UK’s 100 Year Economic Decline - No 1 to Failed State

Do visit my global economics Channel. Latest videos is on rise and fall of Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNYMNzdSQwc - interesting lessons for all modern economies.

Britain has raised generations of people from the Oxbridge nexus to run Britain with emphasis on finance, insurance, banking, and real estate of land ownership. So London thrived but the UK has never had a coherent industrial policy - lost the aerospace industry, the space industry, the auto industry, the steel industry, and companies were allowed to be bought by American global businesses that used the British factories as offshoots of the global business. Easy to shut down. UK citizens have been misled for a hundred years by these people.

I'm 54 and my wife and I are VERY worried about our future, gas and food prices rising daily. We have had our savings dwindle with the cost of living into the stratosphere, and we are finding it impossible to replace them. We can get by, but can't seem to get ahead. My condolences to anyone retiring in this crisis, 30 years nonstop just for a crooked system to take all you worked for.

When I was at University in the 1970s, I shared a room with an Economics student. He told me there was a joke that if you asked two economists what was wrong with the British economy, you would get three different answers.

When you go on holiday, you now feel like staying abroad.

Our economy struggling with uncertainties, housing issues, foreclosures, global fluctuations, and pandemic aftermath, causing instability. Rising inflation, sluggish growth, and trade disruptions need urgent attention from all sectors to restore stability and stimulate growth.

Britain always has favored the rich with it's economic policies to the detriment to the middle class/poor. It isn't bad luck...it's decades of bad governance.

Sadly there's no sign of the bad choices changing under the new administration.

7:24 It's a shame you just say that without deeper thought. They sold it because it was more politically popular than doing what was necessary - increasing the council rents in an era of social mass strikes

I don’t get how house prices “going up 35% in a single year” can at all be seen as part of an “economic miracle”, seems to me to be an economic disaster.

Economic cannibalism and leveraging by the financial sector, particularly Private Equity, has placed the United States on the same path as the UK. The path is accelerating with tax policy favoring astounding wealth concentration.

My dad was Irish(passed away this past November). He never taught me to hate the British but I think I went through a phase with this when I was about 13. It didn't last long but the point is that I feel awful for the U.K. Lots of people in the comments here are acting as if it's karma yet those same people came from slave masters and genocidal maniacs not long ago, we just don't shine a light on their histories.. The English have been conquered and have conquered others. We are all the same this way, both victims and victimizers. I wish for the best for the people of the U.K

The Government is not being openly honest how bad things will get for the UK for example the united Kingdom could end up worst then a middle eastern country soon we are already witnessing the decline and it's looking dire how can any future generation have a future

Main issue not discussed here 1) UK is NOT a manufacturing economy its a service economy with focus on Banking & Finance which was affected by Brexit & Covid. UK is running mostly because of London, outside London, UK is in pretty bad shape and things are only going to get worse unfortunately. I think all the signs are there if you watch the news.

This is good, explains why the uk working class is protesting now.

the graphic at 0:38 paints a vivid picture in my head of all the poles coming to london to work and to send the money they earned back home to Poland. That was 20 years ago. I cannot help but come to the conclusion that we had a major part in making Poland the rich nation it is today.

The rot set in towards the end of the 19th century, when the UK production of steel and chemicals was overtaken by the USA and Germany. The UK was no longer the centre of industrial product innovation that it had been - that crown shifted to the USA in particular and to other European countries too. Both world wars caused stagnation in industrial investment, the only plus side of which is the first class industrial museums we have today, because the lack of investment in emerging techniques meant that old, outdated equipment survived for far too long. The over valuation of the pound with Churchill's ridiculous return to the Gold Standard was repeated after the Bretton Woods agreement where a bankrupt UK tried to support an overvalued price for the pound. As a child, I often wondered why people referred to a half crown (12.5p to younger readers) was referred to as 'Half a dollar'! A survivor of the unsustainable £4 = $1 of the immediate post WW2 era. The truth that the UK had run a balance of payments deficit since Victorian times was brought home as countries no longer used the pound as a reserve currency and as the Empire was dismantled. The newly independent countries turned to the dollar as the reserve currency of choice. As long as the sterling area as a whole produced a balance of payments surplus, the pound could maintain its value, but once sterling lost its role as a reserve currency and the UK was on its own the value was difficult to sustain as Black Wednesday proved decisively. Yet the London public school and Oxford educated elite continued to believe that the good old days were attainable and, as you rightly pointed out, had no respect for getting their hands dirty (Apart from figuratively) The way people have been fooled by unaffordable tax cuts when investment continues to be needed astounds me. Thank you for your clear and detailed analysis.

Getting into two world wars, loss of freebies from the colonies, delusion of empire and exceptionalism, Thatcher, Tories, and Brexit! RIP

The UK feels like a country now burdened by its history, stuck in a mindset of superiority & nostalgia that no longer has any reality to it. With no positive forward looking sense of identity, it seems to be collapsing socially into conflict & recriminations. The culture is oppose the government, without even giving the new one a chance. There's little sense of pulling together around anything. Artificially inflated house prices give the illusion of success but are hollow & actually seems to be dropping like a stone here in South Devon! And without positive influence & accountability to the EU, it feels politically very unstable. We wouldn't qualify to even apply to join the EU on the basis of political instability let alone the extent we've p*ssed the remaining 27 states off with our disgraceful behaviour under the Tories. There seems little hope realistically.

We spend billions of pounds but don't make anything of value. For a while we provided good services, but after leaving the EU I don't know why europe would choose to bank or consult with us when they could choose ireland