I’ve lived in the UK all my life and am now comfortably retired. The country has been in a long slow decline for a number of years. The rate of decline is now increasing and we are looking like Europe’s Argentina, once a prosperous country:
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Couldn’t read the article, but others I have read point to inequality. The UK is rich, has the worlds 6th biggest economy.
Most of my family live there, solidly working class background, and everyone seems to be doing well. Some comfortably retired, as you. Some are working. Some are unhappy with Starmer’s lot.
Taxes are high with 20% VAT really not helping the poor. 40% estate tax was a shock recently, not an issue for the poor, increasingly a problem for the middle class.
Brexit? Seemed stupid to me.
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Hi AdrianC
This is a more readable article:
It’s not just economics, the society is in decline restrictions on free speech, mountain taxes and debt, crime in some areas out of control
We are an country sitting on large reserves of oil and gas and yet have the dearest electricity prices in the world:
There are areas of prosperity but these are shrinking. I feel that I am living in a county in terminal decline.
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UK has the DNA and universities to be great again.
Socialism and regulations are holding it back.
Innovation and risk taking are not rewarded.
Liz Truss caused the plunge in the standard of living. I listen to her occasionally and she is stark raving mad.
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I remember when the North Sea oil fields were discovered. I read an article discussing what the oil boom would do for the country. The consensus was that the UK would “muddle through”.
We of a certain age remember the sorry excuses built by British Leyland. I have commented before on road tests of BL products 50-60 years ago, where the company did not seem to be trying at all. Simple things, like tightening a bolt, that even the US companies of the time could usually manage, seemed beyond the ken of BL. BL’s own PR productions showed the total lack of investment in modern facilities. I remember seeing a piece on TV about the decline of the British motorcycle industry. The reporter talked to a principle at a UK bike dealership about what was happening. The dealership principle demonstrated: British Triumph bike, started with half a dozen operations, with considerable effort, of the kick starter. Japanese bike: press a button and the electric starter spins up the engine. Raleigh Bicycle is owned by a Dutch company. Rolls, Bentley, Jag, Range Rover, Mini are all vanity projects owned by non-British companies. The commercial British aircraft industry has been reduced to a sub-contractor for Airbus.
And the same thing has been happening in the US, over the last 40 years: Boeing has lost half of it’s commercial market share, purely by bungling. The “big three” automakers continuously narrow their product lines, and reduce their volume, in their quest to make more money, while doing less. Schwinn bikes, owned by a Dutch company. Zenith TVs gone.
Most of the innovation and drive to succeed, seems to have migrated to Asia.
Steve
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She did that in 50 days?
Mary Elizabeth Truss (born 26 July 1975) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from September to October 2022. On her fiftieth day in office, she stepped down amid a government crisis, making her the shortest-serving prime minister in British history. The member of Parliament (MP) for South West Norfolk from 2010 to 2024, Truss held various Cabinet positions under three prime ministers—David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson—lastly as foreign secretary from 2021 to 2022.
She didn’t do anything, she didn’t change a thing. She didn’t have the time.
Muddle through - that describes us perfectly. I’m expecting a 1976 style sterling crisis. The USA bailed us out then, but I’m not sure that they will if it happens again.
Maybe if you agree to be the “52nd state”? But I’m not sure the UK has the resources on the scale Canada does, ripe for looting. I used to tease Tim about the US taking over Canada, but I would sometimes finish by saying something along the lines of “seriously, Canada is too rich to escape the US’ grasp forever”.
More broadly, how does the US escape becoming the UK? I agree the US industrial base needs to be built up. But is straight up protection of US companies the way? Protected from foreign competition, US industry will consolidate into a handful of companies, with management that puts things on autopilot, while they head for the golf course. The products of that industry, will present we Proles with a very limited choice, of archaic, shoddy, but expensive, crap, due to the lack of vigorous competition.
Steve
That’s a symptom of the lower taxation of the wealthy.
Competition comes from people with a stake in the future, confident they can take risks in a healthy market.
But when people are mostly in survival mode, there is less building and healthy competition, more squabbling for the crumbs, while the wealthy buy up all the assets, including government, and just take a toll, forevermore.
Gary Stevenson is right:
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What I was seeing, especially at the companies where I worked, from the late 70s through the 80s, was astounding arrogance. Management carried on like they were entitled to customer’s money, just because of who they were. Then the honchos headed for the golf course…while the Proles tried to pedal their archaic, shoddy, overpriced, stuff.
Steve
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Businesses are closing down:
The UK’s official company register contracted at the close of 2024, marking the first recorded decline since Companies House began publishing statistics in 2012.
In April 2025 there are large tax increases on employers and workers will be given more and more legal rights. It is anticipated that smaller businesses will be affected the worse by these changes:
It looks as though we are at what Laffer called ‘peak tax’ but I’m not sure that the government won’t try and raise taxes again.
I was in business for 35 year and am now glad that I’m retired 
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We should be asking why. UK has some very fine universities but seems to have missed out on computers and AI. Had an early lead with Alan Turing but got left behind. Strong in finance but how do they do financing start ups? Venture capital? Too conservative? Not risk takers?
There seems to be a decline in manufacturing. Auto production in decline. Why? Too much competition from imports? High costs? Need a “Make UK Great Again” program? Raise tariffs?
End of the colonial era. Raw materials imported from abroad for manufacture in UK. What’s next? Strong finance and major investment funds have great potential.
It’s interesting that Ireland seems to be doing better. Very agricultural economy but using tax law to attract investment. Seems to be working.
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Ireland’s GDP is bit of an accounting trick:
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When there were terrorist bombings on a London bus, and one or two subway trains, the same day, several years ago, the news ran a lot of video of London streets. I was struck by almost nothing on the streets being recognizably British. Busses and fire trucks were all Mercedes Benz. If even the government can’t find decent British product to buy?
Wasn’t there a mad scientist type in “Help”? He wanted the ring that was on Ringo’s finger, but his lab equipment kept blowing up, because it was British. He even tried to shoot someone, but the gun misfired. He said something like “See? British. Useless. If I had a Luger…” “Help” was made in 1965, and it was playing on British industry having a reputation for building crap.
Steve
Its not just financial/manufacturing. the fabric of what all ways saw as ‘British’ way of life is unwinding. Professor David Betz lectures on war studies at King’s College London He has advised the UK’s MOD and GCHQ on strategic issues. He believes that civil war is coming to the UK and the USA. Sounds a bit far fetched but when you look at everything else that is going one perhaps it’s not so outlandish given the link between economics and war:
His 42 minute lecture on the subject:
Or, if you haven’t the time:
“When all else fails, they take you to war.”
(Gerald Celente)
.
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The thought always rattled around in the back of my mind that racism was the public face of BREXIT, but what really drove it was the delusion in “the city” that they would be free of EU financial regulations, but still have free access to the EU. Here in the US, racism is the public face of “the movement”, but what is really driving it is robbing the Proles blind, to enrich the “JCs”.
So, do the racist campaigns drive the countries to open race war? Or will people catch on to how they are being manipulated, and build a guillotine?
This isn’t the first time someone was preaching race war.
Steve
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The gilt market is the underpinning of the UK financial system. She destroyed it with austerity and a tax cut.
You have a remarkable ability to have no clue. It is ridiculous. Be in the room with people. It is insulting to other people to have conversations where you make believe.
Both austerity and a tax cut at the same time???
Neither happened.
I suspect that the problem in the bond market were as much to do with Andrew Bailey as Liz Truss. She had threatened to take back control of the BofE.
Then please ignore my posts. I really won’t be offended by your doing so.