation of the rail service, somehow neglecting to mention the beeching cuts! That is incredibly missleading given 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure at that time.
> Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.
I agree, this is pretty wild and made me immediately look up who was behind this. Conservative think-tanks gotta conservative think-tank.
It's growing steadily through the 60's-2000's, has a notable dip[1] at the 2008 financial crisis, then starts growing again until just about 2015. And it's been flat since.
The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.
[1] More pronounced than comparable nations, to be fair. The UK was always more dependent on finance.
>The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.
But we’ve imported millions of people that speak different languages since 2015 , why hasn’t line gone up?
I think this is sarcasm, but just to spell it out: this is a causation/correlation fallacy. Immigration is a result of global trade, not its cause. Brexit killed the trade part without actually doing anything about immigration policy.
The incredibly stupid part of all this is that the conservative government insisted on wrecking the trade side because reducing immigration was deemed more important, and then entirely voluntarily issued a lot of work permits.
(without even getting into the more obligatory areas of immigration like refugees and marriages)
One of the authors is from the Centre for Policy Studies. Another is from the Adam Smith Institute. These are the gang of shady right-wing think tanks that brought us Truss and Kwarteng. That tells you everything you need to know about their economic competence.
Their solution is to allow private funds to fund essential infrastructure, it seems.
Which to me just rings hollow, or at best, only a part of the answer. They're correct on some aspects of it, other parts they just gloss over. IE They say that there has been an "erosion" of the industrial base in the UK, while actually the blame could be laid at the feet of Thatcher's service-led policies.
They are not wrong on that thet just make the same error the socialisys do in thinking that is the solution for all time. The solution foe all time ia to both realize the end state of a free market is monopoly and the end state of a state monopoly is stagnation so one needs to focus the government on being proactive and allowing both to compete and put the finger of government on the scale to favor private when public is stagnating and favor public when private ia monopolizing.
Gotta love the fact they go “Hey, look how great France’s infrastructure is.” and then immediately advocate for yet more private infrastructure deals without mentioning that France’s infrastructure was largely government funded (using those taxes they seem to hate).
> From 2010 to the summer of 2024, Britain was run by Conservative-led or Conservative Governments. The Conservatives are the traditional party of business, and in the 1930s and 1980s they pushed through reform programmes that successfully renewed Britain’s economy. Virtually any Conservative minister from the past fourteen years would speak warmly about that heritage if asked, and would express the hope of being its inheritor. And yet, with honourable exceptions, the governments of the last fourteen years failed in this vocation. Failing systems remained unreformed, continuing to stifle Britain’s prosperity. Today Britain is ruled by a Labour Government that recognises this failure to build, and which has articulated high ambitions for changing this. But it remains doubtful that they will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were.
Depending on the specifics, that sounds congruent with some of Adam Smith's economic theories so it's not surprising to see such arguments used, especially if some of the authors are from the Adam Smith Institute.
His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.
It's more likely a sincerely held belief than an attempt at misdirection.
> His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.
That theory is predicated on the market being composed of buyers and sellers of broadly similar financial power. This is no longer the case in most markets, certainly not in the UK as far as ordinary people or most small companies are concerned.
Yes. Markets pursue the interest of wealth-weighted humans, not evenly-weighted humans. Disguising "wealth weighted value" under the concept of "value" (which, colloquially, has a more even weight) is the propaganda coup of the century.
What happened wasn't primarily due to her budget. It was due to a meltdown in the pension sector triggered by over-leverage, arguably caused by the BoE not doing its regulatory duties correctly.
Don't get me wrong, a budget that cuts taxes without cutting spending is no good. But the idea that what happened was a direct consequence of that doesn't make much sense as it had been telegraphed a long way in advance, giving the markets plenty of time to adjust. The central bank changed monetary policy a day before the mini-budget, and changes in that are kept secret until the moment of announcement. Additionally, UK spending has since blown through what the mini-budget would have created without any sudden market turmoil.
Regulators failed to anticipate the dangers that borrowing by pension schemes posed to the stability of the UK’s financial system, according to a parliamentary report into the turmoil that hit the gilt markets following Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini” Budget in September last year.
Pension schemes suffered multibillion-pound losses after they were forced to sell assets to ensure that complex derivative-linked strategies — known as liability driven investments (LDI) — did not implode when gilt yields jumped as investors rejected the then prime minister’s economic strategy.
Also, Truss is basically correct that the UK needs more growth. Disagreeing on her tactics is reasonable, disagreeing on her goals isn't. She was unfortunately attempting to create growth from a position of weakness: in a party that didn't want to do anything hard like cutting spending, and with a fragile/over-leveraged financial sector.
Pull the other one. Only some of the tax cuts had been telegraphed in advance. Abolishing the top rate of income tax and cutting the basic rate early hadn’t been. They ignored all the warnings they were given and sidelined the OBR. The Truss/Kwarteng budget directly crashed the economy and trying to pretend otherwise is some serious revisionism.
The committee report only looked at the regulator. To be sure, the regulator and the pensions industry should have done more. But the idea that Truss and Kwarteng are blameless innocents in the whole fiasco is ridiculous.
That's my point. Crazy economists are not responsible for the damage, it's the elected people who listened to them and followed through. To create an intentionally extreme parallel, imagine they have chosen a group of idk, satanists. Would you blame the group of satanists for being satanists, or the people in charge of a country who contacted a group of satanists for advice?
Of course, the second most upvoted comment is an ad personam dismissal that doesn't even engage with its arguments. How's that for HN-level intelligent discourse?
the parent comment already explained how extremely deceptive and dishonest the article is so what else is there to add? this is like complaining about someone not wanting to bother refuting every individual thing a pathological liar has said when their lies are so obvious
None of what the website says is actually contentious outside of Labour/left wing circles. Economic growth isn't that complicated when coming from behind - but as they say, it's hard if there isn't enough energy or housing.
> I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment
I don't think anyone with a strong grip on economics or British history would argue that. The fact is that post-war rationing continued longer in the UK than it did in Germany, the country that actually lost the war, and Germany recovered far faster in other ways too. Decades of very left wing governments left the UK in a terrible state by the 1970s relative to its peers - it was called the sick man of Europe and needed an IMF bailout - a situation fixed only by Thatcher. This history is well known not only in the UK but internationally. The website provides supporting evidence if you aren't familiar with this.
> our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders
That this sort of absurdly false belief gets repeated unchallenged so often in Britain is exactly why it's falling behind. Thames Tideway, one of the largest engineering projects in Europe and the biggest upgrade to London's sewage system ever, is organized and financed by the private sector (pension funds, Allianz, Amber IG, Dalmore Capital and DIF).
It's literally being built right now and yet you claim the private sector hasn't invested. The reality is the opposite. As the website points out, British governments have historically struggled to do capital investments because the moment money becomes available the unions always take it all. Only the private sector has sufficiently good labour relations to actually build things and the water industry is a good example of that in action. Compare to the NHS where the government has regularly tried to ringfence money for capital investments (repairing leaking hospital roofs etc), only to see its direct orders ignored and the money used for pay rewards instead.
> 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure
The stations were axed due to long term decline in passenger numbers, a situation that reversed immediately upon privatization:
I'm confused at your point - I look at the countries we typically view as more left leaning and both Canada and Europe as a whole has better water quality. If anything, it seems to be a delineation of first world status.
Which is interesting, because I can't believe anyone would say the US water is good when no one will drink water from the faucet, it has to be filtered.
It has always been either over chlorinated, or out of a well with all sorts of contaminants such as sulphur.
According to the graph on this site, ALL countries in the world have very bad water, at least after I move my mouse pointer around the map: all the countries turn orange.
> US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.
Huh? This is a map of the industrialized countries - western Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. Not sure how "left leaning setups do bad", the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.
> the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.
We certainly do here in Norway. And it's provided by the kommune (the local authority) not a private company. Where I live it is what I dilute my Scotch with. It's easily as good as or better than any bottled water.
Historically yes it is a massive part of what unions have done and continue to do. For example there have been many examples of dock workers refusing to transport South African or Israeli goods. That this is done as a collective action organised by union is what protects workers from individual retaliation.
Looks like there has been no slashing going on, even adjusted for inflation and demographics. And the conservative governments after 2010 kept funding at about the same levels as the Labour governments set it at. Fancy that.
I wonder what governments have had to show for this massive 2x increase in adjusted healthcare spending. Vast improvements to the system, surely.
Your own source shows that when adjusted for population size/etc the trend has been flat/slightly down.
Now add inflation, that it was underfunded in the first place, and that the charts used start right after a major recession & the beginning of Thatcher…
I think about flat since Labour was last in power, yes. And it is adjusted for inflation. Seems to have been no real "defunding" going on. And if it was underfunded in the first place, a 3x adjusted increase in spending must have done wonders for it, there must be significant improvements in key objective metrics since then, have there been?
Not increasing funding to match inflation is defunding. If you disagree then you’ll be fine working for the sane salary you’d have had in the mid 90s, right?
No. You would not. So either you’re being deliberately obtuse or now you understand
I am not sure it is very insightful trying to read long term trends here as neither data sets is 'raw'. metacritic adjust the way they interpret reviews and imdb do a number of things to normalise scores over time.
But you can't have it both ways. If you do lockdown etc, you can't then throw parties.
In the US some right wing folks didn't do the full lockdowns. My point was if they are "caught" out at the beach, regardless of if it is bad health policy, folks won't be as mad.
What makes folks mad is the lockdown, then the party, the beach, the fancy dinner. So yeah, Boris is going to be hurting from this, because its infuriating.
