[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?

[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.

[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?

[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?

[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.