I found this interesting. It’s mainly about how Brexit has introduced extra red tape when dealing with Europe. The article says how the EU is the UK’s largest trading partner, with the value of trade being over double that of the next largest trading partner: the USA.
Here are some quotes:
The days of freedom of movement for people, goods, and services between the UK and its neighbours are long gone.
The British economy has lost out and British citizens and businesses suffer from greater bureaucratic botheration.
Nor has immigration into the UK gone down since leaving the EU. The numbers have actually gone up, with people from Commonwealth countries, including India, Pakistan and Nigeria, more than compensating for EU citizens who used to come and go.
Dark money is involved with pushing the UK away from Europe, if Farage gets in during the next GE we’re fucked as a nation. Try and talk to everyone you know to (especially at a GE) convince them to not vote reform, they wont solve anything and are far worse than the alternatives. I can see the Union breaking up if we go down that path as well. (Id get a Scottish passport anyways so not much complaining from me but alas its still not ideal).
I’d break up the Union if that happened and I’m English. How about the People’s Republic of Yorkshire (there are more of us than Scots or Irish - I checked)?
I don’t think the Union is inherently bad, how its structured currently is absolutely rotten but keeping the Union and federalising it more is likely better than a total disintegration. This’d require moving focus away from purely London however and not neglecting the post industrial “mothballed” populations constantly which I don’t see happening.
From the perspective of London the focus is entirely on the shires. Every small minded thought they have dominates the agenda
From the perspective of a provincial, London gets all the investment, all the opportunity & a outsized share of the decent jobs. The plebians in the shires are getting pissed off due to this and are voting for really stupid shit (likely in part due to the education budgets in these regions being lower in real terms than London & the South East), the fact they gain progress in these endeavours shows how badly a huge swathe of the country has been neglected.
The fact that whoever they vote for then seem to just ignore these areas wishes (cough Labour screwing over farmers & failing to reverse Thatcherism during the Blair years cough cough) and continue the focusing on the South East merely throws fuel on the fire. And any wishes they do enact are often propagandised self harming actions which do nothing but serve the ruling classes.
In many post industrial areas the poverty is getting pretty horrific, there are very few jobs that actually allow them to live decent lives due to cost of living with their surroundings quite literally crumbling. Where I’m from (post industrial ex Mining & Fishing area) you cant even try and start your own business as (especially commerical) properties have been bought up by London based equity firms to serve as assets to borrow against which they maintain via artifically high rents that people in these areas could never afford.
Im aware this isnt the average Londoners fault but many of Londons inhabitants fail to understand exactly where this frustration is coming from & I often hear “but London is the only net contributor” which is true but this is directly due to intentional neglect of the other parts of Britain. Vicious feedback loop.
If we could focus on other areas of the country it’d likely also benefit Londoners as the pressure on your housing market would be reduced due to people being able to move elsewhere for decent employment and oppourtunity.
I really think you’ve misunderstood the nature and benefits of “investment in London”.
You can point at crossrail and endless tower blocks as in estment, but these largely cater to a commuter class of stockbrokers from outside London. In the shires.
You seem aware of this, perhaps you’re not aware of the poverty figures for parts of London are genuinely shocking, even compared to other poor parts of the country, largely due to housing costs.
By accepting the media framing of this group , exploiting londoners for their own benefit, as “London” you are hurting our cause. Providing opportunity and ending squalor across the UK needs a focus on the people not how close they are to those benefiting.
I’ve already addressed how putting more investment into other areas of the country would directly benefit Londons housing situation due to it being such a over centralised hub for well paying jobs & Im fully aware London itself suffers from severe inequality.
However the budgets London & the South East gets for virtually everything are signficiantly higher than elsewhere in the country, I genuinely think that via investing in Britains secondary cities more (which compared to French & German secondary cities they are extremely underinvested in and unproductive) it’d benefit the entire country and serve to cool off the political radicalism that has been festering for a solid decade now.
Over centralisation on London is a well understood issue for the UK & we are a very unusual country by European standards for how centralised we are. Even the way the living wage is calculated is a bit unfair, there’s a special allocated “London” living wage due to high costs of living while other areas of the country such as Bristol have similar CoL expenditures but no preferential treatment in the living wage.
The transport network both road and rail is overcentralised around London even, all the major airports (with exception of Manchester) with decent numbers of destinations are also overcentralised.
The fact that London has the only signficiant underground system in the country is absolute insanity and a perfect representation of the issue (Yes I know the Weegies have one but its a tiny loop that hasnt been expanded for over a century).
Yeah… As a Midlander, bring back Mercia too.