Brexit is a symptom, not the cause. The people who were most screwed by Britain's prior mistakes voted for it in a vain attempt at fixing the problem by throwing misguided nostalgia at it.
We’d had a decade of zero growth and 30 years of industrial decline in the North. The country was not doing well, that’s the primary reason it was inevitable putting a big button marked “do not press, posh boy David Cameron says he doesn’t want you to but has no other solutions. Ignore the people saying it will fix the country” would result in the button being pressed.
The economy was doing well for some parts of the country, but you can only ignore the rest for so long.
Well now its not doing that well anywhere, bravo. Thats the problem with populists - they easily find some real issue and point to it, blaming all even completely unrelated woes on it. So far so good.
But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Like trump stop blaming immigrants or its (former) allies for all US woes.
The cure? Nothing easy, intelligent moral population for democratic elections. Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good (ie refusing 6 weeks mandatory minimal paid vacation per year for workers). That's the population bar for true democracy.
Sure, I'm not saying Brexit was the solution to any of it, quite the opposite. But it wasn't a binary choice between X populist saying "Brexit will fix it immediately" and Y mainstream politician saying "here are the complex factors causing this issue, here's how we as a country can address them over so many years". It was a choice between "Brexit will bring sunlit uplands!" and "the country's doing well, don't ruin it!".
It's not hard to understand why, given that choice, someone stuck in a Northern ex-mining town facing zero prospects, poor housing, no local amenities, massive regional unemployment or unstable employment would listen to the one pretending to be listening to their issues. Again, we'd had 30 years before that where FPTP allowed the main parties to more or less ignore huge parts of the electorate.
> Swiss have most direct democracy in the world, and they vote sanely even on emotional topics thinking of greater good
eh, somewhat.
There are still plenty of emotionally charged decisions being made by Swiss voters, like banning all minarets (in a country that had ... 3 minarets before), blanket granting all pensioneers one additional month of payment per year or routinely wrecking your relationship with the EU.
I agree that on average, the Swiss voters don't do too badly. But it's also easier to vote rationally and for the common good when you're as well off as the Swiss are.
Real GDP per capita growth for US vs UK was almost identical until 2008. The last 3 years have been terrible for the UK, but if you're looking for the start of UK's stagnation you have to go much farther back than Brexit.
The problem I see is that although the trend may have started before, Brexit caused the local financial services sector to effectively collapse and move to the Netherlands and Germany. London will never be able to recover that loss in ten generations. Had brexiters not ejected your finance industry, there was probably an opportunity to recover.
As far as I am aware, this is just straight up is not true. Do you have a source for this? Because if the financial sector in the UK halved and moved into the Netherlands and Germany the UK would be doing much, much worse, and Germany much better economically.
This - the economy rode on financialisation and north sea oil for the two decades before 2008. Since 2008 there has been no real action to resolve the core issue of unlocking the potential of the North of England - everyone knows that that is low hanging fruit (human capital, regional infrastructure etc) but no one will actually take the risk and go for it.
It has preformed broadly in line with other western European economics. If you look at GDP numbers over time the big problem was COVID. The UK is richer relative to France or Italy than it was 25 years ago, but no European country has done as well as the US:
That’s the time the Conservative Party were voted in and imposed “austerity”. This involved scaling back government spending and scratching their heads wondering why growth is stalled.
It is insane that not only has it lasted multiple Conservative governments and appears to be alive and well under Starmer's Labour, but also that the USA has now decided to embrace it too.
I don't understand it, I thought these guys were all supposed to have studied economics (is that not the "E" in that Oxbridge "PPE" degree they all have) how are they fumbling the basics so badly
post '08 and until 2016 the UK economy was the fastest growing in the G7, notably countries that imposed much more severe austerity fared even better - Ireland who are still wedded to the policy continues to thrive, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian economies all grew at a much faster rate than the UK (and by extension the rest of the G7)
Head in the sand eh? even using your data the picture is very different to what you were claiming and much closer to my assertion, so we use different sources...your conclusion is still incorrect.
Bet you're not interested in looking at the three Baltic states I mentioned or Ireland...because it would be another fistful of nails in the coffin of your purely ideological belief that "aUsTeRiTy BaD" (truthfully, some austerity is bad, but the fiscal kind).
The old, which have been ‘criminally’ favoured by Britain’s mistakes, have overwhelmingly voted for Brexit. While the young, who have been royally screwed, voted Remain.
The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth.
- Most developed countries have below-replacement child rates from citizens
- Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
- Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation, wealth disparities and concentration of poverty, and structural limits to economic prosperity.
Fighting immigration is just shooting oneself in their demographic foot. (See Japan and Russia)
> The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth.
The UK has had increased (net) immigration for decades, including a huge jump in the past few years[0]. The population grew commensurately, likely mostly due to immigration, since as you accurately point out the birth rate is low; there are roughly 13% more people in the UK now than 20 years ago. Why, then, has the GDP per capita flatlined in the same timeframe? Where is the growth that immigration is supposed to fuel?
> Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
This is a core neoliberal claim that smacks of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
> The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation
By all means, let's have that discussion! If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
But the same neoliberalism that supported increased immigration to developed countries on these economic grounds also morphed into a dual prong of claiming that diversity is our greatest strength and that it's racist to expect immigrants to have to conform to their new host culture. Both attitudes are directly at odds with assimilation and acculturation.
Other wealth European nations that took in a lot of immigrants, mostly from grossly incompatible cultures, have seen concerning increases in violent crime and other things deleterious to social cohesion and quality of life.
> (See Japan and Russia)
Japan's population has been shrinking since 2010; its GDP per capita has been treading water for even longer, since the early 90s. Similar story for Russia, whose population has been flip-flopping from growing and shrinking for a few decades, and whose GDP per capita hasn't seen any sustained growth since the late 2000s.
So it's entirely possible to have a stagnant economy, whether or not you receive immigrants.
> Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
This is about the only unarguably true statement you made. A nation composed of too many nonworking people receiving transfer payments from working people cannot exist in that state for long.
> If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
What? This isn't remotely true. Anti-immigrant sentiment is deliberately induced, because they're an easy target—it has nothing to do with how well they do or don't acculturate. Although, anti-immigrant sentiment does make acculturation more difficult as well—which hey, makes it even easier to inflame anti-immigrant sentiment!
Why the artificial constraint of assuming technology is constant? In not necessarily one to hope that tech will automatically bail us out, of the growth in the previous decades has been from tech innovations like automation.
Technology has a ceiling for a given time, across the world, which is really what you're competing with in a globalized economy.
Which is to say that more technology isn't a solution out of a demographic hole, when you're competing with a country that has the same technology and better demographics.
You think the relentless replacement of UK services by unhinged sovereign wealth funds is caused by 'uncontrolled immigration'? I'll have to study this more.
Ah yes the migration boogieman. migrants are simultaneously uneducated and abusing the welfare system, but also take away people's jobs and push up house prices so that "ordinary" people can't afford houses anymore. Never mind that those accusations are contradictory.
UK was the only EU member not part of the Schengen Zone as-in it was the only member you couldn't freely immigrate to. As well as it's an island, nobody hoping a boat from Morocco and landing in London.
Pakistani's aren't taking your job. The economy is just stagnating.
Post-Pandemic is a huge anomaly [1] but the article is talking about stuff pre-2019.
> it was the only member you couldn't freely immigrate to
Aside from not being the only nation outside of Schengen, Schengen only implies freedom from borders checks. As an EU citizen you could still emigrate freely (or as freely as anywhere else in the EU) to a non-Schengen countries. I know I did.
Ireland was also not in Schengen. And still isn't due to being bound to the CTA with the UK in the good Friday agreement. Cyprus also. And Romania and Bulgaria weren't in it until last year.
Actually both the UK and Ireland were the only two EU members not part of the Schengen Zone (opt-outs since 1997). Since UK Brexit'ed in 2020, that just leaves Ireland.
They're taking large portions of Bradford, Leeds etc.
Also, the boat can go from Morocco to Ceuta, and its cargo can be delivered via lorry across the Channel.
> Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas.
"Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year indefinitely with no material change to its way of life. But it cannot accept, say, a hundred a year, especially if the hundred immigrants come from a substantially different culture, without fundamentally changing the entire social fabric.
And when such massive changes to society occur without buy-in from a convincing majority of people?[0] Well, only idiots would wonder why people think it's out of control.
[0]: In the UK, Brexit made it clear that in fact the buy-in was in the other direction.
> It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
This resistance falls away quickly when food price inflation spirals out of control because you cannot find cheap labour for your harvests. (In 2025, there are zero highly developed nations, (yes, including Japan!) that do not heavily depend upon seasonal migrant labour to help with harvests.) Same when sick and elderly people have unreasonably long wait times at clinic or hospital due to doctor/nurse shortage.
yeah, because despite the UK training a huge number of doctors and nurses, the government doesn't want to pay them enough to stop them emigrating the the US or Australia, which have a lot of demand and much higher wages. So then they try to import health workers from elsewhere. Great plan.
Not to take the spotlight away from the UK, but I am pretty sure that all highly developed nations are struggling to find enough nurses amongst their citizens. Even Japan (gasp) has a special programme to help foreigners learn Japanese and immigrate as a skilled nurse.
