Things\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0only get better\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0always like this.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The last\u00a0Labour\u00a0prime minister to win big before Starmer was Tony Blair. When he came to power in 1997, the U.K. had a bigger economy than China\u2019s, was a leading member of the growing European Union trade\u00a0bloc, and\u00a0was approaching peak oil and gas production in the North Sea. Blair led Britain for 10 years.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nearly three\u00a0decades on,\u00a0Starmer\u00a0inherited a country that has never really recovered from the economic shock of the 2008\u00a0financial crisis,\u00a0is\u00a0menaced by Russia,\u00a0and\u00a0now\u00a0relies\u00a0on imports for its energy security.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u00a0has found no lasting remedy for the resentment felt by many communities (outside\u00a0London,\u00a0the still-flourishing finance capital) who \u2014\u00a0over several decades \u2014\u00a0have seen traditional manufacturing roles move inexorably overseas.\u00a0as the global economy tilts towards China and other rising powers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a pretty incredible run\u00a0from the mid-to late-1980s, through the 1990s, until the [2008] crash,\u201d said Jim O\u2019Neill, a former chief economist at Goldman Sachs and an ex-Treasury minister, who coined the term \u201cBRICs\u201d to describe the economic powers that challenged a Western world order Britain helped to build.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That was when everything changed, O\u2019Neill argued.\u00a0\u201cThe country\u2019s had a dreadful productivity performance since the\u00a0financial crisis,\u201d he said.\u00a0\u201cThat links to the \u2026 absence of real wage growth and exaggerates the feeling of those that have been left behind by historic decline of manufacturing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Things\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0only get better\u00a0 It\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0always like this.\u00a0 The last\u00a0Labour\u00a0prime minister to win big before Starmer was Tony Blair. When…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":39362,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[18715,7786,665,4803,157,1354,255,517,3191,421,1360,234,456,11,20111,2102,8015,1657,20112,284,501,1259,2103,24,2611,94,363,5963,160,1816,95,3766,225,4429,182,5248,484,460,91,5,523,6,461,462,5589,2107,1374,4108],"class_list":["post-39361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-aging","tag-andy-burnham","tag-banks","tag-benchmarks","tag-brexit","tag-budget","tag-china","tag-crisis","tag-david-cameron","tag-debt","tag-elections","tag-energy","tag-energy-security","tag-finance","tag-giorgia-meloni","tag-global-economy","tag-greece","tag-growth","tag-hannah-brenton","tag-immigration","tag-imports","tag-inflation","tag-interest-rates","tag-iran","tag-italy","tag-keir-starmer","tag-liz-truss","tag-manufacturing","tag-markets","tag-military","tag-nigel-farage","tag-north-sea","tag-oil","tag-pensions","tag-rachel-reeves","tag-referendum","tag-russia","tag-security","tag-tony-blair","tag-uk","tag-ukraine","tag-united-kingdom","tag-united-states","tag-war","tag-war-in-iran","tag-war-in-ukraine","tag-welfare","tag-wes-streeting"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39361\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}