That happened a long time ago, the realization was the 70s.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.
Here's some Farage quotes, so you can see that there is no contradiction between the comment you were replying to (him saying it was a disaster is compatible with all this) and him still being a leaver:
“I don’t think that for a moment,” Mr Farage replied when he was asked if the UK would have been better off staying in the EU, the world’s largest single market area. “But what I do think is we haven’t actually benefitted from Brexit economically, what we could have done.”
“I mean, what Brexit’s proved, I’m afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were,” he added. “We’ve mismanaged this totally, and if you look at simple things…such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country.
“Arguably, now we’re back in control, we’re regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members. Brexit has failed.”
Why do people vote for populists that inevitably will just do the bidding of the rich and powerful? That man is such a disgustingly clear example.
The same thing is true in Sweden. People vote for the party that blames the immigrants and then goes on to rule with the liberal conservative part. They all know that during the time they claim is the downfall of Sweden, we have more than one third of state tax income and had the worst privatisation of schools worldwide,
. Yet the problems with schools and healthcare is immigration.
It's not "blaming the immigrants"--that is such a gross oversimplification and distraction. No, the immigrants were pawns, and the predictable outcomes caused by having too many immigrants, as well as those who profited off of that situation--they are ones that the anger is directed towards. A lot of countries, the US included, were on a sustainable path, and then BOOM, the influx of illiterate people, totally dependent on government handouts threw a wrench into everything. Our schools are ruined. Our neighborhoods are ruined. Prices of necessities are through the roof. Healthcare and insurance, literally everything is pricing the middle class out of existence. Yet somehow it is "wrong" to assign blame! The immigrants are merely a symptom of a vast betrayal.
That may be the perception, but it's still not how it happened.
All of the currently-rich nations had a multi-generational baby boom*, long enough for their systems to assume and become dependent on that population growth.
* babies being the most extreme example of "influx of illiterate people, totally dependent on government handouts", though people only objected to them in the UK when I was a kid when it was single mothers producing them
Families started to have fewer kids, but the systems still presumed and needed more people to avoid stagnation. Japan chose stagnation instead of welcoming as many immigrants as it needed, and "the lost decade" became a plural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
> Healthcare and insurance, literally everything is pricing the middle class out of existence.
I assume from this that you're American? That's basically just America that has this problem. Healthcare and health insurance is fine in most other developed (and developing) nations, even e.g. here in Germany in those few years where it took on around a million asylum seekers.
Influx of illiterate people, sure. But then it is an even worse thing to cut taxes and cutting the budget for SFI (Swedish for immigrants).
The school results are worse. Even here the claim is that it is the immigrants' fault. The privatisation of the school system in sweden has led to increased segregation of the school system. Private schools can be found in areas where they get "easy students". Yet they fail to deliver any better results than public schools. Which is amazingly dumb. The state pays private schools (they are open for anyone and have no tuition fees). The schools can then let less money go to tuition and more to the share holders/owners, while being able to claim that they are just as good as schools with all the tough students. By all measurements they should be much better. It is such an enormous failure.
And who do we blame? Immigrants.
And social mobility is going downwards. Not nearly as low in the US, but I want to think that we at least still believe in the value of hard work.
People don’t vote for populists by accident, votes for populists are a symptom of elite failure to build a society that works for everyone while writing their columns, appearing on their panels, or staffing their NGOs. There's a whole class of politicians in Britain who treats politics as a posture, not a practice - and believes people are too stupid to see through it.
> There's a whole class of politicians in Britain who treats politics as a posture, not a practice - and believes people are too stupid to see through it.
IMO, many of the UK politicians themselves don't realise how out of touch they are, both with the people and with the systematic reality of the world in which they exist. (Thinking back to David Davis on Brexit, saying they had a good idea what Czechoslovakia wanted from negotiations, despite it having ceased to exist in 1992).
I don’t see any change coming until politicians stop seeing public opinion as something to be managed and placated. The lesson taken from Truss seems to have been broadly to never try anything bold again to fix the economy.
"People" is a collective, "Farage" is one person. For people collectively to change their behaviour does not require 100% of the individuals to also change their behaviour. Not even when the singular person is also calling the thing a failure.
Not sure why this was downvoted, maybe the use of "foreigners" is a bit loaded, but this is basically it.
Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.
We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
It’s true that too much of the U.K. is a piggy bank for those who don’t live there, but that is true of much of the West now.
> taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
This would end very poorly because what the U.K. sorely needs is investment (to create new productive capacity). For example, Americans invested huge sums in North Sea oil and created an entire industry (before we destroyed it). Conversely, if you force people to keep wealth in the country then you just make things more expensive: they will bid up the price of property and the like. Nothing is added to the UK’s real economy by increasing the number of pounds flowing around in it - it’s only helpful if it’s invested. So what you actually want is tax breaks for foreign investment, but with some kind of ownership cap.
The problem is that the investment in this day and age is entirely extractive. Strip the assets, do minimal infra, and jack up the prices. Water here is a classic example. Investors want their returns, and the best way to get it is by rent-seeking and minimal outlay. I'd go so far to argue that "investment" is the problem.
There's been enough in the way of tax breaks and "derisking". A huge part of the problem with our public finances is being on the hook for some very ill-advised "investments".
The money going out exceeds the money going in, because that's what an investment is. An opportunity to make money.
What you are describing, from the POV of the British firm, is ownership, not investment. Water is a classic example of failure because there was no shareholder capital invested - exactly my point. We don’t talk about all the successful investments because they’re doing just fine.
What the UK desperately needs is actual shareholder capital actually being invested into British companies, so that they can create new wealth. They are welcome to take a share of the wealth they create! Everybody wins!
Can we talk about the successful investments then?
What I see is every national asset, every successful company, and increasingly land and housing sold to (typically overseas) capital, with the proceeds sucked offshore.
Whether it's new housing in London, ARM, the water, the electricity, most products and most supermarkets: the beneficial owner is outside the country, being largely taxed outside the country, and spending their money outside the country.
We're discussing this in the context of a deeply dysfunctional Britain. If the "wealth creation" route were in any way effective, we'd be in a very different place right now. There's been concensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up. It's clearly not working for most of us. Everyone but a select few in this country is living on the edge.
I personally see a major component of our malaise as the rentierism practiced by largely foreign interests throughout our economy. Alternative explanations are welcome, but it's hard to see how we'd be worse off without the vampire squid up each and every orifice.
Had we never received foreign investments to begin with we would certainly be worse off, as indeed we were in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
> There's been consensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up.
Yes most U.K. governments have talked about fine talk but other than Thatcher, failed to actually deliver on securing enough investment. It’s not that the investments are bad, it’s that they have been decreasing for 25 years:
It’s funny that you mention ARM because it was created under Thatcher back when the U.K. was willing to start businesses. Yes it should never have been sold.
The response of "we cannot stop water companies dumping raw sewage into our rivers and lakes because it might impact profits of their Saudi Arabia investment funds" is really all we need to know about the issues. It's sickening.
This is not true. There is no Saudi ownership of Thames Water. 90% or so is owned by Australian, European, and Canadian pension funds. Specifically it was the Macquarie Group (Australian) that loaded it up with debt and pushed it off a cliff.
>I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
Even China with extreme capital controls and pervasive surveillance can't stop money leaving the country. Unless the UK was willing to go fully authoritarian and ban its citizens from spending money overseas, and ban crypto (and build all the internet firewall/DPI infrastructure that doing so would require), it wouldn't stand a chance. And attempting to do so would destroy the value of the pound, because nobody with any options would want to hold a currency that could only be spent in the UK.
Surely you see the difference between ordinary citizens buying online and spending money abroad while on holiday and big foreign companies taking their billions of profits out of the country?
> I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
Capital controls. By the time they are applied it's always too little, too late, and they only ever apply to the plebs -- the wealthy always have ways to move money out (and back in, later -much later-, if it becomes necessary or advantageous). Always too little too late because -I suspect- capital controls don't really work -- not against the wealthy.
Everyone needs a scapegoat. Why not mention Carter and the near double-digit inflation Reagan faced at the beginning of his admistration and the fact that it was nearly half by the end of it?
In the 90s, it brought us some of the best economic times we will ever see.
You can only do the financialization trick a few times and each time it is more damaging than the last. The end comes when it is no longer possible to outrun the delayed negative consequences. There is an attribution problem, like the straw that let broke the camels back, but for the final straw the back may not have broken, but responsibility lies with the weight in its totality.
Oh hang the economy. I don't care about money, I care about people. I care about the incalculable number of folks who have suffered and died from the politics of austerity, in my country and the UK. I care about government services that no longer function because of this case of brain worms that tells people when a government office doesn't work, the solution is to cut it's funding because that's definitely going to help. I care about the alienation of everyone from everyone and everything, all of us trussed up in our little homes, completely disconnected from the effects we have on our communities because of this libertarian fantasy of you being and island and accountable to nothing and no one but your own piddly, small notion of what moves you forwards.
I'll repeat what the other comment said, since it seems like you were sick for most of your macroeconomics class; you are currently living through the consequences of fictionalization. We did try what you're suggesting, both in America and the UK, and the post-industrial financier economics has the exact same consequences every time.
America is a precise model for what the UK will look like if it shirks liberalization. Here in the US, we've lost almost all of our postwar industrial capacity. We can't ship cost-competitive smartphones or electric vehicles without importing parts from China. We can't mass-produce the things we consume or even export enough to keep out of a trade deficit. Our biggest exports are software services reviled the world over for being surveillance systems installed and moderated by America's government. Our businesses are no longer seen as stable blue-chip stocks, but moonshots and gambling opportunities.
If you actually knew the consequences of a financier economy then you wouldn't wish it on your worst enemy.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.