Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Josquius]

In other news...Braverman recently visited the Italian-Turkish border to see the militarised border wall they've built there.

I'm a full-blown YIMBY and YIYBY too - my end goal is Blade Runner

What about the people who can't afford or don't have the ability to use flying cars? :p

I am pretty YIMBY, but having lived in Japan I also have a huge skepticism for those I see online who insist that if you just toss out most regulations and leave it to the market it'll naturally lead to a good situation. No. This is how you get insane levels of inefficient, ugly, soul-destroying sprawl.
What is the most profitable to build is not necessarily the best for society or even the direct customers.

Agreed on Labour seemingly being all noise so far. Really hope there's something going on behind the scenes to get this promised planning reform and other necessities.

Edit: I suppose it's all of a piece in a way - I worry that a lot of Labour thinking really does seem to be that the last government's issues were basically because the Tories are bad and nasty. So Labour are good and nice so everything should now be fine. And I think the Tories were bad and nasty - but also that a lot of the issues are pretty deep (an awful lot unresolved since the global financial crisis really) and structural and require deep, structural change.  And again my fear is that like Labour in the 70s (and arguably like Jimmy Carter) if the left can't find a way to deliver it then the right might

True that the Tories weren't just nasty, they were also shit, and being shit but good doesn't really help much.
Not too sure on those 70s fears though- the problem with the populist right  is they're promising simple answers to complex problems, the liberals at least had some thought behind their ideas as disagreeable as they were. The stuff reform and co are throwing out is just dumb and wouldn't work as they claim it would.

[Josquius]

I read this the other day and thought it quite interesting. Sort of related to the "Blame the middle class!" stuff in the quo vadis dems trainwreck.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/02/death-of-middle-class-professional-spells-danger-for-labour

The death of the middle-class professional spells danger for Labour

Graduate pay is falling – and an aggrieved generation could join white-collar workers in supporting Reform UK


What does it mean to have a middle-class, white-collar professional job?

It used to feel like a promise, a guarantee of a life that might not always run smoothly but would at least be stable, verging sometimes even on smug. It probably meant a mortgage, the kind of job title that made people trust you, and a sense – especially for those who were not born into a middle-class life – of having reached safe harbour. You wouldn't be rich, but you'd be comfortable. Perhaps just as important, given all success is secretly relative, you would know exactly where you stood: never top of the pile, but at least a reassuringly long way off the bottom. But what happens when those layers start collapsing into each other?

Earlier this week, the Resolution Foundation thinktank released a technical update on the labour market that would probably have gone unnoticed if it hadn't been published in the slow news days between Christmas and new year. Its authors noted that new graduate salaries have fallen in real terms over the past two decades by about 4% on average, while the minimum wage has risen by 60%.

Though the two lines are still a long way from crossing over, for gen Z and millennials in particular the boundaries between white-collar and blue-collar worlds are getting blurrier.

At first glance, a narrowing of the gap sounds positively healthy. In a more equal society, why wouldn't the living standards of a barista move closer to those of a barrister? But to put it mildly, what has been happening to the labour market ever since the 2008 crash doesn't exactly feel like the kind of benign levelling up that brings insecure working-class lives closer to smug middle-class ones, while forcing everyone to shake off snobbish assumptions about which jobs really matter. If anything, it feels more like the opposite: a long levelling down that has seen wages flatlining except where the state actively intervenes to force them up, and precariousness creeping up the income scale instead of security trickling down.

Two decades ago, the median recent graduate starting out in a genuine graduate career could expect to earn two and a half times the minimum wage. Now the premium is only 1.6 times minimum wage for median earners, according to the Resolution Foundation, and the lowest earning graduates are fast approaching parity.

Jobs so hotly desirable that young graduates have to jump through endless hoops and internships just to get a foot in the door – say in publishing, or charity and NGO work, or (let's be honest) large parts of journalism and other creative industries – offer starting salaries in some cases barely above the £25,000 a year to which a full-time minimum-wage worker waiting tables or stacking shelves could be entitled as of this April. The old glamour and prestige still clings to these careers, but the money? That's gone, and in some cases it is unlikely to be coming back: not with AI now threatening to gut jobs everywhere from the visual arts to the junior reaches of what were once considered bombproof careers such as accountancy, insurance, law or IT.

The last government's political response to all of this was mostly to argue about whether fewer teenagers should go to university in future or more of them should do maths, as if the problem were kids wanting the wrong things out of life rather than a stagnant labour market, while ignoring an ominous head of steam building up in the here and now. There is a growing pool of young graduates who faithfully did everything they were told would help them get on in life – working hard at school, getting the grades, slogging through their degrees and sucking up the prospect of years of debt repayments to pay for it – only to realise that they may never be rewarded in the way they were promised. How gen Z reacts to this potentially painful readjustment will help shape the politics of this parliament and beyond.

In his 2023 book End Times, the US academic Peter Turchin identifies "elite overproduction" – essentially an economy creating far more educated, ambitious potential elite members than it has prestigious jobs to offer them – as a key trigger for revolutions and civil wars, especially when combined with deep economic inequality and high public debt. Though from the outside these thwarted alphas still look relatively privileged compared with their peers, it's the gap between what they think they were promised and what they actually got that breeds explosive levels of resentment. Frustrated wannabe elites can morph into angry counter-elites, turning on the establishment they had originally dreamed of joining when they realise it isn't actually going to let them in after all. Though populist parties traditionally do best among working-class voters who never went to college, Turchin argues that it's when these frustrated elites make common political cause with the more genuinely impoverished masses that they are most likely to combine and crush the centre. If Reform UK succeeds in its dream of overtaking the Tories as the main challenger to Labour – the threat increasingly preoccupying Keir Starmer's government as it heads into what will undoubtedly be a difficult year – then it might be by bringing together such an unlikely coalition of the aggrieved.

You could argue that a young professional uprising seems a remote prospect in a country such as Britain, where frustrated elites are more likely to vent their anger by just going on strike – as junior doctors did last year, protesting that they could be getting a better hourly rate at Pret a Manger – or kicking out a Tory government than anything more revolutionary.

But the idea that political instability often follows when governments make promises they can't keep is a sound one, and your heart doesn't have to bleed for disillusioned graduates to worry that something is broken here. Gen Z voting patterns around the world now suggest at the very least a backlash against mainstream parties and craving for more radical ones. Across Europe and the US, young voters are turning to the far right in worrying numbers; in Britain, the Greens on the left and Nigel Farage's Reform party on the right experienced surging support among the under-30s last summer. This may be the year we find out whether that was in retrospect the high-water mark of the gen Z revolt, or merely the beginning.

Definitely rings true to me. If the far right was just the dregs falling off the bottom of the working class they'd not get far, but they do have decent numbers of educated folks amongst their number too. They're the ones putting on the suit and tie and pretending to be rational. I've ran into more than a few working in the UK (e.g. the one I've mentioned before who just wouldn't believe I'd ever been to Malmo and it was alright because YouTube had said different).

Lots of this stuff about how there's now the 1% and the rest has been said many times before but you never really seem to see any attention paid to where this is problematic. Equality is good. But a lack of opportunity to ever achieve more...less good.
In China at the moment they're seeing massive unrest with this- quite an issue in much of Africa too.

Understandable why those struggling to even survive would get most attention. But the lack of opportunity to step up from there needs a look too.
A lot of the same root causes behind this as more generally recognised issues, like housing.

[HVC]

The rich pay them, and the poor vote for them (ostensibly), so who else are liberals gonna screw over if not the middle class? Equality only works if you take from one to give to another


*edit* conservative screw the the poor to appease the middle class, and liberals screw the middle class to appease the poor. Naturally the rich get off Scott free.

[Josquius]

The rich pay them, and the poor vote for them (ostensibly), so who else are liberals gonna screw over if not the middle class? Equality only works if you take from one to give to another


*edit* conservative screw the the poor to appease the middle class, and liberals screw the middle class to appease the poor. Naturally the rich get off Scott free.

This took place in the majority under the Conservatives.
It was screw the middle class and the poor (I guess you mean working class? As those two aren't the same) to make the rich richer whilst convincing the poor it was all foreigners fault.

(also liberal=conservative).

[HVC]

It appears that Brit's have long cared more about animals than people. And not just bats. There's a statue in London commemorating the death of two (maybe one) workmen who died while arguing over a stolen sandwich. Did they decide to immortalize the poor overworked hungry builders? Nope. They took pity on the hungry thieving mice

Statue in question

[mongers]

It appears that Brit's have long cared more about animals than people. And not just bats. There's a statue in London commemorating the death of two (maybe one) workmen who died while arguing over a stolen sandwich. Did they decide to immortalize the poor overworked hungry builders? Nope. They took pity on the hungry thieving mice

Statue in question

What's not to love? 

[Sheilbh]

It appears that Brit's have long cared more about animals than people. And not just bats. There's a statue in London commemorating the death of two (maybe one) workmen who died while arguing over a stolen sandwich. Did they decide to immortalize the poor overworked hungry builders? Nope. They took pity on the hungry thieving mice

Statue in question

Oh it's forever been the way. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was founded after and inspired by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (as well as children's welfare charities in the US). I think the RSPCA is one of, if not the oldest, animal welfare charity in the world and one of the biggest in the UK (where it has quasi-legal status and does investigations and prosecutions for animal cruelty).

Animal rights was a genuine angle on the Brexit campaign and one of the first "Brexit freedoms" or significant divergences that have actually passed was banning the export of live animals for slaughter (following bans introduced in New Zealand and Australia). Also plans to ban the import of foie gras.

I'm not sure it's uniquely particularly British but I think attitudes on all this are very Victorian in their weird mix of hyper-sentimentalism and callousness.

[Sheilbh]

I literally don't know how you have this little self-awareness and function in the world
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jan/09/liz-truss-sends-legal-letter-ordering-starmer-to-stop-saying-she-crashed-economy

[Sheilbh]

This seems fine:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/10/uk-energy-supply-gas-storage-levels-centrica

No 10 insists UK has sufficient energy supply despite 'concerningly low' gas storage levels

Centrica says its inventories have fallen by half since early November amid winter cold snap

Earlier this week we apparently came within about 500 MW (or basically one power plant having issues) of the National Grid having to implement "demand management". My understanding is that we've been very very close to the edge of needing blackouts every winter since 2022. Slightly worried that we'll actually need the disaster to happen for government to get a grip on this.

I think there's a lot to David Edgerton's idea that basically the UK had, built and maintained assets until the 1970s and that a lot of the economic policy of the last 40 years has basically been living off those assets. But I think it's broader, I think about it with security in Europe, but also things like energy (although I'd put the date later than the 70s because I don't think this was a flaw you could accuse Thatcher, Kohl or Mitterrand). I think there's been a recent generation of leaders who assume that the lights won't go out and territorial boundaries in Europe are settled because they are. That's just the way things are - not because of the work of previous generations of policy-makers and civil servants. Work that we've since neglected and now we're dancing on the edge.

[mongers]

This seems fine:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jan/10/uk-energy-supply-gas-storage-levels-centrica

No 10 insists UK has sufficient energy supply despite 'concerningly low' gas storage levels

Centrica says its inventories have fallen by half since early November amid winter cold snap

Earlier this week we apparently came within about 500 MW (or basically one power plant having issues) of the National Grid having to implement "demand management". My understanding is that we've been very very close to the edge of needing blackouts every winter since 2022. Slightly worried that we'll actually need the disaster to happen for government to get a grip on this.

I think there's a lot to David Edgerton's idea that basically the UK had, built and maintained assets until the 1970s and that a lot of the economic policy of the last 40 years has basically been living off those assets. But I think it's broader, I think about it with security in Europe, but also things like energy (although I'd put the date later than the 70s because I don't think this was a flaw you could accuse Thatcher, Kohl or Mitterrand). I think there's been a recent generation of leaders who assume that the lights won't go out and territorial boundaries in Europe are settled because they are. That's just the way things are - not because of the work of previous generations of policy-makers and civil servants. Work that we've since neglected and now we're dancing on the edge.

I dpn't disagree with his point, though I think some of it is timing, with the 1st generation of nuke plants being on line and the building of AGC nuke plants maturing and so forth there would be a natural lull in the pace of power plant construction. Plus the economic turmoil of 73-74 and later difficulties might have challenged continued long term planning during the decade.

However I do disagree with your second assertion, how is the thatcherite selling off of national infrastructure, British Gas in 1986 and the others, not an implicit ending of long term planning and national energy policy?

[Sheilbh]

I dpn't disagree with his point, though I think some of it is timing, with the 1st generation of nuke plants being on line and the building of AGC nuke plants maturing and so forth there would be a natural lull in the pace of power plant construction. Plus the economic turmoil of 73-74 and later difficulties might have challenged continued long term planning during the decade.

However I do disagree with your second assertion, how is the thatcherite selling off of national infrastructure, British Gas in 1986 and the others, not an implicit ending of long term planning and national energy policy?

Edgerton's point is wider than energy I should say. His book - The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth Century History - is really good on British economic history. It's very revisionist in all sorts of ways but basically (I think very effectively) demolishing the "declinism" narrative that was so important for Thatcherism - and lots of mini-myths within that.

I think I wasn't clear on Thatcher (or Kohl or Mitterrand). It wasn't a comment on their specific policies but that I think they understood that there was a material side to issues like security or energy and I don't think generally they were as careless/insouciant/taking things for granted as we have.

So I think in a lot of policy areas, but particularly energy and security, basically what we've done only works if everything goes right. Recent UK governments have moved from coal to gas, but also shut down further gas exploration and closed our gas storage while not building new nuclear or allowing the construction of grid infrastructure on large enough scale to meet supply from renewables. There's a world where that could work as a policy mix. They've had good intents but there doesn't need to be much disruption in one area (like gas supply) for us to be in a crisis. My read on Thatcher is that she was generally very involved on the details and prepared on things (and also specifically on energy very aware of the risks of the lights going off), rather than a hope for the best type of policy-maker.

[Tamas]

If we end up having an actual gas shortage before bloody Hungary or Slovakia that's going to be very frustrating.

I am thinking the problem is people are having it too nicely on average. Contentment is widespread enough for inaction and entropy (not to mention nihilism) to set in.

[Richard Hakluyt]

One of my favourite sites, completely apolitical, just some data https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Right now wind is providing 3GW of electricity but demand is 45GW, the wind often drops during a cold snap, so we have a problem which nodody has explained how to resolve to my satisfaction.

[Sheilbh]

One of my favourite sites, completely apolitical, just some data https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Right now wind is providing 3GW of electricity but demand is 45GW, the wind often drops during a cold snap, so we have a problem which nodody has explained how to resolve to my satisfaction.

I agree. I think we need a base layer of power that is not purely renewable - and I've not really heard anyone explain what that will be. There's a German word for these types of days but we've had a lot this winter where it's short days or very cloudy so very little solar, but very still so very little wind - and wholesale prices shoot up and there's lots of management of the grid to keep the lights on.

I think the interconnectors is often cited as a solution - the Octopus guy on Question Time saying "it's always sunny or windy somewhere" which is true. The problem with that is that I believe specifically British and German demand for energy imports is now so high that it's having an impact on energy prices in other countries, like Norway. So I believe it's now becoming a political issue in Norway over whether to build interconnectors to the UK and Germany which will increase the prices for domestic consumers. It feels a bit like European freeloading on American security.

Also with interconnectors I think countries in the Baltic are now having to patrol their sub-sea infrastructure very regularly because that's become a way for Russia to attack. I think Chinese sabotage of Taiwanese sub-sea cables is also at a record high. So building an interconnector to Morocco, say, would be a good idea - as long as it's about providing another stream of energy  that we can use rather in a diverse mix of supply rather than something we rely on as we further wind down fossil fuels, don't build new nukes and don't build enough renewables ourselves. If we're reliant on it, then it's a very vulnerable type of supply.

Again it makes me think of so many issues like the NHS where a pandemic hits and we basically have no spare beds because it's not designed to have spare capacity (which also means right now treatments are being cancelled because there's a cold weather spike). Or housing where we have a tiny percentage of dwellings unoccupied compared to other European countries but also set building targets (which we need or nothing would get built) set based on local housing needs assessments. There's just lots of areas that don't seem to have any room for error or slack for a crisis.

On energy I'm really struck that you've got the Rolls Royce modular nuclear reactors - which should be an answer. That feels like what would happen in the 50s or 60s: British company coming up with a technical solution, meeting a national need - swing the state behind it etc etc. Instead the state is swinging behind it with tens of orders for these reactors, but the states in question are Poland and Czechia

[Barrister]

I agree. I think we need a base layer of power that is not purely renewable - and I've not really heard anyone explain what that will be. There's a German word for these types of days but we've had a lot this winter where it's short days or very cloudy so very little solar, but very still so very little wind - and wholesale prices shoot up and there's lots of management of the grid to keep the lights on.

So on the one hand you wish that base load would be nuclear.  But there's not really any reason to use nuclear in such a fashion - once the reactor is built you're just as well off running it full time.  I think (but could be corrected) that it's going to use up its nuclear fuel at the same rate whether power is being generated or not - the isotopes decay at the same rate.

Which then leaves you with natural gas.  Burns clean (other than CO2), very storeable, easy to turn on and off.

But you have to build (or convert) natural gas plants.