Main stream media seems to have woken up to the fact that our neighbours are considerably wealthier than us.
The French take that extra wealth in terms of longer holidays, a shorter working week and early retirement, the Germans in money. Pretty soon we are gong to be overtaken by the Slovenes and the Poles, and already the right wing media is in a spin about it all.
This is why the government and its backers is calling us all lazy, claiming that “wokeness”, whatever that is, makes us unproductive, that taxes have to be cut further, that the young need to leave the country to prosper and the pathetically small state pension is now unaffordable. Not quite the sun light uplands is it?
The simple fact is that decades of Tory policies have brought us to this. Lack of investment, lack of home building, bad education for the majority, effortless success for second raters from private schools, lack of training, bad management, a collapsing state, unaffordable tax cuts, low productivity and low growth. Then on top of all that Brexit has cost between 4-6% of growth. That’s half the spending on the NHS or three times the defence budget, gone for ever.
Yet still the media calls for more tax cuts to make us more like America.
But we are not America, we need and want a European style economy. Good infrastructure, trains that work, clean water, better education and childcare, good free healthcare and a competent government.
These all cost money, we could have spent North Sea oil revenue on this and been like France or Germany. Now we have to find the money from a smaller pot, from far behind our rivals, with trade barriers to our largest markets and on our own.
It is good that we are finally being told just how bad things are but we are still being sold the same old failed solutions that got us in this mess in the first place. Until that changes nothing else will.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
It might be interesting to compare what the UK and Norway did with their respective North Sea Oil revenues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway