The IFS (HERE) are saying we are experiencing the slowest recovery after a recession on record and it certainly feels like it. We have weak investment, weak productivity growth and weak consumer demand as we are headed into the most far reaching upheaval of our national economic life for forty years or more. Only a few days ago Donald Tusk reminded us that the trade deal we will soon be negotiating will be the first one in history specifically designed to reduce trade.
Brexit would be insane if we were actually growing rapidly but to attempt it when our economy is already weak with projected growth over the next five years to be the slowest ever seen over any five year period since 1875 is more than insane. Yet this is want is being done in our name.
Trump is a basket case hell bent on protectionist policies that will be bad for the USA but calamitous for us. Imagine it, we are leaving our largest trading partner while our second largest is launching a trade war against us. And doing so with the slowest recovery ever experienced. Anybody see any problems?
The BBC (HERE) quote the IFS saying we will need significant tax RISES. So much for the Brexit dividend. We will save so much by leaving the EU that tax INCREASES of £40 billion a year will be needed by the mid 2020s in order to balance the books!!
How have we managed to elect 650 people to govern us so badly? Surely we are witnessing the last few years in the long slow decline of a once great nation. It might once have been possible to see a way out of our present troubles with leaders of stature and gravitas but ten minutes listening to a debate in the House of Commons will sadly show this to be a forlorn hope. They are incapable, most of them anyway, of seeing the parlous state we are in. The chamber is full of idealogues, fantasists and chancers out for themselves.
Even the cabinet today is stuffed full of people who wouldn't have got beyond the back benches forty years ago, now they're the best we've got apparently.
One only has to travel in Europe to see how we have been badly served.
Our town centres have been destroyed by the planners whereas in Europe many have been carefully restored to what they were intended to look like before the war. There is a civic pride and a plan as well as money to make these town centres pleasant places to be, that have a sense of cohesion with the past and the future. Too often ours look incongruous with mis-matched buildings totally out of place in a dystopian post-urban cityscape where it seems the money ran out half way through the construction of a plan that was itself changing every few years. Others simply look grubby, even in parts of the capital.
I watched a report recently about Leeds General Infirmary where the reporter appeared to be standing in front of a fire damaged building. It took a few seconds for me to realise it was actually the hospital.
In France the motorways are excellent, well maintained and not overloaded. The health services are first rate.
Airports have always fascinated me. If I go to Geneva, or Dusseldorf, or Schiphol I am surrounded by glass, stainless steel, terrazzo tiles and concrete in a modern, stylish design. These are all hard wearing, low maintenance surfaces but expensive at first. But Heathrow is full of painted mild steel, plaster and carpets, all cheap surfaces that look worn after fifteen minutes use. It is a microcosm of Britain's problem. Spend 80% of what's really needed and then another 20% every five years in maintenance until the building is knocked down.
Continental European factories, at least the ones I've visited, in all sorts of industries are invariably modern, well organised and efficient. By contrast many British ones are old, tumble down, shabby, chaotic and badly managed. One or two I have been inside do not even have concrete floors (this was a very well known national company). The average British worker and manager think this is OK.
From social cohesion, health, infrastructure and industry the West European nations are far ahead of us.
We are badly led in both industry and national life, but worse than that we are leaving perhaps the lifeline we might have had in the EU to bring us into the 21st century.
