Why Poland Will Overtake British Economy by 2030

Dec 17, 2024

Brexit was the stupidest, stupidest, stupidest decision that Britons have taken since World War II. Only a fool would have advocated that the UK exit the European Union, and we all know who that fool was! Unfortunately, there were many Britons who were ill-informed enough to follow him. Nobody with any understanding of economics could have voted to leave the largest, most successful customs union and single market in the whole world, more especially when that single market is right next door, on our doorstep. There will be a special place in Hell reserved for the loudmouth who pushed for this ridiculous outcome. Especially for a country such as ours which is anyway in steep decline. Now, not only have we lost an empire, but we have lost our influence and greatest economic opportunity that was not only open to us but to which we belonged. Would that clowns joined circuses instead of entering politics! – © Mark Alexander

Diamond Jubilee Marks 60 Years of British Economic Potential Squandered

THE GUARDIAN: Britain has got richer in the past six decades, but other countries have got richer faster and enjoy a more stable economy

Hard though it is now to credit it, when the Queen came to the throne 60 years ago, the UK was the third-biggest economy in the world after the US and the Soviet Union. With Germany recovering from the physical damage caused by the second world war, Britain was Europe's powerhouse.

Since then there have been booms and busts. Two long periods of growth have culminated in deep and painful recessions. Governments of both left and right have tried to modernise and reinvigorate the economy: the three-day week, the winter of discontent, Black Wednesday and the (unfinished) great recession of the past five years have shown how difficult this has been.

Throughout it all, Britain has got richer. While there are surveys questioning whether we are happier on the occasion of the Queen's diamond jubilee than we were when she came to the throne, living standards have more than tripled since 1952.

The consumer luxuries of the age when Harold Macmillan said we had never had it so good have become the necessities of today. Nor is it simply in material terms that Britain is better off. Today's babies can expect to live for about 10 years longer than the baby boomers of six decades ago. They will be fitter and healthier as well.

Yet, the real story of the past 60 years has been of potential squandered. Britain has grown richer, but other countries have grown richer faster. What's more, the economy has become more unbalanced and its foundations shakier. » | Larry Elliott | Sunday, June 03, 2012

David Cameron: 'British Economy Is Getting Worse as Euro Crisis Goes Unresolved'

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: The British economy is getting worse “every day” that the euro crisis goes unresolved, David Cameron has warned, as he told European leaders that the “world cannot wait” any longer for a rescue package to be agreed.

The Prime Minister condemned the “endless questions and changes” in the eurozone that led to the G20 summit of world leaders ending acrimoniously without a detailed plan. His warning that the crisis is having a “chilling effect” on the economy heightened fears that growth in Britain has stalled.

Following the two-day meeting in Cannes, Germany and France failed to explain how they intended to implement a €1trillion rescue package for the single currency after admitting that they were struggling to raise sufficient funds.

The US objected to proposals to increase substantially the size of the International Monetary Fund, which could directly help countries such as Italy. President Barack Obama made clear that he wanted eurozone countries to do more to solve the single currency’s problems.

Cash-rich emerging economies such as China were also not willing to help finance the eurozone bail-out until the Europeans themselves did more.

President Nicolas Sarkozy warned that a deal involving the eurozone and the IMF could take until February to finalise. » | Robert Winnett, Political Editor, in Cannes | Saturday, November 05, 2011

John Kampfner: Cameron's Little Englanders Need Some German Lessons

THE GUARDIAN: Europhobic talk of taking back powers from the EU to foster growth ignores Germany's route to real, lasting economic success

Nothing does your head in more as a Londoner than living in a small town in Germany. It was in the late 1980s that I found myself as a foreign correspondent living in Bonn, the "capital village", as it was known before reunification.

My first culture shock came as I crossed the border from Belgium. When I presented my credit card for payment at a service station the attendant looked at me blankly, and asked: "What would I want with that?" I gradually got used to elderly folk peering through net curtains to see what I might be up to. The neighbourhood committee would leave notes on my car windscreen addressed to the "Dear Respected Neighbour", asking me ever so politely to clean my car as it was bringing down the reputation of the street. And the shops … spindly corner shops that were never open when office folk needed them.

This was the time when in Britain, everyone was aspiring to be Gordon Gekko, or so the myth went. Work hard, play hard, chop and change jobs and enjoy the high-octane lifestyle. How I envied my friends back home. I was convinced that, for all its Thatcherite ugliness and excess, there was something about the UK's gritty liveliness that would leave the stolid Germans behind. The economists tended to agree. Flexible labour markets and low unit labour costs were the future. Deregulation was essential. Financial services presented the path to paradise.

So what has changed? Everything and nothing. Not only did (West) Germany absorb the economically decrepit East in the 1990s, with far less inequity and far greater success than any other country could have achieved, but it has withstood the vagaries of the financial cycle with greater ease than the rest of Europe.

It has done so by changing practices gradually, such as pension reform and labour market reform … and a limited loosening of shopping hours. But it has not altered the postwar settlement that produced the first Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle. The German model is based on long-term planning and investment, not the get-rich-quick City culture that has been the norm in Britain and the US. Read on and comment » | John Kampfner | Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Budget 2009: Now We Are All Up to Our Ears in It
THE TELEGRAPH: Alistair Darling's calamitous Budget not only consigned the nation to decades of debt, but also planted a poisonous legacy that will blight generations to come, says Jeff Randall.

"To preserve [the people's] independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our selection between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude." – Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America,1801-1809.

This week, Alistair Darling made a selection for us. His Budget for Bankruptcy banished economy and liberty. In their place, he delivered a profusion of unaffordable spending and a contract of servitude, not just for this generation, but for the next and the one after that. This is how independence is murdered. A ball-and-chain of spirit-sapping debt has been clamped to the nation's future. We are all serfs now.

In a speech of stunning torpidity (how does he manage it?), the Chancellor claimed: "You can grow your way out of recession, you can't cut your way out of it." Growth sounds attractive, an aspiration for solid citizens. Except the growth that Mr Darling had in mind was government borrowing, which is shooting up like bindweed on steroids, choking the economy.

His red numbers are so immense that most pocket calculators cannot accommodate them. Over the next five years – if all goes according to plan – Mr Darling will borrow £703,000,000,000. As the late Roy Castle used to say: "It's a record breaker!"

The United Kingdom is mired in debt, and the Chancellor's fiendishly clever escape route is, er, to borrow his way out of it. He's in a hole and digging furiously. Yet Gordon Brown, whose face is beginning to resemble a smacked bottom, was delighted by his cipher's performance. This style of presentation – straight from the Ceausescu handbook of statistics management – appeals to the Prime Minister's control-freakery.

It sounds complicated, but is surprisingly simple. You start with a politically desirable conclusion – in this case, the triumph of a suffocating state over personal responsibility, self-sufficiency and wealth-creating enterprise – and work backwards: cheating, lying, fiddling the numbers, until both sides of the balance sheet appear to be in harmony. This is how Labour operated its fraudulent boom. The same trick is being tried in a catastrophic bust. >>> By Jeff Randall | Thursday, April 23, 2009

THE TELEGRAPH: This Budget Will Make Us Pay for Britain's Excesses for Decades

Now we must all pay for the wild excesses of an irresponsible minority, says Adrian Michaels.

I wish I had known I was having such a good time. I will, according to the Budget, be paying for the country's excesses for decades. It is time to pull in the horns and tighten the belt. But wait. My belt doesn't have any more notches. I've been presented by Alistair Darling with the bill for a party I didn't attend.

For months now we have been hearing that it is bankers that brought the global economy to its knees through their irresponsible business practices, made possible by compliant and inattentive politicians and regulators. Meanwhile, people in financial services were paid far too much for their destructive corporate behaviour.

How much, exactly? In December 2007, 15 bankers – all men, of course – sat down for lunch at the Cap Horn, a mountain restaurant in the French ski resort of Courchevel. It was just turning dark when they paid the 28,000 euro bill. There were no prostitutes or drugs, I am informed, and the near-2,000 euros-a-head tab did not afford access to the President of the United States. No. The bankers were playing "Par One Hundred" – a drinking game in which the object would appear to be to vomit on your neighbour as fast as possible – with magnums of Krug champagne. The Cap Horn currently charges 850 euros for a magnum of 1997 Krug.

So what? "They're on a different planet," one friend said. That is the problem, however: bankers are not on a different planet, they are on exactly the same one as the rest of us. If they really were otherworldly, we could just forget about them and their lunches. But we all pay the price for their behaviour. The cheapest item on the Cap Horn's menu is cream cheese with salt and pepper at 13 euros. "Spaghetti à la Bolognaise" is 25 euros.

So not only weren't we at the party that has just ended, the quality of our own lives was made worse by the fiesta's participants. Bankers made sure that we could not eat in the same restaurants as in the past, we could not take holidays in a growing range of destinations, and we could not live where we wanted. Ask the residents of Salcombe in Devon – "Chelsea-on-Sea" as it has become known – about the empty homes in winter and the fancy delis selling porcini mushrooms instead of corner shops selling pints of milk and packets of Quavers. >>> By Adrian Michaels | Thursday, April 23, 2009

Britain’s Economy Grinds to a Halt
TIMESONLINE: Britain's economy is teetering on the brink of recession as official figures showed that output ground to a halt between April and the end of June. This is the weakest performance since 1992, the tail-end of the last recession and will increase pressure on the Bank of England to cut interest rates to prevent a full blown economic slump.

Official figures released this morning showed that output did not grow at all in the second quarter, contrary to initial estimates showing that the economy grew by 0.2 per cent between April and the end of June.

On the year, GDP was 1.4 per cent higher, revised down from an initial reading of 1.6 per cent and the weakest since the final quarter of 1992.

The downward revision came after grim news from the manufacturing and services sectors with surveys suggesting acitivity has contracted for at least three months in a row.

The stagnation of the economy raises the prospect of recession as businesses struggle in increasingly difficult conditions. A technical recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of falling output. Britain’s Economy Grinds to a Halt >>> By Grainne Gilmore | August 22, 2008

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