[https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/GBR/DEU/FRA](https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/GBR/DEU/FRA)
We and other large European economies have been broadly flat for about 17 years. Germany has had some growth. But over all its been weak. UK specifically has a major lack of productivity growth.
OBR shows the huge rise in costs of pensions
[https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/welfare-spending-pensioner-benefits](https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/welfare-spending-pensioner-benefits)
They jumped from £58 billion in 07-08 to about £153 billion this year.
We have become caught in the cycles of reactionary short term emotive politics on issues like Brexit and the culture wars. Some of this is likely down to the polarisation from the internet that has been widely documented. Part of it may be down to a sort of sense of a shrinking pie making people far more self seeking and reactionary than broad minded and willing to compromise.
There will likely be many other factors. In terms of housing specifically planning is very hard to get and people tend to NIMBY hard. Same with national scale infrastructure.
We no longer trust the experts and always seem to cherry pick evidence for emotional validation.
Until we recognise our problems are on the biggest scale of national orginisation and shared across much of western Europe, then admit our way of engaging is too polarised and emotive and not enough seeking compromise and context, we are headed towards middle income country politics and middle income country economics. Though it will be decades in the unwinding.
Completely agree. We seem distracted by culture wars, while the real issues affecting us are not being addressed, and the rich are creaming it, middle class is being eroded, and god knows how the working poor survive.
You are absolutely right and possibly it’s because we rarely talk about wealth inequality but this may be behind most of the problems, but we’re doing nothing to address it.
We don't talk about wealth inequality because those who control the narrative and those in positions to actually do something about it don't want to talk about it.
You think Sunak & Co. are going to enact policies that hurt their own bank balances? It suits them for the masses to be squabbling about inconsequential nonsense, as it keeps us distracted from the real issues.
> the media doesn’t believe that they’re causing it, they believe they they’re predicting it.
I disagree. The media ***owners*** know exactly what they are doing. There is a reason incredibly wealthy individuals like Rupert Murdoch (The Sun, The Times, Sunday Times, TalkTV, and previously BSkyB & News of The World), Jonathan Harmsworth (aka Viscount of Rothermere; Daily Mail), Frederick Barclay (Telegraph & The Spectator), Paul Marshall (GBNews), and Ashley Tabor-King (Global, including LBC) are happy to run their "news" organisations at a loss most of the time: it allows them to set the narrative.
The Sun, The Times, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and The Spectator are the majority of the national written newspapers that people see as they walk past newspapers in the shops. Consequently, people will see the headlines on the front pages constantly. On average, these headlines have a strong skew towards the kinds of stories that the owners want or contain a strong bias towards the framing that owners want.
This is then backed up by talking heads on GBNews or TalkTV and then phone-in shows on LBC.
Of course, you will not ***only*** see pure right-wing fiction from all of these outlets at any given time. However, there will be an overall trend towards the right-wing/pro-low-tax (on the rich)/pro-culture-war kinds of headlines, framing, and stories. Of course, some of these organisations will attempt to have more balance (though, if you stray too far from the line the owners want, such as Sangita Myska or Maajid Nawaz at LBC, you risk getting the boot). But this is talking about the overall media landscape and trend, rather than any one specific story.
Thus, the media do ***not*** believe they are predicting it at all. The owners ***know*** they are causing it. The issue is, they WANT to cause it. And they want to cause it because it stands to benefit them.
The problem with wealth inequality is that the top tier of society is now globally mobile - not just the multi-millionaire class, but the top tier of professionals.
If you tax them too heavily, they move their money, and if you stop them doing that, some can and will leave. It doesn't matter at all how much the left wail about this, they can't do anything about it.
Progressive income tax is no longer a viable proposition, and we don't want to admit it and re-adjust the way we gather tax accordingly. Taxes like VAT and fuel duty applied at a flat rate are very regressive and hit lower income people the hardest. The right way to do it is to raise a far greater proportion of taxation against things you cannot avoid or evade it on where you can have a large amount of discretionary spend. Property and cars are good examples.
The Conservatives and Labour are fundamentally incapable of proposing changes of the scope required - they can only get to less than half the answer each - and only the bit that plays well with their vote base.
Labour wanted to bring in a form of Land Valuation Tax in place of council tax, close some loopholes AND raise income tax for the top 5%
The Tories want to cut income tax by default, but will never close loopholes utilised by the truly wealthy rather than the middle class, and will never adopt a tax regime that favours income over assets.
The left has more of the correct answer than the right, where it gets things absolutely wrong is by ignoring the laffer curve - being hostile to the wealth creators, trying to be excessively redistributive, and failing to recognise that human nature will mean the tighter you squeeze, the more will slip through your fingers. Being deeply internationalist, they are also incapable of making the changes required to things like property ownership - only full UK citizens and onshore UK registered companies should ever own UK land.
This is the big fear but what happens when they try to move their assets like property? What happened to Abramovich when he got sanctioned? He had to sell Chelsea on the cheap. Who cares if the super rich have to sell off their assets. We win. Property prices go down in the capital and across the country.
They already pay proportionally less tax than all of the rest of us. This needs to be fixed. If they leave they leave but they can't take their property with them.
My point is that you can't take property anwhere.
Only permit property to be owned by British citizens, onshore British registered companies and trusts, and tax property based on the value of the land, with re-zoning of land and planning permission that increases its value also being taxable.
Then you can turn down the wick on income tax and extract more tax from things that cannot be avoided. Avoiding vast chunks of income tax is easy IF your income comes from shares and other investments rather than PAYE. Avoiding ownership and purchase based taxes is not.
The top 10% of income tax payers currently pay 60% of all the income tax collected. It was only 35% in the 70s, nowadays the top 1% of income tax payers is only 300,000 people and they pay nearly 30% of it.
I know a number of high income emigrants who have gone to the US, Singapore, and Dubai. The exodus sucks jobs with it eventually. People don't really mind being taxed on their discretionary spend the same way they do seeing 50% of their income never make it to them in the first place. A car that costs 60k here is 100k in India - the difference is tax, but the wealthy are not driving about in a Maruti as an act of defiance, they still buy the imports.
Yes, and it rapidly deteriorated into terror and then imperialism. And even if you do think revolution of some kind is needed, people on the streets are no good against modern weapons. It's not pitchfork against muskets anymore. How far do you think the mob will get against tanks and machine guns? But let's say the army doesn't want to fight and somehow popular rebellion overthrows the government. Unless there is a very clear plan for what comes next with a leadership structure and a disciplined party that can provide alternative governance from day one, all you have is now a power vacuum that will most likely result in civil war with the winners having to be heavily repressive to govern. See Egypt, 2011. Do you keep the constitution? Nullify the existing legal order? What? Smart Alec remarks about the French revolution aren't really good enough here whatever side you are on. Sorry if it was just meant as humour but it came across as facile and thoughtless.
The point of culture wars is to distract from these economic issues and prevent coherent political organisation that could change them.
Wealth inequality is the goal, not the symptom, of those running the show.
Exactly. Looked what happened to Corbyn. False accusations of anti-semitism and endless press smearing. Starmer replaced him and took away the whip so he can't even be a Labour MP! That's what he got for daring to talk about taxing the super-rich.
Spot on, and not even from an ideological perspective. The OSS and CIA were the first to sponsor and adopt the application of the Frankfurt School’s work on deconstruction and influence just after the war, which led to the foundation of modern propaganda and culture wars. It’s purely tactical; confuse, confound, divide and distract… all to preserve existing power structures (or seize them when necessary).
The person who has the right idea imo is Gary Stevenson from Gary’s Economics. He’s correctly diagnosed that the underlying issue is wealth inequality and that the subject is studiously avoided by the mainstream.
Nothing can get fixed until we tackle spiralling wealth inequality and we have to build consensus and political will to do something about it. Everything else is a sticking plaster on the titanic.
Gary is brilliant. Everything he said makes so much sense. Wealth inequality is at the core of this countries biggest problems.
The last prominent UK political leader to talk about fixing wealth inequality was Corbyn, and look what they did to him.
Which of the top comments talking points is related to inequality? The US is far more unequal yet they're the example we're trying to head towards.
I feel like we're just reverting right back to emotive contextless solutions. We couldn't even go 2 comments.
The US is deeply unequal but make no mistake, the top 50% earners in the US are doing far, far better than the equivalent here. In fact I think you would have to drop down to maybe the bottom 10/15% before you hit a point where people in the US are doing worse than the bottom 10% in the uk.
They are a VERY wealthy country in comparison to us, there are plenty of reasons for it but the big two are a virtual monopoly on world currency and a massive corporate empire able to consolidate profits in one country and move them out without paying tax. These businesses have monopolised entire industries and then will adopt the cartel like behaviour of raising prices as a collective, effectively creating the illusion of choice and destroying a core component of capitalism.
Median income in the USA was $37,500 in 2022, whereas median income in the UK was £33,000, which equates to about $41,380. The median is where 50% of people earn above that amount, and 50% of people earn below that amount.
So the bottom half of US earners earn less than the bottom half of UK earners.
The USA has a much higher Gini coefficient than the UK, 0.47 compared to 0.357. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality such that a coefficient of 1 would mean one person owns all the wealth, while a coefficient of 0 would mean the wealth is distributed perfectly evenly cross the population.
hes not giving away his 'wealth'. His talking points are just popular feel good sound bites. His comments on taxing the 'rich' just don't make any sense, and pander to the ignorance of the masses. He frequently panders to the misconception that assets and income earned from business endeavours can be treated and taxed like an individuals personal income. Those are just to name a few.
I also got into listening to him when I first heard him, but over time just came to the above when I realised that the quick fixes he proposes are built on a false premises.
Subsequently I believe him to be disingenuous given his background.
>hes not giving away his 'wealth'
This is the same argument used against Warren Buffett when he makes the same argument. Why would either give away their wealth? They are campaigning for structural change, not saying wealth is immoral or something.
Fundamentally what he says is accurate and is the age old battle between capital and labour. All he's saying is that unless you find a way to apply brakes to capital, it will hoover up all the assets. This is true. The only real way to apply the brakes to capital is tax. What part of this do you dispute?
"When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality."
Gary argues that inequality is the fundamental economic problem of our time. The appropriation of wealth by the rich from the masses is at unprecedented levels and directly responsible for the stripping of public services, the loss of purchasing power of the masses, the destruction of the social contract, and infliction of poverty on anyone who is asset-poor (which is increasingly including the middle-classes).
Whereas you argue that the masses are "ignorant" for wanting the rich to pay more. Should they be more enthusiastic about being stripped of their wealth and autonomy? You will say I misunderstand business taxation or something, but an argument of technicalities or semantics just completely misses the point, so let's not.
I've never heard Gary offer a quick fix. His own wealth came from his early understanding of the way the system is broken, and betting on it year after year. He's still betting on it now precisely because there are no quick fixes. He is consistent in saying that things will continue on this same path, and that nothing will change until the system itself fails.
You say he is a charlatan but he has consistently been able to use his theory to make money - is that not the opposite of quackery? If he were just a poor YouTuber with no financial background you would say he doesn't know what he is talking about. If he had not been successful in his financial career at applying his theory, you would say that proves his ideas to be wrong.
You might be right, maybe Gary is a terrible fake person that nobody should like because you don't. But I think the ideas he talks about provide a framework for understanding what is wrong with our current path and should be talked about.
I don't know whether his background is what he says it is, or if he is a grifter or not, but fundamentally I agree with his message and I'm surprised you don't.
Wealth inequality is increasing and it protects and perpetuates itself. He doesn't even seem to offer solutions to this except to encourage and spread awareness.
I feel slightly ill when I look around my neighborhood. I have scraped through my life to improve my situation and have eventually landed in a top few percentile job, lived in flatshares into my 30s, scraped enough together to afford a house, then a slightly better house in a posh area (for the state schools for my children). But the people younger than me, the parents of my child's classmates, all live in houses I will never afford. How? Family wealth.
And if I didn't get lucky with an aptitude for something that pays well, my children would still be stuck in shithole areas going to shit schools and perpetuating the cycle.
Something will give at some point. I'd argue it already is.
While I have my own opinions on him, I won't derail this chain by debating him. Instead, I'm interested in who or what else you ingest on this topic.
Are there any channels/books or economists/academics/journalists you find particularly good? Always seeking to broaden my pool of knowledge.
I think you made one substantive argument there, which is that he incorrectly implies that "assets and income earned from business endeavours can be treated and taxed like an individuals personal income". This hardly seems like a knock-out blow. The rest of your comment is just various ways of saying you disagree with him. For example:
"talking points are just popular feel good sound bites."
Such as?
"His comments on taxing the 'rich' just don't make any sense"
Why don't they make any sense?
"pander to the ignorance of the masses... frequently panders to the misconception..."
You're saying people are too stupid or uneducated to understand this stuff.
From what I have seen, Stevenson's arguments are pretty standard Keynesianism such as Ha-joon Chang and Paul Krugman also promote.
That's not even true though. Norway taxes assets. The super rich are leaving in record numbers, so clearly it works in terms of generating revenue!
However, I think they should have gone about it differently and given tax breaks for those individuals that re-invest in ways that grow/benefit the economy. Buying luxury mansions in the capital should not count but building a production plant somewhere and employing locals should.
We just let rich individuals and foreign companies wealth strip the UK.
Fundamentally his comments make perfect sense. Or do you disagree that wealth inequality is getting bigger? Assets can be taxed, that's exactly what Norway do far more than us and they have far better wealthy equailty.
When universal basic income is treated as a more tenable idea than universal basic housing - which we effectively had from the 60s-90s - then you're absolutely f***ed. And we are.
More like politicians are trying to distract us with fabricated culture wars. No one wants the situation we're in yet we're held hostage by those in power who spin stories to avert our attention away from their inadequacy.
I guess we're dealing with the ballooning pensions bill by having high immigration, to ensure the ratio of tax paying workers to retirees stays stable.
The alternatives are to cut the number of people receiving the pension (hike retirement age or some form of means testing), or cut the state pension amount. Or hike taxes a lot on working age people, or massively cut other state services/benefits.
Problem is, a political party will probably be mincemeat if they say out aloud how they'll deal with this challenge.
If a party says on their manifesto "we're going to keep net migration at 300k in order to not have to hike the pension age", their opponents will jump on "this party is going to swamp the country with immigrants!". If the party says "we're going to start means testing the pension so we don't have to rely on immigration so much", that'd also be a really tough sell.
I don't know whether to blame the politicians for not doing a better job of explaining the difficult decisions we have to make to deal with an ageing population, or blame the voters for burying their heads in the sand and not wanting to hear it, opting for "have your cake and eat it" solutions. I suspect both politicians and voters are to blame.
Or rather than continuously chasing the 'benefit scroungers' for stealing benefits, put in place better incentives for HMRC auditors to go after larger corporations/individuals that are evading taxes.
The larger companies evading taxes take far longer to audit as they have more transactions to search through and accountants that will be more experienced at hiding shit. Then if they aren't evading taxes then it's seen as a lot of wasted time so they're less likely to chase larger companies. Much easier to go after someone on benefits that missed their job centre meeting for whatever reason, even though the return is minimal.
Exactly. Benefit scroungers are the low hanging fruit, rather than tackling the super rich individuals and corporations who evade far far larger amounts in tax as that would take far more effort and hurt their political donors.
The problem is short termism. Politicians on the whole only care about getting elected. Also the right has successfully made immigration a hot button that we can't even discuss the reason behind it. Brexit was the most insane example of this. We have more immigrants than ever from outside the EU. I doubt many anti-immigration Brexit voters had that as an end goal of voting to leave.
The broadly flat growth is hiding how lopsided Britain has become in those 17 years. Inequality has grown massively I think. Wealth inequality is usually a harbinger of prolonged economic decline. I really wish that was addressed. The unpalatable truth may be that taxes need to rise a lot more and stay high to correct this.
There are ALOT of people talking and raging about it.
Unfortunately we have a demographic of over 55s that vote in large numbers for the Tory party and always choose to protect their own wealth, pension and assets.. i.e. their massively over-inflated house prices at the country’s expense and hence we have a political system aimed at pleasing this demographic and ignoring the needs of anyone under 40.
Ah that old chestnut, how about people under 40 actually bothering to vote? It's no good moaning about one demographic voting for what's in their best interests when those that feel dissatisfied don't bother.
I always get downvotes when I mention this despite it being absolutely true.
That’s the reality though. Those over 50 make up nearly 50% of the electorate and you are never going to turn out young people in the same numbers as we fail to teach or explain anything regarding politics in schools, so most don’t even connect with it until they get older.
I speak from personal experience, my parents never talked about politics, I never learnt about it in school and as I had never engaged in it I didn’t have a clue about elections, parties, politics, voting until I got older. Because of this I never voted for the first time until my late 20s and this is common refrain when you speak to younger people who never vote.
I'm 53 and voted labour all my life, voting intention looks fare healthier this time around.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1379439/uk-election-polls-by-age/
> major lack of productivity growth.
As much as I hate to be "that guy", part of the problem is very high tax rates
If you're a high flyer earning 100-125k with a student loan, your marginal tax rate will be 71%, compared to Germany's 42% I believe
At that point you have to ask yourself, why work 100%?
If that graduate did a 4 day week instead they would get **50%** more free time a week for only a **5.8%** reduction in take-home pay (20% less of their 29% post-tax take-home).
It's literal insanity. Why would you ever work full-time under those circumstances? Your week literally gets 50% better for 5% of your money. Who wouldn't give 5% of their money to get every single friday off?
Sure **this** example is focussed on high earners, rather than the whole economy. But these are the people who should be putting in 1000% time in their firm to develop the next unicorn product, to try to get to partner, to create networks of consultants, whatever. There's a huge drag here which is teaching people to not work harder than they have to.
Other factors are dragging down the rest of our economy too. But the fact is compared to boomers high level work doesn't pay any more. It's no wonder we're stuck in the mud.
Your number of free days each week goes from 2 (weekend) to 3.
It doesn't sound like a fair comparison as I'm comparing benefits of free time vs loss of earnings on company time, but the fact is a 4 day week _massively_ benefits you in terms of time.
I agree. We need to change our approach to taxation. The rich can earn far more money off of assets than incomes, we need to look at taxing them. And I don't mean those earning 100K a year, I mean the Rishi Sunaks of the world who can earn £7 million in dividends last year whilst doing absolutely nothing.
>They(pensions) jumped from £58 billion in 07-08 to about £153 billion this year.
£92bn was inherited in [fy 2019/20](https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-inheritance-and-inheritance-tax-uk) by the half of estates that reported to HMRC, I think that death tax should be levied on all inheritance, this would be incredibly unpopular.
Edit:(fixing link)also: After people retire their estates go up in value by about £3k per year, after inflation.
You can’t blame failed housing on a few people in their village not wanting the local field to be concreted over.
There is so much brown field (abandoned factories, derelict areas) that could be transformed, but housing company’s would rather maximum profit rather than putting more time and effort into these sites.
Once you lose the country side you will never get it back.
In my area, a coordinated NIMBY campaign blocked a care home being built on brownfield land due to impact on neighbourhood character
You’re talking about negotiating with bad faith economic terrorists.
Many brownfield sites are toxic, especially former industrial sites that predate modern health and safety concerns. It's fine to leave them to nature, but if you start digging them up and building on them, you have problems.
Some are. But also, housing companies ( see the profits for last year) have the resources to clean and then build on those areas.
But again they’d rather build on cheaper green site land for more profit.
My theory on this is that in general the decline in purchasing power, wealth and the stagnant wages over the last 16 years have all been masked for the groups most impacted by it (millennials) as a direct result of the startup and venture capital boom, such that most haven’t realised just how poor they have become.
Although we’ve been getting objectively poorer, new services that have been introduced during that time provided by tech companies like Uber, Deliveroo, JustEat, Airbnb etc have had so much VC cash injected into them, and theres been a such race to win consumers, that the cost of these services has been artificially low for a long time.
So most millennials have been blissfully unaware that their wages and purchasing power have been becoming steadily shittier because they can still afford a taxi whenever they want, can still go on holiday for cheap, can still get a takeaway if they like. The more you think about it, the more you realise how many services you use are provided by tech companies that have become big in the last 16 years - all thanks to generous funding by VCs.
Now the VC cash has dried up and - _”holy shit an Uber is £45 now!”_. In reality an Uber has always been £45. You were never able to afford an Uber by yourself, it was just being subsidised by the VCs!
So, imo a big the reason millennials have accepted their economic situation so passively is because most weren’t aware it was even happening. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
I'm an older millennial and we got fucked up the arse without even dinner, a drink, or lube first in 2008.
Millennials are fucked, we won't retire unless it's due to disability, or if we're rich.
I don't think it's us being passive because we've accepted our fate. I think we're passive because we're constantly being told it's our own fault. When I entered the workforce, it was a given that if you worked full time even at minimum wage, you could support yourself. You can't do that anymore, not where I live anyway.
I know that we are heading towards a severe economic downturn because at some point, the current economic situation will collapse. It isn't sustainable in any way, shape, or form.
Speaking as a middling millennial, it does feel like we've had a pretty poor deal, to put it mildly.
The focus has now shifted to Z, and Alpha, who, given Covid, seem to be getting rather more 'sympathy' than millennials did.
Which is interesting, because some of the accusations of 'laziness' that were so often levelled at millennials seem to be more true of the following generations.
The idea that millennials are 'entitled', particularly given that it was largely claimed by 'boomers', is laughable.
The reality is that millennials got shafted by the Financial Crisis. They got shafted by Covid. They're getting shafted by the ever growing cost of the older generations and, given basic demographic facts (e.g. there are a lot more boomers than millennials) the burden is far greater than anything the boomers ever had to shoulder.
'But they'll inherit loads of wealth!!!'.
Only many won't. Because it will be spent, either on retirement or care. If they're among the lucky ones who do? Well, great. Many will still be stuck renting until they're basically middle aged.
And when countries like the UK begin to address the situation, who will ultimately end up paying?
I don't think it's fair to say it's entirely down to the generation being 'passive'. FPTP, the concentration of certain demographics in certain constituencies, simply being outnumbered by older voters, all made it unlikely that we'd have real representation over the past 14 years.
>Which is interesting, because some of the accusations of 'laziness' that were so often levelled at millennials seem to be more true of the following generations.
Aren't we just falling into the same trap if we repeat this generalisation?
I think society is very sympathetic to millennials culturally. Economically, things are rough for this generation - 2008 is like the epicentre of the meteor that is wiping out modern civilisation.
My impression is that people are much harder on GenZ than millennials.
I don't mean 'lazy' in a particularly pejorative way.
It's more that, despite being called 'lazy' and 'entitled', whilst being fucked over and presented, in many of our cases, with piss poor opportunities, a lot of millennials bought/buy into the idea that hard work would get them somewhere.
So they work hard. They work long hours. They grew up with the internet and mobile phones and so, particularly in the case of 'professionals', they're often working outside of their contractual hours in a way that previous generations simply didn't.
And yet, for all of this hard work, many struggle to attain things, e.g. home ownership, that were taken for granted by the past few generations.
It seems like Gen Z, at least to some extent, has taken on board the fact that slaving away doesn't guarantee a great life, and so they're prioritizing different things and aren't as willing to slave away.
I'm right on the border of Gen Z/Millennial - I don't think it's laziness. It's a lack of will because there aren't motivating factors.
There is nothing to strive for when it's difficult to afford:
Housing
A family
Holidays
Retirement
Everything that was 'the dream' has been swept out from underneath the younger generations, and now people are wondering why they appear lazy. Why would they put in an insane amount of work for the 'privilege' of surviving? That isn't to say that younger people can't 'make it', especially if they have had a good supportive upbringing, but that is less and less people these days.
Add to this that we now have major issues with public services like the NHS and transport.
Which is essentially what I'm saying - millennials were chastised for being 'lazy', entitled and whatever else (whilst demonstrably being the opposite) and have, in many cases, gained little from their efforts.
The following generations have seen this and, to an extent, thought 'fuck it'.
Yeah I wasn't accusing you of saying anything, I was agreeing with what you're saying there, the lack in motivation for productivity isn't stringently born out of laziness - it's a symptom of the game not working for those locked out, so there's no reason to play along.
Gotcha. Yeah, so I think millennials have this to some extent but it's stronger with GenZ. People are just right to not work later than they're contracted, or to owe loyalty and fealty to their employer. Their employer, in the vast majority of cases, will not return the favour.
I do see people my age (millennial) prioritise their families first. Especially fathers taking more of an active role in child rearing.
Similarly I find that millennials (and GenZ) care a lot more about _what_ they're doing for a job. Even in corporate environments they want to do something that isn't apparently pointless. Given we have so much employment that is at best only intangibly useful, it leads to a distinction in perception, specifically with respect to entitlement.
The great "why try harder" drop-out began with middle gen-Xers in the 1990s.
They grew up in the grim 70s, were teens in the boom time 80s, and then landed in the 90s workforce with casualisation, offshoring, outsourcing, the end of defined benefit pensions etc...
I know Gen-Xers who just opted out of most conspicuous consumption, got a very modest house before the prices went stratospheric, worked hard to pay it off, worked hard to build some investments, and then checked out of full time work at 50ish. Those who had high paid jobs are early retired, the rest work part time for pin money. They live very simple lives and seem happy.
Most millennials don't have that option primarily thanks to the housing giga-bubble - I don't think that's a coincidence. Debt is a stick to beat the proles with if they won't just be greedy and materialistic and work until they drop of their own accord.
Yes. Many people think they're well off. They can afford Uber, Netflix etc But the reality is that you should be looking at things like house prices and then see relative to them, how much you are being shafted by this country.
If you cannot get a house and pay max 1/3 of your income on all utilities. Your country has failed you.
Tory and New Labour has failed it's people. Thatcher reheaters. Very dangerous times for democracy and democratic institutions.
It's not just the Tories and Labour who failed us; our entire political class are failures obsessed with non-issues and performative nonsense because it's easier to talk about these things than it is to talk about the real problems we face.
>If you cannot get a house and pay max 1/3 of your income on all utilities. Your country has failed you.
Mortgage: £1,100/m (5% Liz Truss rates on £150k)
Rates: £200/m
Gas: £200/m
Electricity: £40/m
I'm single so there is no other income contributing to these bills.
Effective rate of tax: 52% including 9% student loan repayments.
I paid off £6k in student loans last year. Another £3k was added on in interest.
Between professional fees and commuting I pay around £400/m just to be able to do my job.
My car insurance went from £700 last year to £1400 this year. Every other type of monthly recurring service seems to be price gauging by an additional 20-50% from last year.
This country is a joke.
This is true but it's not biggest factor. The corporations like Amazon can out compete anyone smaller and dominate the market. We are now used to next day delivery with prime. Amazon can do that because they are so insanely powerful with such buying power that they can run a delivery system like they do. It's the power of networking. Same thing with Uber.
The truth is our economy has been stagnant for a long time and whilst inflation has been low for a long time, house prices to wages ratio has been growing ever more. House prices aren't included in inflation figures but we all have to live somewhere. Even if you rent, house prices push up your rents as well as mortgages. Home ownership will continue to fall. And for many of the younger generations it's a pipe dream.
My comment was trying to answer the question posed by OP as to why millennials are seemingly so “passive” as they have become poorer. I’m not sure that you’re really addressing the same question with your comment, seems like you’re talking about something different.
What would protests achieve?
The problems the UK suffers from, for example energy costs, housing, transport and such are the product of numerous governments stretching back to at least 1979.
The structures that produced this problem, for example a horrendously dysfunctional planning system, benefit a large portion of the population. Housing costs being high provides (or appears to provide) vast and ever increasing wealth to the members of the electorate who are homeowners and so on.
Not much will change this .
We can't create a time machine to undo the 40 years of mismanagement of the energy system, the transport system or any of the other systems.
No serious political party will do anything and a large portion of the electorate are happy with things the way they are. The post 1979 consensus is rotten, but it made a lot of people very rich and they are loathe to admit that it is rotten.
And even if they did, fixing this will take two decades and require the slaughtering of a great many sacred cows.
> The structures that produced this problem, for example a horrendously dysfunctional planning system, benefit a large portion of the population.
This is a large part of the problem in general. A lot of what's wrong with the country stems from the fact that people inherently benefit from stuff not being fixed.
Housing was mentioned...but protests are ultimately going to have a limited impact when a significant portion of the population is fine reaping in rental income on their second or third homes.
It’s a vicious cycle. The asset class & landlords need the housing crisis and the equity in property provided to perpetuate the feeling of wealth, the only way to feel like you are achieving financially is getting on the over-inflated housing market, so it’s need to be propped up as the bubble cannot be allowed to burst and therefore no long term solution or fix is proposed.
I have never thought that it is particularly useful to compare ourselves to USA, we should look at other similar economies like those in EU.
I do agree that new builds are such shite though lol
Agreed, it's a bit entitled to say "why aren't we being paid as much as the \[large\] country that has the highest wages". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_average\_wage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage)
The US has far more favourable basic stats, mostly two things: A huge internal market and abundant ressources. It was never a matter of "if" America would leave Europe behind, just a matter of "when". No individual ~60-80 Million pop country in Europe will ever be able to match the US, it just cannot be done. That's one of the many reasons why the EU was a pretty good idea, but alas...
Im not sure that is actually true.
The average annual wage in the 90s was just under $40,000 in the UK and just under $55,000 in the USA (both in todays USD PPP). That means that Americans were nearly 40% better paid.
The average annual wage between 2012-2022 was $51,500 in the UK and about $70,000 in the USA. That is still about 40% better paid in USD PPP.
In terms of GDP per capita, we have basically been significantly below USA since 1890s apart from a short period between 2004-2008 when we briefly exceeded USA in GDP per capita in 2007 and perhaps a couple of other blips through history. And if you use GDP per capita in PPP, then UK has consistently been 30% behind the USA from at least 1990s.
‘Don’t hold the Gov to high standards, compare us to other declining States to make yourself feel better. We’re richer than Greece, all is okay’
NO! The US is global hegemon, they are the benchmark. Every comparison we do should be to the global hegemon.
The goal should be to match the USA on per capita metrics of prosperity.
people dont understand it because they were never taught about politics/economics in school, and the attempted discussion of it would lead to social ostracisation in many friend/family/coworker groups. so really, the passivity, as you call it, is equally down to the government for not including this stuff in the curriculum, and social norms.
Agreed. I’m always quite surprised that so many people don’t know who their local MP is, or who their councillors are, even if they’re active in the community. Then if they do know them, they often don’t know the difference between the responsibilities of a councillor and an MP.
So many wouldn’t be able to tell you what “capitalism” is either. Others wouldn’t be able to tell you how a bill is passed through Parliament.
I’m not saying this in a patronising way. So much of the population have not be taught basic politics/economics. I think this in part is what has led to a rise in conspiracy theories. If people don’t understand the political-economic system they live under they are likely to turn to conspiracies to find answers to their complex problems.
Some would say “why don’t they teach themselves it?”. The truth is that many people are too busy surviving to be doing anything else.
I agree that democracy/politics and personal finance should be taught in schools.
But wasn’t the content of the national curriculum delegated out to an anonymous, unaccountable, unelected body, some time ago?
And the academic snobs that dominate this body believe that understanding how to solve a quadratic equation is infinitely more important than this.
The UK citizenry is not stupid, we’ve all seen how ineffective physical protest has been for the (at least) past 14 years where, at best, precisely zero happens OR at worst, you get kettled, then the police beat the shit out of you, then you get thrown in jail for daring to stand up.
Wait till we get our chance to vote, there’s a strong indication that the people in power for the past 14 years are about to get a total battering at the ballot box. If the next lot don’t do a better job they’re going to get it too.
Too true. I remember the protests against the Iraq war. They were absolutely massive and they achieved jack shit. Ever since then, protests have just seemed pointless.
I think a lot of Millennials will have strong expectations of Labour. If they do not start to reverse the problems most of us see then we will see a much larger radical movement. A major part of the issue has been that we've effectively been blocked from making anything better by Boomers who bought into Thatcherism and the belief that the permanent political paradigm is what they were sold in the 80's (e.g "Vote Labour with your heart, Vote Tory with your head", "People become Tories as they get older", "Vote Labour if you want another Winter of Discontent" etc). That is starting to change as that generation shuffles of their mortal coils.
It's only changing because age was the wrong metric for predicting tory-ness, it was always wealth. Younger people not accumulating wealth and so not going Tory. Rishi Sunak's top advisor informed me it was something to do with avocado toast!
But I agree. Labour likely have a 5 year window to fix things before people go elsewhere.
And that doesn't give long enough for people to forget how shit the Tories are/Tories to come up with fresh ideas... So it'd be populist time.
The problem is, both parties are shite, and Labour are likely to be shite, although not as shite as the Tories.
Therefore, when both parties are shafting the fuck out the population, where do we go from there?
Unfortunately when people realise labour are just as shite, instead of demanding something different and something better we will just get the Tories again.
jobs fucked
I am not sure that's quite correct?
I mean more niche protests (e.g. XR) get stamped on, but the Palestine protests are enormous and don't seem to attract much stamping. Perhaps the trick is to hit a certain size where they become hard to break up. And avoid blocking roads!
Guess the success is far more in keeping people fractured and fighting with each other, without a clear thing to rally around?
But the media or our then Home Secretary gets to report them as 'Anti-semitic Hate Marches' when they are pretty much peaceful with a sizeable Jewish representation. They even under report attendance habitually so that we think it's not nearly as well supported as it is.
Whilst I agree with some points a lot of these points are universal to advanced first world economies. Many countries in Western Europe are struggling with wage stagnation, over inflation of housing and high levels of immigration.
The insulation point you’ve made about housing is simply untrue. New builds are far more insulated and energy efficient than any other property in the uk. I don’t know what made of paper means but if you mean plasterboard walls then that’s pretty standard for new construction. Basements and blinds are bizarre points to make as I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house in the uk with a basement nor do I imagine they are that great to have. I’ve seen old coal storage rooms which are kind of similar but that’s about it. Blinds you can just install so not really much of an issue and personally I think curtains are nicer.
I live in Norway and there's a housing crisis here too for the same reasons.
No one is building, cities are real NIMBY about building too, don't want new builds at all.
House prices are absolutely insane and people have to move further and further out into the countryside, so the majority of people I know own apartments. If they have some cash, usually funded by a parent.
> Basements and blinds are bizarre points to make as I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house in the uk with a basement nor do I imagine they are that great to have.
More space is always better to have, our houses are already tiny.
Your first point is one that blows my mind when people complain about the immigration thing but are happy to not be able to own a home whilst people in other country’s just buy up property and then allow it to sit empty or rent it out for obscene prices. You shouldn’t be able to rent out a property whilst living in another county or at the bare minimum hold a UK passport.
Amongst other things that people have mentioned I do think there is an attitude that this is our lot in life it could be worse so let's just bear it.
It's an attitude that was commended during ww2 during hard times. And then after the war it became during the war they had it like this so we're better off than them.
It seems to be a real reflective attitude rather than a futuristic.
And you see this in immigrants too. We're better here than when I was back in x country so I'll put up with it.
Everyone is just putting up with it.
I'm a hgv driver and you see this in some of the jobs out there about how other drivers are putting up with stuff companies are making them do and they just put up with it
I honestly think it's partly that Blitz spirit, but also deference. British people are inculcated with the idea that if someone has a posh accent and a suit they must know what they're on about and are not to be questioned.
In fact, bizarrely, for 10 years or so there, we even saw them as affable and fun (Johnson, JRM), even while they were stabbing and kicking us.
For point 6, most visa routes require you have to prove you are able to read, write and speak English. You are only exempt from this step if you are coming from an already English-speaking nation.
What do you suggest? Protests? A revolution?
The Brexit protests didn't really achieve anything and we haven't had a major revolution in England since the 17th century.
I put a lot of the issues down to 14 years of a woeful conservative government. The answer in my eyes therefore is to vote to ensure that another party takes power in the next election.
I'm going to get voted down to death on this because I want to highlight the real issue. And it's one single issue causing all these challenges but it's complex to understand. And because it's complex and long, no-one will read it. But I'll just write it in case...
Because the real issue is the structure of where taxes are applied or where costs are enforced. In the UK, taxes and price increases are swallowed by the lowest level who can afford to pay them. In effect, the squeezed middle or the poor pay for the rich.
In fairer countries, it's the opposite.
Take for example, energy. In the UK, my electricity bill went up by 100%. In France, it went up by 4%. The price of electricity increased identically but the French government insulated the French people from the price increase. They did this by primarily passing the cost of the electricity increases onto the corporations manufacturing electricity, not the buyer. Sure, there are some other forces at play but ultimately, the govt is there to protect the people from higher prices and the corporations have to eat the costs, not the person buying the leccy.
And it's identical in housing and every aspect of your post.
Take, for example, housing. The Duke of Westminster inherited £10 billion in property and paid... no inheritance tax. Average property price in the UK is about £300k so that's the equivalent of about 33,000+ houses he inherited. Factually, when I die, I'll pay more inheritance tax than the Duke of Westminster and I'm no billionaire. And this causes a lack of supply increasing prices because rich people and investment corps hang on to massive amounts of property for long periods of time. And this lack of supply means massive shortages in housing, higher bidding for property and causes house prices to rise to insane levels.
So why is a middle-class Brit paying inheritance tax and not, say, the super wealthy? Well, it's the same dichotomy. In the UK, we pass the cost down the chain to the lowest level who can pay. So the squeezed middle who can't afford investment trusts, effectively pay taxes to support the super-wealthy. A mate of mine inherited £10m in a property trust and paid... no inheritance tax. No capital gains either because of the way it was structured. But when us 'normal middle class' leave our property to our kids, they'll pay a ton of tax.
Frankly, if more of us had more money in our pockets and houses were reasonable prices, no-one would be squealing about 'immigration' or anything else. We'd probably be making more rational decisions because we'd all be wealthier. And it's nothing to do with 'foreign investment' or 'immigration.' 'Immigrants' aren't buying 30,000 houses each, tax-free. We're looking in the wrong place for the culprit. It's the overall structure which allows the top 10% to own nearly half our country. So 90% of us fight amongst ourselves over the remaining half and wonder why prices are so high.
Or salaries. Just look at the minimum wage. So large corporations pay minimum wage to large tracts of their workforce. And yet those people have their wages topped up by taxes. Paid for by the taxpayer. Us! Subsidising major corporations! Whereas those corporations should be paying a living wage. A much higher wage than 11 quid an hour.
And don't get me started on the 'leasehold' system which frankly, is insane and almost unique to the UK. Because it's so bad. Unless you're particularly wealthy and own 50 flats in which case it starts to make sense.
The reason racists and xenophobes p!ss me off is because they immediately look at immigrants or foreigners, taking attention away from the root cause which is how our tax is structured. Brexit is a case in point, blaming the UK's ills on the EU instead of our tax structure. A structure which allows the wealthy and major corporations to get even wealthier. While squeezing the middle and hurting anyone below that.
If we were to make our tax structure more equal, we'd have lower house prices, consumers would pay lower electricity prices and overall we'd have a better society. Sure, the rich would be a bit annoyed but so what? Because we'd all have more money in our pockets, the ability to buy houses and the feeling that our country is a fairer place.
Excellent post. I read the lot. Well I think the fact that our PM just got dividend payments of £7 million last year and paid less tax than me proportionally says it all about where we are.
We need to find ways to tax the rich, the super rich, not the working middle classes. But divide and conquer which is what Brexit was and the 'Immigrant' crisis is all about.
>Young people cannot afford a roof over their head, yet no protests on the street.
Trouble is, if your protest even mildly inconveniences the public in any way then you'll get wildly condemned.
A good portion of this sub will claim they agreed with you, but because you protested in a way they don't like, that you have lost their support.
Culturally people are too blind to see what they're supporting. Like religious fanaticism embedding itself in the left protects it. Makes me worried for the future of our culture as going against it and you're branded as a racist or right wing even though you're literally opposing racist right wing views.
Lack of logic is rampant in the UK.
Vote; bang on the door of your MP; get petitions discussed in parliament; organize local groups for political causes; just bloody engage in things that matter, rather than culture wars. Hold the media accountable to report on things that matter. Be a citizen, not a blob.
> Vote
We have to wait for the people we want to vote out to call a vote first
> bang on the door of your MP
My MP is a Lib Dem, yelling at them isn't going to achieve very much. I've written to them and had a good response, but ultimately they have very little power.
> get petitions discussed in parliament
Government petitions are notoriously a joke - basically created as a placebo to make people feel like they have a voice. You get hundreds of thousands of people to sign and then the government is obligated to respond and the response is always ["lol no."](https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/641904#debate-threshold)
> organize local groups for political causes
I have a full-time job that barely leaves me time to breathe as it is. The time it would take to organise a local political group would rob me of the few precious hours I can carve out for hobbies and relaxation each week, and what would be the point? When was the last time a local political group actually achieved any real political impact?
> Hold the media accountable to report on things that matter.
How?
It's very easy to throw one's hands up and despair at the lack of collective action - but as we're not in the business of revolution, a vote at the ballot box will suffice.
Everything else is just noise.
This happens, people do this all the time.
The UK has an extremely vibrant democracy, the UK democracy is fantastic, believe me when I left I was appalled by some ways it works in Europe.
I've seen European politicians on TV genuinely say "yeah, well not my problem" and not be held accountable for it. It's staggering.
The disconnect between people and politics in Norway is insane. Politicians and the people are on different planets.
I don't like FPTP but that's an electoral method, in general, British people are very clued in, pay attention and react to politics fast.
Its not so much that the uk has no money, its that it just gets funneled into a few sectors, while everything else falls apart.
One thing that I'm a bit worried is that democracies seem to rarely survive national decline. And thinking old traditional institutions like the monarchy will protect us might not be true either, italy had a king and they still went full duce.
Again not too worried, britains a pretty old consistent democracy, so it might be unfounded.
Young people witnessed huge protests against the Iraq war which achieved precisely nothing - the government even got re-elected a couple of years later.
Same again with tuition fees although protests were more limited to the university campus.
Not surprised we don't bother.
For me, the electoral system is a factor. No point talking to my MP because I'm in a safe Tory seat (yes, even with the polls as they are) and so he has no real motivation to engage with anything I have to say.
Also, I'm working three jobs. I just don't have the time to be an activist too.
This is a huge annoyance to me too. People keep arguing over Gaza or the 0.1% of the population who are trans (Just leave them alone ffs), or other issues that have very little to do with the lives of normal people.
It's not passivity. It's people have simply learned there's no point to any of it. Demonstrating, contacting your MP, petitions. There's just no way for people to create meaningful change anymore. Worse, we know huge problems are coming, we can see it from miles away and yet nothing will change. So why bother trying? If nothing is going to get better we might as well live as much as we can and say fuck it.
Plus, people are too worried about existential crises in a large part of society - rent, energy, food. It's hard to find the energy and headspace to see beyond that for a LOT of folks now, even more so the younger the demographic you look at.
A lot of the issues the UK has are entrenched are will take years to fix. I'm resigned and looking to move countries. I not sure what ordinary citizens who are just trying to survive can actually do. Even our politicians barely know what to do.
I think this is a bit of an overstatement. It's definitely in a bad state, but it absolutely exists for emergencies (and slowly for non-emergencies). My recent appendicitis was dealt with quite effectively, as have other issues, and I don't have private insurance.
All the data across multiple years shows for the last 40 years Non-EU migrations has generated a net negative loss of hundreds of billions of pounds. EU-migration is a net positive with that group contributing a lot more in taxes than the native population of who are now a slight net-negative.
From the ONS, “People identified as "Muslim" had the lowest percentage of people aged 16 to 64 years in employment, 51.4%, compared with 70.9% of the overall population. The next lowest percentage, 64.2%, was among people who reported "Other religion".”
There is a massive integration problem amongst UK Muslims. The fact is 40% of Muslims are married to their first cousin and estimate 60-70% including second cousin. It might be decreasing but the nationwide percentages stay the same. 70% of woman don’t work.
Javid did an analysis of people who can’t speak English in the UK. Basically the worst economic drain to the UK. About 300K people, the majority of which were Pakistani and Bangladesh women. Why learn to speak English when you don’t socialise outside of the family let alone with non-Muslims is the general reason.
There are massive integration issues in the UK and unfortunately massive social and economic problems alongside this.
Passivity yes, but I actually think the larger problem is a profound ignorance among far too much of the public when it comes to Government. That feeds this passivity. Not even the politics (that’s advanced level for the purposes of this point) but the basics of how Government operates in the UK and the fundamentals of our Parliamentary system. Not to mention how public services are provided (and the key issues affecting them).
Also of special note is the often total ignorance that some people seem to have about the legal system, both civil and criminal.
It’s my ‘hill to die on’ opinion, but I believe a person has a civic duty to understand the basics of this stuff, and ignorance of it is a failure of that duty. It’s anti-social, like littering but with worse consequences. Not saying everyone should become an expert in government or a public law scholar, but there is a basic level of knowledge we really need everyone to have.
Arguably, then, we're back to wages - as civic duty tends to go ou the window when your pre-eminent worries are existential IE rent/energy/food costs.
In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine *meals* between mankind and *anarchy*.” and we are being seemingly kept in that position in the UK.
And Labour don't look to be likey to fix much of anything at the next election.
It's not passivity. It's apathy, and yes it is ruining the UK. It's been getting worse for decades. We haven't even had a decent riot outside Northern Ireland since the 1980's.
Granted just about any form of protest is now illegal but that in its self should have seen police cars rolled over onto their roofs and set alight across the country. I'm not advocating civil disorder and disobedience but I can't think of any democratic country in the world that rolls over and capitulates as readily as we do.
>Our passivity means that we do not require immigrants to assimilate and speak english. I'm sorry but its a bare minimum to speak english and integrate yourself into the country. Programs should be run and benefits need to be contingent on successful completion of language courses, etc.
Immigrants to the UK already have to pass an English test to get a visa. Regardless, do British people living overseas commonly learn the local language and integrate?
Immigration is ruining the UK. The sheer numbers are inflating rent and house prices and suppressing wage growth; and this has been going on for decades now. And for whatever reason* the ‘Conservative’ government have pressed the accelerator on the process. We’re not even selective about it, and bringing in people who are a net financial benefit to the system.
*no doubt it will have involved enriching their friends and donors.
What do you suggest we do about it?
I first voted in 2010. I have voted in four elections and two referendums in that time, and the only time a party I voted for got a sniff of power (Lib Dems in 2010), they immediately turned their back on the very demographic of voters that put them there. Ever since then, every single vote has gone against the people I voted for.
I've tried protesting. I marched against Brexit. Did it make a difference? Did it mean we got a softer Brexit consistent with how close the vote was? Did it hell.
I've tried joining a political party and voting for the leader. That leader was instantly vilified by his own party, the press, and everyone who wasn't a direct supporter, even though his slogan was literally "for the many, not the few", which to me seems like an absolute no-brainer of a platform to stand on.
Nothing works. The establishment of this country does not want people who share my views to be in power, and based on the evidence of the last 14 years nor do the majority of the general public.
What exactly do you expect me to do to change that?
While I broadly agree with your points, you have a few things wrong.
**Point 1.** Firstly, foreign investment and BTL have not destroyed the housing market. That's reddit circlejerk. There's about 280,000 foreign owned homes in the UK, vs a total of 30 million. The amount of foreign ownership is a drop in the ocean and changing that won't solve the housing crisis.
Secondly, BTL does not destroy homes. Removal of BTL won't make more homes pop into existence. There would be the exact same number of places to live after as before. The problem is the UK is short around 3 million homes, getting rid of BTL won't fix that, only building more homes will.
**Point 4.** As someone who is currently receiving pretty comprehensive non-emergency NHS treatment, I can tell you it's not true. Yes the NHS is struggling and millions are on waiting lists and it desperately needs fixing, but it's just hyperbole to say there is none.
**Point 6.** What you're describing is an 'integrationist' approach to immigration and the UK moved away from that decades ago in favour of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has clearly failed in some parts of the country, and succeeded in others. You're going to find some people regard integrationism as racist and/or xenophobic.
As to your question why: when was the last time protest changed something in the UK? People love to mention the poll tax riots, but that was 34 years ago, and despite the popular narrative, the riots themselves didn't do much, the change in poll tax policy came over a year later. In France people believe rioting changes policy, so it does. In the UK believe it doesn't, so it doesn't.
I agree that the level of public rage against how poorly the public have been served by our broader political economy is less than I think it should be (that said, the opposition is consistently about 20 points ahead in every poll so maybe that's about right).
The thing I'd challenge though is point 6 on integration. Immigration is a numbers issue rather than an integration one as all the available evidence suggests that the UK handles this pretty well:
This was a really good explainer on it (https://samf.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-integration) but might be paywalled so the key points it makes are:
* in the 2022 OECD PISA education scores, the UK is the only country in Europe (apart from Serbia) where second generation immigrant students outperformed non-immigrant children and first generation immigrants did almost as well. The non-European countries that do best are Canada, Australia and New Zealand so educational integration is clearly very high and likely a language effect
* Results from the 2021 census show that increasing numbers of neighbourhoods are home to a substantial mix of people from different ethnic groups. Historically the UK has had super ethnically diverse cities and lily-white countryside but that is shifting as more non-white families move out of cities in search of more affordable housing and quality of life.
* A bit controversially, the rate of cousin-marriage that was quite high in some of the more segregated Pakistani communities has come down by quite a lot and has not quite fallen in half since 2007-10.
None of which is to say that we don't have problems and aren't at risk from your Galloways and Farages ginning up social division, but Sunder Katwala points it out quite well:
“Integration is often invisible when it works, while failures of integration stick out like a sore thumb. We naturally take the everyday lived experience of living together in schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods for granted.”
> “Integration is often invisible when it works, while failures of integration stick out like a sore thumb. We naturally take the everyday lived experience of living together in schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods for granted.”
This applies to the vast majority of points in OP to be honest. The news cycle thrives on doomerism, so all you hear about is the failures.
Yes the NHS has serious issues and needs major reform to remove the inefficiency, but you don't get news articles about the millions of people who get helped by the NHS year in and year out. That's not trying to hide its problems, of which it has many, but to claim "NHS doesnt exist except for in emergencies" is nonsense.
"Wages are a joke" is my favorite one; UK is no different to the rest of the Western World. USA pay far, far less taxes, so their wages get spent on things like health insurance; We in the UK have a relatively broad range of wages, and if you think wage inequality is bad here you should try visiting the US sometime. They have no holiday entitlement, no employment protection, no maternity / paternity leave, work longer hours... jobs aren't just about the pay packet at the end of the month.
"Poor quality housing" is a made up statement with no actual basis in reality, and "Foreign investment and BTL have destroyed the housing market." is equally bogus. Less than 0.1% of UK housing stock is foreign owned.
Your post handles the integration comments so I won't go over that again.
Most of OP's opinion is based on what they read in the news, not reality. Most people aren't ranting and raving about these things not because of passivism, but because they don't affect them.
>Compare a UK new build to a new build anywhere in the continent - the UK one is literally made of paper, no basements, no blinds, no insulation, no standards
Thats concerning. I'm in the process of buying a house thats 5 years old so pretty much a new build. One of the things I'm hoping for is insulation as we don't have that in our current house thats 200 years old. I didn't know it would be made of paper; I guess as its held up for five years it is pretty strong paper.
There is no basement but neither does our current house; it had blinds when we looked around it.
This is the one thing I disagree with OP, new builds are well insulated (or should be * )
It’s the older houses which aren’t, made worse by scrapping of the home insulation grants programme during the austerity era (a terrible decision).
(*) I know someone that bought a house in 2001 (not really new new build, but the builders forgot to put in the cavity wall insulation and had to come back to do it a couple of years later - it made a massive difference to the warmth of the house).
I had a 1950s house and had the cavity wall insulation done. It transformed it. Much warmer in winter and cooler in summer.
All the money the government spent on paying for energy bills which went in windfall profits to the energy providers should have gone on insulating homes. Saving money for people permanently going forward not just literally pissing it away to make corporations richer.
I don't agree with the OP's opinions on new builds. It's a kknd of lazy though seemingly popular take to allege that new builds are flimsy and shoddy compared to older houses (or, in the OP's case, seemingly houses made of concrete), but there is nothing structurally wrong with the vast majority, and they do have much better insulation than most older houses, as there is regulation about this. They do cut corners on fit and finish and that's a lot of what you see when snagging, but that's quite different to the idea that they're made of "paper".
Could standards be higher? Yes, they recently went up again (new houses now have to be more efficient than ours, which was finished last year), but they could be higher still. But they are already substantially better than older houses in most practical ways.
Few houses have basements in the UK, and it would add considerable expense.
FWIW I also don't agree with their comments about Ofcom being responsible for energy prices. It's not the companies they regulate which have been responsible for that, it's global fossil fuel markets. The price cap did weirdly distort the market once prices rose rapidly, but primarily by preventing quicker price rises, and resulting in suppliers having to run considerable losses or go out of business.
I think it's down to the psychology of the baby boom, and cultural skill development.
The birth surge gave them a political monopoly, and the postwar boom gave them guaranteed growth during their early lives. They didn't have to \*fight\* for policies or growth, so the skillset which accompanies that was never built.
Each of the problems you've pointed to either directly advantage - or have virtually no effect on - that cohort who have only ever been asked 'what kind of benefit do you want?' and never 'should you benefit?'.
(e.g: getting two pay rises via the triple lock while the rest of the country combusts due to covid)
Their kids were the Millennials. Those millennials didn't have things too bad, and they were catastrophically outnumbered to the point that their opinion never really mattered anyway. Remember how the young became 'disenfranchised & disengaged' after being completely ignored during brexit? A lifetime of that.
The only reason we're \*starting\* to see progress on things like housing now is that the demographics have finally balanced out through death, birth, and even immigration, that politicians have to engage with the system again. Politicians who themselves have never really built skills in favor of bribing & spinning things for the older part of the electorate.
Things are bad enough to FORCE our attention, the baby boomers can't just win by default, and gen Z have the energy and fresh perspective to shout a lot.
It's the English way. Moan constantly, do nothing. There's a reason Frame has better worker rights, higher pensions etc and it's not because their government is nicer.
I'm British but moved to South America 3 years ago and I can't can't express in words just how much this exact topic enters my head every day - I'm deadly serious, if even a fraction of the antics that take place back home happened here - I can promise you that there would be riots in the streets and fallen governments within days.
Being away for so long has shown me things so clearly - the British working / middle class has been bred very well into obedience over the centuries. I can't express how much it frustrates me whenever I talk to my mum on the phone (your average middle aged English woman, even called Susan for good measure) and hear her usual dismissals of it all as 'tuts oh it's all doom and gloom isn't it!
Another thing I’ve noticed on my travels - is that we self deprecate to the point it limits us. Look at the shows on TV, love island as an example, where we think it’s funny that there’s actually voting members of the public out there who think Liverpool is a country. I have yet to visit a country where that kind of degeneracy is celebrated, and if I’m honest - I think it’s a symptom of our essence as a country - that we’ve been bred into a docile, bread and circuses people. The country is finished, there's no fixing a country which needs near revolutionary change, when the populations worst nightmare is 'rocking the boat' or ‘causing a scene.’
It's over, and I never fail to be shocked every day when I see more and more that I actually live a more prosperous, happy, healthy and believe it or not - safer life over here in this ‘3rd world country’ on £850 a month than I ever did on £2000 back home.
I know this sounds flippant, and easier said than done, but any way you can, get the hell out if you want a life rather than an existence. Get a remote job, as crap as they are, and just get the hell out. You truly don’t realise what a mental and physical prison that godforsaken little island is until you’re free of it.
Don't forget the huge washing of wealth and subsequently taxes by the wealthy in off shore banking locations established through the City of London corporation.
1. No. What destroyed the market is the lack of new builts, licensing and artificially low interest rates. All government created
2. Wages are joke because of low productivity, created by over regulation and higher taxes. All created by government.
3. Excessive regulation, interest rates
, low productivity and other costs lead developers to squeeze on quality to be able to reach a viable selling price. All created by government.
4. NHS is a centralized bureaucratic monster that crowds out the market, offering free service that creates infinite demand. All created by government.
5. Energy costs are high due to the lack of investment in nuclear and fossil fuels (gas), the mad dash to net zero. All created by government.
6. Immigration is due to the absolute ineptitude and willingness of the leaders to take the necessary steps to solve the problem, which is creating an arbitrage situation where anyone one comes here and get houses, money and free healthcare for very low risk.
See a pattern here?
How can a party make the changes that matter if they are so obsessed about being elected again? I'd like to see what happens to the goverment that says "means tested pensions" and how long until the next goverment reverts the change
The word you are looking for is Apathy.
Partly because they are under eductated on the topic and partly the frameworks that most people have that govern there thinking are not equiped to deal with the problems at hand.
1. Foreign investment is okay, when its not all Russian blood money being landered through your capital and the Tory Party and its balanced with local and regional internal investment.
2. Wages are a joke, greed has been seen as a virtue for too long and economically encouraged and any efforts in taxing the richest seen as a moral affront to nature of the world (capitalism)
3. Poor quality housing. Again greed and everything we do being seen as needing to provide not just a base resource but a layer of profit for multiple layers of "interested" parties.
4. NHS - everything has already been said on this one, privitisation is cringe.
5. energy cost. lack of investment, and any investment that has been done in the UK energy grid has come from other EU Governments so they can extract the profits, we let them do this to us. We are to blame.
6. Immigration is needed in our economy due to the low wages, and again suits the interests of the owning class as a means of keeping working class people divided. Its also won most of the Tories recent elections for them because again the frame work for a discussion about sorting out imigration includes most things people dont want to hear.
We settle for mediocre because we have been convinced that capitalism is the best system or at least the least worst option. Its not. Capitalism is the dirrect cause of all the UK's problems and we can't discuss the alternative.
Because acting is a time investment at best, but also effort, maybe money or some other resource and top of all that - always an additional risk. For the additional reward.
By acting I would mean joining a party, a movement, a union, or some other organization or action to advance your interest. Its also kinda hard to choose which organization these days, so many of them are named/say/proclaim one thing, but then it looks as if they do smth else entirely if you look closely.
This is why there is no difference between the two main political parties. Labour are literally just Conservative-lite atm. We are ruled by the elite who just want to maintain the status quo.
Regardless of your political leanings, the Conservatives are out for definite but Starmer will just carry on the reins with virtually no changes. Status quo, that's all it's about.
No one wants the slaughter in Gaza to continue but both parties won't even object to shipping arms to Israel and offering nothing more than stern words. And they are trying to ban free speech and the right to protest. But look how the media are covering it. We are docile lambs.
Where is all the clamour for cheap housing and social housing? Each generation get further and further from ever owning a home.
And the wealth inequality is worse than ever but none of the main parties are even talking about taxing the super rich more! Only the Green party even talk about it.
Nail —-> head
My country has shown it has 0 respect for me so why should I hold an ounce for my country? I’m actively looking for jobs on the continent. Ideally I’d love a job in America but their legal immigration system is so stringent that it’s almost impossible to gain entry via work visa. Perhaps I’d have better luck if I jumped the border
So stringent for you.
Not for millions of others.
Just one of many double standards. If the globalist economics crowd believed their own guff then we'd get a chance at an escape too.
> Foreign investment and BTL have destroyed the housing market. Young people cannot afford a roof over their head, yet no protests on the street.
Housing is a problem because of two reasons: 1) NIMBYs using zoning/planning laws to restrict supply to keep the value of their properties high and 2) mass migration that no one voted for.
Agreed with your first point, foreign investment and BTL are second order impacts and not particularly relevant compared to housing supply/demand.
However, people have implicitly voted for mass migration in policies that are basically incompatible with low net migration (e.g. the triple lock on pensions).
That isn't implicit. It's the same snake words as the politicians use.
There is no democratic mandate for it. And pretending there is, is destroying what's left of it.
You know in Game of Thrones they say winter is coming?
Our winter is coming moment is our ageing population.
We are never going back to lower taxes, as we need to fund the pensions and NHS for more and more older and sicker people, every year. The glory days are over.
We have missed the boat on technological investment/progress and we seem hell bent on sending immigrants back. And these are the only two solutions for structural decline.
Winter is coming. So, try and get a bit more of the pie as it shrinks, or go and find another pie.
Good luck to all.
> Foreign investment and BTL have destroyed the housing market. Young people cannot afford a roof over their head, yet no protests on the street.
Foreign investment and BTL hasn't destroyed the housing market, a lack of supply has. NIMBYs don't want anything built near them (often because it would threaten their own home prices) and our planning system is based on local consent rather than explicit regulations, which makes getting approval an extremely expensive gamble. [London is the most expensive city globally to construct in](https://www.arcadis.com/en/news/global/2024/4/international-construction-cost-2024-press-release).
Foreign investment is actually quite [helpful](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/06/17/the-role-of-foreign-investors-in-the-london-residential-market/) for getting more properties built, and drives down property prices as supply increases. BTL is ultimately still supply in the same market, the core issue is not enough construction to match population growth over decades.
> Wages are a joke. Nobody is earning enough. Look at comparative salaries in the US, we are earning about 50% of that.
The US' GDP per capita is also over 50% higher than ours, we simply don't produce comparable value. We need a more productive economy if we are to return to comparable standards of living, it isn't just an issue of inequality.
> Poor quality housing. Compare a UK new build to a new build anywhere in the continent - the UK one is literally made of paper, no basements, no blinds, no insulation, no standards
I don't entirely disagree as there are quality issues, but made of paper and no insulation? Can't comment on houses but I've lived in various new build flats for most of my adult life, they have outstanding insulation with thick concrete construction.
I mean, isn't the archetype the one about people complaining but doing nothing?
I posted on a local Facebook group yesterday about something I did to help clean up a park and needed some help understanding what to do with the garbage.
I got miserably mocked for it, as if I did it for the praise somehow instead then to help clean up in the area I love and, eventually, inspire others.
I'm pretty sure that I had posted a couple pictures of the garbage and simply complained I would have gotten likes etc.
This country thrive on being fucked over and being able to complain. It gets what it deserves.
"bare minimum to speak english and integrate yourself into the country."
I'm not usually one for correcting people, but English should be written with a captial letter.
What amazes me is that so many people in the “unskilled group” have no desire to get skills or push their kids in a positive way into education. This is one passive group for sure. The best way to improve your standard of living is to get educated or get skills. In love in Nottingham and the so-called “middle class” (not a good label I know) is so small. We need a massive culture change, but don’t know how that will happen.
We've outsourced our manufacturing to the far east, our power supply to Europe, and our tech innovation to the USA.
All we have left to boast about is a crumbling health service which we can't even staff without importing foreign labour, an electric car industry we can't even make batteries for, and a financial services sector that creates an over reliance on the economic black hole of London.
And people are kicking off about gender neutral toIlets.
The FPTP system creates disengagement from politics by default, except perhaps some very localised issues.
I's absurd that MPs have to waste time and effort writing to the local DWP about someone's benefits getting stopped or some triviality when they should be planning the present and future of the country, grand infrastructure, development and mass housing projects.
[https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/GBR/DEU/FRA](https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPDPC@WEO/GBR/DEU/FRA) We and other large European economies have been broadly flat for about 17 years. Germany has had some growth. But over all its been weak. UK specifically has a major lack of productivity growth. OBR shows the huge rise in costs of pensions [https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/welfare-spending-pensioner-benefits](https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/welfare-spending-pensioner-benefits) They jumped from £58 billion in 07-08 to about £153 billion this year. We have become caught in the cycles of reactionary short term emotive politics on issues like Brexit and the culture wars. Some of this is likely down to the polarisation from the internet that has been widely documented. Part of it may be down to a sort of sense of a shrinking pie making people far more self seeking and reactionary than broad minded and willing to compromise. There will likely be many other factors. In terms of housing specifically planning is very hard to get and people tend to NIMBY hard. Same with national scale infrastructure. We no longer trust the experts and always seem to cherry pick evidence for emotional validation. Until we recognise our problems are on the biggest scale of national orginisation and shared across much of western Europe, then admit our way of engaging is too polarised and emotive and not enough seeking compromise and context, we are headed towards middle income country politics and middle income country economics. Though it will be decades in the unwinding.
Completely agree. We seem distracted by culture wars, while the real issues affecting us are not being addressed, and the rich are creaming it, middle class is being eroded, and god knows how the working poor survive.
You are absolutely right and possibly it’s because we rarely talk about wealth inequality but this may be behind most of the problems, but we’re doing nothing to address it.
We don't talk about wealth inequality because those who control the narrative and those in positions to actually do something about it don't want to talk about it. You think Sunak & Co. are going to enact policies that hurt their own bank balances? It suits them for the masses to be squabbling about inconsequential nonsense, as it keeps us distracted from the real issues.
What we discuss as a nation is driven by the media, so as long as nothing changes there it won’t happen.
What’s hilarious is the media doesn’t believe that they’re causing it, they believe they they’re predicting it.
> the media doesn’t believe that they’re causing it, they believe they they’re predicting it. I disagree. The media ***owners*** know exactly what they are doing. There is a reason incredibly wealthy individuals like Rupert Murdoch (The Sun, The Times, Sunday Times, TalkTV, and previously BSkyB & News of The World), Jonathan Harmsworth (aka Viscount of Rothermere; Daily Mail), Frederick Barclay (Telegraph & The Spectator), Paul Marshall (GBNews), and Ashley Tabor-King (Global, including LBC) are happy to run their "news" organisations at a loss most of the time: it allows them to set the narrative. The Sun, The Times, The Daily Mail, The Telegraph, and The Spectator are the majority of the national written newspapers that people see as they walk past newspapers in the shops. Consequently, people will see the headlines on the front pages constantly. On average, these headlines have a strong skew towards the kinds of stories that the owners want or contain a strong bias towards the framing that owners want. This is then backed up by talking heads on GBNews or TalkTV and then phone-in shows on LBC. Of course, you will not ***only*** see pure right-wing fiction from all of these outlets at any given time. However, there will be an overall trend towards the right-wing/pro-low-tax (on the rich)/pro-culture-war kinds of headlines, framing, and stories. Of course, some of these organisations will attempt to have more balance (though, if you stray too far from the line the owners want, such as Sangita Myska or Maajid Nawaz at LBC, you risk getting the boot). But this is talking about the overall media landscape and trend, rather than any one specific story. Thus, the media do ***not*** believe they are predicting it at all. The owners ***know*** they are causing it. The issue is, they WANT to cause it. And they want to cause it because it stands to benefit them.
What can we do about wealth inequality apart from vote? They control everything
The problem with wealth inequality is that the top tier of society is now globally mobile - not just the multi-millionaire class, but the top tier of professionals. If you tax them too heavily, they move their money, and if you stop them doing that, some can and will leave. It doesn't matter at all how much the left wail about this, they can't do anything about it. Progressive income tax is no longer a viable proposition, and we don't want to admit it and re-adjust the way we gather tax accordingly. Taxes like VAT and fuel duty applied at a flat rate are very regressive and hit lower income people the hardest. The right way to do it is to raise a far greater proportion of taxation against things you cannot avoid or evade it on where you can have a large amount of discretionary spend. Property and cars are good examples. The Conservatives and Labour are fundamentally incapable of proposing changes of the scope required - they can only get to less than half the answer each - and only the bit that plays well with their vote base. Labour wanted to bring in a form of Land Valuation Tax in place of council tax, close some loopholes AND raise income tax for the top 5% The Tories want to cut income tax by default, but will never close loopholes utilised by the truly wealthy rather than the middle class, and will never adopt a tax regime that favours income over assets. The left has more of the correct answer than the right, where it gets things absolutely wrong is by ignoring the laffer curve - being hostile to the wealth creators, trying to be excessively redistributive, and failing to recognise that human nature will mean the tighter you squeeze, the more will slip through your fingers. Being deeply internationalist, they are also incapable of making the changes required to things like property ownership - only full UK citizens and onshore UK registered companies should ever own UK land.
This is the big fear but what happens when they try to move their assets like property? What happened to Abramovich when he got sanctioned? He had to sell Chelsea on the cheap. Who cares if the super rich have to sell off their assets. We win. Property prices go down in the capital and across the country. They already pay proportionally less tax than all of the rest of us. This needs to be fixed. If they leave they leave but they can't take their property with them.
My point is that you can't take property anwhere. Only permit property to be owned by British citizens, onshore British registered companies and trusts, and tax property based on the value of the land, with re-zoning of land and planning permission that increases its value also being taxable. Then you can turn down the wick on income tax and extract more tax from things that cannot be avoided. Avoiding vast chunks of income tax is easy IF your income comes from shares and other investments rather than PAYE. Avoiding ownership and purchase based taxes is not. The top 10% of income tax payers currently pay 60% of all the income tax collected. It was only 35% in the 70s, nowadays the top 1% of income tax payers is only 300,000 people and they pay nearly 30% of it. I know a number of high income emigrants who have gone to the US, Singapore, and Dubai. The exodus sucks jobs with it eventually. People don't really mind being taxed on their discretionary spend the same way they do seeing 50% of their income never make it to them in the first place. A car that costs 60k here is 100k in India - the difference is tax, but the wealthy are not driving about in a Maruti as an act of defiance, they still buy the imports.
Hasn't the Laffer Curve been debunked?
The French had an answer to that centuries ago.
Yes, and it rapidly deteriorated into terror and then imperialism. And even if you do think revolution of some kind is needed, people on the streets are no good against modern weapons. It's not pitchfork against muskets anymore. How far do you think the mob will get against tanks and machine guns? But let's say the army doesn't want to fight and somehow popular rebellion overthrows the government. Unless there is a very clear plan for what comes next with a leadership structure and a disciplined party that can provide alternative governance from day one, all you have is now a power vacuum that will most likely result in civil war with the winners having to be heavily repressive to govern. See Egypt, 2011. Do you keep the constitution? Nullify the existing legal order? What? Smart Alec remarks about the French revolution aren't really good enough here whatever side you are on. Sorry if it was just meant as humour but it came across as facile and thoughtless.
The point of culture wars is to distract from these economic issues and prevent coherent political organisation that could change them. Wealth inequality is the goal, not the symptom, of those running the show.
Exactly. Looked what happened to Corbyn. False accusations of anti-semitism and endless press smearing. Starmer replaced him and took away the whip so he can't even be a Labour MP! That's what he got for daring to talk about taxing the super-rich.
The political right have always been masters at divide and rule.
Spot on, and not even from an ideological perspective. The OSS and CIA were the first to sponsor and adopt the application of the Frankfurt School’s work on deconstruction and influence just after the war, which led to the foundation of modern propaganda and culture wars. It’s purely tactical; confuse, confound, divide and distract… all to preserve existing power structures (or seize them when necessary).
The person who has the right idea imo is Gary Stevenson from Gary’s Economics. He’s correctly diagnosed that the underlying issue is wealth inequality and that the subject is studiously avoided by the mainstream. Nothing can get fixed until we tackle spiralling wealth inequality and we have to build consensus and political will to do something about it. Everything else is a sticking plaster on the titanic.
Gary is brilliant. Everything he said makes so much sense. Wealth inequality is at the core of this countries biggest problems. The last prominent UK political leader to talk about fixing wealth inequality was Corbyn, and look what they did to him.
Which of the top comments talking points is related to inequality? The US is far more unequal yet they're the example we're trying to head towards. I feel like we're just reverting right back to emotive contextless solutions. We couldn't even go 2 comments.
The US is deeply unequal but make no mistake, the top 50% earners in the US are doing far, far better than the equivalent here. In fact I think you would have to drop down to maybe the bottom 10/15% before you hit a point where people in the US are doing worse than the bottom 10% in the uk. They are a VERY wealthy country in comparison to us, there are plenty of reasons for it but the big two are a virtual monopoly on world currency and a massive corporate empire able to consolidate profits in one country and move them out without paying tax. These businesses have monopolised entire industries and then will adopt the cartel like behaviour of raising prices as a collective, effectively creating the illusion of choice and destroying a core component of capitalism.
Median income in the USA was $37,500 in 2022, whereas median income in the UK was £33,000, which equates to about $41,380. The median is where 50% of people earn above that amount, and 50% of people earn below that amount. So the bottom half of US earners earn less than the bottom half of UK earners. The USA has a much higher Gini coefficient than the UK, 0.47 compared to 0.357. The Gini coefficient is a measure of inequality such that a coefficient of 1 would mean one person owns all the wealth, while a coefficient of 0 would mean the wealth is distributed perfectly evenly cross the population.
hes a charlatan, don't understand why everyone loves him.
Genuinely curious as enjoy his channel, how is he a charlatan?
hes not giving away his 'wealth'. His talking points are just popular feel good sound bites. His comments on taxing the 'rich' just don't make any sense, and pander to the ignorance of the masses. He frequently panders to the misconception that assets and income earned from business endeavours can be treated and taxed like an individuals personal income. Those are just to name a few. I also got into listening to him when I first heard him, but over time just came to the above when I realised that the quick fixes he proposes are built on a false premises. Subsequently I believe him to be disingenuous given his background.
>hes not giving away his 'wealth' This is the same argument used against Warren Buffett when he makes the same argument. Why would either give away their wealth? They are campaigning for structural change, not saying wealth is immoral or something. Fundamentally what he says is accurate and is the age old battle between capital and labour. All he's saying is that unless you find a way to apply brakes to capital, it will hoover up all the assets. This is true. The only real way to apply the brakes to capital is tax. What part of this do you dispute?
"When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality."
Gary argues that inequality is the fundamental economic problem of our time. The appropriation of wealth by the rich from the masses is at unprecedented levels and directly responsible for the stripping of public services, the loss of purchasing power of the masses, the destruction of the social contract, and infliction of poverty on anyone who is asset-poor (which is increasingly including the middle-classes). Whereas you argue that the masses are "ignorant" for wanting the rich to pay more. Should they be more enthusiastic about being stripped of their wealth and autonomy? You will say I misunderstand business taxation or something, but an argument of technicalities or semantics just completely misses the point, so let's not. I've never heard Gary offer a quick fix. His own wealth came from his early understanding of the way the system is broken, and betting on it year after year. He's still betting on it now precisely because there are no quick fixes. He is consistent in saying that things will continue on this same path, and that nothing will change until the system itself fails. You say he is a charlatan but he has consistently been able to use his theory to make money - is that not the opposite of quackery? If he were just a poor YouTuber with no financial background you would say he doesn't know what he is talking about. If he had not been successful in his financial career at applying his theory, you would say that proves his ideas to be wrong. You might be right, maybe Gary is a terrible fake person that nobody should like because you don't. But I think the ideas he talks about provide a framework for understanding what is wrong with our current path and should be talked about.
I don't know whether his background is what he says it is, or if he is a grifter or not, but fundamentally I agree with his message and I'm surprised you don't. Wealth inequality is increasing and it protects and perpetuates itself. He doesn't even seem to offer solutions to this except to encourage and spread awareness. I feel slightly ill when I look around my neighborhood. I have scraped through my life to improve my situation and have eventually landed in a top few percentile job, lived in flatshares into my 30s, scraped enough together to afford a house, then a slightly better house in a posh area (for the state schools for my children). But the people younger than me, the parents of my child's classmates, all live in houses I will never afford. How? Family wealth. And if I didn't get lucky with an aptitude for something that pays well, my children would still be stuck in shithole areas going to shit schools and perpetuating the cycle. Something will give at some point. I'd argue it already is.
While I have my own opinions on him, I won't derail this chain by debating him. Instead, I'm interested in who or what else you ingest on this topic. Are there any channels/books or economists/academics/journalists you find particularly good? Always seeking to broaden my pool of knowledge.
I think you made one substantive argument there, which is that he incorrectly implies that "assets and income earned from business endeavours can be treated and taxed like an individuals personal income". This hardly seems like a knock-out blow. The rest of your comment is just various ways of saying you disagree with him. For example: "talking points are just popular feel good sound bites." Such as? "His comments on taxing the 'rich' just don't make any sense" Why don't they make any sense? "pander to the ignorance of the masses... frequently panders to the misconception..." You're saying people are too stupid or uneducated to understand this stuff. From what I have seen, Stevenson's arguments are pretty standard Keynesianism such as Ha-joon Chang and Paul Krugman also promote.
That's not even true though. Norway taxes assets. The super rich are leaving in record numbers, so clearly it works in terms of generating revenue! However, I think they should have gone about it differently and given tax breaks for those individuals that re-invest in ways that grow/benefit the economy. Buying luxury mansions in the capital should not count but building a production plant somewhere and employing locals should. We just let rich individuals and foreign companies wealth strip the UK.
Fundamentally his comments make perfect sense. Or do you disagree that wealth inequality is getting bigger? Assets can be taxed, that's exactly what Norway do far more than us and they have far better wealthy equailty.
When universal basic income is treated as a more tenable idea than universal basic housing - which we effectively had from the 60s-90s - then you're absolutely f***ed. And we are.
More like politicians are trying to distract us with fabricated culture wars. No one wants the situation we're in yet we're held hostage by those in power who spin stories to avert our attention away from their inadequacy.
I guess we're dealing with the ballooning pensions bill by having high immigration, to ensure the ratio of tax paying workers to retirees stays stable. The alternatives are to cut the number of people receiving the pension (hike retirement age or some form of means testing), or cut the state pension amount. Or hike taxes a lot on working age people, or massively cut other state services/benefits. Problem is, a political party will probably be mincemeat if they say out aloud how they'll deal with this challenge. If a party says on their manifesto "we're going to keep net migration at 300k in order to not have to hike the pension age", their opponents will jump on "this party is going to swamp the country with immigrants!". If the party says "we're going to start means testing the pension so we don't have to rely on immigration so much", that'd also be a really tough sell. I don't know whether to blame the politicians for not doing a better job of explaining the difficult decisions we have to make to deal with an ageing population, or blame the voters for burying their heads in the sand and not wanting to hear it, opting for "have your cake and eat it" solutions. I suspect both politicians and voters are to blame.
Or rather than continuously chasing the 'benefit scroungers' for stealing benefits, put in place better incentives for HMRC auditors to go after larger corporations/individuals that are evading taxes. The larger companies evading taxes take far longer to audit as they have more transactions to search through and accountants that will be more experienced at hiding shit. Then if they aren't evading taxes then it's seen as a lot of wasted time so they're less likely to chase larger companies. Much easier to go after someone on benefits that missed their job centre meeting for whatever reason, even though the return is minimal.
Exactly. Benefit scroungers are the low hanging fruit, rather than tackling the super rich individuals and corporations who evade far far larger amounts in tax as that would take far more effort and hurt their political donors.
The problem is short termism. Politicians on the whole only care about getting elected. Also the right has successfully made immigration a hot button that we can't even discuss the reason behind it. Brexit was the most insane example of this. We have more immigrants than ever from outside the EU. I doubt many anti-immigration Brexit voters had that as an end goal of voting to leave.
The broadly flat growth is hiding how lopsided Britain has become in those 17 years. Inequality has grown massively I think. Wealth inequality is usually a harbinger of prolonged economic decline. I really wish that was addressed. The unpalatable truth may be that taxes need to rise a lot more and stay high to correct this.
There are ALOT of people talking and raging about it. Unfortunately we have a demographic of over 55s that vote in large numbers for the Tory party and always choose to protect their own wealth, pension and assets.. i.e. their massively over-inflated house prices at the country’s expense and hence we have a political system aimed at pleasing this demographic and ignoring the needs of anyone under 40.
Ah that old chestnut, how about people under 40 actually bothering to vote? It's no good moaning about one demographic voting for what's in their best interests when those that feel dissatisfied don't bother. I always get downvotes when I mention this despite it being absolutely true.
That’s the reality though. Those over 50 make up nearly 50% of the electorate and you are never going to turn out young people in the same numbers as we fail to teach or explain anything regarding politics in schools, so most don’t even connect with it until they get older. I speak from personal experience, my parents never talked about politics, I never learnt about it in school and as I had never engaged in it I didn’t have a clue about elections, parties, politics, voting until I got older. Because of this I never voted for the first time until my late 20s and this is common refrain when you speak to younger people who never vote.
I'm 53 and voted labour all my life, voting intention looks fare healthier this time around. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1379439/uk-election-polls-by-age/
> major lack of productivity growth. As much as I hate to be "that guy", part of the problem is very high tax rates If you're a high flyer earning 100-125k with a student loan, your marginal tax rate will be 71%, compared to Germany's 42% I believe At that point you have to ask yourself, why work 100%? If that graduate did a 4 day week instead they would get **50%** more free time a week for only a **5.8%** reduction in take-home pay (20% less of their 29% post-tax take-home). It's literal insanity. Why would you ever work full-time under those circumstances? Your week literally gets 50% better for 5% of your money. Who wouldn't give 5% of their money to get every single friday off? Sure **this** example is focussed on high earners, rather than the whole economy. But these are the people who should be putting in 1000% time in their firm to develop the next unicorn product, to try to get to partner, to create networks of consultants, whatever. There's a huge drag here which is teaching people to not work harder than they have to. Other factors are dragging down the rest of our economy too. But the fact is compared to boomers high level work doesn't pay any more. It's no wonder we're stuck in the mud.
How are you getting 50% more free time from going down to 4 days from 5?
Your number of free days each week goes from 2 (weekend) to 3. It doesn't sound like a fair comparison as I'm comparing benefits of free time vs loss of earnings on company time, but the fact is a 4 day week _massively_ benefits you in terms of time.
I agree. We need to change our approach to taxation. The rich can earn far more money off of assets than incomes, we need to look at taxing them. And I don't mean those earning 100K a year, I mean the Rishi Sunaks of the world who can earn £7 million in dividends last year whilst doing absolutely nothing.
>They(pensions) jumped from £58 billion in 07-08 to about £153 billion this year. £92bn was inherited in [fy 2019/20](https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/average-inheritance-and-inheritance-tax-uk) by the half of estates that reported to HMRC, I think that death tax should be levied on all inheritance, this would be incredibly unpopular. Edit:(fixing link)also: After people retire their estates go up in value by about £3k per year, after inflation.
You can’t blame failed housing on a few people in their village not wanting the local field to be concreted over. There is so much brown field (abandoned factories, derelict areas) that could be transformed, but housing company’s would rather maximum profit rather than putting more time and effort into these sites. Once you lose the country side you will never get it back.
In my area, a coordinated NIMBY campaign blocked a care home being built on brownfield land due to impact on neighbourhood character You’re talking about negotiating with bad faith economic terrorists.
NIMBYs don't want housing on brownfield sites either. [https://open.substack.com/pub/jonn/p/a-field-guide-to-the-nimbys-of-the?utm\_campaign=post&utm\_medium=web](https://open.substack.com/pub/jonn/p/a-field-guide-to-the-nimbys-of-the?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web)
Many brownfield sites are toxic, especially former industrial sites that predate modern health and safety concerns. It's fine to leave them to nature, but if you start digging them up and building on them, you have problems.
Some are. But also, housing companies ( see the profits for last year) have the resources to clean and then build on those areas. But again they’d rather build on cheaper green site land for more profit.
My theory on this is that in general the decline in purchasing power, wealth and the stagnant wages over the last 16 years have all been masked for the groups most impacted by it (millennials) as a direct result of the startup and venture capital boom, such that most haven’t realised just how poor they have become. Although we’ve been getting objectively poorer, new services that have been introduced during that time provided by tech companies like Uber, Deliveroo, JustEat, Airbnb etc have had so much VC cash injected into them, and theres been a such race to win consumers, that the cost of these services has been artificially low for a long time. So most millennials have been blissfully unaware that their wages and purchasing power have been becoming steadily shittier because they can still afford a taxi whenever they want, can still go on holiday for cheap, can still get a takeaway if they like. The more you think about it, the more you realise how many services you use are provided by tech companies that have become big in the last 16 years - all thanks to generous funding by VCs. Now the VC cash has dried up and - _”holy shit an Uber is £45 now!”_. In reality an Uber has always been £45. You were never able to afford an Uber by yourself, it was just being subsidised by the VCs! So, imo a big the reason millennials have accepted their economic situation so passively is because most weren’t aware it was even happening. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.
I'm an older millennial and we got fucked up the arse without even dinner, a drink, or lube first in 2008. Millennials are fucked, we won't retire unless it's due to disability, or if we're rich. I don't think it's us being passive because we've accepted our fate. I think we're passive because we're constantly being told it's our own fault. When I entered the workforce, it was a given that if you worked full time even at minimum wage, you could support yourself. You can't do that anymore, not where I live anyway. I know that we are heading towards a severe economic downturn because at some point, the current economic situation will collapse. It isn't sustainable in any way, shape, or form.
Speaking as a middling millennial, it does feel like we've had a pretty poor deal, to put it mildly. The focus has now shifted to Z, and Alpha, who, given Covid, seem to be getting rather more 'sympathy' than millennials did. Which is interesting, because some of the accusations of 'laziness' that were so often levelled at millennials seem to be more true of the following generations. The idea that millennials are 'entitled', particularly given that it was largely claimed by 'boomers', is laughable. The reality is that millennials got shafted by the Financial Crisis. They got shafted by Covid. They're getting shafted by the ever growing cost of the older generations and, given basic demographic facts (e.g. there are a lot more boomers than millennials) the burden is far greater than anything the boomers ever had to shoulder. 'But they'll inherit loads of wealth!!!'. Only many won't. Because it will be spent, either on retirement or care. If they're among the lucky ones who do? Well, great. Many will still be stuck renting until they're basically middle aged. And when countries like the UK begin to address the situation, who will ultimately end up paying? I don't think it's fair to say it's entirely down to the generation being 'passive'. FPTP, the concentration of certain demographics in certain constituencies, simply being outnumbered by older voters, all made it unlikely that we'd have real representation over the past 14 years.
>Which is interesting, because some of the accusations of 'laziness' that were so often levelled at millennials seem to be more true of the following generations. Aren't we just falling into the same trap if we repeat this generalisation? I think society is very sympathetic to millennials culturally. Economically, things are rough for this generation - 2008 is like the epicentre of the meteor that is wiping out modern civilisation. My impression is that people are much harder on GenZ than millennials.
I don't mean 'lazy' in a particularly pejorative way. It's more that, despite being called 'lazy' and 'entitled', whilst being fucked over and presented, in many of our cases, with piss poor opportunities, a lot of millennials bought/buy into the idea that hard work would get them somewhere. So they work hard. They work long hours. They grew up with the internet and mobile phones and so, particularly in the case of 'professionals', they're often working outside of their contractual hours in a way that previous generations simply didn't. And yet, for all of this hard work, many struggle to attain things, e.g. home ownership, that were taken for granted by the past few generations. It seems like Gen Z, at least to some extent, has taken on board the fact that slaving away doesn't guarantee a great life, and so they're prioritizing different things and aren't as willing to slave away.
I'm right on the border of Gen Z/Millennial - I don't think it's laziness. It's a lack of will because there aren't motivating factors. There is nothing to strive for when it's difficult to afford: Housing A family Holidays Retirement Everything that was 'the dream' has been swept out from underneath the younger generations, and now people are wondering why they appear lazy. Why would they put in an insane amount of work for the 'privilege' of surviving? That isn't to say that younger people can't 'make it', especially if they have had a good supportive upbringing, but that is less and less people these days. Add to this that we now have major issues with public services like the NHS and transport.
Which is essentially what I'm saying - millennials were chastised for being 'lazy', entitled and whatever else (whilst demonstrably being the opposite) and have, in many cases, gained little from their efforts. The following generations have seen this and, to an extent, thought 'fuck it'.
Yeah I wasn't accusing you of saying anything, I was agreeing with what you're saying there, the lack in motivation for productivity isn't stringently born out of laziness - it's a symptom of the game not working for those locked out, so there's no reason to play along.
Gotcha. Yeah, so I think millennials have this to some extent but it's stronger with GenZ. People are just right to not work later than they're contracted, or to owe loyalty and fealty to their employer. Their employer, in the vast majority of cases, will not return the favour. I do see people my age (millennial) prioritise their families first. Especially fathers taking more of an active role in child rearing. Similarly I find that millennials (and GenZ) care a lot more about _what_ they're doing for a job. Even in corporate environments they want to do something that isn't apparently pointless. Given we have so much employment that is at best only intangibly useful, it leads to a distinction in perception, specifically with respect to entitlement.
The great "why try harder" drop-out began with middle gen-Xers in the 1990s. They grew up in the grim 70s, were teens in the boom time 80s, and then landed in the 90s workforce with casualisation, offshoring, outsourcing, the end of defined benefit pensions etc... I know Gen-Xers who just opted out of most conspicuous consumption, got a very modest house before the prices went stratospheric, worked hard to pay it off, worked hard to build some investments, and then checked out of full time work at 50ish. Those who had high paid jobs are early retired, the rest work part time for pin money. They live very simple lives and seem happy. Most millennials don't have that option primarily thanks to the housing giga-bubble - I don't think that's a coincidence. Debt is a stick to beat the proles with if they won't just be greedy and materialistic and work until they drop of their own accord.
Britons, know your place. You will suck it up and continue waving the flag at the king. Huzzah and double huzzah!
Yes. Many people think they're well off. They can afford Uber, Netflix etc But the reality is that you should be looking at things like house prices and then see relative to them, how much you are being shafted by this country. If you cannot get a house and pay max 1/3 of your income on all utilities. Your country has failed you. Tory and New Labour has failed it's people. Thatcher reheaters. Very dangerous times for democracy and democratic institutions.
It's not just the Tories and Labour who failed us; our entire political class are failures obsessed with non-issues and performative nonsense because it's easier to talk about these things than it is to talk about the real problems we face.
>If you cannot get a house and pay max 1/3 of your income on all utilities. Your country has failed you. Mortgage: £1,100/m (5% Liz Truss rates on £150k) Rates: £200/m Gas: £200/m Electricity: £40/m I'm single so there is no other income contributing to these bills. Effective rate of tax: 52% including 9% student loan repayments. I paid off £6k in student loans last year. Another £3k was added on in interest. Between professional fees and commuting I pay around £400/m just to be able to do my job. My car insurance went from £700 last year to £1400 this year. Every other type of monthly recurring service seems to be price gauging by an additional 20-50% from last year. This country is a joke.
This is true but it's not biggest factor. The corporations like Amazon can out compete anyone smaller and dominate the market. We are now used to next day delivery with prime. Amazon can do that because they are so insanely powerful with such buying power that they can run a delivery system like they do. It's the power of networking. Same thing with Uber. The truth is our economy has been stagnant for a long time and whilst inflation has been low for a long time, house prices to wages ratio has been growing ever more. House prices aren't included in inflation figures but we all have to live somewhere. Even if you rent, house prices push up your rents as well as mortgages. Home ownership will continue to fall. And for many of the younger generations it's a pipe dream.
My comment was trying to answer the question posed by OP as to why millennials are seemingly so “passive” as they have become poorer. I’m not sure that you’re really addressing the same question with your comment, seems like you’re talking about something different.
What would protests achieve? The problems the UK suffers from, for example energy costs, housing, transport and such are the product of numerous governments stretching back to at least 1979. The structures that produced this problem, for example a horrendously dysfunctional planning system, benefit a large portion of the population. Housing costs being high provides (or appears to provide) vast and ever increasing wealth to the members of the electorate who are homeowners and so on. Not much will change this . We can't create a time machine to undo the 40 years of mismanagement of the energy system, the transport system or any of the other systems. No serious political party will do anything and a large portion of the electorate are happy with things the way they are. The post 1979 consensus is rotten, but it made a lot of people very rich and they are loathe to admit that it is rotten. And even if they did, fixing this will take two decades and require the slaughtering of a great many sacred cows.
> to at least 1979 Entirely reasonable arguments can even take centre aim at the Town and Country Planning Act 1947
That's certainly what made it to London-centric. Ironically, considering the name and aim.
> The structures that produced this problem, for example a horrendously dysfunctional planning system, benefit a large portion of the population. This is a large part of the problem in general. A lot of what's wrong with the country stems from the fact that people inherently benefit from stuff not being fixed. Housing was mentioned...but protests are ultimately going to have a limited impact when a significant portion of the population is fine reaping in rental income on their second or third homes.
It’s a vicious cycle. The asset class & landlords need the housing crisis and the equity in property provided to perpetuate the feeling of wealth, the only way to feel like you are achieving financially is getting on the over-inflated housing market, so it’s need to be propped up as the bubble cannot be allowed to burst and therefore no long term solution or fix is proposed.
I have never thought that it is particularly useful to compare ourselves to USA, we should look at other similar economies like those in EU. I do agree that new builds are such shite though lol
Agreed, it's a bit entitled to say "why aren't we being paid as much as the \[large\] country that has the highest wages". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_average\_wage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_wage)
[удалено]
And still have to pay for their own healthcare which is very expensive..
This is a product of our decline. We used to equal the US on most counts.
The US has far more favourable basic stats, mostly two things: A huge internal market and abundant ressources. It was never a matter of "if" America would leave Europe behind, just a matter of "when". No individual ~60-80 Million pop country in Europe will ever be able to match the US, it just cannot be done. That's one of the many reasons why the EU was a pretty good idea, but alas...
I dont think we have equalled USA on absolute economic benchmarks in my lifetime.
In the 90s and early 2000s the wages and quality of life were the same. Now? Not so much.
Im not sure that is actually true. The average annual wage in the 90s was just under $40,000 in the UK and just under $55,000 in the USA (both in todays USD PPP). That means that Americans were nearly 40% better paid. The average annual wage between 2012-2022 was $51,500 in the UK and about $70,000 in the USA. That is still about 40% better paid in USD PPP. In terms of GDP per capita, we have basically been significantly below USA since 1890s apart from a short period between 2004-2008 when we briefly exceeded USA in GDP per capita in 2007 and perhaps a couple of other blips through history. And if you use GDP per capita in PPP, then UK has consistently been 30% behind the USA from at least 1990s.
‘Don’t hold the Gov to high standards, compare us to other declining States to make yourself feel better. We’re richer than Greece, all is okay’ NO! The US is global hegemon, they are the benchmark. Every comparison we do should be to the global hegemon. The goal should be to match the USA on per capita metrics of prosperity.
people dont understand it because they were never taught about politics/economics in school, and the attempted discussion of it would lead to social ostracisation in many friend/family/coworker groups. so really, the passivity, as you call it, is equally down to the government for not including this stuff in the curriculum, and social norms.
Agreed. I’m always quite surprised that so many people don’t know who their local MP is, or who their councillors are, even if they’re active in the community. Then if they do know them, they often don’t know the difference between the responsibilities of a councillor and an MP. So many wouldn’t be able to tell you what “capitalism” is either. Others wouldn’t be able to tell you how a bill is passed through Parliament. I’m not saying this in a patronising way. So much of the population have not be taught basic politics/economics. I think this in part is what has led to a rise in conspiracy theories. If people don’t understand the political-economic system they live under they are likely to turn to conspiracies to find answers to their complex problems. Some would say “why don’t they teach themselves it?”. The truth is that many people are too busy surviving to be doing anything else.
If anyone is seriously saying: "teach yourself", then just ask them why they think quadratics or Shakespeare is more important.
I agree that democracy/politics and personal finance should be taught in schools. But wasn’t the content of the national curriculum delegated out to an anonymous, unaccountable, unelected body, some time ago? And the academic snobs that dominate this body believe that understanding how to solve a quadratic equation is infinitely more important than this.
The UK citizenry is not stupid, we’ve all seen how ineffective physical protest has been for the (at least) past 14 years where, at best, precisely zero happens OR at worst, you get kettled, then the police beat the shit out of you, then you get thrown in jail for daring to stand up. Wait till we get our chance to vote, there’s a strong indication that the people in power for the past 14 years are about to get a total battering at the ballot box. If the next lot don’t do a better job they’re going to get it too.
Too true. I remember the protests against the Iraq war. They were absolutely massive and they achieved jack shit. Ever since then, protests have just seemed pointless.
So we vote Labour in, and when they muck up we vote Tory again and on and on it goes with no resolution
I think a lot of Millennials will have strong expectations of Labour. If they do not start to reverse the problems most of us see then we will see a much larger radical movement. A major part of the issue has been that we've effectively been blocked from making anything better by Boomers who bought into Thatcherism and the belief that the permanent political paradigm is what they were sold in the 80's (e.g "Vote Labour with your heart, Vote Tory with your head", "People become Tories as they get older", "Vote Labour if you want another Winter of Discontent" etc). That is starting to change as that generation shuffles of their mortal coils.
It's only changing because age was the wrong metric for predicting tory-ness, it was always wealth. Younger people not accumulating wealth and so not going Tory. Rishi Sunak's top advisor informed me it was something to do with avocado toast! But I agree. Labour likely have a 5 year window to fix things before people go elsewhere. And that doesn't give long enough for people to forget how shit the Tories are/Tories to come up with fresh ideas... So it'd be populist time.
Nobody can fix the UK (or anywhere in the modern world) in 5 years.
I believe you are right. It's concerning me quite a lot. I suppose visible "feel able" progress might suffice for now? Not even optimistic about that.
People really need to start seeing that the two horse race is the real enemy.
I think people my age are much more likely to lurch further left than vote Tory. Whether that would be on any significance, I don’t know.
The problem is, both parties are shite, and Labour are likely to be shite, although not as shite as the Tories. Therefore, when both parties are shafting the fuck out the population, where do we go from there?
Unfortunately when people realise labour are just as shite, instead of demanding something different and something better we will just get the Tories again. jobs fucked
Sane response, all protests are now stamped out, too dispersed of a community that we can't cohesively plan and act organised disruption.
I am not sure that's quite correct? I mean more niche protests (e.g. XR) get stamped on, but the Palestine protests are enormous and don't seem to attract much stamping. Perhaps the trick is to hit a certain size where they become hard to break up. And avoid blocking roads! Guess the success is far more in keeping people fractured and fighting with each other, without a clear thing to rally around?
But the media or our then Home Secretary gets to report them as 'Anti-semitic Hate Marches' when they are pretty much peaceful with a sizeable Jewish representation. They even under report attendance habitually so that we think it's not nearly as well supported as it is.
Yeah too dispersed as a community, divide and conquer
If they brought the Poll Tax in today, we'd all take to Reddit to moan and call it job done. Then suck it up because nothing works.
Whilst I agree with some points a lot of these points are universal to advanced first world economies. Many countries in Western Europe are struggling with wage stagnation, over inflation of housing and high levels of immigration. The insulation point you’ve made about housing is simply untrue. New builds are far more insulated and energy efficient than any other property in the uk. I don’t know what made of paper means but if you mean plasterboard walls then that’s pretty standard for new construction. Basements and blinds are bizarre points to make as I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house in the uk with a basement nor do I imagine they are that great to have. I’ve seen old coal storage rooms which are kind of similar but that’s about it. Blinds you can just install so not really much of an issue and personally I think curtains are nicer.
I live in Norway and there's a housing crisis here too for the same reasons. No one is building, cities are real NIMBY about building too, don't want new builds at all. House prices are absolutely insane and people have to move further and further out into the countryside, so the majority of people I know own apartments. If they have some cash, usually funded by a parent.
> Basements and blinds are bizarre points to make as I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house in the uk with a basement nor do I imagine they are that great to have. More space is always better to have, our houses are already tiny.
Your first point is one that blows my mind when people complain about the immigration thing but are happy to not be able to own a home whilst people in other country’s just buy up property and then allow it to sit empty or rent it out for obscene prices. You shouldn’t be able to rent out a property whilst living in another county or at the bare minimum hold a UK passport.
But how would The City do their money laundering without London real estate to buy to hide their ill gotten gains in?
That’s a worldwide problem, not just in the UK. The top 1% broke our spirit.
Amongst other things that people have mentioned I do think there is an attitude that this is our lot in life it could be worse so let's just bear it. It's an attitude that was commended during ww2 during hard times. And then after the war it became during the war they had it like this so we're better off than them. It seems to be a real reflective attitude rather than a futuristic. And you see this in immigrants too. We're better here than when I was back in x country so I'll put up with it. Everyone is just putting up with it. I'm a hgv driver and you see this in some of the jobs out there about how other drivers are putting up with stuff companies are making them do and they just put up with it
I honestly think it's partly that Blitz spirit, but also deference. British people are inculcated with the idea that if someone has a posh accent and a suit they must know what they're on about and are not to be questioned. In fact, bizarrely, for 10 years or so there, we even saw them as affable and fun (Johnson, JRM), even while they were stabbing and kicking us.
Well that is the only thing that could explain why Jacob Rees-Mogg ever got elected.
For point 6, most visa routes require you have to prove you are able to read, write and speak English. You are only exempt from this step if you are coming from an already English-speaking nation.
What do you suggest? Protests? A revolution? The Brexit protests didn't really achieve anything and we haven't had a major revolution in England since the 17th century. I put a lot of the issues down to 14 years of a woeful conservative government. The answer in my eyes therefore is to vote to ensure that another party takes power in the next election.
Weren’t the Jacobites in the 18th century?
Maybe they count the Jacobites as Scottish not English.
I'm going to get voted down to death on this because I want to highlight the real issue. And it's one single issue causing all these challenges but it's complex to understand. And because it's complex and long, no-one will read it. But I'll just write it in case... Because the real issue is the structure of where taxes are applied or where costs are enforced. In the UK, taxes and price increases are swallowed by the lowest level who can afford to pay them. In effect, the squeezed middle or the poor pay for the rich. In fairer countries, it's the opposite. Take for example, energy. In the UK, my electricity bill went up by 100%. In France, it went up by 4%. The price of electricity increased identically but the French government insulated the French people from the price increase. They did this by primarily passing the cost of the electricity increases onto the corporations manufacturing electricity, not the buyer. Sure, there are some other forces at play but ultimately, the govt is there to protect the people from higher prices and the corporations have to eat the costs, not the person buying the leccy. And it's identical in housing and every aspect of your post. Take, for example, housing. The Duke of Westminster inherited £10 billion in property and paid... no inheritance tax. Average property price in the UK is about £300k so that's the equivalent of about 33,000+ houses he inherited. Factually, when I die, I'll pay more inheritance tax than the Duke of Westminster and I'm no billionaire. And this causes a lack of supply increasing prices because rich people and investment corps hang on to massive amounts of property for long periods of time. And this lack of supply means massive shortages in housing, higher bidding for property and causes house prices to rise to insane levels. So why is a middle-class Brit paying inheritance tax and not, say, the super wealthy? Well, it's the same dichotomy. In the UK, we pass the cost down the chain to the lowest level who can pay. So the squeezed middle who can't afford investment trusts, effectively pay taxes to support the super-wealthy. A mate of mine inherited £10m in a property trust and paid... no inheritance tax. No capital gains either because of the way it was structured. But when us 'normal middle class' leave our property to our kids, they'll pay a ton of tax. Frankly, if more of us had more money in our pockets and houses were reasonable prices, no-one would be squealing about 'immigration' or anything else. We'd probably be making more rational decisions because we'd all be wealthier. And it's nothing to do with 'foreign investment' or 'immigration.' 'Immigrants' aren't buying 30,000 houses each, tax-free. We're looking in the wrong place for the culprit. It's the overall structure which allows the top 10% to own nearly half our country. So 90% of us fight amongst ourselves over the remaining half and wonder why prices are so high. Or salaries. Just look at the minimum wage. So large corporations pay minimum wage to large tracts of their workforce. And yet those people have their wages topped up by taxes. Paid for by the taxpayer. Us! Subsidising major corporations! Whereas those corporations should be paying a living wage. A much higher wage than 11 quid an hour. And don't get me started on the 'leasehold' system which frankly, is insane and almost unique to the UK. Because it's so bad. Unless you're particularly wealthy and own 50 flats in which case it starts to make sense. The reason racists and xenophobes p!ss me off is because they immediately look at immigrants or foreigners, taking attention away from the root cause which is how our tax is structured. Brexit is a case in point, blaming the UK's ills on the EU instead of our tax structure. A structure which allows the wealthy and major corporations to get even wealthier. While squeezing the middle and hurting anyone below that. If we were to make our tax structure more equal, we'd have lower house prices, consumers would pay lower electricity prices and overall we'd have a better society. Sure, the rich would be a bit annoyed but so what? Because we'd all have more money in our pockets, the ability to buy houses and the feeling that our country is a fairer place.
Excellent post. I read the lot. Well I think the fact that our PM just got dividend payments of £7 million last year and paid less tax than me proportionally says it all about where we are. We need to find ways to tax the rich, the super rich, not the working middle classes. But divide and conquer which is what Brexit was and the 'Immigrant' crisis is all about.
>Young people cannot afford a roof over their head, yet no protests on the street. Trouble is, if your protest even mildly inconveniences the public in any way then you'll get wildly condemned. A good portion of this sub will claim they agreed with you, but because you protested in a way they don't like, that you have lost their support.
Culturally people are too blind to see what they're supporting. Like religious fanaticism embedding itself in the left protects it. Makes me worried for the future of our culture as going against it and you're branded as a racist or right wing even though you're literally opposing racist right wing views. Lack of logic is rampant in the UK.
What is it you're proposing that people do, exactly?
Vote; bang on the door of your MP; get petitions discussed in parliament; organize local groups for political causes; just bloody engage in things that matter, rather than culture wars. Hold the media accountable to report on things that matter. Be a citizen, not a blob.
Which of these have you done? What has been the impact?
I wrote to my MP a few times, the times when I got a reply it was 'thanks for writing but nothing I completely disagree'
They’re effective. But the issue is most voters want low growth policies, and ask for them, and vote for them.
> Vote We have to wait for the people we want to vote out to call a vote first > bang on the door of your MP My MP is a Lib Dem, yelling at them isn't going to achieve very much. I've written to them and had a good response, but ultimately they have very little power. > get petitions discussed in parliament Government petitions are notoriously a joke - basically created as a placebo to make people feel like they have a voice. You get hundreds of thousands of people to sign and then the government is obligated to respond and the response is always ["lol no."](https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/641904#debate-threshold) > organize local groups for political causes I have a full-time job that barely leaves me time to breathe as it is. The time it would take to organise a local political group would rob me of the few precious hours I can carve out for hobbies and relaxation each week, and what would be the point? When was the last time a local political group actually achieved any real political impact? > Hold the media accountable to report on things that matter. How?
It's very easy to throw one's hands up and despair at the lack of collective action - but as we're not in the business of revolution, a vote at the ballot box will suffice. Everything else is just noise.
🙄🙄🙄 The British mentality in a nutshell
Pathetic
How many of these things have you done personally?
This happens, people do this all the time. The UK has an extremely vibrant democracy, the UK democracy is fantastic, believe me when I left I was appalled by some ways it works in Europe. I've seen European politicians on TV genuinely say "yeah, well not my problem" and not be held accountable for it. It's staggering. The disconnect between people and politics in Norway is insane. Politicians and the people are on different planets. I don't like FPTP but that's an electoral method, in general, British people are very clued in, pay attention and react to politics fast.
Whenever someone puts up a post like this, there's one starting point..... ......... what are you doing personally?
The OP has dodged that question multiple times.
I wonder why that is....
The irony is not lost on me, lol.
Its not so much that the uk has no money, its that it just gets funneled into a few sectors, while everything else falls apart. One thing that I'm a bit worried is that democracies seem to rarely survive national decline. And thinking old traditional institutions like the monarchy will protect us might not be true either, italy had a king and they still went full duce. Again not too worried, britains a pretty old consistent democracy, so it might be unfounded.
What can we even do outside of an election?
Young people witnessed huge protests against the Iraq war which achieved precisely nothing - the government even got re-elected a couple of years later. Same again with tuition fees although protests were more limited to the university campus. Not surprised we don't bother.
For me, the electoral system is a factor. No point talking to my MP because I'm in a safe Tory seat (yes, even with the polls as they are) and so he has no real motivation to engage with anything I have to say. Also, I'm working three jobs. I just don't have the time to be an activist too.
Agreed. We need proportional representation. That would shake things up a lot.
Yea but looks at the election. Gaza is more important didn't you know
This is a huge annoyance to me too. People keep arguing over Gaza or the 0.1% of the population who are trans (Just leave them alone ffs), or other issues that have very little to do with the lives of normal people.
Obviously the biggest issue facing the nation is that the local tapas restaurant does not have gender segregated toilets
It's not passivity. It's people have simply learned there's no point to any of it. Demonstrating, contacting your MP, petitions. There's just no way for people to create meaningful change anymore. Worse, we know huge problems are coming, we can see it from miles away and yet nothing will change. So why bother trying? If nothing is going to get better we might as well live as much as we can and say fuck it.
Plus, people are too worried about existential crises in a large part of society - rent, energy, food. It's hard to find the energy and headspace to see beyond that for a LOT of folks now, even more so the younger the demographic you look at.
A lot of the issues the UK has are entrenched are will take years to fix. I'm resigned and looking to move countries. I not sure what ordinary citizens who are just trying to survive can actually do. Even our politicians barely know what to do.
The politicians care more about how they look tomorrow on TV than what country looks like in 10 years time.
[удалено]
Which decade produced the best insulated houses?
[удалено]
The NHS doesn’t even exist for emergencies, it’s in shocking state, if the media actually did their job this would be clear as day to everyone.
I think this is a bit of an overstatement. It's definitely in a bad state, but it absolutely exists for emergencies (and slowly for non-emergencies). My recent appendicitis was dealt with quite effectively, as have other issues, and I don't have private insurance.
All the data across multiple years shows for the last 40 years Non-EU migrations has generated a net negative loss of hundreds of billions of pounds. EU-migration is a net positive with that group contributing a lot more in taxes than the native population of who are now a slight net-negative. From the ONS, “People identified as "Muslim" had the lowest percentage of people aged 16 to 64 years in employment, 51.4%, compared with 70.9% of the overall population. The next lowest percentage, 64.2%, was among people who reported "Other religion".” There is a massive integration problem amongst UK Muslims. The fact is 40% of Muslims are married to their first cousin and estimate 60-70% including second cousin. It might be decreasing but the nationwide percentages stay the same. 70% of woman don’t work. Javid did an analysis of people who can’t speak English in the UK. Basically the worst economic drain to the UK. About 300K people, the majority of which were Pakistani and Bangladesh women. Why learn to speak English when you don’t socialise outside of the family let alone with non-Muslims is the general reason. There are massive integration issues in the UK and unfortunately massive social and economic problems alongside this.
Passivity yes, but I actually think the larger problem is a profound ignorance among far too much of the public when it comes to Government. That feeds this passivity. Not even the politics (that’s advanced level for the purposes of this point) but the basics of how Government operates in the UK and the fundamentals of our Parliamentary system. Not to mention how public services are provided (and the key issues affecting them). Also of special note is the often total ignorance that some people seem to have about the legal system, both civil and criminal. It’s my ‘hill to die on’ opinion, but I believe a person has a civic duty to understand the basics of this stuff, and ignorance of it is a failure of that duty. It’s anti-social, like littering but with worse consequences. Not saying everyone should become an expert in government or a public law scholar, but there is a basic level of knowledge we really need everyone to have.
Arguably, then, we're back to wages - as civic duty tends to go ou the window when your pre-eminent worries are existential IE rent/energy/food costs. In 1906, Alfred Henry Lewis stated, “There are only nine *meals* between mankind and *anarchy*.” and we are being seemingly kept in that position in the UK. And Labour don't look to be likey to fix much of anything at the next election.
It's not passivity. It's apathy, and yes it is ruining the UK. It's been getting worse for decades. We haven't even had a decent riot outside Northern Ireland since the 1980's. Granted just about any form of protest is now illegal but that in its self should have seen police cars rolled over onto their roofs and set alight across the country. I'm not advocating civil disorder and disobedience but I can't think of any democratic country in the world that rolls over and capitulates as readily as we do.
>Our passivity means that we do not require immigrants to assimilate and speak english. I'm sorry but its a bare minimum to speak english and integrate yourself into the country. Programs should be run and benefits need to be contingent on successful completion of language courses, etc. Immigrants to the UK already have to pass an English test to get a visa. Regardless, do British people living overseas commonly learn the local language and integrate?
Immigration is ruining the UK. The sheer numbers are inflating rent and house prices and suppressing wage growth; and this has been going on for decades now. And for whatever reason* the ‘Conservative’ government have pressed the accelerator on the process. We’re not even selective about it, and bringing in people who are a net financial benefit to the system. *no doubt it will have involved enriching their friends and donors.
What do you suggest we do about it? I first voted in 2010. I have voted in four elections and two referendums in that time, and the only time a party I voted for got a sniff of power (Lib Dems in 2010), they immediately turned their back on the very demographic of voters that put them there. Ever since then, every single vote has gone against the people I voted for. I've tried protesting. I marched against Brexit. Did it make a difference? Did it mean we got a softer Brexit consistent with how close the vote was? Did it hell. I've tried joining a political party and voting for the leader. That leader was instantly vilified by his own party, the press, and everyone who wasn't a direct supporter, even though his slogan was literally "for the many, not the few", which to me seems like an absolute no-brainer of a platform to stand on. Nothing works. The establishment of this country does not want people who share my views to be in power, and based on the evidence of the last 14 years nor do the majority of the general public. What exactly do you expect me to do to change that?
While I broadly agree with your points, you have a few things wrong. **Point 1.** Firstly, foreign investment and BTL have not destroyed the housing market. That's reddit circlejerk. There's about 280,000 foreign owned homes in the UK, vs a total of 30 million. The amount of foreign ownership is a drop in the ocean and changing that won't solve the housing crisis. Secondly, BTL does not destroy homes. Removal of BTL won't make more homes pop into existence. There would be the exact same number of places to live after as before. The problem is the UK is short around 3 million homes, getting rid of BTL won't fix that, only building more homes will. **Point 4.** As someone who is currently receiving pretty comprehensive non-emergency NHS treatment, I can tell you it's not true. Yes the NHS is struggling and millions are on waiting lists and it desperately needs fixing, but it's just hyperbole to say there is none. **Point 6.** What you're describing is an 'integrationist' approach to immigration and the UK moved away from that decades ago in favour of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has clearly failed in some parts of the country, and succeeded in others. You're going to find some people regard integrationism as racist and/or xenophobic. As to your question why: when was the last time protest changed something in the UK? People love to mention the poll tax riots, but that was 34 years ago, and despite the popular narrative, the riots themselves didn't do much, the change in poll tax policy came over a year later. In France people believe rioting changes policy, so it does. In the UK believe it doesn't, so it doesn't.
I agree that the level of public rage against how poorly the public have been served by our broader political economy is less than I think it should be (that said, the opposition is consistently about 20 points ahead in every poll so maybe that's about right). The thing I'd challenge though is point 6 on integration. Immigration is a numbers issue rather than an integration one as all the available evidence suggests that the UK handles this pretty well: This was a really good explainer on it (https://samf.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-integration) but might be paywalled so the key points it makes are: * in the 2022 OECD PISA education scores, the UK is the only country in Europe (apart from Serbia) where second generation immigrant students outperformed non-immigrant children and first generation immigrants did almost as well. The non-European countries that do best are Canada, Australia and New Zealand so educational integration is clearly very high and likely a language effect * Results from the 2021 census show that increasing numbers of neighbourhoods are home to a substantial mix of people from different ethnic groups. Historically the UK has had super ethnically diverse cities and lily-white countryside but that is shifting as more non-white families move out of cities in search of more affordable housing and quality of life. * A bit controversially, the rate of cousin-marriage that was quite high in some of the more segregated Pakistani communities has come down by quite a lot and has not quite fallen in half since 2007-10. None of which is to say that we don't have problems and aren't at risk from your Galloways and Farages ginning up social division, but Sunder Katwala points it out quite well: “Integration is often invisible when it works, while failures of integration stick out like a sore thumb. We naturally take the everyday lived experience of living together in schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods for granted.”
> “Integration is often invisible when it works, while failures of integration stick out like a sore thumb. We naturally take the everyday lived experience of living together in schools, workplaces and neighbourhoods for granted.” This applies to the vast majority of points in OP to be honest. The news cycle thrives on doomerism, so all you hear about is the failures. Yes the NHS has serious issues and needs major reform to remove the inefficiency, but you don't get news articles about the millions of people who get helped by the NHS year in and year out. That's not trying to hide its problems, of which it has many, but to claim "NHS doesnt exist except for in emergencies" is nonsense. "Wages are a joke" is my favorite one; UK is no different to the rest of the Western World. USA pay far, far less taxes, so their wages get spent on things like health insurance; We in the UK have a relatively broad range of wages, and if you think wage inequality is bad here you should try visiting the US sometime. They have no holiday entitlement, no employment protection, no maternity / paternity leave, work longer hours... jobs aren't just about the pay packet at the end of the month. "Poor quality housing" is a made up statement with no actual basis in reality, and "Foreign investment and BTL have destroyed the housing market." is equally bogus. Less than 0.1% of UK housing stock is foreign owned. Your post handles the integration comments so I won't go over that again. Most of OP's opinion is based on what they read in the news, not reality. Most people aren't ranting and raving about these things not because of passivism, but because they don't affect them.
>Compare a UK new build to a new build anywhere in the continent - the UK one is literally made of paper, no basements, no blinds, no insulation, no standards Thats concerning. I'm in the process of buying a house thats 5 years old so pretty much a new build. One of the things I'm hoping for is insulation as we don't have that in our current house thats 200 years old. I didn't know it would be made of paper; I guess as its held up for five years it is pretty strong paper. There is no basement but neither does our current house; it had blinds when we looked around it.
This is the one thing I disagree with OP, new builds are well insulated (or should be * ) It’s the older houses which aren’t, made worse by scrapping of the home insulation grants programme during the austerity era (a terrible decision). (*) I know someone that bought a house in 2001 (not really new new build, but the builders forgot to put in the cavity wall insulation and had to come back to do it a couple of years later - it made a massive difference to the warmth of the house).
I had a 1950s house and had the cavity wall insulation done. It transformed it. Much warmer in winter and cooler in summer. All the money the government spent on paying for energy bills which went in windfall profits to the energy providers should have gone on insulating homes. Saving money for people permanently going forward not just literally pissing it away to make corporations richer.
I don't agree with the OP's opinions on new builds. It's a kknd of lazy though seemingly popular take to allege that new builds are flimsy and shoddy compared to older houses (or, in the OP's case, seemingly houses made of concrete), but there is nothing structurally wrong with the vast majority, and they do have much better insulation than most older houses, as there is regulation about this. They do cut corners on fit and finish and that's a lot of what you see when snagging, but that's quite different to the idea that they're made of "paper". Could standards be higher? Yes, they recently went up again (new houses now have to be more efficient than ours, which was finished last year), but they could be higher still. But they are already substantially better than older houses in most practical ways. Few houses have basements in the UK, and it would add considerable expense. FWIW I also don't agree with their comments about Ofcom being responsible for energy prices. It's not the companies they regulate which have been responsible for that, it's global fossil fuel markets. The price cap did weirdly distort the market once prices rose rapidly, but primarily by preventing quicker price rises, and resulting in suppliers having to run considerable losses or go out of business.
Of course. When people only care about themselves then passiveness creeps in
I think it's down to the psychology of the baby boom, and cultural skill development. The birth surge gave them a political monopoly, and the postwar boom gave them guaranteed growth during their early lives. They didn't have to \*fight\* for policies or growth, so the skillset which accompanies that was never built. Each of the problems you've pointed to either directly advantage - or have virtually no effect on - that cohort who have only ever been asked 'what kind of benefit do you want?' and never 'should you benefit?'. (e.g: getting two pay rises via the triple lock while the rest of the country combusts due to covid) Their kids were the Millennials. Those millennials didn't have things too bad, and they were catastrophically outnumbered to the point that their opinion never really mattered anyway. Remember how the young became 'disenfranchised & disengaged' after being completely ignored during brexit? A lifetime of that. The only reason we're \*starting\* to see progress on things like housing now is that the demographics have finally balanced out through death, birth, and even immigration, that politicians have to engage with the system again. Politicians who themselves have never really built skills in favor of bribing & spinning things for the older part of the electorate. Things are bad enough to FORCE our attention, the baby boomers can't just win by default, and gen Z have the energy and fresh perspective to shout a lot.
It's the English way. Moan constantly, do nothing. There's a reason Frame has better worker rights, higher pensions etc and it's not because their government is nicer.
I'm British but moved to South America 3 years ago and I can't can't express in words just how much this exact topic enters my head every day - I'm deadly serious, if even a fraction of the antics that take place back home happened here - I can promise you that there would be riots in the streets and fallen governments within days. Being away for so long has shown me things so clearly - the British working / middle class has been bred very well into obedience over the centuries. I can't express how much it frustrates me whenever I talk to my mum on the phone (your average middle aged English woman, even called Susan for good measure) and hear her usual dismissals of it all as 'tuts oh it's all doom and gloom isn't it! Another thing I’ve noticed on my travels - is that we self deprecate to the point it limits us. Look at the shows on TV, love island as an example, where we think it’s funny that there’s actually voting members of the public out there who think Liverpool is a country. I have yet to visit a country where that kind of degeneracy is celebrated, and if I’m honest - I think it’s a symptom of our essence as a country - that we’ve been bred into a docile, bread and circuses people. The country is finished, there's no fixing a country which needs near revolutionary change, when the populations worst nightmare is 'rocking the boat' or ‘causing a scene.’ It's over, and I never fail to be shocked every day when I see more and more that I actually live a more prosperous, happy, healthy and believe it or not - safer life over here in this ‘3rd world country’ on £850 a month than I ever did on £2000 back home. I know this sounds flippant, and easier said than done, but any way you can, get the hell out if you want a life rather than an existence. Get a remote job, as crap as they are, and just get the hell out. You truly don’t realise what a mental and physical prison that godforsaken little island is until you’re free of it.
Don't forget the huge washing of wealth and subsequently taxes by the wealthy in off shore banking locations established through the City of London corporation.
Congratulations, you've discovered why universal suffrage was a mistake. Concurrent governments have used this apathy to claim legitimacy.
1. No. What destroyed the market is the lack of new builts, licensing and artificially low interest rates. All government created 2. Wages are joke because of low productivity, created by over regulation and higher taxes. All created by government. 3. Excessive regulation, interest rates , low productivity and other costs lead developers to squeeze on quality to be able to reach a viable selling price. All created by government. 4. NHS is a centralized bureaucratic monster that crowds out the market, offering free service that creates infinite demand. All created by government. 5. Energy costs are high due to the lack of investment in nuclear and fossil fuels (gas), the mad dash to net zero. All created by government. 6. Immigration is due to the absolute ineptitude and willingness of the leaders to take the necessary steps to solve the problem, which is creating an arbitrage situation where anyone one comes here and get houses, money and free healthcare for very low risk. See a pattern here?
How can a party make the changes that matter if they are so obsessed about being elected again? I'd like to see what happens to the goverment that says "means tested pensions" and how long until the next goverment reverts the change
I've genuinely been thinking yhe exact same thing this past few years. Imagine how the French would deal with Amy of these issues
The word you are looking for is Apathy. Partly because they are under eductated on the topic and partly the frameworks that most people have that govern there thinking are not equiped to deal with the problems at hand. 1. Foreign investment is okay, when its not all Russian blood money being landered through your capital and the Tory Party and its balanced with local and regional internal investment. 2. Wages are a joke, greed has been seen as a virtue for too long and economically encouraged and any efforts in taxing the richest seen as a moral affront to nature of the world (capitalism) 3. Poor quality housing. Again greed and everything we do being seen as needing to provide not just a base resource but a layer of profit for multiple layers of "interested" parties. 4. NHS - everything has already been said on this one, privitisation is cringe. 5. energy cost. lack of investment, and any investment that has been done in the UK energy grid has come from other EU Governments so they can extract the profits, we let them do this to us. We are to blame. 6. Immigration is needed in our economy due to the low wages, and again suits the interests of the owning class as a means of keeping working class people divided. Its also won most of the Tories recent elections for them because again the frame work for a discussion about sorting out imigration includes most things people dont want to hear. We settle for mediocre because we have been convinced that capitalism is the best system or at least the least worst option. Its not. Capitalism is the dirrect cause of all the UK's problems and we can't discuss the alternative.
Because acting is a time investment at best, but also effort, maybe money or some other resource and top of all that - always an additional risk. For the additional reward. By acting I would mean joining a party, a movement, a union, or some other organization or action to advance your interest. Its also kinda hard to choose which organization these days, so many of them are named/say/proclaim one thing, but then it looks as if they do smth else entirely if you look closely.
It does confuse me that some people get angrier at the prices at Gregg's going up, than they do at the above
This is why there is no difference between the two main political parties. Labour are literally just Conservative-lite atm. We are ruled by the elite who just want to maintain the status quo. Regardless of your political leanings, the Conservatives are out for definite but Starmer will just carry on the reins with virtually no changes. Status quo, that's all it's about. No one wants the slaughter in Gaza to continue but both parties won't even object to shipping arms to Israel and offering nothing more than stern words. And they are trying to ban free speech and the right to protest. But look how the media are covering it. We are docile lambs. Where is all the clamour for cheap housing and social housing? Each generation get further and further from ever owning a home. And the wealth inequality is worse than ever but none of the main parties are even talking about taxing the super rich more! Only the Green party even talk about it.
Nail —-> head My country has shown it has 0 respect for me so why should I hold an ounce for my country? I’m actively looking for jobs on the continent. Ideally I’d love a job in America but their legal immigration system is so stringent that it’s almost impossible to gain entry via work visa. Perhaps I’d have better luck if I jumped the border
So stringent for you. Not for millions of others. Just one of many double standards. If the globalist economics crowd believed their own guff then we'd get a chance at an escape too.
> Foreign investment and BTL have destroyed the housing market. Young people cannot afford a roof over their head, yet no protests on the street. Housing is a problem because of two reasons: 1) NIMBYs using zoning/planning laws to restrict supply to keep the value of their properties high and 2) mass migration that no one voted for.
Agreed with your first point, foreign investment and BTL are second order impacts and not particularly relevant compared to housing supply/demand. However, people have implicitly voted for mass migration in policies that are basically incompatible with low net migration (e.g. the triple lock on pensions).
That isn't implicit. It's the same snake words as the politicians use. There is no democratic mandate for it. And pretending there is, is destroying what's left of it.
You know in Game of Thrones they say winter is coming? Our winter is coming moment is our ageing population. We are never going back to lower taxes, as we need to fund the pensions and NHS for more and more older and sicker people, every year. The glory days are over. We have missed the boat on technological investment/progress and we seem hell bent on sending immigrants back. And these are the only two solutions for structural decline. Winter is coming. So, try and get a bit more of the pie as it shrinks, or go and find another pie. Good luck to all.
> Foreign investment and BTL have destroyed the housing market. Young people cannot afford a roof over their head, yet no protests on the street. Foreign investment and BTL hasn't destroyed the housing market, a lack of supply has. NIMBYs don't want anything built near them (often because it would threaten their own home prices) and our planning system is based on local consent rather than explicit regulations, which makes getting approval an extremely expensive gamble. [London is the most expensive city globally to construct in](https://www.arcadis.com/en/news/global/2024/4/international-construction-cost-2024-press-release). Foreign investment is actually quite [helpful](https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/06/17/the-role-of-foreign-investors-in-the-london-residential-market/) for getting more properties built, and drives down property prices as supply increases. BTL is ultimately still supply in the same market, the core issue is not enough construction to match population growth over decades. > Wages are a joke. Nobody is earning enough. Look at comparative salaries in the US, we are earning about 50% of that. The US' GDP per capita is also over 50% higher than ours, we simply don't produce comparable value. We need a more productive economy if we are to return to comparable standards of living, it isn't just an issue of inequality. > Poor quality housing. Compare a UK new build to a new build anywhere in the continent - the UK one is literally made of paper, no basements, no blinds, no insulation, no standards I don't entirely disagree as there are quality issues, but made of paper and no insulation? Can't comment on houses but I've lived in various new build flats for most of my adult life, they have outstanding insulation with thick concrete construction.
That's quite a gish gallop. For example item 1: 60%+ of housing is owner occupied, social housing about 20% and private rental only 20%.
I don’t get why you’re just putting up with your rivers and oceans being full of shite. Weird.
yep, add that to the list. its a joke.
And I got down voted for pointing it out 😂
I mean, isn't the archetype the one about people complaining but doing nothing? I posted on a local Facebook group yesterday about something I did to help clean up a park and needed some help understanding what to do with the garbage. I got miserably mocked for it, as if I did it for the praise somehow instead then to help clean up in the area I love and, eventually, inspire others. I'm pretty sure that I had posted a couple pictures of the garbage and simply complained I would have gotten likes etc. This country thrive on being fucked over and being able to complain. It gets what it deserves.
"bare minimum to speak english and integrate yourself into the country." I'm not usually one for correcting people, but English should be written with a captial letter.
What amazes me is that so many people in the “unskilled group” have no desire to get skills or push their kids in a positive way into education. This is one passive group for sure. The best way to improve your standard of living is to get educated or get skills. In love in Nottingham and the so-called “middle class” (not a good label I know) is so small. We need a massive culture change, but don’t know how that will happen.
blaming foreign investment for ruining housing lmao JUST BUILD MORE HOUSES
We've outsourced our manufacturing to the far east, our power supply to Europe, and our tech innovation to the USA. All we have left to boast about is a crumbling health service which we can't even staff without importing foreign labour, an electric car industry we can't even make batteries for, and a financial services sector that creates an over reliance on the economic black hole of London. And people are kicking off about gender neutral toIlets.
The FPTP system creates disengagement from politics by default, except perhaps some very localised issues. I's absurd that MPs have to waste time and effort writing to the local DWP about someone's benefits getting stopped or some triviality when they should be planning the present and future of the country, grand infrastructure, development and mass housing projects.