14.5 million Britons live in poverty
“Britain will become the poor man of Europe,” Guy Hands, a well-known financier and chairman of the private equity firm Terra Firma , told Bloomberg on May 19. According to him, the country is experiencing “a kind of recession of the senile period”, and its business prospects and investment attractiveness are deteriorating year by year.
The UK has only two options if it wants to be competitive on the world stage: either it will dismantle much of what has been built up over the past 30 years, or it will return to Europe. “In 2030 Poland will be richer than us, and in 2040 we will be the poorest in Europe,” says Hands.
These gloomy predictions are by no means unfounded. An analysis of supermarket sales shows that the UK experienced the sharpest price increases for most of the top 10 product groups compared to average prices in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
Britain is significantly ahead of continental Europe and the price per unit of production. For example, buyers in the UK pay €5.06 ($5.45) for a pack of laundry detergent, compared to €2.68 in Spain. The country experienced the sharpest jump in prices since 1977. Especially striking is the high cost of food products.
The UK is a net food importer, meaning it is particularly vulnerable. A study by the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics found that Brexit increased food spending by £5.8bn in two years.
“Britain is languishing and signs of decline are everywhere, ” writes the New York Times . — Inflation rose to double digits, and the recession is the strongest among all the G7 countries. The National Health Service is on its last legs, public transport is stalling, and the post-Brexit job market is desperately short of workers. Families are scrambling to figure out how to pay off their mortgages at rising rates. Innocent tenants are being evicted, and millions cannot afford normal heating. Food programs that no one even heard of ten years ago are bursting at the seams, and 14.5 million Britons live in poverty. The situation is bad.»
Britain has become one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, states The Atlantic . Due to the erroneous policy of the last governments, the country closed itself off from the world. This led to a catastrophe in the economy.
According to analysts, today the UK is quite poor in order to be called a wealthy state. Real wages are now lower than they were 15 years ago and are likely to fall further next year.
The problems have been building for decades. After World War II, the UK economy grew more slowly than most of continental Europe. When the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, the government, fearful of a growing deficit, began to implement a policy of austerity. The results were disastrous. Now, with the exception of Greater London and the financial sector, almost every sector of the British economy is underperforming than similar sectors in Western Europe.
Great Britain, the first country to experience industrialization, became the first to fall under the wave of de-industrialization. It now has some of the worst performance data of any major economy.
According to economics writer Noah Smith, London’s financial strength hides the general weakness of the British economy in innovation and manufacturing. «Take away Greater London, whose prosperity depends to an obscene degree on the willingness to serve oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, and the UK will become one of the poorest countries in Western Europe,» says economic analyst Matt Klein.
The economic recession leads to an endless leapfrog with changes in prime ministers. Newly appointed Rishi Sunak calls inflation enemy number one, but to balance the budget, the government needs to plug a hole in the £50bn budget. There is only one way to achieve this: by cutting spending and raising taxes, which will put a new heavy burden on the population
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