🇬🇧💶 The UK is a poor country with a lot of very rich people. The average person in the UK will soon be worse off than the average Pole or Slovenian.
Britain has actually been in a state of decline since the 80s, how did this happen?
1/13 🧵
2/13 Since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, successive Conservative and New Labour governments have embraced neoliberalism.
The UK transitioned from entrepreneurial capitalism to rentier capitalism.
3/13 In rentier capitalism, the economy is organised around income-generating assets.
Ownership of sought-after scarce assets becomes the source of a large portion of economic activity, and the regime is dominated by vastly wealthy rentiers.
4/13 The effect of Thatcherite-era reforms were to open up new income streams to rentiers that had little or no productive effects.
The share of UK GDP coming from manufacturing was 32% in 1973, today it is under 9%.
The UK today is producing a lot of money, but not much else.
5/13 The UK has pioneered a lot of reforms to empower rentiers:
privatisation, tax breaks, financialisation and deregulation, expansion of consumer credit (household debt increased from 37% to 70% of GDP under Thatcher), and the disaster that is public private partnerships:
6/13 London has exploded as a center of international finance capital.
In fact, without London, the UK's average living standard would be poorer than EVERY STATE in America
7/13 Foreign buyers now account for 41% of activity on the London property market.
Financialisation centered in London has become a huge drag on the rest of the British economy, costing the UK economy an estimated £4.5 TRILLION in unrealised growth in a 20 year period.
8/13 Deregulation has also allowed the UK to become a global centre for financial fraud.
A 2016 report estimated that financial fraud costs the UK £193bn per year.
9/13 The City of London is also at the centre of the world’s “shadow banking” economy, which is now estimated to account for half the world’s assets.
Britain has created a deeply complex web of "offshoring" to allow the world’s super rich to hide their wealth in tax havens.
10/13 Britain has also chosen to keep an overvalued pound to favour financialisation, which has helped crush their native industry by making their exports unaffordable.
11/13 Now, millionaires are fleeing the UK faster than any country in the world.
Only China will have more millionaires emigrate in 2024, but Britain outpaces them per capita by a factor of 14!
12/13 It's becoming more common for big US firms like Blackrock to acquire British companies.
The UK economy is becoming more subservient to Wall Street, while the new financialised economy engages in a great asset-stripping of the rest of the country. How long can this last?
13/13 All of this is taken from my latest essay.
If you want to read more about how Britain has become a postnational state, subservient to international finance, here it is in full:
keithwoods.pub/p/the-great-br…
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