[glomph]

This website makes some claims about what has caused both growth and decline that are pretty contentious.

I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment in public services like creating the NHS and the building of council housing.

They baffelingly attribute yhat growth to the Conservative Govrernment of the 1930s rather than the post war labour government.

Similarly this page attributes growth in the 80s to the Conservative government privatisation program. Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.

I think a perfect example of this is our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders and now we have a disaster with shit being poured into all our rivers and costs to households rising dramatically.

Edit: I read on and they use the drop in passengers in the railway in 1965 as an argument against nationalisation of the rail service, somehow neglecting to mention the beeching cuts! That is incredibly missleading given 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure at that time.

[maxehmookau]

> Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.

I agree, this is pretty wild and made me immediately look up who was behind this. Conservative think-tanks gotta conservative think-tank.

[ajross]

Indeed, this is spun nonsense. The problem with the UK right now is brexit. You can see it on a GDP graph: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/uni...

It's growing steadily through the 60's-2000's, has a notable dip[1] at the 2008 financial crisis, then starts growing again until just about 2015. And it's been flat since.

The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.

[1] More pronounced than comparable nations, to be fair. The UK was always more dependent on finance.

[thedrbrian]

>The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.

But we’ve imported millions of people that speak different languages since 2015 , why hasn’t line gone up?

[ajross]

I think this is sarcasm, but just to spell it out: this is a causation/correlation fallacy. Immigration is a result of global trade, not its cause. Brexit killed the trade part without actually doing anything about immigration policy.

[pjc50]

The incredibly stupid part of all this is that the conservative government insisted on wrecking the trade side because reducing immigration was deemed more important, and then entirely voluntarily issued a lot of work permits.

(without even getting into the more obligatory areas of immigration like refugees and marriages)

[nmadden]

One of the authors is from the Centre for Policy Studies. Another is from the Adam Smith Institute. These are the gang of shady right-wing think tanks that brought us Truss and Kwarteng. That tells you everything you need to know about their economic competence.

[kranke155]

Their solution is to allow private funds to fund essential infrastructure, it seems.

Which to me just rings hollow, or at best, only a part of the answer. They're correct on some aspects of it, other parts they just gloss over. IE They say that there has been an "erosion" of the industrial base in the UK, while actually the blame could be laid at the feet of Thatcher's service-led policies.

[snapplebobapple]

They are not wrong on that thet just make the same error the socialisys do in thinking that is the solution for all time. The solution foe all time ia to both realize the end state of a free market is monopoly and the end state of a state monopoly is stagnation so one needs to focus the government on being proactive and allowing both to compete and put the finger of government on the scale to favor private when public is stagnating and favor public when private ia monopolizing.

[moomin]

Gotta love the fact they go “Hey, look how great France’s infrastructure is.” and then immediately advocate for yet more private infrastructure deals without mentioning that France’s infrastructure was largely government funded (using those taxes they seem to hate).

[amadeuspagel]

> From 2010 to the summer of 2024, Britain was run by Conservative-led or Conservative Governments. The Conservatives are the traditional party of business, and in the 1930s and 1980s they pushed through reform programmes that successfully renewed Britain’s economy. Virtually any Conservative minister from the past fourteen years would speak warmly about that heritage if asked, and would express the hope of being its inheritor. And yet, with honourable exceptions, the governments of the last fourteen years failed in this vocation. Failing systems remained unreformed, continuing to stifle Britain’s prosperity. Today Britain is ruled by a Labour Government that recognises this failure to build, and which has articulated high ambitions for changing this. But it remains doubtful that they will be any better at delivering on those ambitions than the Conservatives were.

[throwaway48540]

What is shady about them? Are they criminals?

[schmidtleonard]

Their agenda is to frame the self-serving interests of a very narrow group as the economic interests of everyone. That's shady.

[cherrycherry98]

Depending on the specifics, that sounds congruent with some of Adam Smith's economic theories so it's not surprising to see such arguments used, especially if some of the authors are from the Adam Smith Institute.

His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.

It's more likely a sincerely held belief than an attempt at misdirection.

[ninalanyon]

Adam Smith is probably spinning in his grave.

> His whole invisible hand metaphor is about society advancing as a whole from agents acting in their self interest.

That theory is predicated on the market being composed of buyers and sellers of broadly similar financial power. This is no longer the case in most markets, certainly not in the UK as far as ordinary people or most small companies are concerned.

[schmidtleonard]

Yes. Markets pursue the interest of wealth-weighted humans, not evenly-weighted humans. Disguising "wealth weighted value" under the concept of "value" (which, colloquially, has a more even weight) is the propaganda coup of the century.

[moomin]

I doubt Adam Smith would agree with anything the Adam Smith Institute says.

[nmadden]

As rjsw says, they refuse to disclose who funds them. See https://www.monbiot.com/2022/10/07/thinktanking-the-country/ for some background.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

If you consider tanking the UK economy to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions of pounds, then yes, absolutely.

[throwaway48540]

How could they possibly do that?

[grumpy_coder]

They are referring to the liz truss budget.

[mike_hearn]

What happened wasn't primarily due to her budget. It was due to a meltdown in the pension sector triggered by over-leverage, arguably caused by the BoE not doing its regulatory duties correctly.

Don't get me wrong, a budget that cuts taxes without cutting spending is no good. But the idea that what happened was a direct consequence of that doesn't make much sense as it had been telegraphed a long way in advance, giving the markets plenty of time to adjust. The central bank changed monetary policy a day before the mini-budget, and changes in that are kept secret until the moment of announcement. Additionally, UK spending has since blown through what the mini-budget would have created without any sudden market turmoil.

https://www.ft.com/content/4701b6ac-851e-43fd-a2b2-b38dd07c7...

Regulators failed to anticipate the dangers that borrowing by pension schemes posed to the stability of the UK’s financial system, according to a parliamentary report into the turmoil that hit the gilt markets following Liz Truss’s disastrous “mini” Budget in September last year.

Pension schemes suffered multibillion-pound losses after they were forced to sell assets to ensure that complex derivative-linked strategies — known as liability driven investments (LDI) — did not implode when gilt yields jumped as investors rejected the then prime minister’s economic strategy.

Also, Truss is basically correct that the UK needs more growth. Disagreeing on her tactics is reasonable, disagreeing on her goals isn't. She was unfortunately attempting to create growth from a position of weakness: in a party that didn't want to do anything hard like cutting spending, and with a fragile/over-leveraged financial sector.

[throwaway48540]

So it is the elected representatives who are responsible for choosing them and implementing whatever they suggested?

[rjsw]

They refuse to say who funds them.

[pch00]

Led By Donkeys' exposure of the Truss mini-budget and the Adam Smith Institute involvement is enlightening:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRDLIOME47c

[GordonAShumway]

Hats. The fedoras they wear shades their faces from view, m’lady

[sph]

Of course, the second most upvoted comment is an ad personam dismissal that doesn't even engage with its arguments. How's that for HN-level intelligent discourse?

[wtfwhateven]

the parent comment already explained how extremely deceptive and dishonest the article is so what else is there to add? this is like complaining about someone not wanting to bother refuting every individual thing a pathological liar has said when their lies are so obvious

[schmidtleonard]

If the asset prices don't grow, how will the rich people get paid for being rich? Won't anyone think of the poor rich people!

[mike_hearn]

None of what the website says is actually contentious outside of Labour/left wing circles. Economic growth isn't that complicated when coming from behind - but as they say, it's hard if there isn't enough energy or housing.

> I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment

I don't think anyone with a strong grip on economics or British history would argue that. The fact is that post-war rationing continued longer in the UK than it did in Germany, the country that actually lost the war, and Germany recovered far faster in other ways too. Decades of very left wing governments left the UK in a terrible state by the 1970s relative to its peers - it was called the sick man of Europe and needed an IMF bailout - a situation fixed only by Thatcher. This history is well known not only in the UK but internationally. The website provides supporting evidence if you aren't familiar with this.

> our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders

That this sort of absurdly false belief gets repeated unchallenged so often in Britain is exactly why it's falling behind. Thames Tideway, one of the largest engineering projects in Europe and the biggest upgrade to London's sewage system ever, is organized and financed by the private sector (pension funds, Allianz, Amber IG, Dalmore Capital and DIF).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Tunnel#Funding_...

It's literally being built right now and yet you claim the private sector hasn't invested. The reality is the opposite. As the website points out, British governments have historically struggled to do capital investments because the moment money becomes available the unions always take it all. Only the private sector has sufficiently good labour relations to actually build things and the water industry is a good example of that in action. Compare to the NHS where the government has regularly tried to ringfence money for capital investments (repairing leaking hospital roofs etc), only to see its direct orders ignored and the money used for pay rewards instead.

> 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure

The stations were axed due to long term decline in passenger numbers, a situation that reversed immediately upon privatization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...

[cscurmudgeon]

Water quality by country.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/water-qua...

US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.

It is not as black and white as you imply.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I'm confused at your point - I look at the countries we typically view as more left leaning and both Canada and Europe as a whole has better water quality. If anything, it seems to be a delineation of first world status.

[happymellon]

Which is interesting, because I can't believe anyone would say the US water is good when no one will drink water from the faucet, it has to be filtered.

It has always been either over chlorinated, or out of a well with all sorts of contaminants such as sulphur.

[shiroiushi]

According to the graph on this site, ALL countries in the world have very bad water, at least after I move my mouse pointer around the map: all the countries turn orange.

[feedforward]

> US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.

Huh? This is a map of the industrialized countries - western Europe, the US and Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and South Korea. Not sure how "left leaning setups do bad", the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.

[ninalanyon]

> the Scandinavian countries seem to have good water.

We certainly do here in Norway. And it's provided by the kommune (the local authority) not a private company. Where I live it is what I dilute my Scotch with. It's easily as good as or better than any bottled water.