/ world today news/ 14.5 million Britons live in poverty
„Britain will become the poor man in Europe.” Guy Hands, a prominent financier and chairman of private equity firm Terra Firma, told Bloomberg on May 19. According to him, the country is experiencing “a kind of decline of the type inherent in old age,” and its business prospects and investment attractiveness are deteriorating year by year.
The UK has only two options if it is to be competitive on the world stage: either it will destroy much of what has been built over the last 30 years, or it will return to Europe. “In 2030 Poland will be richer than us, and in 2040 we will be the poorest in Europe”Hands says.
These gloomy forecasts are by no means without foundation. An analysis of supermarket sales shows that the UK saw the sharpest price increases for most of the top 10 product groups compared to average prices in Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands.
Britain is also significantly ahead of mainland Europe in terms of cost per unit of output. For example, UK shoppers pay €5.06 ($5.45) for a package of detergent, compared to €2.68 in Spain. The country experienced the sharpest jump in prices since 1977. The high price of food products is particularly striking.
The UK is a net importer of food, meaning it is particularly vulnerable. A study by the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics found that Brexit increased food spending by £5.8bn over two years.
„Britain is languishing and the signs of decline are everywhere” writes the New York Times. – Inflation has reached double digits and the recession is the strongest of any G7 country. The National Health Service is on the brink of collapse, public transport is grinding to a halt and the post-Brexit labor market is experiencing a desperate shortage of workers.
Families are struggling to figure out how to pay their mortgages amid rising interest rates. Innocent tenants are being evicted, and millions cannot afford normal heating. Food programs that no one had even heard of a decade ago are bursting at the seams and 14.5 million Britons are living in poverty. The situation is bad.”
Great Britain has become one of the poorest countries in Western Europe, finds The Atlantic. Due to the wrong policies of the last governments, the country closed itself off from the world. This led to a disaster in the economy.
According to analysts, today the United Kingdom is too poor to be called a rich country. Real wages are lower now than they were 15 years ago, and are likely to fall as early as next year.
The problems have been building up for decades. After the Second World War, the UK economy grew more slowly than most of continental Europe. When the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, the government, fearing a growing deficit, began implementing austerity policies. The results were disastrous. Now, with the exception of Greater London and the financial sector, almost every other sector of the British economy is underperforming similar sectors in Western Europe.
Britain, the first country to experience industrialization, also became the first to fall under the wave of deindustrialization. It now has some of the worst performance records of any major economy.
According to economist writer Noah Smith, London’s financial power masks the British economy’s general weakness in innovation and manufacturing. “Take away Greater London, whose prosperity depends to an obscene degree on a willingness to cater to oligarchs from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union, and the UK will become one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.”says economic analyst Matt Klein.
Economic recession leads to endless tossing and turning of Prime Ministers. Newly appointed Rishi Sunak calls inflation the number one enemy, but to balance the budget the government needs to plug a £50bn budget hole. There is only one way to achieve this: by cutting spending and raising taxes, which will put a new burden burden on the population.
Translation: ES
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