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When ‘Team GB’ won medals at the Olympics, they were partly funded by the National Lottery, which operates by giving false hope to the poor – in effect, a stealth tax on the working classes.
In the UK we could well have reached peak inequality, but that is exactly the time when everything is open to change.
Free or very much cheaper higher education is on offer in so many other countries. As it stands, around one third of student fees in the UK are not being repaid, and the English system of most young people leaving home to attend university is financially unsupportable in the long run.
After both the 1991 and 2001 censuses, the British discovered that there were a million fewer people living in the country than they had believed because they had over-counted immigration and under-counted emigration.
The EU is hardly a federal super-state. But individual countries within the EU have made policy choices at the national level that have resulted in great social progress. The British keep looking for a quick fix instead.
a Downing Street policy board chief recently explained to Theresa May, in contrast to being progressive, the Tories and the government have come to look like ‘a narrow party of nostalgia, hard Brexit, public sector austerity and lazy privilege’.51
Why would you let them get away with this stuff about ‘foreign judges’ and the need to ‘take back control’ when Britain’s own public opinion is routinely manipulated by five or six unaccountable rich white men, themselves either foreigners or foreign-domiciled?
the British believe myths about European regulations over the shape of bananas while not knowing the truth about all their regulations that have been imposed on others!
The British are choosing their fate, it is not being forced upon them,
International law doesn’t care about feelings, belief, positivity, optimism, or patriotism. It just is. Anyone who says that ‘Brexit is failing because you don’t believe in it enough’ might as well be talking about fairies at the bottom of the garden, for all that their comment relates to the reality of our situation.
One admittedly minor advantage of Brexit may turn out to be that the BBC learns to spell out swear words and stop pretending they don’t exist.
Why could they not do a deal with the rest of the EU? Part of the answer is that the high days of empire were not about trade deals at all but were achieved through domination.
The British made few deals and rarely stuck to those they did
Britain did promote free trade throughout most of the nineteenth century, but the British were in an overwhelmingly strong position to exploit it, as they could destroy domestic industries in other countries through flooding markets with cheaper goods. In New Zealand
the people at home who lost out the most were the rich who had investments in the colonies, and so economic inequality within the UK fell as the rich became poorer and the poor won a welfare state.
The British elite blamed trade unions at home for their woes in the 1970s, but their economic woes were actually down to Britain’s loss of bullyboy status worldwide.
By GDP per head, in 1870 the UK was the richest large country in the world, becoming second to the USA by 1913, falling to fourth in 1950, eighth in 1973 and twelfth in 1989. It briefly rose to ninth by 2008 when the effects of the 1986 Big Bang and the subsequent unsustainable banking boom made themselves known, but has fallen ever since that date, dropping faster and faster with each passing year so that it will soon be outside the top two dozen, if current trends continue.66 Brexit may well accelerate that process.
Britain now leads the world in harmless innuendo about soggy bottoms. It’s nice to be good at something harmless for a change.
the British have yet to get to the bottom of where they are from, and how they have been misinformed.
Xenophobic histories and geographies, and the memorising of Kipling’s poems, was probably not the best education for understanding Britain’s future world trade possibilities in the twenty-first century.
‘since the end of World War II – which marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire – the UK hasn’t really figured out how on earth to pay our way in the world’.69 The Brexiteers were
The most ardent of Brexiteers really do suggest that a second empire is possible. In an attempt to sound up-to-date, they actually began to adopt that joke version of computer-speak to name it – Empire 2.0. What had started as parody became farce. The Times newspaper reported: ‘Ministers aim to build “empire 2.0” with African Commonwealth’.
in 2015, India, despite its huge population, was only the UK’s eighteenth largest export market; by 2016, that ranking had dropped to twenty-third. By
The precursors to ARM chips were originally state funded and appeared in BBC microcomputers, but the British (especially the English) have preferred real-estate investment pipe-dreams to industrial hard work.
the rate of return on assets in Britain was greater if those assets were not industrial, so the British with money in the main moved out of industry.
the destination for the most exports from the UK to any single country is the USA. But British exports to the USA were worth $6 billion less in 2016 as compared to 2015. Figure 4.6 shows the total then dropping again by $2 billion in the year to 2017.
Brexit will not result in Empire 2.0, but in Empire 0.0 – a return to the days before the British Empire existed – which could be all to the good in the end.
Eventually, every place that once had an empire learns to get over it.
Brexit, whatever it eventually comes to mean, will be about Britain learning how small a country it really is – how unimportant a trade partner it really is compared to the inflated propaganda about its imagined greatness.
When you see Theresa May looking broken and Boris Johnson appearing to play the fool, you are seeing how Britain looks to the rest of the world.
Life expectancy for women in the UK is now lower than in Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.74
The future of farming in Britain has been cast into great uncertainty, as the UK may well not be able to afford to replicate EU farming subsidies in future, and at the same time fund its National Health Service and keep its taxes low for the rich and its inefficient industrial and service sectors as they currently are. Something is going to have to give.
As for the EU, it is first and foremost a rule-based organisation. If the rules around Article 50 were bent to allow Britain back in on special terms, then the whole edifice is undermined. Scotland should be let in if it wants, and Northern Ireland too. But England is out and must be kept out – at least until it has resolved its deep internal problems. Call it nation building.
He could have added that all the MEPs from Britain would also then be retired, which removes the largest group of far-right MEPs in the European Parliament,
He could have mentioned all the opt-outs that the British should not really have had in the first place.
He could have mentioned how much better are the prospects for more joined-up-thinking in the EU without the UK.
The British have yet to come to terms with themselves and what they have done. Until they do that, th...
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No country on earth has carved up so much of the globe and constructed so many other countries, often with the wrong borders in ...
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accepting your mistakes is the hardest thing to do if you have been brought up to extinguish self-doubt, to give orders to others and to lead from the front. If you have come to believe that yours is the earth and everything that’s in it.
It was not just the colonised who suffered; the colonisers too were hugely damaged, and that damage lasts a long time. It takes generations to become normal again. We British are still going through the process.
The reduction in manufacturing’s share of the UK economy was an intentional strategy, one that harked back to Thatcher-era Britain, when the plan was to remove the UK’s dependence on ‘unsophisticated’ manufacturing and move into services and banking. The strategy was known at the time to be high-risk. Today, it has backfired on Britain in dramatic fashion.
No longer would Britain flourish by imposing unfair terms of trade on countries around the globe. Instead, it was thought, Britain could enjoy superior status by becoming the supreme financial juggler for the world.
in 2008, the banks fell apart. They fell apart because they had to. You cannot make more and more money out of doing less and less of productive use for ever.
Trade is never free, and freedom means far more than having the right to trade.
Private bank lending is skewed towards consumption, as the Bank of England now itself belatedly acknowledges, and to property speculation (which the Bank of England does not yet acknowledge), rather than investment.
Economists overestimate the value of free trade.
Those who make the most out of trade are not those who are most efficient but those who are best at manipulating others to buy or sell their goods. Trade rarely benefits everyone involved equally.
today, as in 1839, Britain makes hardly anything that China needs. The British know relatively little about producing goods efficiently, in comparison with other people. Why should they? They didn’t have to.
Better to be called a nation of shopkeepers than one of scoundrels, spivs or slavers.
the consideration of the consequences for trade of leaving the EU continues to be more of a fight between members of the government and their acolytes, rather than a serious public debate.
