The gathering crisis in the UK (opens in new tab)

I read something slightly different into your metaphor: it's about pro-social, positive sum games vs zero/negative sum games.

The mouse is participating in the positive sum game of joint savings, and the cat is robbing it blind (very negative sum as it's also robbing its future self).

There's a lot of that happening across society (healthcare, education, addiction-fueled tech companies, ...), and the people who do it oftentimes do end up (at least short term) better off (= rich), but we as a nation end up poorer (the whole negative sum thing).

There are however plenty of ways to become rich doing positive sum things (though lord knows it's harder than it looks), so there will be rich people who don't deserve the blame so to speak.

But the clearly visible, media-amplified cases will of course be cartoonish villains, all too eager to sell you the rope to hang them with so to speak.

How are „the rich“ bringing the crisis about, in your opinion?

Are you talking about the budget deficit? It’s not really like a pot you only look into when times are hard since it’s constantly known.

I really like your metaphor, but it is misleading.

The world needs more guillotines

To answer such questions I always imagine transplanting a random citizen of country 1 to country 2 and vice versa. In other words, I guess you should ask the expats.

Having lived in both the UK and the US, I would say that anyone not rich is still much better off in the former because of the free healthcare, better infrastructure, cheaper education, etc.

However, in my experience the UK living standards (again, for a non-rich person) are significantly worse than the rest of Northwestern Europe. And the UK's trajectory is not looking good.

> are things really that bad there?

UK resident here. I am in a lucky position where the current hardships don't affect me financially. In the short-term, I can ignore the issue and pretend it doesn't exist. I wish it was only a short-term issue.

Long-term however, most of what attracted me to the UK in the first place died with the pandemic. The high street in most places is a shadow of its former self (replaced by money-laundering fronts masquerading as gift/American candy shops), work in tech is stuck in a weird hybrid state where it's neither fully remote nor on-site and is the worst of both worlds, wages haven't kept up with inflation while housing prices have skyrocketed, businesses are struggling and will struggle even more as people don't even have the money to pay their heating/energy bills, let alone for discretionary spending. The NHS is basically a write-off at this point and your only option is to go private.

Taxes on the other hand are still high. Now I don't know anybody who likes paying taxes, but it stings less when you feel like you get your money's worth out of them (in terms of infrastructure or services, such as the NHS) and the tax rate is adequately calibrated. However, the tax brackets have yet to adjust for inflation, so you must earn more (and thus pay more tax) even though your standard of living hasn't actually changed at all. Services that you used to be able to get for "free" (paid by your taxes) such as the NHS are no longer functional, so you must now effectively pay twice and go private instead.

Politically, there doesn't seem to be any urgency to fix the problem either, from any side of the political spectrum. I haven't paid attention to them too much here (I can't vote anyway), but the feeling I got was complete apathy from the ruling class. It always felt like a plane flying on autopilot with nobody at the controls - we happened to luck out for a while and prosper despite that but now we're approaching a mountain and it will be really bad if someone doesn't change course.

I have an EU passport, when my current lease expires I will be moving back to the EU and taking my business with me. At this point I am losing money by staying here, paying huge rents and taxes for sub-par value in return.

It depends on who you ask. If you ask any british person who has been out of the country for a few years, yes, it's absolutely going down the pipes.

If you ask people who have lived there the whole time, they've been frog-boiled.

The truth is somewhere in the middle: the current malaise is a continuation of pre-existing trends. There were always holes in british roads, now there are just more of them. There were always food banks, now they just run out of food before they run out of hungry people.

I don’t think so —- it’s all a bit hyperbolic . Yeah tough times but most inflation forecasts have it going doing to near 0% by the end of 2023 — guy needs to breathe.

That cannot possibly be the only thing it delivered. The likes of Farage have been working on this thing for decades. They must be getting a lot more it of it

> And we thought things were bad in the US.

That inflation is mostly driven by energy costs, which are a direct result of European policy failures on nuclear and fossil fuels. The US is mostly a net neutral producer/consumer of fossil fuels and energy, which is why it's insulated from the impacts of Russia cutting off gas.

It's starting from a decent place, but the delta is steep. (I'm not from the UK.)

It’s pretty grim at the moment.

Brexit caused an odd selection effect in the Tory party where sensible responsible politicians such as Ken Clarke and maybe Theresa May were pushed out for pointing out the problems with Brexit and replaced but more the irresponsible fibbing variety who were prepared to deny reality and say everything with hard brexit will be great such as Boris and his fellows. Not sure where this all goes next. Maybe to Starmer who at least is responsible but will have quite the mess to deal with.

> The standard approach for the government now seems to be to look for short term wins in the tabloids and ignore the long term.

Was this ever not the case?

This might sound like cheap shots, but I say it with love for my friends in the Uk...

If you look at Britain historically...coal is dead. Wool is dead. The island itself is fairly small for much agriculture. There aren't a whole lot of natural resources. They had power and resources through their empire, but that is gone. Their one shot, so to speak, was like many developed nations - services, including financial. But Brexit was signaling, and companies saw that there was little incentive to stay and do business there vs. Frankfurt, Zurich, New York, etc.

So... yeah, a lot of us pre-Brexit saw this malaise not only for what it was, but what it was going to become. It isn't a pretty picture and the utter void of competent political leadership means this is probably a protracted decline.

Who is squeezing „less well off“ and making unregulated profits?

There's something wild going on there, too. Leaked documents have shown how their best chance at real Labour-style governance (Corbyn) was intentionally smeared from within as an antisemite, among other things, in order to torpedo his popularity. Instead, Labour has the hugely ineffectual Tory-esque Keir Starmer now. Feels very much like a managed opposition.

A couple of things:

Tories have done well to court the people that show up at the polls with things like keeping the Triple-Lock pension guarantee[1].

Like the Democrats, Labour's demographics have started to shift more to the well-educated (though I suspect this will swing back massively, come the next election). This alienated their traditional working class base who care more about their own economic realities than whatever social crusade is the flavour of the week.

Young Labour went out of their way to paint pro-Brexiters as racists and bigots. The dirty secret is that even Corbyn has been a long time Euro-sceptic. Because of the in-fighting on the correct position, Labour didn't take a hard stance on Brexit until very close to the end, IIRC. At which point, anti-Brexit votes were being siphoned off by the Liberal Democrats, with pro-Brexit votes going to the Tories.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)...

Funny, from the outside, UK always sounds as if it is overrun by leftist politics. I wouldn‘t have guessed tories were in charge most of the time.

London has a Labor major and it is the economic Center, so maybe there was a lot of Labor influence on the economy after all?

What’s remarkable is that everyone recognizes that “the disagreements over solutions have become” “intractable” but thinks the solution is to handle more things at the federal/EU/UN level.

I always wonder why balkanization is described as "desperate" or some other extremely bad thing.

Can't usher in a new order if the old order is still functioning.

Or an opportunity for a powerful figure to take power by force and rule over all.

I'm not for dictatorships, but we already have too many countries in the world. And provinces and states within these countries. Too many little fiefdoms. Too many wannabe lords. Too many presidents, premiers, prime ministers, governors, chancellors, kings, emperors. Too many parliaments, congresses, too many senators, deputies, representatives. Too much division. Hell, we're going to have American, Chinese, and European bases on the Moon and Mars. No wonder we can't tackle collective challenges. We'll be traveling through other galaxies and still call ourselves based on the particular piece of land we were born in on this particular planet called the Earth.

I fully acknowledge that this is a privileged point of view on my part. I am lucky enough to live in an industrialized and peaceful enough country to be able to hold this opinion without having to worry about my basic survival.

I know you mean well, but

> * Restart of all possible coal plants (only two have announced restart in Germany!)

> * Removal of any restrictions limiting oil and diesel fired gensets from operating

are really bad ideas. The current crisis is nothing compared to the looming climate crisis. What we need is a hard sustained break in energy consumption. We can have a good quality of life with a lot less energy, if we stop wasting so many resources on things that don't matter or are not required. We should buy (and produce) less non-essentials and travel should be limited to things that really require physical presence. Home office should be offered whenever possible.

> This is not limited to the UK

Sure, everyone is struggling but there are some unique twists and turns in the UK right now, and some have been made worse by own goals.

Yeah, it's all fairly bad, but then I'm not sure where I would move to.

US seems bonkers in its own way, Germany is buckling under the gas crisis, France... lovely place but i can't understand how it stays afloat. Poland is just about in free fall. Italy and Spain seem (?) perpetually in the grip of a political crisis. Other countries i know less about.

Switzerland? Netherlands? Denmark?

> French nuclear fleet is just out of service

Isn't it just temporary due to the heatwave? Thus they'll be able to power them back on as winter hits (which coincides with extra demand for heating)?

Great stuff, fully agreed with all of these.

And I would add: a very large industrial effort to create heatpumps on such a scale that we can convert all of Europe in two years tops.

I don't think "freedom" is to blame. Freedom in varying degrees has been around for a long time, and attempts to exploit it failed to produce results for the enemies of freedom. They have however recently identified a weakness, (not freedom) and have exploited it to devastating effect. If we continue to fail to identify and make repairs to that weakness, well then that's on us and we deserve what we get.

I think if your country's politics can be this badly steamrolled by a kleptocracy with the GDP of Italy then maybe, just maybe, you live in a failed state.

Despite a 24/7 media campaign to suggest otherwise, there is no proof that Russia actually did this. The first line of your link agrees.

I think the relentless scapegoating by Western elite of Russia/China/Iran/COVID/$CURRENT_BOGEYMAN/etc. is the real problem. They are avoiding responsibility for a collapsing system, which is only going to allow that collapse to continue.

I'm not sure how accurately you can call it "interference" when major political players within the affected nations are actively courting it as a way to achieve their aims while maintaining plausible deniability and a consistent funding source.

What are you claiming? That Rupert Murdoch and his children are Russian sleeper agents?

Look no further than Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov’s daughter, Elizaveta, being an assistant to far-right Aymeric Chauprade, a French Member of the European Parliament.

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

Yep, exactly. The US is nowadays Rome, and the Western world is its modern Roman empire. When the actual (Western) Roman empire fell into decline, Rome (the city) was hit last in terms of decline in standards of living. It's the peripheries which got cut off first.

I don't understand.

A nation is, technically speaking, it's rulers and the rules they impose (on others and themselves). So bringing down a nation would imply a sea-change in rulers & rules. Considering that authoritarianism is humanities Default form of Government, it stands to reason that "bringing down" a democracy means reverting to that default. This will happen with the alternative is worse. (The situation in Somalia is arguably worse than authoritarianism, for example). Authoritarianism might also serve, at least in theory, as a kind of "boot loader" for something better - although the transition always seems to require a great deal of blood.

Create a crisis, provide a solution. Install bought/captured politicians, perhaps a dash of tyranny, CBDC and social credit for all. Total surveillance and enslavement. It doesn't require violence, people will demand these 'solutions' when they are stressed enough.

Every tyrannical regime in the past had a constitution. Rendered mute by a uni-party system, captured media and judiciary. Now you can add big tech collusion to the fray.

Brexit didn't really come into force until January 2020, so we're only what, 2.5 years into its implementation now? Seems a little early to be dismissing the dire predictions.

> I'd ignore Stross. He's been predicting inflation and famine since Brexit passed.

Thank God he was wrong about all that, it's hard to imagine what the UK would look like with close to 20% inflation.

Wait...

How quickly do you think such systemic changes are going to play out? And it already did kill people. The covid response was not exactly stellar.

Yeah, Charlie was an early victim of Brexit Derangement Syndrome. I stopped following him after a long "state of the world" links post where every single link was to the Guardian. Granted, the Grauniad isn't much worse than any other paper, but if it's your only window onto the world then you're going to get a very distorted picture of reality.

What, how?! Currently, it looks further than ever.

> Green energy (except nuclear) ... the rare earth elements.

These facts may interest you:

"the [French Environment and Energy Management Agency] ultimately concluded that the renewable energy sector actually barely uses such materials."[0]

"A large amount of uranium is in rare earth deposits, and may be extracted as a by-product."[1]

> Need to remove red tape, ... de-regulate business

Another quote for you, about the Fukushima disaster:

"There is a growing body of evidence that suggests the accident was the result of failures in regulation and nuclear plant design and that both were lagging behind international best practices and standards."[2]

[0] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2019/11/28/are-rare-earths-used-...

[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

[2] https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p...

> Need to remove red tape, stop controlling prices, de-regulate business, establish free trade agreements, and do all manner of things to increase real productivity and not the government-pretend kind of productivity.

Is there any historical evidence of this approach leading to positive change?

Just theoretically, I don't see it--energy is a public good with tons of externalities (both positive and negative).

What is 'red tape' though? No-one ever defines what red tape they would remove.

Also, surely the problem at the moment is that energy prices are controlled by series of regional monopoly energy providers, the only thing stopping them from putting bills up astronomically is price controls. If you removed the regulation stopping them from raising prices energy bills will be so high that you will have rioting in central London that would make the poll tax riots look like a church fete. I think that would be a rash move.

Green energy will save the environment and save the poor decades from now when these sophisticated and complex climate and economic models predict the poor will really suffer from an apocalypse.

It is unfortunate that the poor will likely die at a higher rate in the next three years from reduced economic output, ESG induced famine, inflation and that Germany is back to coal and firewood in the short term. But realize it is for a greater future.

Non-dispatchable generation sources are just fine, so long as you also consider storage requirements and transmission improvements in the total cost. If we could get commitment to those things as part of generation rollout I suspect the total cost per MW would be comparable to nuke, provide the same base loading capacity (better actually, since it could quickly respond to demand) and not generate nuclear waste. If we aren't able to summon the political will to tackle the storage and transmission issues then I agree nuke is the best option but it;s silly and reductive to paint it as 'nuke good renewable bad'