God, this place is such a sh*thole (literally if you count the sewage in the water). It's depressing. Every week, X is going downhill, Y is failing, we're out of money. I am so hopeless about my country's future. I feel that this is our century of humiliation.
This seems to be the case for most European countries, particularly here in France. We’re experiencing stagnation, or perhaps even a decline. Launching a product in Europe is significantly more challenging due to the market’s high fragmentation.
I don’t have much hope for the future of tech companies in Europe.
It’s exhausting trying to explain this to American leftists. They believe the UK / EU is rich, their healthcare is amazing and “free”, and no one has to work more than 35 hours a week. They visit London and Paris once in 10 years for vacation and think they understand the economic order.
European corporations and political class are rich and benefit from high GDP stimulated by mass migration and foreign funds cornering the housing market.
But European salaries are stagnating and job security is dropping like a stone, while the cost of living is steadily rising. And public healthcare is getting terrible with months of wait for an appointment.
Spain is now used as example of a growing economy in EU but youth unemployment is high and rising and wages are peanuts compared to housing. A lot of native Spanish kids are just checking out. I guess the Spanish corporations and foreign investors are having a blast. And the boomers with their fat pensions and renting their real estate portfolio.
Of note, the same is happening even in China. I feel really bad for Gen Z.
American leftist discourse about Europe is always hilarious. Apparently someone forgot to tell them that the "free" healthcare just means that it is forcibly deducted from your pay and only "free" if you don't work (Free meaning the people who work pay for you). Also they forget to mention that the actual health care system is chronically understaffed and that you should avoid the hospital if at all possible and that you might wait months to see a specialist.
Car discourse is another very good one. Apparently Europeans just really hate cars and take bikes/busses everywhere. They seem to genuinely believe that the US is the only country in the world with a car culture.
You should understand that the American situation is, in fact, much worse than ours in many ways. For instance, the average American pays a 40% tax rate compared to our 25% once you account for healthcare.
Sounds like the non-existent British NHS where getting an appointment to see a doctor is about as likely as meeting the Loch Ness Monster for a spot of tea and crumpets.
Ironically when we were living in Ireland and my daughter was going to have to wait 16 months to get a suspicious growth checked for cancer it was the UK that made it possible for us to go to a private clinic near Belfast and have her checked in a week. And it still wasn't even expensive. Free healthcare isn't actually free if you die waiting.
It used to be the jewel in the crown of empire though.
Thatcher and the more recent 14 years of UK Conservative government seemed to have kicked it bloody and senseless like Alex and his droogs from the Korova Milkbar.
The NHS and the Empire don't really overlap. It was founded right at the end of the war, shortly before the UK started having to divest from its colonies, and of course it was never a thing in any of the non-UK colonies!
I often think the NHS was only founded as a result of the war, as an extension of the military and civilian healthcare needs for injury care. German bombers didn't respect the British class system.
Only the Conservatives? You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country? Give me a break. The whole political class is rotten. And the upcoming "Reform UK" is a joke, to say the least.
> You think Blair, Brown, and now Starmer did great things for the country?
No, but apparently you think that I think that. Perhaps you might like to work through that again ...
Leaving the state of the UK as a whole to one side, the NHS was actively kicked like a dog prior to Blair who did at least stop kicking it and attempt to reverse the decline with some, albeit limited, success.
The problem is policy is oriented to growing GDP and not GDP per capita. Large corporations benefit from GDP growth and lower wages, so they incentivize the political class to grow the population artificially (wink-wink).
The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success. What percent of the UK is effectively civil servants or people receiving benefits? What percent are net takers? A lot
> The other problem is the welfare state or just the state. So much graft and just living off printed money. It pushes out success.
I see these uninformed comments all the time, and to be they suggest that the person in question has an intense ideological bent, but an aversion to evidence. As another commenter pointed out, a large amount of UK benefits spending (~£100bn) is on the state pension (the single largest benefit).
You are correct that there are a large number of economically inactive people in the UK (something like 20% of working-age people). We have had at least 50 years of government presupposing that the problem here is that these people are lazy, and a little stick will motivate them back to work. The mere fact that this has not worked (and we have tried it repeatedly) might suggest that the problem is a bit more complex than this.
One issue is that the general health of the population is very poor. Unfortunately, improving this is a very hard problem. I think people underestimate just how hard. If you could solve this, you would create hundreds of billions of pounds in value (I am not underestimating). Presumably some starting points would be working out how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food. Not sure what else helps here. I would give this a read: https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=61595
The other problem is that there are no jobs for the people in question, so even if they want to work (or are heavily incentivised to do so) they are not able to. The government can create some employment for these people, but a better vocational training system might help here.
The graft and living off printed money I do see is mostly in housing – people in the UK love to own and rent out houses. This means that (compared to e.g. Germany/Switzerland/Austria) there are very weak protections for renters. Additionally, when house prices are really high it makes it very challenging to build industries on top of this.
> Presumably some starting points would be working out how to lower the costs of fruit and vegetables and increase the cost of ultra-processed fast food.
Britain has implemented a sugar tax, but I despair when even a right-wing governments attempt to make walking and cycling easier falls victim to culture war nonsense.
Most of the benefits bill in the UK is paid to people who receive the the state pension
Of the others it's split between those who don't earn enough from work i.e. their employers don't pay them enough to live on so those benefits are essentially subsidising companies
And the other large chunk is people who aren't fit to work, this increased as a result of Covid but also the underfunding of health / social care by the previous government
The civil service isn't that big but the largest influx of people was caused by Brexit and the need to duplicate many of the things that didn't need to be separate when part of the EU
The people who've been living off printed money as those with assets, almost all the gains from the cheap money supply over the last 15 or so years has gone to the well off
Well specifically for engineering-related products (both software and hardware).
How can you thrive and be competitive when your competitors in the far-east work for >60 hours per week with a solid ecosystem and generous support from the government?
I am specifically worried about the future of European engineering, unlike US you have much smaller capitals and moats. Many of the products are sustained mainly by legacy built by your predecessors.
If nothing changes then by next-generation most if not all would be devoured by chaebols, Asian Sovereign Wealth Funds, or American PEs. You'll have to work for >60 hours but they not you will enjoy the surplus. Take your poison.
A few here have commented on different aspects, and they have their part to play but I agree with you, market fragmentation is the scale killer.
From an outside perspective it might appear like Europe is a true single market like the US but it isn't. Scaling to a European level isn't impossible but it is difficult. Some of that will just be difficult to do anything about, language, different cultures, etc.
On the political side I'm sure there is plenty more the EU can do but I don't see the will.
Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes. The language barrier is just the cost of a translator. Is that cost prohibitively high in Europe? I hear a lot of explanations of why Europe has fewer tech companies than America, but they are almost never backed by statistics. The most obvious answer continues to be the Bretton Woods system, by which large amounts of money are funnelled into America, seemingly without reason. China inverts this flow by debasing its currency, and Europe does not.
> The language barrier is just the cost of a translator.
Is it?
> Market fragmentation is a measurable phenomenon, as far as a language goes.
Market fragmentation isn't about language fragmentation – the EU has no single market for services currently, which means if you want to launch a product EU-wide you are effectively launching a product in 27 different countries. There is some harmonization, but not much. If you launch a product in the US you have a large fully harmonized single market.
The most bizarre thing is that the loudest critics of EUs market fragmentation are usually the most aggressive blockers of integration that would mitigate these issues.
The good news is that a relatively small amount of aggressive planning reform (namely, firing everyone involved and never calling it "planning" ever again) will fix most of the (fixable...) worst aspects of modern Britain.
The problem isn't building stuff, it's building stuff where stuff needs to be.
We built plenty of out-of-town shopping centres, business parks and industrial estates in the 70s, 80s, 90s. We stopped because it turns out they're, for the most part, shit. Given the choice, people will WFH and order off Amazon rather than go within a mile of these places.
What we need is to tackle the vested interests in the towns and cities themselves, as an example you can't grow most of our university cities at the edges without much better transit through the centres (trams at least, maybe metro rail). But the very suggestion and the preservation crowd as well as the existing suburbanites lose their shit.
And this is against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.
Like Brexit, there's a huge overhang of misinformed old people who hate change, but have no vested interest in the real economy because their pensions stay the same even if they block growth.
> against a backdrop of rural and less educated people mistrusting anything going on in the growth cities, and I don't just mean London.
Quite. It's time for a campaign of bigging up the second and third cities. Of course, this immediately fell to a victory of Starmer Labour keeping HS2 cuts instead of Burnham Labour (who has done great things for Manchester).
This. London can't grow much more - it can densify up to a point, but you can't build much more on the edges of town without some enormously expensive infrastructure upgrades through the middle. Which they should probably do anyway, a tube line, a Crossrail line and a new HS line every decade or so, but neither Labour nor Tories are into that politically, because of London-envy in the rest of the country.
Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and the larger university cities on the other hand, masses of scope, and on a much smaller budget and shorter timescale.
It's also the quality of the build… most new build houses are shit because the house building companies are more interested in their profit than the quality of the product
If we made cars like we make houses there'd be a long queue outside every car dealer as people returned them to get their money back
Much of it was destroyed during or immediately after WWII, or extensively - and expensively - renovated at the tail end of the 20th century. Some of it muddles on in not-really-fit-for-purpose condition: terraced houses with lath-and-plaster walls between units, street plans that can't accommodate modern requirements for recycling bins, parking and so on, homes that are difficult to insulate or retrofit with modern heating.
It's a bit like software that's been in use for 20 years. Most of the bugs have been worked out, and all the mid-tier stuff that was written at the same time has been abandoned and forgotten.
Meanwhile, a lot of those beautiful-from-the-outside Georgian and Regency townhouses that dominate the streets of much of inner London? In many cases they're really not that great to live in, unless you gut them and rebuild the entire inside.
I'm not saying all new-builds are great, mind. Some of what I've seen seems particularly mean - small and high-density, despite being in the middle of nowhere - all the cons of density without any of the pros. You'd think we'd have learned by now, but no.
I think the new builds also highlight the problem in that we're mostly obsessed with building these weird not-quite-a-town clumps of houses rather than actually growing patterns that we know work.
That and people have no taste. I like Poundbury, but I would also accept some modernist Foster-ville if someone actually did it and was prepared to put their foot down to make it consistent.
Oh, I’m not saying old houses are better (although many of them have more generous sized rooms and plots)
I’m saying as an absolute that the quality of most new build houses in the UK is shit from both design and construction perspectives
A key test for me is look at the back of a new build house and see how ugly many of them are - they literally design them to have curb appeal but no appeal when you’re sitting in the back garden.
They fit them with smaller windows so they don’t have to add as much insulation… the list of shitty things the major housebuilders do is pretty long
The garden thing feels like a cultural bug. Sort of, everyone thinks they ought to have a garden, but most people don't actually, in practice, want to do the work to maintain one, nor do they want to pay the extra for the amount of space that makes a good and useful one.
Most of those new-builds with tiny, astroturf-and-slabs gardens and wooden fence panels would be better built as apartment blocks with a shared park. Or, if your cultural aversion to apartments is too strong, as seems to be the case in much of Anglo culture ("my own roof over my own head"), row/terrace-style housing again with outdoor space provided in the form of a shared public or private park.
It seems to work well in parts of Inner London anyway, the Georgian garden squares are way nicer than a garden almost any individual resident would have time to maintain. I don't know why we can't have more of that.
Yes, so destroy the current system, then we can do all that. All we basically need is a system that can properly facilitate "Yes, but" rather than "No" and has a mechanism for bartering.
Also I don't think you're right about university cities. Taking Cambridge for example, it's completely strangled, and not by a need for buses. The causality is backwards.
BUUUT MuHHH PAAARRRKiiiiNNNGGGG!! (And house values). And we can't _possibly_ make the town look different than it did in 1972 because "heritage".
We're talking about a bunch of crusty old church biddies who will literally force you to put the most godawful, hideous house covering in the history of man BACK on your house because they're terrified of being reminded it's not the 70's.
In fact, the only post 1972 thing you ARE allowed to do is pave over your front garden and park two Jeep Cherokees (neither of which actually fit in the available space) on it.
Ah yes, it's a delight that the pavements are now covered in SUV's too because they're too big to park legally. Very in keeping with the distinct cultural heritage of the area.
But build a bike lane or even a bike shed, and they'll drag the city council all the way to the EU Supreme Court, even though half of that demographic voted Brexit.
Hold on though, that's not 1970s pebble dash, that's 1920s pebble dash, that was on the house when it was built (ish - seems that area was built up between 184 and 1914). The house is in a conservation area, which means you've got to keep it looking original. If you don't want to do that, just don't move to a conservation area!
Yes there are ridiculous rules like that are enforced. However tbh she should have checked first.
Rules around how the area should look, should be decided by people that live there. There are many better examples where it makes a lot of sense for the locals to be strict about rules about what can be erected.
I used to live near the Village of Corfe Castle. Generally the argument is that the place would lose its character and it won't be the same place anymore if it didn't keep its distinctive look.
If you would just start building places that don't fit in with the rest of the village. The village wouldn't have it character and thus it wouldn't have its tourism in the Summer as a result.
There countless towns and village with a bunch of heritage that literally goes back maybe a millennia and the argument that we should throw this away to build a load of crap houses (new houses BTW are awful, I've looked at many in the last few years) is completely asinine.
But it's _good_ when houses look different. Growing up my family would drive around new developments and say "ugg, these cookie-cutter houses all look the same, I miss when you we built unique and individual houses" and then it's jarring to move somewhere where people value conformity above all else and being different is considered bad. God forbid your house has eaves.
Explains a lot, actually.
I'm not talking about knocking down thousand-year old houses. I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally. But "locals" (aka old people with enormous amounts of time on their hands who bizarrely feel the right to tell other people what their home should look like) insisting that everything stay mediocre forever because they grew up with it this way is a bit much.
I think it is perfectly fine that people that actually live in an area get to decide what it looks like. If people don't involve themselves in that process and it is monopolized by people "with too much time on their hands" that is their fault. If they don't like the busy bodies then they should make time and actually go to the meetings.
You decide you own level of involvement in the community.
> I note that your example doesn't seem to have a problem putting car parks in, incidentally.
It is very interesting that whenever you bring up an example where it illustrates a particular point well, they will try to find anything they can point to so they can dismiss the general point being made. Guess what, a place in rural England that you can only travel easily to via car or coach will prioritise parking.
BTW I suspect knowing that area, you probably couldn't build anything other than parking in those places.
The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.
The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.
Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B
Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A
Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.
Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.
It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.
And I just meant that the car park is butt-ugly and shows the council's true priorities. They could at least put it on the edge of the village.
> The challenge is that the people who live in an area use the rules in such a way as to make building new homes very expensive or outright impossible. The people who would like to live in that area have no say, and lack representation.
Okay so what? I think that is perfectly fine. It isn't necessary for everyplace to cater for everyone.
> The bigger picture here is that it means even two rational people can inadvertently make the situation worse for themselves.
>
> Person A lives in City A, but wants to move to City B
>
> Person B lives in City B, but wants to move to City A
>
> Person A votes to make it hard to build new homes in city A, because it makes their own home worth more.
>
> Person B votes to make it hard to build new homes in City B, because it makes their own home worth more.
>
> It makes sense in a self-interested way but both wind up worse off.
These seems like a fantasy scenario to me. Typically people are either moving to a particular area, or out of a particular area, not swapping one nice affluent area for another equally affluent area (which is somewhat assumed in your scenario).
The reason btw housing is expensive is because housing became an investment vehicle isn't because of nimby's and we have about 600,000 (net) people entering the UK every year.
Not at all. It is quite clear that you are doing the "lets take this to the logical extreme". That might be fine in some sort of debate club tactic but it isn't what I was suggesting should happen at all and you know it. So I think we will leave it there.
That's fair when it comes to villages, but it's mostly the edge of small cities, and within larger ones, that growth needs to happen - because that's where infrastructure exists or can be added on.
Let the Cotswolds and Kent Weald be chocolate-box nimbyland, but keep it out of places that are trying to get work done.
The usual suggestion is to build cities more like Berlin (for example) which has an inner city with many 4-6 storey buildings — much denser than London's terraced houses, but without the isolation of skyscrapers.
These are all solutions that ignore the main problem. They literally cannot build enough properties (whatever they are) to fill current demand. Even if they relax the regulations that we currently have in place. Even there were enough properties built the infrastructure for utilities can't be scaled easily. There are issues building new properties right now because the electric grid cannot handle the combination of that and large data centres.
Since supply of house cannot be increased to solve this problem, you need to lessen the demand. The most obvious way to do this that I can see is to put a cap on immigration that is much lower than the number of people leaving (about 400,000 people leave the UK each year). However for various reasons this is seen as absolute verboten.
BTW, I know exactly the type of buildings you are talking about (we have them in Manchester) and they are typically look awful and usually start falling apart after shortly after construction. They are also not very nice to live in (I have lived in one for short amount of time).
Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.
Partly changing social customs - and you could, legitimately I think, argue some of this is down to immigration/multiculturalism - the old landlady/boarding house model, for example, which provided a LOT of cheap and relatively comfortable roofs over heads, was based on higher trust and cultural commonality than exists today.
But a lot of demand is driven by people living alone, either due to family breakdown, old age, or just out of personal choice.
On that basis if you wanted to increase supply, levers you could pull are an even more favourable tax treatment of rent-a-room schemes (although it's already pretty generous - people just don't want to), land value taxes to encourage under-occupiers to downsize, inheritance tax changes for the same (no more favourable "family home" treatment relative to cash or pension assets) and, more difficult this, legal and planning instruments to encourage suburban densification, get streets that are largely full of decaying HMOs knocked down and replaced by mid-rise which is fit for purpose.
> Despite what you might read in the news, occupancy per household is LOWER than it has been for a long time.
It has nothing to do with what I read on the news. It is simply numbers. You can come up with all these crazy schemes to increase supply which probably won't happen, or you could reduce demand that could literally be done tomorrow if they wanted to.
The problem is the institutions are unaccountable and can't be easily made controllable by the electorate again. Bank of England, the judiciary etc. These control the country not the MPs. Blair onward
Judicial review at the moment is just completely insane.
If you want to do anything it takes the best part of a decade of planning and environmental review, in large part because there are a small army of charitable organisations (often with their fees capped) waiting to challenge absolutely everything.
A government consultation was recently blocked! A consultation!
We need to completely destroy this system, they can do something useful instead. Angels sing whenever a Quango dies.
It's not, its just that you are swept into the news cycle of doomerism where engagement is established with FUD. The UK is fine compared to many of its peer nations in many areas.
It's not quite that bad - the news obviously makes it seem like it's worse than it is. Also we finally got rid of the Tories, so at least things are heading in the right direction. I made a list of some positive changes Labour have made already:
* Allow onshore wind
* Means tested winter fuel allowance
* Inheritance tax for farms
* Assisted dying bill (controversial but I think generally people are in favour of this)
* Scrapping the public footpath registration deadline
The only stupid thing I think they've done is the porn site age testing thing, but that was also a Tory policy.
IMO the big problem is the right-wing media. Take something like the winter fuel allowance. Very obviously the right thing to do, and even pensioners were generally in favour (check this article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gegy4r9ndo ), yet it still somehow a huge controversy with disingenuous articles even on the BBC like this one fuelling the faux outrage: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c80l9lde5yjo
How can we make any improvements if such obviously good changes meet such an irrational reaction?
Exactly. It's not merely the Fabian state, being ruled by lawyers, by socialist agitators, it is the vast swathes of proles who cheer every time they crush success or do wealth appropriations. It feels like you are always just two steps away from being rounded up in a pogrom for merely having savings.
The PM himself defines working class as people with no savings. It's horrid.
How much savings do you have? Is it used for rent-seeking behaviour? I think that's the key issue the country is facing.
If you have a little padding no-one will be coming for you.
Everyone in power is desparately trying dance around tax reform. When you tax productive work much more heavily than unproductive work (looking at our etf holdings grow and crowding out home/business owners with buy-to-lets), you are going to get stagnation.
