If only Europe ever heard of social democracy, that thing that elevated everyone out of poverty after WW2...
Britain has social democracy. It was among the first countries in the world to introduce a welfare system, although Kaiser Germany actually had one earlier in practice. And up until today has one of the most generous welfare systems there is. Not necessarily the most modern or well-run one, but certainly a generous healthcare, child benefit, education, etc.. system.
That's not the issue.
A large part of Britain's entire modern economy, more than most others, is also based around the aforementioned FIRE sectors - and while these sectors do bring in large profits from the rest of the world (thank neo-colonialism, foreign oligarchs, insurance monopoly over world shipping, etc...), this money stays at the very top and I don't think most of it is even taxed. The better you are with finance the better you are at avoiding taxes.
And of course during the times of economic downturn, the same FIRE sectors parasitize off Britain's own population which doesn't do any good for anyone either.
Yet these sectors do count towards the GDP. So on paper Britain has a large GDP, but in practice much of this economic activity is concentrated just among the rich and the more competent of the agents that specialize in real estate, banking, etc.. and amass their own small fortunes. And it's only the rest of Britain's GDP that actually represents the wealth of ordinary people. That's Britain's agricultural, industrial, real service sectors pretty much. Count just them, divide by 90-95% of Britain's population, and you'll get a better idea of people's average wealth.
I'm certainly not becoming richer, even though my local economy is growing. Most people can't afford rent or a morgage and salaries are stagant facing the inflation, productivity and economic growth. And in the UK, even before Truss and Brexit, things were like that. The poor are not becoming richer at all, they don't earn more, they have less social services available and cost of living is increasing. That's true for the UK, most Europe and the US. And that has been true since neoliberalism got widespread.
The only good thing that economic growth brings is more jobs, but they are increasingly poorly paid and with less labor protections.
Well I was speaking in general terms. But if we're speaking about Britain and a lot of these other countries - economic growth is not taking place so much through any massive investments into the country itself, or productivity increases. Mostly it's coming from just population growth, which in turn is driven by immigration. More workers, more companies, more state sector, more jobs, bigger economy. But that also means that there's a continous surplus of labour that prevents salaries from rising. Any wealth you end up generating is just spread over more people.
And then you have greater demand for housing due to population growth too, and if construction doesn't keep up, which it hasn't by all accounts, then housing prices are pressured up too. And so on.
So these globalist elites don't have any new ideas really. Apart from that whole FIRE business, it's just a case of growing these Western economies through immigration in an attempt to compete with emerging economies in the global south, who are actually seeing huge investments into infrastructure, agriculture, etc.. and productivity increases and so on - and are growing quicker, albeit from a lower base.
To even maintain Britain as a destination for immigration, people's living standards need to grow too, not just the aggregate size of the economy. Britain's elites have fostered in a self-defeating policy. What they really need to come up with, is a new model.
The richest win, no matter what. There are speculative mechanisms to make money both in grown and downlfalls. If the economy is growing, you invest. If the economy is shrinking or crashing, you short. That's why you see crap like Boeing happening. What matters is the short term profits to pay dividinds and issue buybacks. If it crashes after, no problem, you can short the shares. That's also why the richest supported the Tories for so long. It doesn't make sence for the Bristish economy but help them become much more rich by deregulating (this includes leaving the EU) so they could speculate as they please removing the little checks and balances.
Also strikes are effective if well organized. One thing is an expected downfall, another is to stop operation without expectation. It's also bad for the government that loses credibility and still needs the vote of the people to continue.
Yup, pretty much.
Although I disagree that strikes are effective. The rich operate as a class, at least when it comes to protecting the system that benefits them. The rest of the population don't. Whatever small local wins they can make here or there won't transfer to others and will quickly be eroded by the next inflation cycle or whatever anyway. But really, when you have all these strikes that's a symptom that you've already lost. The total number of resources available are decreasing and people are just fighting over the scraps. That's what happened in Russia in the 90s - the new boirgouise democratic government was within a few years facing a huge amount of striking workers all over the country - but the fact is that this coincided with the economy as a whole deindustrializing, the currency crashing, loans having to be taken from abroad, and so on.. Even if the government made it an absolute priority to raise wages to substitance levels, it wouldn't have been able to.
