Comment by ben_w
9 days ago
IMO, the wheels fell off decades before I was born.
The peak of the empire was around WW1, where the victory was immediately followed by Irish home rule, and Churchill(!) putting the UK military into austerity to save money, which is how it came to be that evacuating from Dunkirk involved a lot of civilian ships, amongst other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule
WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory. Not that Westminster collectively realised the nation's weakness until the Suez Crisis and the Wind of Change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(speech)
I'm not sure the people of the UK have yet fully internalised this decline, given the things said and written during the Brexit process. Perhaps social media really did make it all worse, but it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson may or may not have taken an arrow to the eyeball.
That happened a long time ago, the realization was the 70s.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.
Brexit may have been the emotional response, but like most it didn't help.
Is "emotional" supposed to trivialise the complaints? People would vote the same way now, most likely. The opinion hasn't shifted around much…
17 replies →
Not sure why this was downvoted, maybe the use of "foreigners" is a bit loaded, but this is basically it.
Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.
We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
It’s true that too much of the U.K. is a piggy bank for those who don’t live there, but that is true of much of the West now.
> taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
This would end very poorly because what the U.K. sorely needs is investment (to create new productive capacity). For example, Americans invested huge sums in North Sea oil and created an entire industry (before we destroyed it). Conversely, if you force people to keep wealth in the country then you just make things more expensive: they will bid up the price of property and the like. Nothing is added to the UK’s real economy by increasing the number of pounds flowing around in it - it’s only helpful if it’s invested. So what you actually want is tax breaks for foreign investment, but with some kind of ownership cap.
6 replies →
The response of "we cannot stop water companies dumping raw sewage into our rivers and lakes because it might impact profits of their Saudi Arabia investment funds" is really all we need to know about the issues. It's sickening.
1 reply →
>I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
Even China with extreme capital controls and pervasive surveillance can't stop money leaving the country. Unless the UK was willing to go fully authoritarian and ban its citizens from spending money overseas, and ban crypto (and build all the internet firewall/DPI infrastructure that doing so would require), it wouldn't stand a chance. And attempting to do so would destroy the value of the pound, because nobody with any options would want to hold a currency that could only be spent in the UK.
1 reply →
Go learn what dividend, royalty and interest withholding taxes are.
> I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
Capital controls. By the time they are applied it's always too little, too late, and they only ever apply to the plebs -- the wealthy always have ways to move money out (and back in, later -much later-, if it becomes necessary or advantageous). Always too little too late because -I suspect- capital controls don't really work -- not against the wealthy.
[flagged]
Everyone needs a scapegoat. Why not mention Carter and the near double-digit inflation Reagan faced at the beginning of his admistration and the fact that it was nearly half by the end of it?
In the 90s, it brought us some of the best economic times we will ever see.
So sure, lets rewrite history.
4 replies →
> it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson
This. The UK was a band of feudal kingdoms that somehow managed to create an overseas empire. The empire is now gone, and the feudal kingdom is struggling to transform itself into a modern nation.
Everywhere was a band of feudal kingdoms. What’s so special about the U.K.?
Everywhere else transformed, whereas the British elite (in the power sense, not the skill sense) still seem to be proud of their feudal heritage.
1 reply →
The Netherlands is politically dysfunctional and the people are egotistical assholes but at least the economy is ticking.
Without money society is just doomed.
> The Netherlands is politically dysfunctional and the people are egotistical assholes
Could you elaborate? From over here the Netherlands seems almost a paradise of modern society.
Our politics does have some good parts. The political system we have is reasonably good. We have many political parties due to the proportional representation system. A single party is also unlikely to get a majority in parliament on their own, so parties with different backgrounds will have to work together to form a functioning government.
We do suffer from many political parties not willing to cause short term pain to improve long term outcomes. There are a few urgent issues going on in politics at the moment. Stuff where a decision needs to be made now and action should be taken. But the political parties do not want to make those decisions because they would inflict short term pain to some voters but would also improve the long term quality of life and economics of the Netherlands.
The worst part is that those issues have been known for a long time, but decisions were postponed over and over again because politicians didn't want to make the decision. Making the issues worse and more urgent over time.
At the same time populism is clearly on the rise in the Netherlands. A famous thing happening in a debate before the previous elections was a populist saying "But this woman cannot wait for the costs to be decreased, she needs it now." about decreasing a specific part of healthcare costs for citizens. Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.
1 reply →
Paradise is maybe a bit much. I’m German and from close to the border. Not right across but close enough that I visit a lot and my city is overran by Dutch people every Christmas.
On average as a tourist, the Netherlands is straight up just a better version of Germany. However a friend of mine recently moved. She’s from India, moved to Germany and then fell in love with a Durch man she ultimately married. In the process of moving she of course also switched into the Dutch health care system and that I think is legit worse than the German one but I don’t know how much that might be a symptom of a greater issue in the Netherlands.
The difference is essentially that the Dutch health care system tries to be profitable which is nice but then results in procedures not being covered by health insurance that a German doctor would find essential. Specifically preventative care and child birth related stuff where very problematic for her.
But otherwise I think the Netherlands takes a very practical approach to society. Is it annoying for cars to navigate Dutch cities? Yes but also it’s the only country where you can basically always take a bicycle anywhere and be safe. Is 100km/h on the highway annoying? Yes but it’s also the most relaxing drive in heavy traffic I can imagine. I think in a quite literal sense, i think the Dutch are less conservative than we are. The way things were done matters less which results in people seeing the benefits of change much more. Like everything car related. Youd start a riot in germany just doing parking like the Dutch do.
1 reply →
The uk is a lot of things, but theocratic really isn’t one of them. If you’re referring to the House of Lords then you don’t really understand our government. The general population is as atheist as anywhere outside of Scandi countries.
> The general population is as atheist as anywhere outside of Scandi countries.
I appreciate the proximity of the two sentences made it unclear, but the general population isn't what I'm critical of in this case. I briefly had an Iranian project manager, that nation is almost as high as you can get on the theocracy scale (IIRC it would be beaten by Afghanistan), but he absolutely was not and had tattoos of video game characters.
Also, I should say that the use of "theocracy" in the modern sense is somewhat looser than the historical, and therefore ask if we're actually disagreeing? Certainly I don't mean in the sense of the deification of the Pharaohs.
Re the rest:
Given my focus is the rulers and not the people, I think the Lords Spiritual remain relevant (the attempt to replace the HoL with an elected one being promised by the HoC in 1911, still waiting).
Likewise that the head of state is also the head of the national church and there being a religious requirement for being crowned monarch, and that there is no desire to reform away the monarchy as an institution, likewise the Establishment nature of the CoE, making this the only non-meta conversation I've ever had where I can legitimately use the longest (recognised, non-systematic) word in the English language by saying that the UK political system is one of antidisestablishmentarianism.
I don't think I'd count the coins, even though this is about the ruling classes who are much more likely than anyone else to speak Latin and thus recognise the abbreviation printed on them. "FID DEF" has an ironic history, but so does the much easier to read "In God We Trust" and I'm not (yet) going to describe the USA in this way.
Aside from all of that, there's also the requirement of schools that:
…
- https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/collective-worshi...
Even in the loosest sense, I struggle to see how the uk is any more theocratic than any other European country. The lords spiritual have minimal practical influence over policy. And while I’m a republican, I don’t think the monarch has much influence over public policy. I guess you could argue they have soft power but that seems like it might also be true of religious leaders in any country. Is Israel a theocracy in your view?
As for WW2, Roosevelt worked hard to make sure Britain couldn't reconstitute its empire, and to work toward global self-determination.
The more I study that time period, the more I realize how incredibly effed up every decision that those leaders made. They were desperate, I get it, but damn. And then most of the Nazi scum escaped and did their shadowy best to influence world history for many more decades!