Does it matter if Poland overtakes Britain, if both our populations are able to survive and prosper? The phrasing has a racist and geopolitical element to it, which superceeds the issues around UK government's lack of investment in R&D and destruction of the welfare state. This is not a zero sum game.
Poles used to come to England to do lower level jobs, pick fruit, clean houses. Definitely racism and resentment here. Old school European racism sees Eastern Europeans as a lower level white, a concept I don’t think a lot of Americans are familiar with. There were white slaves back in the day too. It’s where the word comes from; the Slavic people.
No that is not where the word comes from. Slav is an English-ization of “slowanie” (what slavs call their group) which means “people of the word “ or people who can talk or something along those lines.
Yeah. In Polish Slav means a speaker, or person of our word. In Latin, it meant person who we can take to do work for free, but the Polish came up with the term first.
Our old word for foreigner is the same as non speaker or mute, Niemcy, which now specifically refers to the Germans. I guess they were our first foreigners.
Well, it would be quite noteworthy from a historical perspective. Has Poland ever been ahead of Britain economically in the past 1000 years? Poland periodically gets chopped up by its neighbors, WW2 was the 4th time the same thing happened and also I believe Poland was significantly more destroyed than Britain during WW2. They are fairly disadvantaged geographically, no moat to speak of. Their economy suffered under communism until around 30 years ago. I don’t think any racism is required to be surprised at the prospect of Poland overtaking Britain economically.
Labour campaigned and voted against Brexit shouting this would happen. "Project Fear" as it was called. But now they pretend like Brexit has nothing to do with it... it's just the torries fault apparently.
The Labour leader at the time of the referendum was luke warm about remaining at best. So much so I doubt he voted to remain despite what he said. He had a long history of criticism of the EU.
The stated position of the labour party, and what they campaigned for, was Remain. At the time, there were many people like you saying one thing about Corbyn while he said another. Nobody liked Corbyn, so he surely must have been a Brexiteer! Despite him not having made Eurosceptic comments for many years.
Oh no - what if the line doesn't go up? The line. It has to go up. It has to. We'll do anything - any-thing. Please. Oh please. Just let the line go up!
The line of Per Capita Economic Output is unironically one of the most important lines in existence. One could argue that every single line that's better than it is also harder to measure.
Look at the way these people lived. The way the dressed. The way the carried themselves. The culture. The customs. The traditions.
It was a thriving high-trust society.
The line has gone up orders of magnitude in the past 100 years, but are the people thriving? Is their nation something to be proud of? Do they have any herritage left to pass on to their children? Is there any optimism in the future we have chosen?
I don't think so.
Can we ever return to the past? - no, but the future we have chosen is a bad one.
The video is mostly of the upper classes and military. Looks nice but I'm pretty certain I'd prefer to live now. I'm actually from n Ireland but live in the Scotland. The class system is definitely a lot more noticeable here than home. I suspect it was way worse back then.
I have some sympathy for your point of view. I'm very much pro union but when I go to England I think I'm glad I don't live there. So crowded. Most of the countryside fenced off. Unlike Scotland were it's possible to escape to the wilderness. Compared to Ireland I think people in England seem depressed.
On the high trust thing, I think part of it may be partly the mass immigration of the 1950s. As an outside observer I think that may have divided the country a bit. To me there doesn't seem to be much integration.
All I'm hoping is that the UK gets over brexit and doesn't stay in terminal decline. The current Tory leadership only seem interested in managing that decline. At least Boris was optimistic and believed Britain was a great place to be.
The numbers the article quotes are not the current US dollar GDP, but PPP (i.e. GDP adjusted to local prices) per capita. The 2021 current US dollar GDP numbers are rather far appart:
UK $47,334.36
Poland $17,840.92
Romania $14,861.91
Hungary $18,772.67