Eight Reasons Why the UK is going over an economic cliff
Here's why, and I need ten paragraphs to do it. Firstly, this country manufactures very little any more. It has very low savings. It is highly taxed and regulated, to the point where small business owners would be lucky to take away eight or nine per cent of their money after company tax, local tax, and all the other charges.
Secondly, the UK has gross inequality built into its social model and papered over by ludicrous levels of personal borrowing (and yes, I do have credit cards). It's debt, whilst way below the EU average, is climbing very significantly and now looks set to climb further.
Thirdly, the UK has built-in deficits in the balance of trade and is highly dependent on global capital flows to keep the balance of payments steady. It is slipping towards energy-dependence on foreign fuel sources without having invested in its nuclear or coal potential, and sources of long-term funding for new business are practically non-existent.
In addition, if it were not for immigration, it would be doomed in productivity terms, and indeed the long-term inability of the UK to hold on to the bulk of its brightest and best-educated workforce is if anything enhanced by all the other factors that I have identified. Many of the indigenous population of the UK who have not got out are kept afloat, indeed kept off the employment market, by a truly ridiculous level of government welfare payment and 'targeted' benefits which mean not only that a large number of people don't have to work, but that they cannot work.
Fifthly, successive British governments have attempted to avoid spending cuts, and have in fact increased the government share of the economy to around a quarter, by adopting a programme called the Private Finance Initiative that promises spending benefits today in return for ruinous repayment of costs tomorrow. The programme also depends upon outsourcing government activities in such a way that inefficient firms cannot be truly disciplined and can only be fired at great cost.
Sixth, the UK population remaining is ageing and has very little pension provision. Despite huge amounts of money being thrown at NHS/private finance providers over the past few years, care for the elderly, and for diseases and illnesses associated with old age, has not markedly improved. In orphanages and care homes, the state has struck at non-state bodies such as churches and has undermined unpaid carers in such a way that there is very little reason for people to supplement the state system with private effort.
A cast of mind based on secular selfishness and the sexual righteousness of metropolitan groups has led to the closure of orphanages, attacks on the religious, and soon it will lead to a group-based attempt to sideline anyone doing anything worthwhile who is not under state regulation.
Indeed, newspapers of record are now starting to talk of the advantages of 'dying at home' and euthanasia. This is of a piece, I suppose, with the UK political elite's contempt for human life. Things used to be expressed by such people in terms of the bloody code that saw working class people hanged on one of a variety of 200 potential offences; now it is expressed in terms of the abomination that was the Human Embryology and Fertilisation bill, which deepens a crisis in which a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortions which provide material for uncharted experimentation, sometimes upon the remains of beings that could have easily survived outside the womb.
Seventh, the UK's credit model, more than that of the United States, is based on rising house prices. This has been true since the Thatcher administration sold off council houses. House prices are now crashing.
The eighth point, which is related, is that very few of these new houses were built with allotments or in areas where people could grow their own food on good garden soil. Instead, they were based around supermarkets, which global food and oil price rises are going to damage very severely. When the history of the UK's crash is written, the dependence on cheap supermarket economies of scale for food, part-time extra jobs at supermarkets to maintain a 'quality of life' by maintaining minimum credit card payments, and the effect of supermarkets on small farmers will be near the heart of the sad tale.
There are things that might be done, which I'll save for the next post. Yet no-one is doing them. Here's a video of where the UK is right now, and of what is going to happen.
Here's why, and I need ten paragraphs to do it. Firstly, this country manufactures very little any more. It has very low savings. It is highly taxed and regulated, to the point where small business owners would be lucky to take away eight or nine per cent of their money after company tax, local tax, and all the other charges.
Secondly, the UK has gross inequality built into its social model and papered over by ludicrous levels of personal borrowing (and yes, I do have credit cards). It's debt, whilst way below the EU average, is climbing very significantly and now looks set to climb further.
Thirdly, the UK has built-in deficits in the balance of trade and is highly dependent on global capital flows to keep the balance of payments steady. It is slipping towards energy-dependence on foreign fuel sources without having invested in its nuclear or coal potential, and sources of long-term funding for new business are practically non-existent.
In addition, if it were not for immigration, it would be doomed in productivity terms, and indeed the long-term inability of the UK to hold on to the bulk of its brightest and best-educated workforce is if anything enhanced by all the other factors that I have identified. Many of the indigenous population of the UK who have not got out are kept afloat, indeed kept off the employment market, by a truly ridiculous level of government welfare payment and 'targeted' benefits which mean not only that a large number of people don't have to work, but that they cannot work.
Fifthly, successive British governments have attempted to avoid spending cuts, and have in fact increased the government share of the economy to around a quarter, by adopting a programme called the Private Finance Initiative that promises spending benefits today in return for ruinous repayment of costs tomorrow. The programme also depends upon outsourcing government activities in such a way that inefficient firms cannot be truly disciplined and can only be fired at great cost.
Sixth, the UK population remaining is ageing and has very little pension provision. Despite huge amounts of money being thrown at NHS/private finance providers over the past few years, care for the elderly, and for diseases and illnesses associated with old age, has not markedly improved. In orphanages and care homes, the state has struck at non-state bodies such as churches and has undermined unpaid carers in such a way that there is very little reason for people to supplement the state system with private effort.
A cast of mind based on secular selfishness and the sexual righteousness of metropolitan groups has led to the closure of orphanages, attacks on the religious, and soon it will lead to a group-based attempt to sideline anyone doing anything worthwhile who is not under state regulation.
Indeed, newspapers of record are now starting to talk of the advantages of 'dying at home' and euthanasia. This is of a piece, I suppose, with the UK political elite's contempt for human life. Things used to be expressed by such people in terms of the bloody code that saw working class people hanged on one of a variety of 200 potential offences; now it is expressed in terms of the abomination that was the Human Embryology and Fertilisation bill, which deepens a crisis in which a quarter of all pregnancies end in abortions which provide material for uncharted experimentation, sometimes upon the remains of beings that could have easily survived outside the womb.
Seventh, the UK's credit model, more than that of the United States, is based on rising house prices. This has been true since the Thatcher administration sold off council houses. House prices are now crashing.
The eighth point, which is related, is that very few of these new houses were built with allotments or in areas where people could grow their own food on good garden soil. Instead, they were based around supermarkets, which global food and oil price rises are going to damage very severely. When the history of the UK's crash is written, the dependence on cheap supermarket economies of scale for food, part-time extra jobs at supermarkets to maintain a 'quality of life' by maintaining minimum credit card payments, and the effect of supermarkets on small farmers will be near the heart of the sad tale.
There are things that might be done, which I'll save for the next post. Yet no-one is doing them. Here's a video of where the UK is right now, and of what is going to happen.
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