Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[OttoVonBismarck]

Daniel Hannan, former Conservative MEP and Brexiteer, has a scathing op-ed in the Telegraph blasting Britain as a poor country headed for ruin.

Somewhat rich given his background he acknowledges no role in his own political movement for Britain's current condition; but he does point out something I have pointed out before about the UK having poor productivity compared to the rest of the Anglosphere, and having a much lower per capita GDP and wage standard than is often assumed when compared to other developed countries--as he correctly points out if Britain were a State it would be poorer than Mississippi per capita.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/22/britain-is-now-a-poor-nation-this-is-our-number-one-issue/

Britain is now a poor nation. This is the number one issue we face – yet our leaders ignore it

Our average living standards are lower than those in the least affluent US state. Slovenes are overtaking us and Poles are not far behind

DANIEL HANNAN

22 July 2023 • 8:07pm

British politics ought to revolve around just one question. Why are we falling behind other advanced economies? That question should have dominated the recent by-elections. It should be the focus of every party manifesto. It should occupy our front pages and lead our news bulletins. Yet it is being almost wholly ignored as we quarrel about equality, obesity, trans rights and other ephemera.

Britain has some of the lowest productivity in the developed world, meaning that we generate less stuff per hour. Slovenes are overtaking us now, and Poles are on course to do so in the mid-2030s. South Koreans, who had a third of our income per head as recently as 1985, have already surpassed us. Yet we refuse to acknowledge, let alone address, the causes of our decline.

Consider the oceans of ink spilt over the question of Nigel Farage's bank account. That row dominated our news cycle for a week, following the usual trajectory of a culture-war skirmish. Commentators started from whether or not they liked Farage, and then proclaimed their supposed general principles on that basis. When the facts emerged, Farage's critics looked foolish. The other side piled in with gusto.

All harmless enough, you might say. Indignation can be invigorating. But it can also be a massive distraction. Have you seen any discussion of how much harder it has become to open and operate a bank account in general? Any debate about whether these difficulties are deterring investment, encouraging businesses to move to places where banking is easy, such as Singapore or the Gulf?

You can hardly have failed to notice that dealing with your own bank is more of a nuisance than it used to be, what with all this "know your customer" malarkey. The bureaucracy has ballooned since Brexit – in other words, at precisely the moment when we could be opting out of the needlessly intrusive bits of the EU's Money Laundering Directive. But never mind all that. Much more fun to have a go at Jon Sopel, eh?

The problem is not just that we refuse to see our decline as a challenge. It is that we refuse to see it at all. We keep telling ourselves that we are a rich country. Right-wingers do it out of patriotic boosterism, Left-wingers as a pitch for more spending ("Why are benefits so stingy when we're the fifth biggest economy in the world?")

It is true that, in global terms, we are still wealthy. It is true, too, that the EU, which has made similar mistakes to ours, is also on the slide, so that we do well enough when we measure ourselves against France, Germany or Spain. But look at the other Anglosphere countries, and a very different picture emerges.

The average American is 39 per cent wealthier and 38 per cent more productive than the average Brit. Housing is also much cheaper in the US, as was energy even before the Ukraine war.

If Britain were a US state, it would languish at the bottom of the league. When my friend Douglas Carswell, the former Conservative and Ukip MP, emigrated in despair at our lockdown, he chose Mississippi, where he now runs a think tank. He picked that state because it ranked 50th out of 50, and he believed that, if school choice and tax cuts could be made to work in Mississippi, they would work anywhere. What he found, to his surprise, was a higher standard of living than he had left behind.

"A teacher or a registered nurse here starts on maybe £41,000", he tells me. In Britain, outside London, a teacher gets around £30,000, a nurse £25,000.

"The superintendent of a typical school district in Mississippi takes home £130,000 a year, similar to a Cabinet minister," says Carswell. "I know landscape gardeners who make more than the hedge-fund managers I knew in west London".

All this, remember, in the poorest state in the Union, a state whose median income is less than two thirds of the American average. As the economist Sam Bowman puts it, "Americans could stop working each year on September 22 and still be richer than Britons working for the whole year."

We don't have to look far to find the causes of our relative poverty. Since March 2009, the Bank of England has increased the amount of money in circulation by about 50 per cent. The currency debasement accelerated during our needlessly harsh lockdown, leaving us all worse off. Government spending and borrowing shot up, and no party proposes to return to the levels of January 2020.

We refuse to build houses while admitting half a million people per year. House prices have increased by 450 per cent in real terms since I was born in 1971, a figure no other OECD country comes close to. Expensive property drives up the cost of everything else.

Meanwhile, the proportion of day-to-day government spending dedicated to the NHS has risen from 27 per cent in 2000 to 44 per cent and will, as Sajid Javid points out, soon exceed 50 per cent. The quip that Britain is a health bureaucracy with a government attached is becoming literally true. Not only does the NHS soak up resources; it also produces worse outcomes than rival systems, so keeping more Brits off work.

We argue about Brexit, wokery and Just Stop Oil as a kind of displacement activity. We would rather not recognise, let alone remedy, our longer-term problems. The only serious attempt to prioritise growth came from Liz Truss, and prompted outrage from civil servants, commentators and MPs, including many Tories.

It turned out that they did not want fracking, or cheaper child care, or oil and gas drilling, or lower stamp duty, or an end to the absurd IR35 rules that punish the self-employed. They did not want to attract top-rate taxpayers – that is, the people who pay most to the British state and claim least from it. Conservative MPs knew damn well that cutting top-rate tax would bring in more revenue, but they baulked at what they called the "optics".

Who knows, maybe they were right. Maybe that's why, in other Anglosphere countries, economic reforms have more often been initiated by Left-of-centre politicians: Paul Martin in Canada, Roger Douglas in New Zealand, Bill Clinton in the US. Leftist governments can reduce entitlements without being accused of murdering the poor.

Might something similar be true here? In theory, Sir Keir Starmer could get away with things that no Tory would touch. He could bring the NHS into line with European healthcare systems, where public and private providers coexist. He could end the triple lock on pensions, or even let the pension age rise with longevity. He could build more houses, lifting the nooses that asphyxiate our cities and that are misleadingly called green belts. He could slow the rise in benefits spending.

But nothing in Starmer's history suggests constancy of character. His current flip-flopping over Ulez is depressingly typical. He has gone back and forth over nationalisation, rejoining the EU and immigration. He has gone from telling us all to vote for Jeremy Corbyn to kicking the well-meaning old boob out of Labour.

Starmer's guiding principle is popularity. To the extent that he has committed himself to anything, he wants more borrowing, tougher green targets and easier strikes – all things that will worsen our problems.

No, I'm afraid that, as in the late 1970s, we are going to have to learn the hard way. No doubt we shall be bickering about diversity and inclusion right up to the moment when the final economic calamity overwhelms us.

[mongers]

Daniel Hannan, former Conservative MEP and Brexiteer, has a scathing op-ed in the Telegraph blasting Britain as a poor country headed for ruin.

.....
We argue about Brexit, wokery and Just Stop Oil as a kind of displacement activity. We would rather not recognise, let alone remedy, our longer-term problems. The only serious attempt to prioritise growth came from Liz Truss, and prompted outrage from civil servants, commentators and MPs, including many Tories.

....

That's just utter bollock on his part.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah - from a more left-wing perspective and someone who is not tainted by Brexit, see Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation (a think tank that's very influential with Starmer's team) in The Guardian a couple of days ago - possibly a reply to Hannan's piece.

This is, if anything, one of the things that I think is positive and makes me relatively optimistic. There is an emerging consensus across left and right on problems - productivity, housing, planning etc. The solutions will obviously be politically contentious and different for right or left, but I think it's a good sign that everyone's identifying the same issues. I think of Phil Tinline's recent book on "negative" consensus. That it's not a shared ideal or dream that everyone is working towards, but a shared nightmare that everyone is working to avoid - for the post-war generation it was the mass unemployment of the 30s which they believed directly led to fascism, for the Thatcherite consensus it was inflation and union power. It's not clear what emerges next but I think whoever is perceived to have solved those issues will probably set the frame of politics for the next 20-30 years (until that, inevitably, breaks down):

We've caught the distraction disease – we do anything to avoid the problems we face
Torsten Bell
Politicians aren't the only ones to blame for a lack of focus on real issues, as culture war debates waste ever more of our time and energy

Sun 23 Jul 2023 09.01 BST
Last modified on Sun 23 Jul 2023 21.47 BST

We all get distracted, as Twitter or daydreaming makes us less productive than we would like to be. That might be suboptimal, but it's not you or me getting distracted that should really worry us. It's Britain.

Ours is a country where workers are stuck with wages at the same level they were as we went into the financial crisis of 2008. Productivity growth – the key driver of rising living standards – has all but ground to a halt. Last year there was a 37% rise in food bank use compared with the year before and in the past few weeks one in 20 adults reported having run out of food and being unable to afford more. Temperatures and NHS waiting lists are hitting record highs, while pupil absence rates at secondary school are 50% higher post-pandemic.

Problems that need addressing are being added to our national to-do list far quicker than our politicians are managing to cross them off. But it's the slow pace of addressing them, rather than their inevitable arrival, that should give us all pause for thought. What is increasingly clear is that British politics, and our public policy debates more generally, are too easily distracted.

Last week it was debating scrapping inheritance tax – just the latest tax cut to be floated. There's only one problem: Britain in the 2020s is in the tax-rising not tax-cutting business, thanks to the rising cost of government debt, the legacy of austerity and our ageing society. The tax take averaged 33% of GDP over the 2000s and 2010s, but is now on course to approach 38% by 2027-28 – a rise of £4,200 per household. The pretence that tax cuts are around the corner, most famously from Liz Truss, has distracted us from the real task: ensuring we improve the quality of our taxes not just their quantity.

Our tax system largely pretends the electric vehicle revolution isn't happening while discouraging firms from investing and people from moving. Council tax has become as regressive and hated as the poll tax it was created to replace, and the wages workers sweat for are taxed more heavily than almost every other form of income.

If only that was it – across the biggest challenges Britain faces, our policy and politics opt for distraction over action. On net zero the most immediate challenge is to decarbonise our home heating, largely by replacing gas boilers with heat pumps. The government is committed to 600,000 being installed a year by 2028. But just 70,000 were fitted last year, in part because politicians have been distracted by the idea that pumping hydrogen through our existing gas network might provide a technologically exciting alternative. The winners? Highly paid hydrogen industry lobbyists but not Britain, which despite needing a huge rollout of heat pumps is installing the least per capita among 21 European countries, according to the Committee on Climate Change.

Distractions don't just stop us addressing the problems we face, they also mean that we miss Britain's very real strengths – both present and potential – that provide the answers we need. Dreams that the UK will become a centre for global chip manufacturing distract us from the reality that we are a service-exporting superpower, and from the need to prioritise the high-value manufacturing – from automotive to chemicals – that we already have but is under threat.

Our great second cities, from Birmingham to Manchester, are the plausible route to turning levelling up from rhetoric into reality. But rather than doing the hard yards over decades to support those cities to prosper (requiring significantly more change and investment than is being contemplated by either main party), we get distracted by the idea that Manchester, for example, is already too successful and risks leaving its neighbouring towns behind. The truth? Residents of Manchester remain the poorest in Greater Manchester.

We have a Conservative government, so the distractions from policy answers on the right are more visible for all to see, from culture war nonsense to a return of imperial measures or dreams of royal yachts. But they exist on the left, too, not least the widespread focus on "degrowth" – the argument that growth isn't even desirable – after 15 years in which the lack of growth has left workers' wages stagnant and our public finances under strain.

We can't just blame our politicians – our wider public policy debate has caught the distraction disease. The 2010s saw never-ending discussions of the theoretical risk that robots might take all our jobs, while back in the real world employment hit record highs. That might have helped some people sell books, but it was no use when the real problem was Britain seeing far too few robots installed – or business investment of any kind (firms in France, Germany and the US have invested 20% more on average since 2005 – a gap that has cost the UK economy 4% of GDP, and workers £1,250 a year in lost wages).

When it comes to poverty, our debates seem more focused on PR than progress. Every six months the issue is rebranded: from period poverty to broadband poverty. The words change but do nothing to solve the underlying problem – poverty itself. People who are on lower incomes in Britain simply have too little money, being a staggering 22% poorer than their counterparts in France.

Britain has become a distraction nation. Things become the focus because they sound interesting, not because they're important. Too much time is spent rebranding a problem rather than solving it. And we often let wishful thinking about magical solutions get in the way of doing what blindingly obviously needs to be done. Britain, in short, needs to get a grip.

Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org

And on the blindingly obvious. I know I keep banging on about it, but decades of underinvestment (whether public or private):



Which is particularly reflected in the underperformance of regional cities (in my view because we're not decentralised enough) - and it is mad but I have seen stuff about Manchester getting too much and being "too" successful. As you see here - imagine people saying of Palermo, "it's too successful" so we need to hold it back while Sheffield catches up:


That is now being really felt beccause the global financial crisis destroyed our business model (and then, with Brexit, we doused the ruins in gasoline and burned them again). Which shows up in productvity:


And, as you'd expect, wages:


I am, increasingly, a little worried about Starmer's direction on all this.

[Josquius]

Lots of articles cropping up this week on tory learnings from Uxbridge and the right pushing to make anti climate bollocks their core policy. Potentially worrying. It does hit the same areas as brexit.

On the other stuff... Amazing the UK is behind even south Italy. I guess they've a bigger rural /urban divide there to make up for it?

[Sheilbh]

Lots of articles cropping up this week on tory learnings from Uxbridge and the right pushing to make anti climate bollocks their core policy. Potentially worrying. It does hit the same areas as brexit.

On this I found this interesting - that the poorest 40% are both disproportionately impacted by bad air quality which ULEZ is aiming to fix, and disproportionately hit by the costs of ULEZ:


I think that is going to be a recurring problem with climate policies - particularly as we're getting into micro stuff in people's lives now. I've said it before but I think it's really crucial that policies are designed that are fair and perceived to be fair or we'll see big backlashes.

On the other stuff... Amazing the UK is behind even south Italy. I guess they've a bigger rural /urban divide there to make up for it?

I'm not sure. To be honest I think it goes more for Brits sense of themselves (which is not aligned with our actual wealth.

You see it in Hannan's patronising "even Poles" line - go to Poland. Warsaw feels like a boomtown. It feels like a place where things are happening. We should be looking there and in East Germany for possible solutions (though I think Germany's a bit different) - not least because my understanding is the only areas of the West that have a similar scale of de-industrialisation as parts of the UK are the former Communist states.

[OttoVonBismarck]

One thing I did find particularly questionable about Hannan's piece was his comparison of Britain to the "Anglosphere."

I don't think, in terms of economics, that is a very useful comparison. Economically, the US, Canada and Australia have a ton in common. Britain is not really a very similar economy.

The US/Canada/Aus are all very large (geographically) countries, with vast natural resources, vast land holdings, and are major historical beneficiaries of immigration which has given all three more robust population growth in the 20th and most of the 21st century. [To clarify a bit--Canada is by far the fastest growing of the four countries. Australia is growing faster than the United States--which is growing at about the same rate as Britain. However, while America/Britain don't have a high growth rate, America is a massively larger country--with 330m people, it essentially had many decades of high growth rates due to immigration and natural births happening at a high clip.]

Politically, Canada / Australia have a lot more in common with Britain than does America.

As noted the damning issue for British economic growth is really its comparison to European peers (or near peer) countries, whose economic situations are fairly similar in a macro-sense to Britain's, and basically all of whom have been doing much better since the 2000s.

[Sheilbh]

One thing I did find particularly questionable about Hannan's piece was his comparison of Britain to the "Anglosphere."

I don't think, in terms of economics, that is a very useful comparison. Economically, the US, Canada and Australia have a ton in common. Britain is not really a very similar economy.

The US/Canada/Aus are all very large (geographically) countries, with vast natural resources, vast land holdings, and are major historical beneficiaries of immigration which has given all three more robust population growth in the 20th and most of the 21st century. [To clarify a bit--Canada is by far the fastest growing of the four countries. Australia is growing faster than the United States--which is growing at about the same rate as Britain. However, while America/Britain don't have a high growth rate, America is a massively larger country--with 330m people, it essentially had many decades of high growth rates due to immigration and natural births happening at a high clip.]

Politically, Canada / Australia have a lot more in common with Britain than does America.

Yeah I totally agree.

There are similarities around politics and culture - I've mentioned it before and it is generally true that on any opinion polling about issues, the UK tends to be closer to Canada and/or Australia than many European countries. I think that's likely just an effect of speaking the same language as America - and I think the sense of living in an American world is particularly strong if you're in Britain, Canada or Australia.

Having said that I think our political economies often do echo each other. Whether it was a post-war consensus in Britain and New Zealand, a similar set up with a fair go in Australia and New Deal into Great Society America - and then there's Thatcherism in the UK, Rogernomics in New Zealand, Reaganism in the US followed by third way politics. I suspect looking at Starmer, Albanese and Biden that even if our situations are different our policies may end up rhyming - that only occasionally happens with Europe which has I think broadly had more stable models.

As noted the damning issue for British economic growth is really its comparison to European peers (or near peer) countries, whose economic situations are fairly similar in a macro-sense to Britain's, and basically all of whom have been doing much better since the 2000s.

I'd sligthly push back on this in a couple of ways.

I think it's overly rosy on the rest of Europe. There are broadly speaking two stories since the crash. There's countries that have not really recovered since 2008: the UK, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece (I'd add - all countries that went pretty hard on austerity). In that group, the UK is towards the top of the table between the Netherlands and Portugal, but better than France, Spain, Italy, Greece etc. The other story is Germany and countries that are quite tied into German supply chains - so basically CEE, but especially Poland and Hungary. I'd argue that it's the tale of austerity on one side and cheap Russian gas and Chinese markets on the other - and that both have either failed or are coming under increasing challenge. So despite very different models since 2016 when we've felt the impact austerity but also Russian gas politics and challenges in China, the UK and Germany's economies have basically been level-pegging.

In many ways I think this is because they reflect two sides of the same coin. The UK model (pre-crash, pre-Brexit) was selling services to the world, particularly financial services when capital was flowing very freely and with a particular foot in the European market - plus oil and gas (either exports or services). The Germany model was supported by cheap energy, largely from Russian gas, as well as expanding markets for German exports and affiliates. Both of those models kind of rely on that globalised, open model. I think it stalled with the crash and the combination of Xi and US policy to China, shifts in US trade policy and Russia's wars mean it's not coming back. Like the rest of Europe the UK also has an ageing population - although within a European context the UK is comparatively younger and has many of the youngest regions in Europe (of the 25 youngest regions in Europe, 18 are in the UK - largely cities and largely driven by immigration).

So while there are distinctively British features, I think a lot of it is part of a broader European story where there are actually lots of similarities (particularly with Benelux). And I think the challenges are the same. My view is, broadly, that we should focus on the things we do well rather than try to entirely transform our economy - so that's higher education, life sciences and some other specific areas of tech, services, culture and tourism. Looking at that I think it's not a bad list, which some countries would envy as an economic base - but it is a society that's going to have issues with/need to address inequality. Also I think Brexit has clarified our options (i.e. we don't have as many). In Europe we could play footsie with China - out of the EU we can't. For better or worse, whether we like or not - we broadly need to politically, strategically and economically align with the US.

Having said all that () the big outlier where I think the UK is really exceptional is regional inequality. That isn't new to a large extent - in this I think the comparison with Italy is quite helpful. It has been a huge issue with huge numbers of schemes and ambitions and strategies to fix it for about 100 years now. I look at Germany - I also look at Scotland - and think ultimately the key is decentralisation and local power, decision making, revenue collecting and spending.

But British political culture hates that - we have a National Health Service. We even have a national gum clean up strategy, national bin regulations and national guidance on queuing for household waste disposal (all to be implemented, but not decided, by local government). Some of Corbyn's most popular ideas were a National Education Service and a National Care Service. So I suspect we will continue to try and have National strategies to fix regional inequality with the same results as we've had for the last 100 years.

I hope I'm wrong. But right now you have the Institute for Government - a think tank for and by the civil service largely - congratulating everyone on how many civil service jobs have been moved out of London and distributed to the rest of the country. In terms of actual head count, it's more London based than it was a decade ago. They're also very keen on the Treasury opening its second office in Darlington rather than Leeds or Newcastle because Newcastle and Leeds are already cities so don't need it/it wouldn't offer a change of perspective from London - which is in the "Manchester is too successful" camp (if you were cynical - Darlington isn't ever going to aspire to challenge London, a Northern metropolis might)

[OttoVonBismarck]

Is there truth then to the claim that British housing prices have become unaffordable at a rate much higher than in the rest of Europe? I know in the United States at least housing affordability has been a problem, and a growing one, for 20 years--so it seems like it is plaguing lots of developed countries. But the figures in the Hannan article are much worse than in the U.S., outside of the hyper-markets in NY / DC / Miami / LA / Seattle / SF Bay.,

[Sheilbh]

Is there truth then to the claim that British housing prices have become unaffordable at a rate much higher than in the rest of Europe? I know in the United States at least housing affordability has been a problem, and a growing one, for 20 years--so it seems like it is plaguing lots of developed countries. But the figures in the Hannan article are much worse than in the U.S., outside of the hyper-markets in NY / DC / Miami / LA / Seattle / SF Bay.,

I think broadly, yes (and there does seem an Anglosphere element to some of this) - and I think it slightly depends on which European countries you compare the UK with:



But if you look at things like price to income ratio (for buying or rent), we're broadly similar to the Netherlands and the Nordics - and the same goes for the "housing risk" charts I've seen.

I think part of it is financialisation and global flows of capital looking for safe assets which has particularly affected some property markets, including in the UK - so that may reflect a bt of the political culture point where we have more in common with Canada, the US and Australia.

I think there's also a cultural point which is a bias against building/living in apartments that makes supply more of a problem (and in the UK, historically, apartments have been poor quality).

As a proportion of dwellings the UK is at 20% between Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, who are lower, and the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway who are higher (then the US and Canada). It's striking  because the Netherlands and Norway especially are the European countries who are higher on the "housing risk" indexes - and have higher price to income ratios than the UK (Belgium is more or less the same). Obviously, also worth noting that the UK (particularly England), Netherlands and Belgium also have some of the highest population density in Europe - but their urban areas are some of the least dense.

So the UK doesn't look too dissimilar to Benelux and the Nordics. But is, on average, poorer and particularly has a high level of regional inequality that doesn't apply in those countries which makes it all look and feel more extreme.

That would basically be my counter to Hannan's Anglosphere point - I think the UK is basically a North-West European country with some American/"Anglosphere" characteristics, while I think he basically views it (perhaps romantically, as a Thatcher-Reagan fan) as basically America. More generally I think an awful lot of ink has been wasted on exceptional aspects of Britain's economy and politics (good and bad) when I think there are very few. The political trends, economic challenges and conditions in Britain are broadly the same as we see across the West - the exact shape of it varies depending on specific local characteristics or political culture, but not very much (except for the US which is huge and exceptional). In general there's nothing much special here (for good or bad).

[crazy canuck]

The thing those sorts of analysis miss is the point Otto made early - the rather dramatic increase in population (through immigration) in countries like Canada and Australia. 

We had a housing shortage before the immigration numbers increased, and housing starts have not kept up at all.  Governments are now scrambling to try various things to increase housing starts and reduce the delays in getting housing built. 

In hindsight, this is something that should have been done years ago.  But at least it is being done now.

To be clear, increased immigration is easily a net positive, and those numbers should not drop - we just need to put more resources into creating the housing and infrastructure to accommodate our increasing population. 

[Crazy_Ivan80]

To be clear, increased immigration is easily a net positive,

the caveat being that this is very dependent on the kind of immigrants arriving. It's not nearly as positive in other places (but then Canada is quite strict about who gets in)

[HVC]

It's also not just that immigrants are coming, but where they're settling. Already crowded cities. The boonies are still (relatively) cheap.

[Sheilbh]

The thing those sorts of analysis miss is the point Otto made early - the rather dramatic increase in population (through immigration) in countries like Canada and Australia. 

We had a housing shortage before the immigration numbers increased, and housing starts have not kept up at all.  Governments are now scrambling to try various things to increase housing starts and reduce the delays in getting housing built. 

In hindsight, this is something that should have been done years ago.  But at least it is being done now.

To be clear, increased immigration is easily a net positive, and those numbers should not drop - we just need to put more resources into creating the housing and infrastructure to accommodate our increasing population. 

I think that's fair and probably why the UK is still at the top of the housing stock increase and bottom of price increase. I think immigration has been a factor in the UK for the last 20 years or so but wasn't really before then. There's been a shift in the last twenty years driven by immigration which is, as you say, basically good but needs resources.

From 1970 to 2000 the UK population basically floated around 55 million. Since 2000 it's increased to about 67 million - primarily because of moving from being a country with net emigration (not least to Australia ) to one with net immigration:


That's from 2012 based on the 2011 census, but it basically floated around those rates for the rest of the decade. Although in the two years since Brexit UK net immigration has been at 500k and 600k so about double the previous peaks. In the last census the UK has a far lower proportion of foreign born residents than Canada or Australia but higher than the US. Again I think that's all pretty recognisable for the Benelux and the Nordics (and again striking that those are the other European markets with similar or higher price to income ratios). I think it's one of the things I'd love to see more reporting on generally is European countries as immigration societies because I think so much of the reporting is just about the politics and controversies.

In the UK I think there's broad agreement on housing as an issue and that we need to build more (which is a start). But I don't think there's anywhere near enough movement on actually addressing it or much sign of a willingness to confront the vested interests/spend the political capital to do it - and housing starts have collapsed after the government cancelled targets for local areas (under pressure from backbenchers). I'm not super-optimistic but at least everyone's agreeing it's a problem and it's an issue everyone is talking about which is new. I could be wrong but I think it's one of the issues where the party that solves it basically sets the terms of politics for a generation.

Sort of related to the more reporting on the social change - there's been the release of the school census just now (flagged by Stephen Bush of the FT). One really interesting thing is that basically when they're in primary school it's filled in by parents, but once they're in secondary school the kids fill in loads of bits. In general in England and Wales around 30% of schoolkids are visible minorities (and about 35% minorities in total) - what's really interesting is those proportions increase once the kids start filling in the forms themselves. It looks like - across the frame - kids are just being more precise on their identity. So the parents tick a broad, high level category like "black British" and then when it gets to the kids, they are far more specific, say "Ghanaian and Irish". Not sure there's a full article in it but I thought it was a little interesting - and it makes sense to me that kids would want to be more precise, more accurate because they always do

[Josquius]

On this I found this interesting - that the poorest 40% are both disproportionately impacted by bad air quality which ULEZ is aiming to fix, and disproportionately hit by the costs of ULEZ:
[
I think that is going to be a recurring problem with climate policies - particularly as we're getting into micro stuff in people's lives now. I've said it before but I think it's really crucial that policies are designed that are fair and perceived to be fair or we'll see big backlashes.

Yes. It's complicated too as many of these poorest also tend to have aspirations around getting fancy cars and such. It's hard to make the breakthrough and convince many to go for something that is for the benefit of all.

The big issue I see, and has locally basically been the topic of a video I might hopefully finish in the next month or two. Been on with it for years, not that it shows...
Is that so much of these anti climate change acts just come across as pure sticks. There's no carrots with them.

Newcastle recently setup a Ulez, only covering commercial vehicles. It's initial proposals to be for all recieved massive backlash - it technically just covers the centre but by the way Newcastles geography works and our lack of crossings east of the centre this fucks up things for people going all over the region.  With the state of public transport in the area there's so much room for improvement there but it's just not coming.

On the other stuff... Amazing the UK is behind even so u lookth Italy. I guess they've a bigger rural /urban divide there to make up for itote]
I'm not sure. To be honest I think it goes more for Brits sense of themselves (which is not aligned with our actual wealth.

You see it in Hannan's patronising "even Poles" line - go to Poland. Warsaw feels like a boomtown. It feels like a place where things are happening. We should be looking there and in East Germany for possible solutions (though I think Germany's a bit different) - not least because my understanding is the only areas of the West that have a similar scale of de-industrialisation as parts of the UK are the former Communist states.

Oh definitely on poland. Even without brexit it was on track to take over the UK by the end of the decade for individuals wealth. I expect it's just got a few years to hit that point now.

It's interesting how with Eastern Europe in general our mindset never left the 90s-see that stupid torys comment recently about not wanting the UK to turn into east Berlin... Ie super happening and reknowned as probably one of the best places in Europe.

But I don't think this applies to Italy. They're usually better than the UK for squandering their advantages and being awful. The south is especially known for being shit. I've heard nothing of a turn around there - have we really dropped so much this past decade?

[PJL]

On this I found this interesting - that the poorest 40% are both disproportionately impacted by bad air quality which ULEZ is aiming to fix, and disproportionately hit by the costs of ULEZ:
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I think that is going to be a recurring problem with climate policies - particularly as we're getting into micro stuff in people's lives now. I've said it before but I think it's really crucial that policies are designed that are fair and perceived to be fair or we'll see big backlashes.

Yes. It's complicated too as many of these poorest also tend to have aspirations around getting fancy cars and such. It's hard to make the breakthrough and convince many to go for something that is for the benefit of all.

The big issue I see, and has locally basically been the topic of a video I might hopefully finish in the next month or two. Been on with it for years, not that it shows...
Is that so much of these anti climate change acts just come across as pure sticks. There's no carrots with them.

Newcastle recently setup a Ulez, only covering commercial vehicles. It's initial proposals to be for all recieved massive backlash - it technically just covers the centre but by the way Newcastles geography works and our lack of crossings east of the centre this fucks up things for people going all over the region.  With the state of public transport in the area there's so much room for improvement there but it's just not coming.

I think with a lot of these schemes there also a perception of it being a money making cash grab by the local authorites as well. It's a similar thing with residential parking permits supposidly helping out with locals parking near their home and relieving parking congestion but many think it's just a cash cow for the LAs.