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I’d offer a limited defense of this country.
The UK’s growth trend since 2007 is largely because the UK was one of the fastest growing major economies in the previous decade, and because of various second-order effects of the US dollar being highly depressed from the late 90s until 2008/2009 and then surging in value until now. For a brief moment the UK’s nominal gdp/capita was even slightly higher than the US in 2007, again because of an FX quirk after the dotcom bust and mid-2000s oil bubble sent the dollar cratering. The fiscal problem is, as others have said, obvious and has long been obvious. Brits expect continental European social democracy at American tax rates. It isn’t possible and has never been possible. Therefore the UK will continue to run high deficits and struggle with poor public services. It is what it is, but it isn’t collapse-tier really. Every major party has acknowledged it in private, there just aren’t any palatable solutions.
The immigration problem is significant but France and Sweden’s problems with immigration and Islamism are still much worse. As a percentage of non-European immigrants, the UK has fewer migrants from the Islamic world than almost anywhere else in Northern Europe, including France, Germany, Benelux and the Nordics. Again, a collapse is more likely elsewhere (probably France). The UK is closer to the US on the “pace of being destroyed by mass immigration” scale than worse-off countries elsewhere in Western Europe, and more likely to end up Brazilified than Lebanonified.
32 year old warships being scrapped. The biggest problem for the British military is America’s snail-level pace at building F-35s which means that it will be 15+ years after the two aircraft carriers came in before they have enough planes to operate them as intentioned.
The core problem with the British civil service is that it’s run by figures like Cummings who believe issues are a result of stupidity or inefficiency instead of deep-rooted political realities (like the tax situation I describe above, and views on planning among the electorate) that can’t be changed by putting a few smart autists in power in Whitehall.
He says the opposite, that the culture of government is deeply broken. A few smart people can't fix it without full control over staffing, hiring and sacking - they need to break the power of the Civil Service and recruit a new class of elected politician educated in a fundamentally different way.
The culture of government wasn’t the primary problem though, it was a banal economic issue that requires telling the public something they don’t want to hear and then fixing it knowing it will cost you the next election, and likely the one after that.
Cummings would be shocked at how little difference replacing the bureaucracy made; the bulk of expenditure isn’t on stereotypical faceless bureaucrats inefficiently faxing documents around large office buildings, it’s on pensions and healthcare.
British healthcare is not run excellently: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/maternity-payouts-twice-cost-of-care-times-health-commission-svdhsjhqk
https://unherd.com/2020/09/lets-be-honest-the-nhs-is-awful/
https://www.themotte.org/post/829/friday-fun-thread-for-january-12/178889?context=8#context
If the country was governed well, everything would improve, health included. There are ways to do more with less. They could've managed HS2 properly for one thing. And when was the bureaucracy replaced?
They can’t manage HS2 properly for the same reason that California can’t built HSR or that infrastructure projects in all Anglo countries cost 5x as much as they do anywhere else, namely common law and restrictions on eminent domain that allow more challenges and more legal action. Only parliament can solve it but they don’t want to because the people don’t want it; Boris Johnson proposed planning reform and people in deep-blue Tory constituencies flipped to the Liberal Democrats in protest at the idea that local small town councils would no longer be able to veto any construction. Not really a bureaucracy problem.
The NHS is awful because the UK spends much less, both absolutely per-person and as a proportion of GDP, than other wealthy nations. Everything is done at the cheapest price, because of the tax/spend conundrum I discussed. The people won’t accept more taxes and won’t accept privatization, so there it is. Again, it’s a people problem, not a state problem. The compromise that the UK has (mediocre public services and moderate taxation levels) is one the public have selected. There are no administrative solutions, no magic sauce in the bureaucracy that can fix it. It’s just basic math. Either taxes go up or services get worse, the public will accept neither.
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Uh, the US’s largest states are white minority, gen z is the last white majority generation, there’s no functioning border, and we have more immigrants than births every year.
Now I don’t think a Hispanic majority- or plurality or whatever- is a death knell, but ‘control of immigration’ is not an American strength.
Yes, but fundamentally the US probably isn’t going to experience major ethnic conflict because of immigration. Latinos are mostly Christian (either devout or secularized catholics), quickly adopt American dress and have high intermarriage rates by the third generation. Most of Central America moving north will manifest itself in, long term, a lower performing population, higher inequality, more corruption and crime, and general civilizational decline, probably. But there will be no grand clash of civilizations, thus Brazilification.
In much of continental Europe, non-European immigration is overwhelmingly Muslim. Assimilation is limited, cultural identities strong. Very few German or Austrian second-generation Muslim immigrants consider themselves German or Austrian, for example. They conceive of themselves as having a strong, separate identity. This makes Lebanonization that descends into open ethno-religious conflict much more likely in countries like France, Sweden, Germany etc.
The UK sits kind of between the two. Immigrants are a lot more diverse, with large Chinese and Indian (Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist) contingents, many African Christians from former colonies (France’s former colonies are largely Muslim, by contrast) plus a large number of additional groups from all over the world who speak English (eg. Filipinos are the third most common nationality in the NHS after British and Indians). Islamic immigration remains high, and there have been terror attacks, the grooming gangs scandals and so on, but it is a smaller proportion of the total than in continental Europe. Most non-Muslim groups also have relatively high intermarriage rates.
I think the UK is therefore more likely to Brazilify than to Lebanonify.
Something I've never been clear on, which I think you might be able to explain due to your (astoundingly broad and deep!) geopolitical knowledge:
What exactly does "brazilification" mean? I've seen it used enough and I'm familiar enough with the popular perception of Brazil that I think I've picked up the "vibe", but I find myself wondering if there isn't more to it than just "extreme inequality and crime, favelas in every city where the wealthy never go." Is there a racial component in Brazil, or is it just a socioeconomic thing? Is there a specific historical path that is necessary to count as brazilification?
Brazil has a racial hierarchy but it’s in denial and likes to pretend that there’s a ‘Brazilian’ race instead of many races which could all be Brazilian, in order to cover up the massive drag of high human capital demographics subsidizing lower human capital ones which then proceed to repay them with crime.
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It started decades ago as a progressive economics term to argue that rising economic inequality risked America looking more like much of Latin America, where the top 5% live like Americans while the bottom 90% are poor. Over time it was adopted by the right in light of ongoing mass immigration, keeping some of its original meaning but adding the idea that Brazil is also poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional. On the internet right the Brazilification thesis stands in contrast to the ‘Balkanization’ or Lebanon scenarios in which ethnic tensions crystallize into hot conflict. Brazil, by contrast, has little significant racial strife of the kind far rightists sometimes predict in the West’s future.
Got it, thanks.
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Ah, appreciate the clarification. I’d thought that Britain’s immigrants were highly Pakistani or unassimilating Hindus; sort of like France or Germany. A comparatively small number of Pakistanis in a context of mostly assimilating migration from throughout the former empire is a meaningful improvement over that assumption.
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