How Britain’s Destroying Itself

33 comments
  1. shockingly, applying the some ideology and practice of georgian & victorian colonial exploitation, to a modern national economy is a bad idea. especially when its just cannibalising the origin nation.

    almost like extracting the productive effort of the entire uk out to trusts and banks in british oversesas territory, is treason to any kind of patriotic mindset.

    luckily westminster has no such interest in the betterment of the lives of british people. otherwise the city of london corporation bankers and friends, might not be getting so wealthy at the expense of everyone else. and that just isnt the proper and done thing.

  2. Labour be like: Weve got to make Brexit work.

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    Its some what ironic, where once covid was a way to hide the negative impact of Brexit, now all it does is show our utter failure.

  3. My god that was a rambling diatribe that didn’t lead anywhere.

    Edit: oh its this guy. He seems to regularly write the most spectacularly gleeful obituaries for Britain

  4. I’ve never voted tories; yet my dad and his friends always have.. of course they are boomers who say the younger gen are freeloading moaners, yet my first boss who was a boomer said my wage should be what he got (in the late 80s).. I still had to live with my parents for years on and off post education due to shit pay. I think some of these pricks don’t understand inflactipn. 18k I’m 1990 would be around 35k now, so paying someone 18k now in London won’t go anywhere.

  5. Colleague the other day told me, 100% serious, it’s too early to tell whether tories have actually done a bad job, and being a politician it’s hard! Then followed up with it “everyone says that the B thing has been terrible, but it could be argued just as easily that it has brought a lot of positives.”

  6. When something clearly doesn’t work, you shouldn’t keep on doing it.
    Perhaps time some stopped thinking they know it all and took the time to learn from others.

  7. Agree that we’re in a shit state of affairs but what a terrible piece of writing that is. Meandering, self referential, confusing causality (Brexit was a symptom, not a cause, of current problems), and repeating itself.

    I can’t believe Medium try to charge people subscriptions. They should fucking pay us for proofreading services of such amateur junk

  8. I’d argue that Brexit was really the bottle exploding, with the pressure building since 2008, or perhaps 2007. You can always draw cause and effect of course, but to say there were no real issues before Brexit I don’t think is true.

    After the disastrous war in Iraq, Tony Blair, with a reduced majority and bad approval ratings resigned, allowing Gordon Brown to take over.

    Almost immediately after, the financial crises happened. This battered the British economy and gave ammunition to the media against Brown. Additionally, Brown was seen as boring by the British public, and he was compared to Blair. Not that that should be a bad thing. But again, the media paints a picture, we see them try to do similar things with Starmer.

    So with the grrat recession, boring Brown and the publics standards of living suddenly diminished, they wanted change. Unfortunately, the only change you can have in our two party politics is the other party, in this case the Tories. And the Tories did have charisma, even if they didn’t also have the substance. Cameron even declared himself Blair’s successor ‘heir to Blair’. Arguably this was Britain first taste of populism. Light populism compared to Brexit and Johnson though.

    This came at a critically terrible time though, and so Tories did Tory things and put the great recession financial burden on the working public, rolling out hard hitting austerity measures. Making public lives even worse.

    So, the public had gone from largely living well, to being a lot worse off in a matter of years, they had already tried to fix it by changing political party, that hadn’t worked, just made things worse. They were looking for more change to return their lives to the prosperity they once had. This opened them up to populism leading to Boris Johnson and the lies of Brexit. And it’s only got worse.

  9. Got my invitation for permanent residency in Australia a couple days ago.

    Britain has nothing to offer the younger generation any more so I may as well be in a warm country.

  10. Article makes it sound like it all started with Brexit. In fact, it started much earlier than that, brexit certainly made it even worse, but the living standards were already plummeting and the UK was second only to Greece in the EU as the country with biggest decline in living standards for millennials.

  11. Why are economies fixated with growth? Growth cannot be infinite.

    GDP is not an accurate measurement. Much better to use GDP per capita.

  12. Because no leading politician will admit that Brexit is a colossal failure due to an abject fear of the tabloids?

  13. > If you think I’m kidding, let’s take another example. Leadership? Britain’s bizarre leaders recently proposed, as a “solution” to its self-made energy crisis, opening up a new…coal mine.

    There’s two whole paragraphs about this. The coal mine in questions is for coking coal, not for energy production.

    The source he linked even states that quite clearly. Can he not read or is this just dishonesty? Either way, I’m not sure his viewpoint is worth considering.

  14. Tories a large factor

    But it’s other things. General NIMBY-ness, can’t build anything quickly without stalled planning, aversion to career chasing, inter-generational ambition deficit…

  15. This is a really bad article. Like really laughably bad. That it’s so upvoted tells you everything you need to know about this sub.

  16. First of all we’ve had a whole bunch of PMs since then and brexit, we’re not expected to be stable right now. We’re not expected to be growing.

    Secondly, even without taking that into consideration, thay huuuge bar is like 4% , japan is 0.9% our economy might be pre pandemic but its not like everyone else is shooting off ahead. Considering inflation is double digits we’re less than half a year away from them, despite all the hardship we’re having.

    My real question would be why isn’t everyone else further ahead than they are?

  17. In 2016 someone asked me if I believed that brexit would break the economy and Britain ending like an african county

    i responded that of course not, britain would likely still be a first world country, however so are Italy and Spain ( 9 place and 14 place GDP world wide), which mean that Britain not becaming a third world country is a meaningless measurement to assess brexit damage but dropping britain GDP from the previous fouth position to less say 10th would be pretty significant

  18. My in-laws keep saying they’ll vote Conservative because “who else is there??”. It’s this dangerous attitude and two generations of pensioners now, that keep these wankers in power.

  19. The current Conservative party is not anything like the Tories of past decades, they are a bastard mix of socialist, green, liberal, criminal and psychopath.

  20. You always wonder how these ancient civilizations went from being so powerful to disappearing, ending up abandoned and in ruins.

    I think crappy leaders who were greedy and only interested in themselves must be the answer.

    The UK was fine, and although may have had its problems, was doing generally ok and was a fairly powerful /influential nation. But ever since the Brexit vote especially, it’s like someone pulled the plug out on the UK and now were slowly going down the drain. Now we’re a laughing stock.

    Other factors (Covid and the Ukraine war) obviously had an impact too, but it generally does just come down to the people in charge. There’s a reason the UK is the most affected/worse off while other places aren’t struggling quite as much.

    Why any nation on earth would voluntarily decide to harm and weaken itself, and strip its own citizens of rights many have had their whole life, and decrease standards of living, I’ll never understand. Now things keep getting worse and more expensive.

    Basically every major industry is going on strike, things are falling apart, and there’s no real sign of things getting better anytime soon. Especially under Brexit we’ll be worse off for probably a decade or two (at least). I know my lifetime is screwed over because of it.

  21.      Here is a summary of the piece – a piece that, while perhaps on the money, seems to me to be repetitious and to over use emphasis.

         Britain was doing well – it had no extraordinary problems, no problems much worse than other countries – but Brexit was sold on the lie that, nevertheless, a radical solution was needed. That radical solution, which was Brexit itself (and especially perhaps the form of Brexit that we got), gave the country an extraordinary problem. So, *Brexit is the crisis that it purported to solve*. In that sense, Britain is destroying itself.

  22. Incompetant PMs are the biggest issue although there are others

    You just can’t not blame them for most things thats gone wrong has been caused by them

    David Cameron was ok, I admittedly don’t know much about him as when I was the age he was PM I didn’t care much about politics (Only turned 20 recently so couldn’t vote)

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    Tereasa may, Boris Johnson, Liz truss, Rishi Sunak are just incompetent walking fuckups

    Blaming Europe for everything never helped

    Pushing for brexit claiming we can get a US trade deal without actually checking with the US and other countries first

    List goes on

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    Labour isn’t much better, they always get so close to winning then just decide to push random agendas that they know people won’t like cause they think they have already won

    Most recent is scrapping house of lords

    They really don’t know how to appeal to the larger market do they

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    EDIT

    So this isn’t just a tory rant

    IN MY OPINION (could be wrong please correct me if possible)

    Economically we are quite reliant on other countries such as china for imports as we had that liberty to weaken our primary and secondary industry in the EU

    If we wanted brexit to work we should have

    1. strengthened those two industries primary and secondary (so we are less reliant on imports)
    2. not isolated the EU our neighbours like idiots
    3. And negotiated with other countries before the vote even happened

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