Decades of economic decline has 'broken' Britons, pushing one fifth of people into poverty and towards political Reform

I would go back to 1914, but 56 is a fairly good starting point

The UK has been extremely conservative (non-political meaning) when it comes to policymaking. That will always be a path for managed decline. The willingness to take risks, tear things down, invest in building big things, etc are all necessary. I haven’t seen that in British politics for as long as I have been watching, but I also have not seen it across most of Europe or in the US. The west has calcified.

In 2007 Brits were richer than North Americans

> What needs to be pointed out is that Brexit made this worse but was not the beginning of it. Accelerationists need to recognize that right wing incompetence does not always result in more support for left wing parties…. A lot of the time, it results in support for more extreme right wing parties.

to add to this, the British economy has for decades been ridiculously lopsided towards London and the area around it. Traditional industries in the rest of the country were allowed to fail while their money was ploughed into London and its finance and services industries, which unsurprisingly now form a major backbone of our modern economy (though Londoners like to insist they did it all themselves). This isn't great for anyone, not even Londoners as their property prices have spiked to unaffordable levels. It's a great place to be if you have money or were fortunate enough to be able to live with parents I guess. Attempts at decentralising have not been well thought out as it has invariably just meant "move it to Manchester".

The rot started when Margaret Thatcher got in. She was anti worker, anti union and sold off all the silverware to her friends. Just look at the mess of water privtisation where England has raw sewage running in their rivers because private water companies prefer to pay dvidends to shareholders. They used profit to pay dividends and not investing in maintenance and capacity. Thatchers stupid policies has also flowed to places like Australia where mass privitisation continues while the public pays twice as much for their previous assets that they owned. Its the scam of the century privatising profits and socialising the losses.

One really important thing that happened after 2008 crash was that companies bought up rental  property and family housing.  Now there's a huge issue trying to find a flat to rent.  It's shocking when you look into how much rental stock was bought up super c**** after the crash. This had a profound effect on affordability.  By 2026 you see the word Blackstone a lot and they are cornering the market worldwide.  Today UK healthcare professionals are seeing rickets return as children are malnourished. People freeze while the heat is turned off. They huddle in coats, hats, etc under blankets. You cannot turn on the heat. It's outrageous what they charge.  https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/18/return-of-victorian-era-diseases-to-the-uk-scabies-measles-rickets-scurvy https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/nov/09/uk-households-winter-heating-study

Didn't Blair start another major round of privatising public utilities which has only gotten worse over the last decades?

Is *anywhere* other than China and the US not in a state of economic stagnation or decline?

It disturbs me that this has so many upvotes. Tony Blair's Labour is a big part of the reason everything is so bad now. That government deregulated the City, which massively contributed to the Global Financial Crisis ("wasn't Labour's fault" - What? You don't remember Mandelson saying he had no problem with people in the City getting absolutely filthy rich a la Gordon Gekko?) In fact, Blair and Mandelson enabled The City to grow into the monster that it is today, helping it to stoke a property bubble that has priced young people out of homeownership, tied up wealth into illiquid, stagnant assets (housing) and left areas outside of the capital to rot, with multiple, multiple negative downstream consequences. The Blair government also massively expanded the public-private ownership of PFI, which is part of the reason the state has much less money today, because it is still busy paying back the 20% or so returns that private equity demands in order to 'invest' into the country Yes, that Labour government spent more and had schemes like SureStart, but if you wonder why the industrial position of the country is so bad now, then the Nu-Labour government is a huge part of the reason. Our finance-led model also completely depends on upholding the International Rules Based Order. now very much under threat as the world becomes more multipolar. Let's all just pray that we don't have to literally realise that you can't eat spreadsheets one day. >The UK has been in a state of managed decline since 1956 This is debatable and would be fiercely contested by economists and historians alike. Britain was still a major industrial power into the 70s. What I think is less debatable, is that Neoliberalism is the economic model that is gradually sucking wealth out of the nation by enabling the sociopathic forces of international capital to play states off against each other in a race to the bottom, and sees a domination of the country by private, multinationals who spend a good deal of time and effort arranging their corporate structures so they can move profits outside of the country and often into tax havens. The Finance Curse by Shaxson, Trade Wars are Class Wars by Michael Pettis, Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail by Abby Innes are the books to read if you want to understand the headline of the linked article.

If it’s like my council, they’re utterly inept, and everyone working there are all friends and family

Meanwhile the wage bill for Manchester City footballers is over 200 million pounds per year. Bread and circuses!

The simpletons are easier than ever to control through social media. Guess it's back to the dark ages where the church was telling everyone exactly what to think...

You have to keep the poor hating each other. Else they find out how much the rich actually own. In Germany the two richest families own as much as the poorer half of the population for example. 

So same as here in Belgium. A lot of left leaning People voting right because immigration is a major point in the decision Who to vote for and the parties on the left dont want to represent them.

There's a book called What's the Matter with Kansas? by Thomas Frank. One of the key points of the book is the Conservative movement in America has successfully convinced the White Working Class that government cannot materially help them so they vote for their cultural interests rather than their economic interests. It seems applicable for other countries too.

Reform is the home of the worst of the Tories who have been in power for the last one and a half decades

No one else is offering them anything. Look at the number of places in the UK that are derelict and have already fallen apart. And none of the major parties care, so someone offering something, anything, is appealing, particularly when they give them reasons for why this happened (which are, obviously, all lies). This is what Thatcherism leads to, be warned rest of the world.

But surely if that rhetoric didn’t work anywhere, it will work in the UK!

Works every time!

a pretty common theme across the world tbh

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Exactly, how many Conservative politicians have moved to Reform? It's not a small number.

They just need to change the name from time to time, the sheep will happily walk towards the wolves again.

Every year since 2008, the message has been the same: "There's not much money right now, so we're going to have to cut things back and ask you for more. But it's the only way to get us out of this slump." Rinse and repeat on an annual basis. 18 straight years of 'Jam Tomorrow', and they call it unreasonable to ask where's the bottom. I would never vote Reform but anyone with half a brain can see where their popularity is coming from, people haven't had anyone try to improve their quality of life for almost 2 decades and you'll listen to anyone when you're as desperate as that will make you.

The phrase "one of the richest countries in the world" does more and more work each passing year. The UK's share of global GDP shrinks every second of every day and if you rank by any per capita metrics rather than absolute GDP size it is a much less impressive picture. And if you adjust for PPP or look at things like disposable income... Suddenly the UK's peer group becomes Central Europe.

If a rich country cant take care of its people. It is a political decision, not an economic.

Lords and monarchs take it all, nothing has changed.

The Tories were in power from 2010-2024. They were certainly given a chance!

Media. The same answer everywhere in the world where conservatives are gaining power. Use social and cultural issues to manipulate the rubes into voting against their own interests.

Nurses aren’t right wing tho? Most people in healthcare are fiercely left wing. 🤷‍♂️ Bob the builder’s a muppet tho, can’t argue with that.

The answer is hate. So addictive! Every day a new hateful headline in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, The Sun, on their Facebook an xitter. People were under threat of benefit cheats, then Polish plumbers then boat people. They had to react, Tories were the only people selling them the problem and offering a 'solution'. Like that abusive partner who convinces you that everone is out to get you and they're the only ones who can save you.

Same thing in Canada with liberals. Right wing parties are scum but a majority of people think they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps f*** everyone else

The "right" government is now in power, and what are they doing? Correct, F*** ALL. No wonder people turn to fringe parties when the normal parties deliver f*** all that's useful to the average voter. A lot of the radicalization happening in Europe is a direct result of the parties in power not doing anything about the problems in their countries and just riding the economic wave of the 2010s.

https://consoc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/The-Economic-Impact-of-Brexit.pdf The economy is 4% smaller due to Brexit based on this report from 6 months ago. That's what, £129 billion? The NHS budget is £220 billion.  People are probably going to vote in a man that was the driving force behind Brexit, and has stated on the record that he wants to move to an insurance-based (I.e. American) system of healthcare.  Turkeys voting for Christmas. 

EU membership was not the cause of our ills and Brexit wasn't the solution. It did mask some of the problems or mitigate them a bit, but Britain's current state, whilst compounded by Brexit, is due to policy at Westminster, not in Brussels.

Brexit was a symptom of the anger.

If Brexit AND Trump never happened, "the West" would probably have a large \~60 trillion transatlantic free trade zone by now, which completely and utterly would dominate the global economy and geopolitics. The biggest and worst misconception among Brexit supporters is that if they can just escape Europe’s “overregulation” and high taxes, they’ll experience an American consumer boom—like the one the U.S. saw after the 2008 crash, with successful Big Tech companies and decent growth. What Brexit supporters completely overlook is that the U.S wealth *not* is a result of innovation and de-regulation. USA has simply borrowed an obscene amount of money—almost a trillion dollars a year. That’s *a lot* of money. In fact, it’s so much money that the U.S. would drown in inflation if Europe and the Middle East weren’t importing large amounts of dollars. The UK *doesn’t* have that option. The UK can’t borrow its way out of low economic growth. They have to trade and innovate like the rest of worlds countries.

it probably didn't help, britain suffers from the same ills that every other country in western europe has

Huge. Billions of pounds were squandered not because we spent it on some experiment but because we self sabotaged our own economy. Its money that we just lost out on. And the effects are not getting better. Theyre probably staying the same. What happened to this £300m a week?

That's partially true. Many empires do collapse, just look at the USSR. Britain managed to land "peacefully" meaning they mostly gave up on their empire and let it go peacefully and without much internal turmoil. That being said, the cycle of empires are pretty uniform. There's always a breaking point where maintaining the empire is more resources that the wealth extracted from it. Spiraling national debt, running continous deficits, debasing of currency, overspending on military usually ends in losing the world currency status and thus the means to finance the empire. This is what happened to Spain, the Dutch, the British and now is happening to someone too.

Interesting view point. To me it does feel like 16 years of stagnation, very much a lost generation in Britain

He also got kicked out of Reform because he wasn’t sucking Farage’s d*** like all the others in Reform

It won't be Restore. I'll bet they're basically unknown outside of Listnook. I honestly don't think it'll be Reform either - Farage's association with Trump is costing them, they've grabbed failed Tories and given them prime positions, thereby alienating their voters who despise 'the Uniparty', they've made a hash of the councils where they've won seats, and that's all before anti-Reform tactical voting kicks in. They'll do well in the forthcoming local elections, but I predict that'll be their high water mark.

As someone who has the miserable luck of being one of Ruoert Lowe's constituents, although it's a small issue in the grand scheme of things, seeing it happen locally it astounds me that his donations are legal. Donating your government salary to charities and good causes sounds fine and laudible on paper but the fact you can donate to the church, football club and lifeboat *in your own constituency*, functionally serving as very direct bribes to the community you want to vote for you, absolutely blows my mind.

Taking all considerations into account, neither reform nor restore can resurrect britain. It needs to be a coalition government.

Restore is thankfully polling very low and they are even more extreme and batshit than Reform. More people support Labour, Lib Dems and the Greens, we just need to work together and vote tactically to keep Reform, Restore and the Tories out.

That was a choice made by the Conservatives, and they are now a dead party because of it.

They did, UK got triple the number of immigrants in comparison to immigration before Brexit. Increased immigration after Brexit is an example of politicians not doing what voters what.

That was an intentional decision by the Conservatives. They promised that after we left we'd have an "Australian style points based immigration system" (you couldn't get through a speech without hearing those exact words) to replace the apparent free-for-all that we had with the EU. People thought that meant tough rules, but instead the Conservatives made it easier than ever for people to move here as virtually every job became "skilled" and eligible for visa sponsorship. There were even more insane aspects to this as well. The Conservatives changed the rules around training placements so that UK medical school graduates no longer had priority over graduates of foreign schools. This led to the ridiculous outcome where our own grads, whose degrees are heavily subsidised, couldn't get the places they wanted or couldn't get one at all. This has only now been reversed.

The best part is Brexit being triggered by anti-migration sentiments, where the UK voters just voted against the government without really understanding what it was all about. anyway the UK still refuses to acknowledge the anti-migration sentiments of the nation and why every single PM has been voted out.

Well hang on a minute we still have Gibraltar!

The issues has become that anyone can become a lord as long as they support a politician. Therefore the hereditary nature of aristocracy has died down long time ago. When russian billionaires linked to kremlin can become lords, suddenly this balance and check on power comes into question.

That's...an interesting view ngl 🤔

A bunch of the same Conservatives who failed the UK over the last 15 years Reforming a new party to pretend they didn't destroy the UK

Vs say Germany?