Thread by @nfergus

My new "Rotten Britain" column in @TheFP contains some pretty startling statistics. It may help to summarize them in a thread. 1/16thefp.com/p/niall-fergus…

Essex Police—the force responsible for harassing @AllisonPearson—recorded 808 Non-Crime Hate Incidents in 2023, up from 500 in 2018, a rate of 21.5 NCHIs per 100 officers. According to @Policy_Exchange, the British police spent an estimated 60,000 police hours per annum on NCHIs. 2/16

UK real wage growth has been flat for 16 years. Average weekly wages are only 0.8% higher today than at their previous peak in 2008. Annual real wages are 6.9% lower for the average full-time worker than they were back then. 3/16

Productivity growth between 2019 and 2023 was 7.6% in the United States, compared with 1.5% in Britain. In 2003, UK per capita GDP was 81% of the U.S. equivalent. Today it’s 69%. 4/16

No Anglosphere country has seen its share of global GDP shrink more this century than Britain, down nearly a third (−31%) since 2000. Subtract London from the UK economy, and the rest of the country would be as poor in terms of per capita GDP as Mississippi. 5/16

The national debt (public sector net debt excluding public sector banks) is very close to 100% of GDP (99.4%) and set to rise, compared with lows of just over 20 percent in the 1990s. Since 2021, debt service costs have jumped above 10% of revenues and 4% of GDP, their highest levels since World War II. 6/16

Chronic under-investment in infrastructure has coincided with significant population growth. The British population has grown by 13% since 2005, or by 19% since 1990. The striking thing is that nearly all that increase is due to net migration, as the total fertility rate has been below the replacement rate (2.1 live births per woman) since 1973. Indeed, according to the Office for National Statistics, the total fertility rate in England and Wales in 2023 fell to its lowest level on record: 1.44 children per woman. 7/16

“In the year ending June 2024,” wrote @GoodwinMJ recently, “some 1.2 million people—equivalent to a city the size of Birmingham—migrated into Britain. . . . And more than 1 million of them came from outside Europe—typically from India, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, and Zimbabwe. . . . Since 2012, net migration has added 4.5 million people to the country, equivalent to four cities the size of Birmingham.” 8/16

The total figure is even higher if one calculates gross migration: just under 7.4 million since Britons voted to leave the EU, and 11 million since 2012. 9/16

Only 18% of non-European nationals came on work visas. The great majority are students (29%), students’ dependents (8%), workers’ dependents (23%), and asylum-seekers (8%). 10/16

The foreign-born share of the total population of England and Wales is now one-fifth, compared with 15.6% for the United States. And of that foreign-born share, 70% were born outside Europe. The Muslim share of the British population was forecast by Pew in 2010 to rise from 6.1% in 2020 to 11.3% in 2050. The projected Muslim share in the U.S. was just 2.1%. 11/16

Nearly one in five employees of the NHS in England are foreign nationals. Just as the NHS is one of the largest employers in the world, with a total of 1.34 million people on its payroll, so it also treats an astonishingly large number of people. In 2023–24, there were 16.5 million attendances at Accident & Emergency departments and 4.7 million admissions, as well as 23.4 million referrals for outpatient appointments, and around 8.6 million elective admissions. In Britain, it seems, you are either working for the NHS or being treated by the NHS. 12/16

The total number of people claiming benefits because of long-term ill health was 650,000 before the Covid pandemic. According to @FraserNelson, the number now exceeds 3 million and by 2028 will have risen to 4.1 million. Since 2010, the overall approval rate for sickness benefits has more than doubled to 80%. 13/16

Including all forms of benefit, one in five working-age people are now classified as economically inactive, meaning they are neither in work nor looking for a job. There are areas of my native Glasgow where nearly half the working-age population is on some form or other of welfare. 14/16

On returning to England after two decades of working in the United States, I thought I must be imagining the increased rainfall, so I checked the data. Sure enough, the decade from 2011 to 2020 was on average 9% wetter than the 1961 to 1990 average. And six of the UK’s 10 wettest years since 1862 have occurred since 1998: in descending order, 2000, 2020, 2012, 1998, 2008, and 2014. 15/16

All in all, it's a truly dismal picture. To see what Britain needs to do to stop the rot (though not to stop the rain), read the whole article here: 16/16thefp.com/p/niall-fergus…