Is the UK becoming a third-world country?

The short answer to the OP's question is: NO. However, people are living what they've collectively voted for:

the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer

less state so less services

less/no tax on those most able to pay so less in the pot

being cut off from their most imortant trading partners

an erosion of rights

no accountability for those in power

The ability to lie and manipulate with impunity in the name of freedom of speech

Democracy is great innit, those with the means can appeal to the lowest instincts of fools to make fools of the fools.

is it me or does £100k for a replacement lightning conductor sound a bit expensive for a school.

Ooh, you know what? This sentiment is actually a major problem we have in the UK right now. Apologies if this is incorrect, but you appear to be an average punter hearing a number and going 'ooh that's a lot of money' but unless you're an architect or engineer you really have no idea. Knowledgeable people who do stuff are under siege all the time from people who say 'oh that's a lot of money, can't you do it for less?' and we end up forced to do things on the cheap all the time just because no-one respects our knowledge, skill and experience.

This is a major reason why everything is shit. At all levels, everyone doing stuff is under massive pressure to do it on the cheap. We try to tell our bosses and our customers what the right thing to do is but they don't listen, they just think we're a bunch of nerds fretting about nerdy stuff and we can be ignored.

Having worked in a few other countries, the biggest difference in places that are known for competence in engineering is that people ****ing listen to engineers.

The UK is manifestly not a 3rd world country (do people still use that phrase??). It is however an excellent example of a country with a dysfunctional neo-liberal market economy, much like the US, where the end result is little or no investment in public services and infrastructure. The result is crumbling roads, schools, hospitals, bankrupt councils, leaking water pipes and shit in our rivers. It's all a result of not spending money on the things we all benefit from and could very easily be fixed.

You want to see a '3rd world country', go and have a look at Sri Lanka or one of the many other places where the electricity grid regularly goes down, there is no runnning water and where basic food stuffs disappear from the shops.

You can’t ‘become’ a third world country. That term has a specific definition.

Can you expand on this please- surely the stereotype has rendered the original definition obsolete?

I still think that the majority have a far better standard of life in the UK than 40, 50 60 years ago, and not far off that of pre 2008, which is where my rose tints seem strongest.  Sure things have been at the least unsettled  post Brexit but I don't think that as a country it's yet enough to draw a long term trend.

pretty obvious that the UK is not a third world country but it certainly is a rapidly declining first world one. A country of proliferating potholes.

just an example, Birmingham has spent hundreds of millions on an IT project. why is stuff like this not a centralised government service provider to LAs?

Have you seen how poorly central government handles IT purchase? The costs would run into billions for something not fit for purpose due to the minister of the day changing the contract specs as a result of whatever is flavour of the week in the press. We sold our IT procurement department during the first rush of privatisations and lost all our central expertise as the civil servant were offered suitcases of money to work in the newly formed private sector agency.

The country got left with the dross and we're now at the point where supposedly educated people insist that encryption can be by-passed to "protect the children" without damaging banking and other sectors needing secure communications. A clue mathematics will not allow this ever.

@molgrips is it an engineer quoting this price or is it a dodgy sales man, who thinks **** it I'll give them a crazy price and see what happens, from my own experience of getting quotes of tradesmen (i) Prices/(ii) job time/(iii) quality

can be dramatically wild.

and yes in my own work people think things can take a few hours, when it could take weeks and they are forever badgering, but then again, other things i can do in ten-fifteen minutes that colleagues may takes weeks over.

experience and recommendations count for a great deal.

"I think a few of you need to go and spend some time in a third world country to get a healthy dose of perspective"

This this this. And staying in a holiday resort for a couple of weeks doesn't count.

Slightly off-topic:

A few people have said that the UK might be a 'second world country'. I was taught that the 'three world' idea wasn't just about wealth but also about systems. A child born at the time could be born into one of three worlds which would dictate what their life would be like:

Capitalist

Communist

Developing

or a slightly different version:

US and allies

USSR and allies

Non-aligned

I think the current schools concrete crisis is the UK in a nutshell.

30 years ago it looked quite good, 10 years ago it was crumbling at the edges, now it's crumbling everywhere.

The biggest council in the country has just declared itself bankrupt. 20 more are said to be on the brink of doing the same

I can't see why the press are even bothering to focus on Birmingham..
Budget gap of £87m and population 1.15M people is small change.
Our council owes £1.12 Billion and growing (£2.1B next year) with a population of 100,000

FFS we owe an order of magnitude more in absolute terms let alone per capita.

High school geography tells us why comparing single indicators (GDP p/c in this case) is misleading. If you look at the HDI rankings the UK is above the USA as a whole.

Ultimately GDP/cap is not only misleading but highly damaging over any time period in any state with a balance of payments deficit.

Ultimately we are over spending as a country but like my council on things we don't actually need living in a fantasy shaped by special interest groups...and people who are looking for quick profit and or nepotism.

Take a typical STW moan about cycle paths.. drain covers and such.
Why doesn't my 2.4" DD with sealant suffer the same fate as these people demand .. ??
Could it be they need to ride a bike suitable for the cycle paths not demand to make cycle paths somewhere to ride their bike with skinny tyres? If it takes a bit longer then set off earlier ???

Don't misunderstand if we had an infinite amount of money and resources by all means spend some of this excess money on better cyclepaths... but with the roads in the state they are it's demanding something the majority would rather see elsewhere.

The same can be said of the NHS... it has simultaneously expanded to cater to special interests whilst cutting out the majority on basic healthcare and made paying over the market price for anything but its actual staff an art form.
Not that these are not all good causes with infinite money.. but why are the NHS for example paying for IVF when it can't afford life saving operations and people are dying on waiting lists.
Non of these "wouldn't it be nice" services are individually to blame, rather it is each of these chipping away at the basic services.

All this is underlain by the continued lie that "We are rich because of our GDP" ... spending money you don't have on luxuries doesn't make anyone rich.
I started off mentioning my council debt and nepotism.
We have I think 12 of these statues now... £12-14,000 each apparently and their only purpose is to line the pockets of the artist who is a family member of one of the former councillors and for them to get their kickbacks. Their unintended purpose being to scare children and even many adults... but this by a council that makes the debt of Birmingham look like small change and to add insult to injury we the council tax payers pay for the council to pay an advertising agency (I'm sure they are family/friends) another £110,00 a year to tell those who don't want them they "need to be taught how to appreciate art" or should move elsewhere if they don't like it.

Even if these were in any way nice they are at best a luxury and the poor shouldn't be being forced to pay for luxuries for the rich.

Scale that up and that is exactly why we are becoming one of the poorest nations on earth.

@whatyadoinsucka That number will have been produced by a tendering team at the contractors, a salesman will have made only initial contact to ask what they can tender for. That number will have been the cheapest of those that provided a price. A large chunk of that pricing will be for access equipment and welfare facilities to allow the job to be carried out safely (LEA's are sticklers for ensuring everyone can go home in one piece at the end of every day). The materials will be a small part of the cost.

IMO It isn't, but it's been getting worse.

I haven't read the entire thread but it seems a lot of these issues are the direct result of a combination of things, the lack of trickle down economics I feel has played a large part.

thanks @sandwich true, i assume thats why changing a lightbulb can cost so much money

Ultimately we are over spending as a country but like my council on things we don’t actually need living in a fantasy shaped by special interest groups…and people who are looking for quick profit and or nepotism.

We're not overspending. We are very much under-spending. There is not a finite amount of money which we can use to spend on public services and infrastructure. Pretending there is leads to the under-investment we now experience. The trouble is spending money on 'the basics' like schools and hospitals is very expensive and requires massive investment, whilst putting up a few arty statues costs next to nothing and can be done with some random arts council grant.

the lack of trickle down economics I feel has played a large part.

Trickle down economics is a myth, a gargantuan lie designed to fool people that they would benefit from the rich getting a lot richer. We've never had trickle down economics, just tax and deliberate wealth redistribution, and that's what we need more of.

centralisation of IT with appropriately skilled and paid professionals would save a metric tonne of cash.

in for insourcing where possible / appropriate is the answer.

centralising has got to be better than the current model of hundreds (thousands?) of badly tendered and managed contracts costing us millions we currently have

and keep the ministers out of it, I think the idea a politician can be parachuted in with bugger all experience and make important decisions is flawed

like I said just an example of how we could improve

dazh

We’re not overspending. We are very much under-spending. There is not a finite amount of money which we can use to spend on public services and infrastructure.

So which country do you suggest we invade to steal their resources?
Or do you just subscribe to a belief system with unicorns and horns of plenty?

We have become a country who wants everything but to pay for nothing.

why we are becoming one of the poorest nations on earth

we are not becoming one of the poorest nations on earth. Anyone who thinks so is clearly uneducated about how the vast majority of people on this planet live. "poverty" in the UK for a single person means a weekly income of £227 per week (source - https://observatory.leeds.gov.uk/leeds-poverty-fact-book/relative-and-absolute-poverty/), which is approx $15,000 per year. That puts someone in poverty in the UK ahead of the average income in somewhere like greece, twice the average income of somewhere like Brazil and 6x the average income of someone in india (source - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income)

the average (median) wealth of a UK adult is $140k, making us in the top 5% of all countries around the world. That is 10x as wealthy as someone in serbia (which is in the middle of the list) and 100x as wealthy as someone in a proper third world country like suriname or Rwanda and 500x as wealthy as someone in a poor 3rd world country like Sierra leone.

We should be concerned about the way things are going, but we are massively massively rich as a country.

@molgrips is it an engineer quoting this price or is it a dodgy sales man, who thinks **** it I’ll give them a crazy price and see what happens

In my line of work, the engineers say 'the job will cost X' and the salespeople say 'no that's too much, our competitors will under cut us' however the same thing is happening at competitors so none of the deals the customer is offered can actually work. So when the project starts it goes wrong or the results are bad. And we have to employ loads of people just to clean up the mess. This happens almost every time in the UK and from what I can tell it happens in other industries as well.

It's because no-one respects the engineers or designers or the people with the actual knowledge. Knowledge is not respected, we're anti-intellectual in the UK. Kids who do well at school get mocked and we even get politicians saying that they've had enough of experts. Sure, that was a stupid line to trot out, but like all politicians he's saying things that people are receptive to - that statement was a product of our national culture.

the average (median) wealth of a UK adult is $140k, making us in the top 5% of all countries around the world.

Two things:

- Actual cash sums for income aren't a good indicator of economic security and happiness. That comes from discretionary spending ability. £227 a week is no good if rent is £200 a week. But even if rent of £50 is available, that's no good if it's a shit flat in a shit area where you fear for you safety.

- The MEAN wealth is not the issue here, it's the distribution of that wealth.

Anyone on here who thinks the UK is, or is becoming a third world country is showing themselves up as arrogant and self-entitled, in my opinion. To even consider that there are equivalencies between the like of Sudan, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe etc is crass, and demeans the issues faced by many other countries.

This exactly. There's a lot of moaning about the roads and references to the third world. This betrays unbelieveable privilege and total lack of self-awareness by middle accounts receiveable managers at specialist glass distributors in Norwich whose greatest pain in life is that they hit a pothole two months ago in their second hand Korean SUV.

The UK has a massive (per capita), very safe, technologically advanced road network in which 99%+ is perfectly good to travel on at speed. It's a million miles away from the position in most developing countries.

it’s also informative to spend some time in another European country and see...why most refugees actually don’t risk their lives to come here and choose to stay elsewhere.

Most refugees choose (or more accurately, are only able) to go to the country next to their own: Turkey from Syria, Kenya from Somalia, Jordan from Palestine, and so on. A still larger number of people escaped danger at their home but aren't refugees because they didn't cross an international border and are "internally displaced persons".

"Most refugees don't come to the UK" is totally true and doesn't really tell us anything about anything.

Poverty is relative to cost of living, £227 a week in the UK is poverty. Switzerland is near the top on Spin's list (the list is bollocks as Hong Kong in fourth and Saudi above Portugal tells any thinking person) but there are about 30 000 Swiss living illegally in France and commuting over the border because they can't afford to live in Switzerland. 70 000 French pensioners live legally in Maroco, not necessarily rich in French terms but very rich in Marocan terms.

This is what happens when people lose their minds, believe the media drivel and vote Tory. They are the people to blame. Brainless cretins with blood on their hands who now deserve everything they get. Mortgage gone up and you can't afford it? Your fault.

Can't afford your utility bills? Your fault.

Can't afford a holiday this year? Your fault.

Don't vote tory you morons.

They basically voted to be financially raped and to make those corrupt Tories richer. Look at the covid contracts scam they pulled.  And still some won't learn from the blindingly obvious and will be back at the polls soon with their pens, ready to plunge the country even deeper into the mire.

Probably the same idiots who lined the streets waving at the Royal family. See you next Tuesdays, every single one of them

Brainless cretins with blood on their hands who now deserve everything they get.

To what extent are people culpable for their own lack of intelligence?

We aren't taught how to vote or how to understand politics. People with brain power and curiosity to spare will do this, but not everyone does.

As with almost everything else, the bottom line is education.

Seems a lot of middle aged, middle class white men in this thread complaining… I wonder how many of them have actually spent any significant time in a developing country? You need to get some perspective.

Apart from the small fact that the middle aged white men have all said it is wrong to compare UK to a 3rd world country in response to the frankly stupid question from OP.
I can complain that the country has become worse in the last 20 years whilst also not saying it is like a 3rd world country.

I fear it's in terminal decline.

It's not just one issue, it's everything at once. No chance of Labour or anyone else being able to fix this before the media turn on them for spending too much.

I think people complain about the roads simply because the patched up tarmac barely held together with short term repairs is just a very visible metaphor for everything that's going on beneath the surface.

So which country do you suggest we invade to steal their resources?
Or do you just subscribe to a belief system with unicorns and horns of plenty?

Don't want to turn this into another MMT thread but you appear to be of the view that money is finite and pegged to real resources. It's not. If we want to spend 10bn on a hospital building programme accessing the money to do that is not a problem. The barrier is whether there is sufficient slack in the economy to meet the demand that 10bn spend will generate. That's called economic growth, which is usually understood to be a good thing. The reason economic growth is currently stagnant is because the govt is not spending.

Seems a lot of middle aged, middle class white men in this thread complaining… I wonder how many of them have actually spent any significant time in a developing country? You need to get some perspective.

What an incredibly problematic statement to make.

Are middle aged, middle class white men not able to have an opinion on the country they've lived in unless they've lived in a developing one?
And why have you brought race into it?

Disgusting post.

Isn't "becoming a third world country" just a turn of phrase that people are taking too literally? We all know what the OP meant surely.

I fear it’s in terminal decline.

It’s not just one issue, it’s everything at once. No chance of Labour or anyone else being able to fix this before the media turn on them for spending too much.

Pretty sure everyone was saying that in 1997 and 13 years later we had a country full of new schools and hospitals where class sizes were down and NHS waiting lists almost eliminated. You can debate how that spending was implemented (PFI etc) but you can't argue that it wasn't necessary. The problem now is that the current labour leadership appears to be falling for the tory austerity narrative. If that is true then yes things will continue to decline but I doubt that's how it will pan out.

Are middle aged, middle class white men not able to have an opinion on the country they’ve lived in unless they’ve lived in a developing one?

All lives matter. 😂

We still have fresh water on tap.

We- being Scottish. Whose water is like fresh nectar, but down south, it might be fresh, but it tastes like tar.

Pretty sure everyone was saying that in 1997 and 13 years later we had a country full of new schools and hospitals where class sizes were down and NHS waiting lists almost eliminated. You can debate how that spending was implemented (PFI etc) but you can’t argue that it wasn’t necessary. . The problem now is that the current labour leadership appears to be falling for the tory austerity narrative.

TBF, a key part of the 97 Labour election winning strategy was to stick to the outgoing Tory governments spending limits, as it was the only way to stop the Tories whacking them with the 'typical Labour, tax and spend' stick'. They only opened the spending taps later.

We don't often agree, Dazh, but in economic terms you're right, it's first year economics. The consequences are usually increaded growth, but inflation and a falling currency so you then have to work out the impact of those on the various classes/social groups or whatever you want to call them. Overall the impact is likely to be a positive for the little people and a negative for the very rich. So when Starmer wants to run a "tight ship" you know that a Lbaour government won't be and end to the decline.

we are not becoming one of the poorest nations on earth. Anyone who thinks so is clearly uneducated about how the vast majority of people on this planet live. “poverty” in the UK for a single person means a weekly income of £227 per week

molgrips

wo things:

– Actual cash sums for income aren’t a good indicator of economic security and happiness. That comes from discretionary spending ability. £227 a week is no good if rent is £200 a week. But even if rent of £50 is available, that’s no good if it’s a shit flat in a shit area where you fear for you safety.

– The MEAN wealth is not the issue here, it’s the distribution of that wealth.

This ^^^ I'd go further and say "money" as such in absolute terms has nothing to do with it.

This exactly. There’s a lot of moaning about the roads and references to the third world. This betrays unbelieveable privilege and total lack of self-awareness by middle accounts receiveable managers at specialist glass distributors in Norwich whose greatest pain in life is that they hit a pothole two months ago in their second hand Korean SUV.

The UK has a massive (per capita), very safe, technologically advanced road network in which 99%+ is perfectly good to travel on at speed. It’s a million miles away from the position in most developing countries.

If we exclude nations at war and those FUBAR from corruption beyond the UK then we are near the bottom in real terms because we prioritise spending money on (for example) roads over (for example) feeding kids.

It's the distribution of and priorities of that wealth/resources makes us poor as a nation.

I've lived in developing nations with mostly little more than cart tracks where 'major highways' have massive fissures but everyone who wanted has a house, food and access to clean water.

Don’t want to turn this into another MMT thread but you appear to be of the view that money is finite and pegged to real resources. It’s not. If we want to spend 10bn on a hospital building programme accessing the money to do that is not a problem. The barrier is whether there is sufficient slack in the economy to meet the demand that 10bn spend will generate. That’s called economic growth, which is usually understood to be a good thing. The reason economic growth is currently stagnant is because the govt is not spending.

A "sovereign nation" can do whatever it wants with it's fake money but a nation with a negative balance of trade that cannot meet it's own population's requirements is not sovereign it must pay for goods in something with a value to whoever is selling.

The UK has to buy food from outside the UK... it isn't something over which we have an option because we don't have the capacity to grow enough to feed our population.

If we were an island rich in resources we could use conch shells... and if noone wanted to sell us luxury goods in exchange we could just do without luxury goods but food isn't something we can just do without.

The UK is definitely moving in that direction.
In real terms LA funding by central gov has been cut by 50% since 2010 and there’s a continuing devolution of responsibility from central to local gov – do more with less.
Tory gov has no interest in slowing or stopping the decline – they’ll be out at the next GE so, from their perspective…cream it while you can.
Starmer & co don’t, I fear, have any real grasp of the scale of the problems they will inherit – nor does anyone else.
I’m not convinced by MMT but it’s clear that adherence to ‘balancing the books’ will do nothing to help a Lab gov.
In some senses the dismal state of the UK and an electoral shagging for the tories could well lead to their return next time around – starmer/corbyn/wilson have had a go but we still haven’t got to the sunlit uplands so…let the other lot have another go.
What a mess.
Terminal decline.

Yeah ^^this^^ aligns with much of my thoughts, Camaron/Osbourne and Austerity initiated many of the problems that we're seeing come home now (although I'm sure the Blair/Brown Gov' share some blame), the ERG/Right-wing of the Tory party takeover post 2016 hasn't helped the situation. My Missus works in LA and their long term 'defunding' and firm nudging towards the jaws of the private sector "Service delivery" outfits is obvious, the NHS is in the same boat.

My worry isn't just the state we find ourselves in as a nation now, it's the worry that a change of Government won't actually solve much, that SKS and Co' will be too constrained by the RW media narrative and all the "balancing the books" waffle, it's going to take any government at least two terms to even start to address things and I'm just not sure current Labour are even up to it let alone if they'll even get a chance with Murdoch and the (remaining) Barclay Bro chipping away at the nation's Psyche...

shittier ice cream

Yet another thing to blame Thatcher for 😉

(all IMO of course)

I would argue that the UK could feed itself if there wasn't so much waste at every level, enough to feed 30 million with the supermarkets being the main culprits. Then there's the appalling way people eat which is one of the main strains on the health service.

People not only voting for the state they're in at elections, they do it when they go shopping, choose how they get to the shops, leisure choices... . It's a society in which the media promote a way of life and values which are toxic to the people themselves.

No.

1. Ignoring the COL crisis our rates of poverty, child poverty and debt are slightly higher than France and Germany and less than Italy and Spain,

2. Our government is stable, if ineffective.

3. Mortality rates amongst all age groups whilst not improving are stable.

4. Fuel, food, water and energy are freely available and at stable prices.

Are middle aged, middle class white men not able to have an opinion on the country they’ve lived in unless they’ve lived in a developing one?

They're allowed to have an opinion however stupid, but if they can't see past their own prejudices and life experience despite being provided with actual facts, then maybe they should look inward as to why they're so monumentally wrong.

I await more wailing and gnashing of teeth as you compare yourself to the Yazidi, or something.

Third world country 😂

Some folk really need to give their heads a wobble.

Edukator

I would argue that the UK could feed itself if there wasn’t so much waste at every level, enough to feed 30 million with the supermarkets being the main culprits. Then there’s the appalling way people eat which is one of the main strains on the health service.

Perhaps .(probably not and not in a way without turning the UK into a big factory farm) but the UK couldn't feed itself for a lot longer than supermarkets have been a thing.
Quite how much of that was through choice or bad management is debateable so I'm not sure when I'd put a cut-off but pre-WWII we were already dependent on importing food and the population has exploded since.

I do believe we're definitely on the decline. To be fair, we've been on a steady decline since losing the Empire.

I believe we have a ton of problems like an over bloated state, poorly run (in every sense) public services, lack of investment in critical areas, a more divisive culture seems to be on the horizon, an education system that doesn't really set students up for the 'real world', a strange culture of entitlement from the younger, the political landscape is dire etc etc. It's not great at the moment.

That said, there are plenty of good things about the UK that i'm happy with. I'm not quite ready to sell up and disappear to Switzerland just yet.

A Labour government would be disastrous for this country. Will be interesting to see what plays out at the next GE.

2. Our government is stable, if ineffective.

Arguable.

3. Mortality rates amongst all age groups whilst not improving are stable.

They're actually getting worse (MrsIHN is an actuary, this is an actual thing that they're having to cater for now when pricing premiums etc)

4. Fuel, food, water and energy are freely available and at stable prices.

Have you been in a cave?

Have you been in a cave?

Still nothing like the scale of ****ups in some actual 3rd world countries though.

A Labour government would be disastrous for this country.

You're aware that 13 years of Tory government hasn't been a rampant success, yeah?

I'm absolutely a middle ground voter and no Labour zealot, but I'm firmly in the "we might as well give them a go, they couldn't do any worse than this lot" camp

A Labour government would be disastrous for this country.

Why so?

I’m not quite ready to sell up and disappear to Switzerland just yet.

I am - well, not Swtizerland, but somewhere else. Having lived and worked overseas there are certainly places more attractive.

The UK is definitely moving in that direction.
In real terms LA funding by central gov has been cut by 50% since 2010 and there’s a continuing devolution of responsibility from central to local gov – do more with less.
Tory gov has no interest in slowing or stopping the decline – they’ll be out at the next GE so, from their perspective…cream it while you can.
Starmer & co don’t, I fear, have any real grasp of the scale of the problems they will inherit – nor does anyone else.
I’m not convinced by MMT but it’s clear that adherence to ‘balancing the books’ will do nothing to help a Lab gov.
In some senses the dismal state of the UK and an electoral shagging for the tories could well lead to their return next time around – starmer/corbyn/wilson have had a go but we still haven’t got to the sunlit uplands so…let the other lot have another go.
What a mess.

+1

The UK is starting to feel like 2000's Eastern Europe, the general feeling that everything is just about ticking along, but the infrastructure was built during some past heyday and is now crumbling.

Perhaps .(probably not and not in a way without turning the UK into a big factory farm) but the UK couldn’t feed itself for a lot longer than supermarkets have been a thing.
Quite how much of that was through choice or bad management is debateable so I’m not sure when I’d put a cut-off but pre-WWII we were already dependent on importing food and the population has exploded since.

IIRC the story is a lot more nuanced than the headline.

The headline is we're only something like 61% self sufficient, but that's based on the value of food we eat, i.e. on a £100 food shop, an average of £61 was from the UK.

The nuance is we are broadly self sufficient in grain, it varies by year depending on the weather, but imports and exports average out in the long term. So we are self sufficient. Same with livestock and dairy, we export some low value food and import higher value. So it's only consumer taste that isn't self sufficient.

Fruit and veg is more complicated. Clearly we're not self sufficient in bananas and avocado, but we're in the 70's% for more staple veg. Again there's a consumer issue that people want apples in June, they're going to come from Africa not Somerset. Same with a lot of veg.

If you cut off from the rest of the world tonight, we wouldn't starve, there'd just be less choice.

pre-WWII

Pre green revolution. Check out productivity now. The UK could feed a nation of perfect BMI people with a very low levels of meat consumption and low waste.

– Actual cash sums for income aren’t a good indicator of economic security and happiness. That comes from discretionary spending ability. £227 a week is no good if rent is £200 a week. But even if rent of £50 is available, that’s no good if it’s a shit flat in a shit area where you fear for you safety.

True, its not an exact amount, however £227 a week here gets you a lot lot more than £3 per week in africa. No-one here is walking 5 miles to get water.

This map shows average income adjusted for local purchasing power - blue is above $60,000, where we are. Red is below $2,500, where the third world is.

[img] [/img]

most people from third world countries would die for the standard of living that poverty here represents. This is why many of them risk life and limb to get here.

Our government is stable, if ineffective.

Arguable.

No, it's not. The UK hasn't experienced a revolution in over 100 years. The biggest domestic upheaval in the last 100 years was leaving a customs and social union - and while that was a totally stupid idea at great cost, there was no violence. There are no coups. There are peaceful transitions of power. Votes are free and implemented. The judiciary is independent and its decisions are implemented even when it doesn't suit the interests of elected officials. Government contracts aren't ripped up just because they were signed by the other party. The army doesn't intervene in politics. Assets aren't nationalised without compensation. And a hundred other things that don't look like an unstable state...

I’m absolutely a middle ground voter and no Labour zealot, but I’m firmly in the “we might as well give them a go, they couldn’t do any worse than this lot” camp

Can we give Jeff Bezos a go first! 🙂

Anyone who can get two books I ordered in bed last night at 11pm to my desk by 10.30am this morning is the sort of chap I want in charge of sorting shit out! 🤣🤣

Sorting shit out should be taken out of the hands of someone who was top in their debating forum at Uni.

Anyone who can get two books I ordered in bed last night at 11pm to my desk by 10.30am this morning is the sort of chap I want in charge of sorting shit out!

He does it by paying people crap money to work long shifts in rubbish conditions, and then paying as little tax as possible on the huge profits. I'm not sure he's really the example we should be looking to.

...well, we're currently doing it by paying inept people bucket loads of cash to screw it up. So there must be some middle ground somewhere.

Can we give Jeff Bezos a go first!

All Bezos does is transport goods from a warehouse to an address within easy driving distance after processing an electronic payment. If you're seriously comparing that to the massively complex task of building schools and hospitals, roads, railway lines, energy grids, water and waste infrastructure etc then you should probably have a think.

So Amazon as a whole is just a logistics company then? OK!

This map shows average income adjusted for local purchasing power

A better example. But still does not quite reflect the pressure people face. Someone in sub-Saharan Africa might happy if they have clean water and sanitation. But we take those things for granted and can have a poor quality of life even with them. We can still feel isolated, alone and helpless whilst feeling pressurised into a well paid job we hate, that takes us away from our family and we can't find a way out of.

It's easy to say 'oh these are first world problems' and they are, but we shoudn't trivialise them. We may have more discretionary purchasing power than most places but that does not make us happy. It's easy to say 'live the simple life' but not necessarily easy to do, since 'the simple life' needs things we might not be able to get like family and community support, or close friends etc.

However I fully agree that the UK is nowhere near a third world country for that and many other reasons. But it is still shitty.

All Bezos does is transport goods from a warehouse to an address within easy driving distance after processing an electronic payment.

As military people like to say, "Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics." Reliably delivering massive quantities of stuff around the globe is a hugely impressive undertaking. If it was easy, everyone would have done it.

He does it by paying people crap money to work long shifts in rubbish conditions, and then paying as little tax as possible on the huge profits.

Successful companies have always paid the lowest wages they can get away with. Same with paying tax, nobody pays more tax than they are required to. I've never worked for Amazon, but looking at images of their warehouses, the conditions look much less crap than factories I worked at when I was young. Amazon is profitable now, I believe, but for a long time they were basically operating as a non-profit delivering cheap goods to consumers, funded by their investors. Bezos didn't become wealthy from Amazon profits, he became wealthy from investors believing that Amazon would eventually become a profitable market leader and pushing the stock price far higher than the historical profits justified.

Basically, Bezos isn't a nice guy, but neither are most successful business people. Rather than worrying about that, it's better to set reasonable minimum wage levels and workplace health and safety standards and then just let people get on with things.

Bezos didn’t become wealthy from Amazon profits, he became wealthy from investors believing that Amazon would eventually become a profitable market leader and pushing the stock price far higher than the historical profits justified.

He speaks the truth - as they haven't made much profit they haven't paid much tax - the serious tax avoiders are the likes of Apple and the Pharma companies, Amazon are in a lower league.

I'm not holding Bezos up as a shining example of humanity - but I've never felt that MPs who rely on public approval for their jobs should solely be in charge of big infrastructure projects.

It leads to decisions based on popularity, personal gain and short-term'ism (ie kicking that maintenance budget into someone elses budget spend). There's got to be a better way of dealing with these things.

but pre-WWII we were already dependent on importing food

During WWII we managed to bring something approaching 90-95% of available farming land back into production from a pre war level of 35-40%. We also managed to decay the soil to such an extent they probably took decades off it's productive life and are still dealing with the consequences of that decision today*

* I'm not saying that decision was wrong, I'm just saying that it had unintended and unforeseen consequences.

there was no violence.

Jo Cox was murdered.

Having worked in a few other countries, the biggest difference in places that are known for competence in engineering is that people **** listen to engineers.

Where are these utopias?

Asking for an engineering type friend who is genuinely fed up with copping the blame for shit going wrong after putting forward the opinion that stuff done right takes X amount of time and not one eighth of that time.

They’re actually getting worse (MrsIHN is an actuary, this is an actual thing that they’re having to cater for now when pricing premiums etc)

The ONS figures show that life expectancy increased continually to 2020 all the figures from then on are somewhat meaningless.  Covid, CoL, Ukraine all help to skew the numbers.

Have you been in a cave?

Inflation due to the energy crisis and the following inflationary increases and then interest rates to curb inflation are all rises due to known causes, some of which will again decrease over time  - energy, food, fuel, etc.  It's hardly 3rd worth stuff where exchange rates can change by 50% in a day or inflation can hit 300% in a week, is it?

Jo Cox was murdered.

That's true. I don't think it's as simple as saying she was assassinated because of Brexit. But in any case, I'm not saying there has never been political violence in the UK - that is totally untrue. But it's just not the case that violence is routinely used against politicians and activists or that perpetrators are not punished. Compare that to the rowdy democracies of Nigeria or India or Brazil, let alone the authoritarian states of Russian or Gabon or Myanmar.

I’ve never felt that MPs who rely on public approval for their jobs should solely be in charge of big infrastructure projects.

They're not.

But it’s just not the case that violence is routinely used against politicians and activists or that perpetrators are not punished.

Yes, I agree with your broader point, but I think it does us no harm to remember that we're not immune from political violence.

A better example. But still does not quite reflect the pressure people face. Someone in sub-Saharan Africa might happy if they have clean water and sanitation. But we take those things for granted and can have a poor quality of life even with them. We can still feel isolated, alone and helpless whilst feeling pressurised into a well paid job we hate, that takes us away from our family and we can’t find a way out of.

that may be so, but the measure of "first world" vs "third world" is not one of happiness. Its generally (these days) taken as a rough index of development, life length, quality of life, and so on, and as such the UK is miles away from something you'd categorise as "third world" in every measurable index. So the answer is still a resounding "no".

I remember being shocked by the level of inequality in Morocco in the 70s. Income inequality in Britain now outstrips Morocco.

The ONS figures show that life expectancy increased continually to 2020 all the figures from then on are somewhat meaningless. Covid, CoL, Ukraine all help to skew the numbers.

The thing is, the job of actuaries like MrsIHN is to remove the effects of exceptional factors like those things. And when they do that, the mortality figures are getting worse.

And CoL 'skews' the numbers? If that's true, are you saying that we don't need to worry that people are dying because they can't afford to live? That's an interesting perspective

Inflation due to the energy crisis and the following inflationary increases and then interest rates to curb inflation are all rises due to known causes, some of which will again decrease over time – energy, food, fuel, etc. It’s hardly 3rd worth stuff where exchange rates can change by 50% in a day or inflation can hit 300% in a week, is it?

No, of course it's not. I'm not saying that we are comparable to 3rd world stuff, but it's pretty crap for a 1st world one.

" A third world country " possibly too strong a phrase, but you would have to be quite the optimist not to see the pretty poor state we are now in. Unfortunately for Labour, this can't be sorted in one term, and will probably let " that lot" back in, and so the decline will continue.

Not third world no, but if you look at GDP subdivided by region then large lumps of the UK are on a par with Romania and other parts of central europe, and that starts to matter

BillMC

Full Member

I remember being shocked by the level of inequality in Morocco in the 70s. Income inequality in Britain now outstrips Morocco.

I do think inequality in the UK is a problem, but that's not factually true. The UK has a Gini Coefficient of 36.6, Morocco is 39.5. Lower is more equal.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality

Gini coefficients - Morocco measured in 2013, UK in 2019 so both are likely to have changed in intervening periods.
My guess, FWIW, is the gap will have closed - Morocco falling & UK rising.

the UK is miles away from something you’d categorise as “third world” in every measurable index. So the answer is still a resounding “no”.

Oh no, I absolutely agree. I'm just pointing out perils of statistics.

Irrespective of all the damage the Tories have done (some of it deliberate, of course) this country will never move forward until we stop constantly looking back.  The Monarchy, the Aristocracy, the Honours system etc etc just keep perpetuating the past.  The ownership of the land and the vast majority of the wealth by a few people is nothing short of obscene.  They are also the ones mainly responsible for us constantly harking back to our 'Glorious past'.  We must be fairly unique in the developed world in this respect, shirley?

Are we a 21st century European emulation of 20th century Argentina perhaps? We have apparently declining productivity, increasing indebtedness and more pervasive everyday corruption like the driving test touting thing that’s been hitting the news.

It strikes me that it’s going to be hard to clean things up when it so often appears there’s a broad acceptance in society of the entitlement of a kleptocratic privately educated “elite”.

This is a shadow of the country I moved to 20 years ago, and it’s increasingly striking how run down it is here when I return from visiting our neighbouring countries.

Agree with this:

We can still feel isolated, alone and helpless whilst feeling pressurised into a well paid job we hate, that takes us away from our family and we can’t find a way out of.

I think a lot of the problems in the UK are difficult to capture with statistics or graphs - so are largely ignored. They're wishy-washy "Guardian" things that are mostly imperceptible. It's class, culture and community. It's security and stability. It's perceptions and opinions.

The biggest council in the country has just declared itself bankrupt. 20 more are said to be on the brink of doing the same

I’d say that’s the very definition of a failed state

A failed state wouldn't allow women to make a £760m unequal pay claim, let them win it, actually pay it, or let it bring down a local authority serving a million people.

i.e. we have rights, functioning legal system to some degree, mostly stick to the law and principles even when it's inconvenient etc.

They are also the ones mainly responsible for us constantly harking back to our ‘Glorious past’.  We must be fairly unique in the developed world in this respect, shirley?

Beyond the Mail-Telegraph-Rees-Mogg Axis, I don't think there is a lot of harking back to past (glorious or otherwise) in everyday life in the UK, actually. It's a small and dying class of poppy-botherers now. France, Austria, Greece, Russia, China all place a greater emphasis on the past imvho.

...there are certainly places more attractive.

Always have been. The big thing the UK has had during my lifetime is tolerance. That has been cynically eroded quite deliberately by those in power.

Where are these utopias?

Asking for an engineering type friend who is genuinely fed up with copping the blame for shit going wrong after putting forward the opinion that stuff done right takes X amount of time and not one eighth of that time.

I don't know if Germany is quite the place it was when I was younger, but when I graduated in civil engineering the German side of the family addressed me as Herr Ingeneur. There was a running gag that in Germany if you announced you were an engineer you would be invited in to meet the daughter, in the UK you would be invited in to fix the washing machine.