Economy Britain's deteriorating economy and society

[Maciamo]

Most of the news coming from the UK in the last few years has been rather depressing. Obviously the countries suffering from Brexit, but not only. Brexit has exacerbated all previous underlying problems, like the lack of housing and the inefficient NHS. The UK now looks like the sick man of Europe. A lot of talented British people are leaving the country. The following video says that nobody wants to live in the UK anymore but this is not true. The country receives hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year. In fact there are more people moving to the UK now than before Brexit, which is ironic as lowering immigration was one of the key selling point of Brexiters. The main difference is that the immigrants are not coming from Europe anymore but from developing countries. The number of foreign students has increased a lot too, in part to compensate for the lack of EU students. But these people are just coming to the UK to study, then usually return to their country with their degree. As educated British people are also leaving in mass, the country experiences a brain drain. The immigrants that are staying are typically undereducated and poor.

 

[Maciamo]

According to the video a lot of British people are moving away to countries like the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. However, the last three all suffer from extremely high property prices as well due to a lack of new housing being built.

Canada is also on a downward trend, very much like the UK. Both countries seem great place to live in the 1990s and early 2000s, but those are suffering from extremely high cost of living nowadays and deteriorating services and quality of life.

As for the United States I have explained in detail why I think to so bad country to live, although some states are clearly better than others.

 

[norbert]

The UK is being buried economically by the financial black hole known as the City of London. That's why the "British" establishment is at the forefront of Russophobia because the battle currently fought in Ukraine is among many that will result in the emergence of a new, multipolar world order. Having destroyed Britain's industrial base, the Thatcher's neoliberals have transformed the country into a casino, an economic house of cards that will collapse once Pax (Anglo-)Americana is brought to its end. In Russia and China, the power of financial capital is either radically curbed or entirely smashed. Banks will serve society, not vice versa like in the West. That's bad news for London and Wall Street. There is no left and right anymore and this has been true for a long time. Tony Blair's Labour was more Thatcherite than the Conservative Party and it was under his government that Britain went through the final stages of Britain's transformation from an industrial country to a financial rentier economy. The trick that Margaret Thatcher played on the British public to get it onboard with her policies is to turn workers into owners or at least to give them the illusion of being owners by letting them buy council housing at a discount price, 44% of the actual value if memory serves. This shortsightedness would have devastating effects and drive the new "owners" into an ever stifling debt slavery to the rentier class.

Today's British economy is little more than a money-laundering scheme. Remember how London used to be the favourite destination for Russian oligarchs and still is to those who pose as "dissidents." Everyone with deep pockets was welcome, be it a Russian oligarch, head of an internationally operating crime syndicate, an Arab sheikh or some other kind of crook. Half of the world's stolen wealth was, or still is, parked in London. GDP generated from manufacturing is under 9% today. Remember the disaster with the British railway which was outsourced to public companies like many other public assets but the railway remains a particular case of the catastrophic consequences of privatisation. Not only did services deteriorate but there was an increase in accidents and an explosion in costs. In the end, privatisation ended up costing than state more than when these assets were state-owned. Profits were privatised, losses socialised.

As the country is running dry, as the opportunities to plunder are dwindling, not only the young and educated are fleeing but there is also a mass exodus of millionaires and billionaires. The rats seem to be abandoning the sinking ship. An economy where money is made from money will collapse sooner or later. If you don't make things, if you don't have a manufacturing base, you don't have a sustainable economy. Even the little manufacturing left in Britain is struggling against an overvalued Pound Sterling which makes exports difficult because they are unaffordable to the rest of the world except for the very rich buying British-made luxury cars. It's questionable how much of a first world country the UK still is. The British are living beyond the means, enabled by foreign capital buying domestic financial assets. It's a system that can crash anytime.

 

[Maciamo]

British food exports to EU ‘have fallen £3bn a year since Brexit’

"A report by the Centre of Inclusive Trade Policy (CITP) has found that the export of UK food and agricultural products to the EU has fallen by more than 16% on average across the three years since Britain left the single market, when compared with the three years before the exit."

 

[Maciamo]

It's been five years since Brexit. Let's have a look at how things turned out for the UK.

 

[qh777]

All the governments in the west all seem to have this huge problem of not being fiscally responsible. It’s just very aggravating.

 

[Vallicanus]

All the governments in the west all seem to have this huge problem of not being fiscally responsible. It’s just very aggravating.

Please name any government anywhere that is fiscally responsible.

 

[qh777]

Please name any government anywhere that is fiscally responsible.

Haha touché

 

[pedassa]

It's been five years since Brexit. Let's have a look at how things turned out for the UK.

View attachment 17577

Why 2020? I must have missed something. Brexit was 2016? Did nothing happen in between, did Covid not happened, did Ukraine not happen? Up until July we had the fastest growth in the G7 this year and business was starting to feel optimistic. But everyone was fed up with Boris's antics, payback and jumping from the frying pan into the fire, were suckered by unspecified promise of change by the most left wing Government in British History.

Yeh we got big problems and biggest is this dumb and stupid new Government which thinks it can increase tax by £25bn, borrow £40bn and give 75% to its own supporters in unionised public sector, the remainder to be spent on (sorry wasted) on the public sector AND the markets not notice! BUT don't worry we have our own currency and speculators are going to force The Chancellor to be prudent, and after that she will be toast - fired, gone never to heard of again. Unfortunately we will have to struggle on for the next four years with this disastrous and already hugely unpopular Prime Minister whose Party will be wiped out at the next election.

BTW we don't need more University students, either British or foreign - we need far fewer but higher qualified. The rest would actually get higher salaries as plumbers and electricians, the skills we do need.

The drain of talented individuals and billionaires is very worrying but then what does the Left Wing expect when it heaps the tax burden on them.

 

[qh777]

That inheritance tax on farmland is terrible. The U.S. had that, and people would have to sell some of their land to pay the tax.

 

[pedassa]

Perhaps that article in the Independent might have been a little more accurate if it had published this graph:

There is a sick man. The sick man as can be seen is Europe, the whole of the EU with Germany the worst performer plus The UK.

The future does not look good for Europe either - definitely the Sick Man of the World.

Actually Brexit has meant little change. The catastrophes predicted by the IMF (Lagarde's immediate 10% fall in GDP) or the Bank of England prediction of almost an extra 1 million unemployed never happened. The UK stuck in the old rut following Europe in its decline, substituting a bit more exports to non-EU and basically making up for the fall in EU business - very disappointing for both camps, pro and anti EU. No doubt our latest Government, which is singularly inept, will do its best to push us further behind.

 

[Maciamo]

Why 2020? I must have missed something. Brexit was 2016?

The Brexit referendum was in 2016 but Brexit only became effective on 31st January 2020.

 

[Maciamo]

That inheritance tax on farmland is terrible. The U.S. had that, and people would have to sell some of their land to pay the tax.

Many developed countries have high inheritance taxes on any assets (cash, stocks, properties, land, you name it). Belgium has the highest inheritance tax in the world at 80% between unrelated individuals. Between parents and children or grandparents and grandchildren it is substantially lower. It's actually quite complicated as the rate is progressive and depends on the region, but it ranges between 3% and 30% between close family members.

In the UK and the US it is 40%, but while the UK has a flat rate for practically everyone, the US has an estate tax exemption on the first $14 million (twice more for married couples), so only the ultra rich end up paying inheritance taxes.

Nevertheless there are a number of countries that have no inheritance tax at all, such as Austria, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Cyprus, Slovakia, Romania, Canada, Australia, Mexico, India, and China.

 

[qh777]

Many developed countries have high inheritance taxes on any assets (cash, stocks, properties, land, you name it). Belgium has the highest inheritance tax in the world at 80% between unrelated individuals. Between parents and children or grandparents and grandchildren it is substantially lower. It's actually quite complicated as the rate is progressive and depends on the region, but it ranges between 3% and 30% between close family members.

In the UK and the US it is 40%, but while the UK has a flat rate for practically everyone, the US has an estate tax exemption on the first $14 million (twice more for married couples), so only the ultra rich end up paying inheritance taxes.

Nevertheless there are a number of countries that have no inheritance tax at all, such as Austria, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Malta, Cyprus, Slovakia, Romania, Canada, Australia, Mexico, India, and China.

Whatever it is it's bad. Just my opinion.

 

[Maciamo]

Things are going from bad to worse for the UK since Brexit. Interestingly supporters of the Reform UK party (the former Brexit party) are the first to admit that so many things in British society are much worse now than they were 10 years ago. I guess they were already negative people to start with, the kind of people who like to complain about everything and easily fall prey to populist discourse with their harebrained solutions like Brexit.

 

[Maciamo]

Who would have thought ten years ago that several regions of the UK would be poorer than Slovenia or Lithuania in 2026? The consequences of Brexit are only starting to emerge and are probably going to get much worse over the next 10 years.

 

[Tigertim]

Nothing to do with Brexit, everything to do with bad management, the refusal to drill for oil in the north sea, the obsession with net zero.
Literally giving Ukraine £3 billion each year that should be going on services in the Uk, more billions wasted on migrants that should not be here, money being spent everywhere but on the services for British people.

 

[Maciamo]

Nothing to do with Brexit, everything to do with bad management, the refusal to drill for oil in the north sea, the obsession with net zero.
Literally giving Ukraine £3 billion each year that should be going on services in the Uk, more billions wasted on migrants that should not be here, money being spent everywhere but on the services for British people.

Since you are apparently more of a financial expert than the financial times, how do you explain that business investment in the UK stalled exactly from the time Theresa May chose to formally notify the EU of the country's intention to withdraw from the EU referendum in 2017 and has never recovered since then? Brexit took place in 2020, which showed a drop of more than 20% in business investment in the UK, which also didn't recover after Covid. By 2022, the gap between the pre-Brexit trend and the reality was 40%. Now it's over 50%.

As for your argument that this is because of the aid to Ukraine, it doesn't hold at all. Most European countries are giving more than the UK per capita and if not suffered economically from it. Baltic countries in Poland are booming economically despite their aid to Ukraine. FYI, £3 billion per year amounts to only £43 per person for British citizens. That's nothing.

As for your argument that the British government has banned new oil and gas exploration licenses in the North Sea, it only took effect in November 2025. It's too new to have any impact in the statistics. Anyway, British oil companies are private (unlike in Norway) and their profits do not benefit the British population at large.

Finally, for the immigrants that should not be here as you say, this is something self-inflicted by Brexit voters. A lot of EU citizens left Britain after Brexit and were replaced by non-EU (mostly Third World) immigrants. It's not just a shift in the nature of the immigrants. The total number of immigrants to the UK skyrocketed after Brexit. Before Brexit, there were generally less than 100,000 non-EU immigrants annually. After Brexit, this soared to 1 million!

 

[Maciamo]

Another chart from the economist showing how Brexit has dramatically increased overall immigration. This is what low IQ populism looks like. As a result, the percentage of British people leaving the UK has doubled since Brexit. No other European country has its population being replaced more quickly by non-EU immigrants as Britain (and more specifically England has very few immigrants move to Wales, Northern Ireland, or even Scotland).

 

[Tigertim]

I am well aware of the betrayal of the British peoples in regards both the numbers and quality of migrants to the Uk after brexit.

The countries you mention that are booming, Poland and the Baltic states ironically do not have this migrant issue yet, hence why they are booming, the Uk on the otherhand is wasting tens of billions on these people, common sense would say this is going to be harmfull for the overall economy.