Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[OttoVonBismarck]

Is there a reason these maps include England+Wales but not Scotland / NI? If it was just England it would make more senes to me, but showing 2/4 of the UK countries seems an odd choice, does the census lump Wales/England together?

[HVC]

The welsh aren't as uppity.

[Zanza]

Pity the millennial. Greying at the temples, thinning on top and thickening round the middle. Once a shorthand for rebellious youth, now even the prime minister (born in 1980, uses more than two fingers to type) falls into this increasingly aged category. The typical millennial is haunted by Instagram adverts for fertility treatment, wills and Viagra.

If the ravages of time were not bad enough, then the iniquities of British society make things worse. Life is pretty tough for the generation sinking into their middle years. It is a time when people are supposed to be kicking on with their careers, rearing children and, often, caring for ageing parents. But it is also a time when housing and child-care costs combine with uneven taxes and an unbalanced welfare state to create a miserable period. Call it the Dark Ages. (Bagehot should declare an interest: he is slap-bang in the middle of them.)

As with most problems in British politics, it all starts with housing. The average age of a first-time buyer is 32. Those who bought a house recently may be on the wrong side of a leveraged bet on the most expensive asset they will ever buy. If house prices crater, younger people will find it easier to buy; older homeowners will be insulated, having built up more equity. Those in the Dark Ages will be stuffed. Even before mortgage costs shot up, affordability was stretched. The average house costs about £300,000 ($362,000). When the median salary is about £33,000, it takes two earners to afford one. That makes child care inevitable, unless Granny and Grandpa are around.

Unfortunately, Britain has among the most expensive child care in the world. British parents spend between a quarter and a third of their income, depending on how it is measured, on paying other people to look after the sprogs. The government has parked plans to give parents more free child care, along with a scheme to reduce required staffing ratios in a bid to make it cheaper.

Still, 30-somethings on average earnings can surely console themselves that their basic rate of income tax is a mere 20%. Unfortunately, things sometimes go haywire in the tax system—and those in the Dark Ages are often the victims. Policies such as whipping away child benefit from the moderately well-off mixes poorly with a byzantine and often cruel working-age welfare system. An unlucky household with children could in some circumstances face a marginal deduction rate of between 80% and 96%, according to the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank.

Every generation thinks they have it rough. Someone with a mortgage during the early 1990s may have struggled with rocketing interest rates (even if lower house prices made those loans more affordable). Houses may have been cheap in the 1960s, but petrol had lead in it, men dropped dead in their 60s and women could not open a bank account in their own name.

Some have it better than others, however, even if they do not always like to admit it. Those who are now at retirement age will have benefited most of all. On average someone born in 1956 will pay about £940,000 in tax throughout their life. But they are forecast to receive state benefits amounting to about £1.2m, or £291,000 net. Someone born in 1996 will enjoy less than half of that figure: a fresh-faced 27-year-old today will receive barely more than someone born in 1931, about a decade before the term "welfare state" was first popularised.

And so a fundamental part of the social contract has broken down. Before Britons exchanged a miserable middle age for a gilded retirement. "Giving goods to an older person is figuratively giving goods to yourself when old" is a neat adage from Paul Samuelson, an economist. Those in the Dark Ages will pay more and receive less. Boomers used their demographic weight to slant the state to their benefit, argued David Willetts, a Conservative grandee, in "The Pinch", a prescient book published in 2010 on inequality between the generations. Millennials are bearing the cost.

It would be better—politically, economically and socially—to offer younger voters something today. It is in the Conservatives' political interest. British millennials are the first generation to buck the trend of drifting right with age, according to one study by the Financial Times. For some mps this is proof that the generation is irredeemably woke. More thoughtful Conservatives take a materialist view: it is hard to vote for the party that offers them so little. At the moment, neither head, heart nor wallet provides much reason for younger people to vote Conservative.

Helping those stuck in the Dark Ages might boost the economy, too. Better access to child care could boost output per worker by 30% according to one controversial study, if inept male workers are replaced by competent women. Even if the gains from better child care are smaller, they would be welcome for an economy in sore need of productivity growth.

More self-interested millennial moaning below

Intergenerational inequality leads to intergenerational conflict. Some pensioners are poor, but more are rich. Although one in five pensioners is in poverty, one in four lives in a household with assets of more than £1m, thanks to a booming property market and generous pensions. Friction between haves and have-nots is inevitable, even if they are separated by age. Merely waiting for inheritances to cascade down through the generations is a recipe for an unhappy society.

Each of these problems is fixable. The government could and should do more for young parents. That child care is unaffordable is not a fact of life, as any German can attest. That Britain's homes are small and dear is not a law of nature, but a choice of successive governments. That Britain's taxation system is tilted too far towards income, while property wealth is left undertaxed, is a policy decision. The government could choose differently. Spread some light on the Dark Ages and everyone would be better off.

https://www.economist.com/britain/2023/01/05/britons-in-their-thirties-are-stuck-in-a-dark-age

TL;DR: Millennials in the UK are fucked.

[Barrister]

I wouldn't call someone born in 1980 a Millenial.

[Sheilbh]

Is there a reason these maps include England+Wales but not Scotland / NI? If it was just England it would make more senes to me, but showing 2/4 of the UK countries seems an odd choice, does the census lump Wales/England together?

Different national statistics bodies and censuses. A bit like Scotland and Northern Ireland have different legal systems while England and Wales have the same.

This time round the Scottish census was delayed for a year because of covid, while the English and Welsh and Northern Irish ones went ahead.

TL;DR: Millennials in the UK are fucked.

Yep.

[Admiral Yi]

Anyone else surprised by how low the LGBT+ percentages are?

Yup.  I'd always thought gays alone were like 5% of the population.

[Sheilbh]

Just on millenials - and the FT piece OvB posted. This is really interesting - also I think interesting including more than just the UK and US:



One attempted suggestion - I think there is something to this. I'm not sure that Europe and America are diverging culturally, but I definitely think because we speak English the UK is far more in the American "sphere" on issues. Just today I was listening to a BBC podcast and they advertised this year's Reith Lectures organised around FDR's "four freedoms"

How America is alienating us from Europe
Young English speakers are adopting a progressivism incomprehensible to the rest of the world
James Marriott
Wednesday January 04 2023, 9.00pm, The Times

If you are young, idealistic and anxious to know whether the purity of your left-wing principles will survive the disappointments of middle age, you might pay attention to the language being spoken around you. If you can hear English there is a better chance that your youthful socialism will remain uncorrupted. In Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, millennials are defying ancient political laws and failing to become more right-wing as they age. Modern 35-year-olds in Britain and America are, according to a recent analysis in the Financial Times, "by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history".

But in the rest of Europe, notably France, Italy, Germany and Spain, young people still follow ancient routes of political migration, voting for more right-wing parties as they get older. In Britain, millennial leftism is usually attributed to economic disadvantage — house prices, student loans, falling living standards. But this analysis applies only unevenly in Europe. Young Germans may be better housed, better employed and more cheaply educated than their British peers but young Italians (of whom two thirds between the ages of 18 and 35 live with their parents) are hardly gazing towards futures of unclouded financial freedom.

Many factors are at work. It's worth noting that European millennials wishing to vote for economic redistribution often have options on the right as well as the left. But perhaps the most interesting is the way that in a world connected by social media, language not geography is becoming a critical cultural divide. The West, which we are accustomed to thinking of as a monolith, is split between those English-speaking countries that share the internet with America and those that do not.

Anybody with a Twitter account will be familiar with the incessant proximity of America's culture wars. Psychologically, many British people now inhabit an American world, obsessing over American politics, American injustices and American Supreme Court rulings. Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders are exhaustedly familiar with the theme.

American progressive ideas spread across the English language internet as does a fear of the conspiracist, anti-democratic American right. But where other languages are spoken online, the connection to American morals and American anxieties is looser. It helps to explain why most European countries lack an American-style progressive consensus among younger voters. In France, millennials support far-right parties in numbers that would be inconceivable and horrifying in Britain or America. In the second round of the French presidential elections last year, 49 per cent of voters aged 25 to 35 voted for Marine Le Pen. In an election in Saxony-Anhalt in Germany last year, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party performed more strongly with millennials than with older voters.

Meanwhile, battles over trans rights have little purchase on public discourse in France and Germany. There is, as my colleague Oliver Moody has written, "no German word for woke". The modern German student experience resembles more closely the easygoing university life of the early 2000s than the intensely political environment of some contemporary campuses in Britain and America.

France has culture-war clashes, but establishment hostility to "woke" ideas is far more unified than in Britain. To liberal English ears a centrist such as President Macron sounds as if he belongs much further on the right when he rails against left-wing ideologies "racialising" French society.

In his book History Has Begun, the Portuguese diplomat and intellectual Bruno Macaes goes so far as to suggest that American and European civilisation are diverging. He argues that America, once essentially a European society, is moving away to create a new kind of culture that is incomprehensible to many Europeans. Whereas liberalism, with its claim to universal moral principles, can be applied round the world, "woke" ideas, rooted in the specific racial atrocities of US history, are less easily exported.

Macaes says cultural differences between Europe and America have grown so wide it is no longer possible for European thinkers to forge careers as public intellectuals in the English-speaking world. No modern French intellectual has the influence of Sartre, De Beauvoir or Foucault. Michel Houellebecq, France's most acclaimed novelist, is a mainstream figure at home but his controversial books — Submission imagines an Islamic takeover of the French state — make it impossible to conceive of him achieving similar stature in Britain or America.

In anglophone countries, elite prestige increasingly derives from an ability to talk about intersectionality rather than European culture. Declining numbers of Britons speak a foreign language. The days when European films — Godard, Fellini, Bergman — were obligatory viewing for cultured English-speakers are past. Indeed, the old American sense of cultural inferiority to ancient European culture is morphing into hostility. Courses on western civilisation, tracing European culture from the ancient Greeks to the American present, were once a mainstay of US campuses. Now the very phrase "western civilisation" has fallen under suspicion.

"All they do in America," the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once remarked, "is to remasticate the old European culture." Well, no longer. It is impossible now to believe American culture is merely a gaudy, inept regurgitation of old-world themes. From a continental perspective it is morphing into something altogether stranger, more exotic and harder to understand. And we in Britain are along for the ride.

I think John Burn-Murdoch is right to point out that this is overstating the culture angle (though I think it's real) as electoral systems also play a role. FPTP forces coalitions within big tent parties rather than multi-party coalitions. So with PR economic right-wingers who are socially liberal can still vote for, say, the FDP or VVD - in the UK or US they need to choose their preference social authoritarianism or economic liberalism (and vice versa on the left). And even if that party forms a coalition with or relies on the radical right those voters get to feel like their hands are clean.

[Sheilbh]

I mentioned Wes Streeting, Labour's Shadow Health Secretary (and someone who's talked of a lot as a future leadership candidate for the Blairite centre right) being the only person really talking about public sector reform. This interview gives a bit of that and is also possibly the most detailed sense we have of what Labour's front-bench actually want to do if they win. Though obviously pitched at readers of the Times. But you can see the Blairite pitch reform in the interests of the public/patients v forces of conservtism on right and left.

Needless to say I agree with a lot of this Salaried GPs instead of private practices working under a complicated NHS contract sounds very sensible - especially given that there's a crisis emerging in junior GPs not wanting to become partners - but it will be a very big reform that the BMA will fight:

Wes Streeting: We must think radically — I want to phase out the existing GP system
The shadow health secretary has big ideas to reform the NHS for patients, and he isn't afraid to take on vested interests
Rachel Sylvester
Friday January 06 2023, 3.30pm, The Times

When Wes Streeting insists that "the NHS is a service not a shrine", it is both personal and political. For more than 18 months, the shadow health secretary has been battling cancer as well as fighting the "highly pressured and inefficient bureaucracy" that is the health service.

He had kidney cancer diagnosed in May 2021, had an operation and is now "cancer free" but his two follow-up scans were delayed because of backlogs and he endured "an infuriating merry-go-round with results". On one occasion, he was invited for what he thought was a scan appointment only to find when he arrived at the hospital that it was a meeting to discuss the scan.

"It was a waste of my time, a waste of a really pressured urologist and nurse, a waste of an appointment that could have been used by someone else," he says. "Anyone who's ever been through cancer will know the anxiety. Having had this experience as a patient, I am absolutely determined to drive improvements because this system isn't working for patients, it's not working for staff and it's got to change."

With ambulances backed up outside hospitals and patients lined up on trolleys, the NHS is "buckling at the seams" this winter, Streeting says. "I had one elderly relative who had a fall and seriously injured their hip and shoulder. They were told it would be six to eight hours for an ambulance to come so the neighbours put them in the back of their estate car on boards and took them to hospital. Another relative had to go to A&E in severe pain and waited well over 12 hours, until past midnight. She just went home. I think there is a genuine fear in the country at the moment about what will happen if you need the NHS. For the first time in the history of the NHS, people no longer feel confident that emergency care will be there for them."

Simply throwing more money at the problem is not, in his view, the answer. "We have to be certain that we're spending the money the NHS already has to maximum impact, and the fact is that when people can't get a GP appointment they go to an accident and emergency department which, on average, costs the taxpayer £359 per appointment, where if they could see the GP that would cost about £39. That's bad for patients, challenging for hospitals and more expensive for the taxpayer."

Streeting, 39, a former leader of the National Union of Students who grew up on an east London council estate, is a politician in a hurry. The health service, he says, needs "fundamental change", although there are some immediate things the government could do to arrest the present crisis. It is "absurd that we are losing precious time to industrial action when patients desperately need access to care," he says. If he were health secretary, he would "absolutely be willing to sit down and negotiate with Pat Cullen [general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing] and other health union leaders to see off this dispute". The idea of a 10 per cent rise, now being floated by the nurses, "certainly looks like a more reasonable figure than where the RCN started", Streeting says. "We are currently pouring £3 billion down the drain in agency costs, at the same time as saying we can't afford to pay staff more. This is a ludicrous position."

The shadow health secretary has infuriated some Labour MPs by saying he wants to use spare capacity in the private sector to bring waiting lists down, but he insists he won't be ideological about healthcare. "Where we've got to as a country is a two-tier healthcare system where those who can afford to pay to go private, and those who can't afford to wait longer. I find that unconscionable. I know that there are sections of the left who find this deeply uncomfortable, and I can't say that I'm over the moon about spending taxpayers' money on more expensive private-sector treatment, but I would find it hard to look someone on a low income in the eye and say, 'I'm sorry, but I'm going to make you wait longer because my principles are more important than faster access to care'. "

Streeting wants two more big reforms, to GP services and to public health. With a record two million people waiting more than a month to see a GP, the shadow health secretary says: "I think we need to completely rethink what primary care looks like." GPs should no longer be "the sole gatekeeper" to the NHS, he says. "I'm convinced that pharmacy has a big role to play. This is where competing interests among providers might not always work in the interests of patients. I can well understand why there are GPs who look with anxiety at pronouncements from politicians that community pharmacies should be doing more vaccination or more prescribing, but that's because they're thinking about their own income and their own activity. Vaccinations are money for old rope, and a good money spinner, and not unreasonably GP partners are thinking about the finances of their own practice. That's totally reasonable but what matters to the patient is fast, accessible care, wherever that is."

He also wants people to be able to refer themselves directly to specialists, rather than having to go through their GPs. "Sometimes it's pretty obvious that you don't need to see the [family] doctor. I had a lump on the back of my head, during the pandemic. I needed to see a dermatologist but in order to get an appointment with a dermatologist, I had to go through the GP. What a waste of my GP's time. I think there are some services where you ought to be able to self refer."

Instead of GP surgeries he wants modern health centres with a wider range of facilities "where you will have your family doctor, but you'll also see nurses, you'll see physiotherapists, you might go for a minor injury or a scan . . . Unless we shift activity and spending out of hospitals into the community we are going to continue to just spend more and more on a system that delivers poorer outcomes." If Labour wins power, he wants to tear up the GP contract. "The truth is that the way that GP practices operate financially is a murky, opaque business. I'm not sure that people can honestly say exactly how the money is spent or where it goes. And from my point of view, as someone who wants to be a custodian of the public finances as health secretary, that would not be a tolerable situation," he says. "I'm minded to phase out the whole system of GP partners altogether and to look at salaried GPs working in modern practices alongside a range of other professionals."

This would put Streeting on collision course with the British Medical Association, but he is ready to take on the "vested interest" of the doctors' union. "Nye Bevan famously said he had to stuff their mouths with gold because the BMA opposed the foundation of the NHS. There have always been people within the system who oppose fundamental change which, decades later, is widely accepted. I'm always prepared to work with people. We're going to be actively consulting on this. I recognise it will be a big change. I want to listen to the profession and take people with us but, most importantly, I want to get this right for patients. The NHS is so broken, we do have to think radically."

As well as facing down the doctors' union, Streeting is ready to take on the libertarian right over smoking. New Zealand has introduced a law which means that nobody now under the age of 14 will ever be legally permitted to buy cigarettes, and he is interested in doing something similar here. "As the son of smokers I hated the smell of cigarette smoke growing up," he says. "I'd like to see it phased out altogether . . . it would make such a transformational impact on the health of individuals and on the health of the nation as a whole and therefore, on the public finances in terms of the cost that we incur as a result of smoking."

He thinks the public would be broadly supportive. "Every single anti-smoking initiative that has been introduced in this country has been fiercely opposed at the time by all sorts of vested interests, and has both had a transformational impact in terms of health and enjoyed real public support. How many of us remember the days of awful smoky nightclubs, train carriages full of smoke? Who's calling for the return of smoking in cars with children in the back seat?" He also wants to clamp down on vaping. "I'm deeply anxious about the fact that having reduced smoking, particularly among young people, we've sleepwalked into the growth of a new industry in vaping, which has seen enormous take-up among children and young people who otherwise would not smoke," he says. "My instinct is to take the same approach with vaping as we did with smoking in terms of packaging and marketing, because I'm concerned that the vaping industry is now growing exponentially and there may well be risks associated with it that are not yet clear. I'm sick and tired of seeing young people congregating outside vaping shops on high streets."

Streeting is ready to take on the forces of conservatism on left and right. "I want to be a champion for patients," he says. "We love the fact the NHS is free at the point of use, we love and appreciate the people who work in it, but we are deeply unhappy with the quality and speed of the service it's providing. I don't think that by being honest and hard-headed about the scale of the crisis I'm doing a disservice to the founding principles of the NHS. Quite the opposite. It's having heard the cries for help from staff working the NHS that we want to grip the issue of reform."

Curriculum vitae
Born January 21, 1983
Educated Westminster City School, Cambridge University
Career Elected president of the National Union of Students in 2008. Worked at the Blairite think tank Progress then became head of education at Stonewall. Elected MP for Ilford North in 2015 and became shadow schools minister in 2020. Joined shadow cabinet with the child poverty portfolio in 2021 and was appointed shadow health secretary in 2022.
Family Lives with his partner, Joe Dancey, a public affairs consultant. His grandfather was a bank robber and his grandmother shared a prison cell with Christine Keeler.

[Josquius]

I wouldn't call someone born in 1980 a Millenial.

It's on the border. I've seen it starting between 78 and 82. I do think 1980 is the most common it being a round year.


I was just thinking about this the other day. Millenials seem to have become old really suddenly in the past few years. It's like covid formed a sudden wall to say your young days are over rather than it being a gradual transition.

[Admiral Yi]

"The Blairite center right?" 

[Sheilbh]

"The Blairite center right?" 

Sorry, typo centre left (and right of the party).

[Gups]

"The Blairite center right?" 

Sorry, typo centre left (and right of the party).

Meaningless these days. There's the hard left and there's everyone else. Binary.

[Josquius]

"The Blairite center right?" 

That's what the corbynites call it.

[Josquius]

Do my eyes deceive or is the government actually doing something good?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/08/single-use-plastic-cutlery-and-plates-to-be-banned-in-england

Single-use plastic cutlery and plates to be banned in England

Single-use items such as plastic cutlery, plates and trays are to be banned in England in a bid to reduce pollution, the government has confirmed.

Figures suggest that every year England uses about 1.1bn single-use plates and 4.25bn pieces of such cutlery, only 10% of which are recycled after being used.

Plastic items relating to takeaway food and drink, including food containers and cutlery, make up the largest share of litter in the world's oceans, according to research.

Now the environment secretary, Thérèse Coffey, is set to ban a suite of single-use plastic items, confirming reports made last month.

The move follows a consultation on the issue by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) that ran from November 2021 to February 2022.

"A plastic fork can take 200 years to decompose, that is two centuries in landfill or polluting our oceans," said Coffey.

Plastic packaging and waste
Britons dispose of nearly 100bn pieces of plastic packaging a year, survey finds
Read more
"I am determined to drive forward action to tackle this issue head on. We've already taken major steps in recent years – but we know there is more to do, and we have again listened to the public's calls.

"This new ban will have a huge impact to stop the pollution of billions of pieces of plastic and help to protect the natural environment for future generations."

The response to the consultation on proposals to ban commonly littered single-use plastic items in England is set to be released on Saturday. The Guardian understands plastic cutlery, plates and trays will be included in the ban.

Similar bans have already been made in Scotland and Wales, while the UK government banned single-use plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds in England in 2020.

However it appears the new move is not comprehensive. According to the Daily Mail, the ban will cover plastic plates, bowls and trays used for food and drink eaten at a restaurant, cafe or takeaway but not in settings such as supermarkets and shops.






The move to ban single-use plastics has previously been hailed as a welcome step by campaigners, although some have criticised the slow pace of progress and the limited scope of such a ban, while others have stressed the need to focus on reducing waste at source.

Megan Randles, political campaigner for Greenpeace UK, welcomed the move but warned: "This is like reaching for a mop instead of turning off the tap.

"We need the government to deliver a meaningful plastic reduction strategy, which means bringing in plastic reduction targets and a proper reuse and refill scheme."

[/quote]

Proof is in the pudding of course. They've promised big things in the past. But this somehow seems more believable than levelling up et al.

[garbon]

As the article notes, they've already banned some items in 2020.

I'd be happy if they could move to reduce/ban all the non recyclable plastic that groceries come in.