Boomer life according to the economist

Yes, far better to make up your opinion first and then cherry pick stats to match your view.

Taking those in turn,

Education - absolutely. It's nonsense that "our" universities are full of "foreign" students because they pay higher fees and are good for the economy. We should be educating our own people to build our own economy. It's nonsense to be educating foreign students when businesses are crying out for educated/competent people from abroad. One of the greatest British Stupidities of this current era.

Regional Inequality - next thing you know there will be a huge office in Westminster called "The Department For Levelling Up" headed by some little worm like Michael Gove. If people want to level up they need to start levelling themselves up. A lot of the nonsense comes from people who want generous rewards from very little work. Poor UK productivity and the sick-note culture are indicators of a much broader problem.

Support Business Growth - it sounds lovely but I'm never quite sure what it looks like on the ground. Playing about with tax and allowances is easy enough but it doesn't create customer demand out of thin air and there's no point subsidising loss-making businesses just to employ a few people. Regrettably companies like Tata Steel and Nissan are only willing to stay in UK if they receive generous bribes from the government.

That first point, Education, is the key driver. It's something we can and should address right here, right now. Get education right and the rest should follow. But despite what politicians keep saying the idea that UK can go head-to-head with India, South Korea etc and beat them every time is pure dreamland. UK has backed itself into a tricky corner and will struggle to get out of it. Education is our best hope.

Call me a cynic, but we're fked no matter what.

We have historically enjoyed a very favoured position due to our location, Navy and technological innovations (including the industrial revolution).

However, this country has been in decline from those heady heights since the early 1900s as other, better positioned countries (US, China) caught up and surpassed us, accelerated by two world wars that financially ruined us, partially delayed by the lottery win that was North Sea oil and gas, but now really setting in, and accelerated again by Brexit.

Our competitive advantages are largely gone. The speed of information and learning has never been faster. We simply cannot expect to maintain significantly greater living standards than the rest of the world any more.

Chin up though, eh?!

Productivity problems are largely down to a 20-year lack of investment by businesses who became wedded to cheap overseas labour, NOT down to the conduct of your average Brit worker - despite record low interest rates business owners opted for cheap labour over investment in force-multipliers like automation and advanced software. That's a structural headache that we desperately need to resolve.

...and the regional issues are NOT going to be solved by plucky Brits picking themselves up and dusting themselves off. Policies have been London-centric for decades.


That applies to the rest of Europe also, and to the US to a degree (although they have the ubiquitous dollar and the largest domestic market in the world to buoy them up).

And we're weighed down by the impossibility of a "welfare state" that was unaffordable from the day it was set up and becomes more unaffordable every year. Then we have Rishi last week talking about a booming economy when we all know we're clattering over pot-holed roads and can't get an appointment at the doctor.

Until politicians stop spinning their wild optimism and knuckle down to hard facts we can't even begin to address the implications of this unfortunate reality.

Is that part actually true? Surely if there was more demand from Uk students that were hitting the right standards the Unis would ramp up their capacity?

Not strictly true - misleading Daily Wail link notwithstanding (see below). The majority of international students come over here to study postgraduate courses, not Bachelors degrees. So very very few school leavers are denied places.


Apparently not. NOWHERE in that article does it say that foreign students are getting those places - it just says top-grade A-level students are being turned away, and obliquely references greater competition. It refers to having to bring over foreign doctors, but that's probably a factor of (a) insufficient places in the UK; (b) UK junior doctors able to get better roles/pay/conditions abroad; and (c) many UK-born doctors now having 'foreign' names, which is guaranteed to confuse your average Daily Mail reader.

Have a read here - 7,100 places per year for home students (vs 30,000 applications - THAT is why top-grade students are being turned away), only 500 for international students.
https://www.themedicportal.com/blog/ucas-applicati...


FFS, what's happened to people's critical reading and reasoning skills??? I mean, the Wail is a bigoted comic - surely linking to it should be grounds for immediate discrediting of your argument.

I’m just asking the question but if that’s the answer I would have to suggest that we’ve been short of doctors for a while now………..

Only we've just outed ourselves from the EU, which can delay the inevitable by acting in concert and levy tariffs on outsiders whilst trading tariff free with each other. A brilliant move on our part.

And the US is big enough, with sufficient natural resources, population and a much lower regulation environment to stave off the worst of it for much longer than us.