Ireland’s economy is very interesting, somehow their GDP per capita is now the highest in the world (by the way, Ireland is in the EU) :
There is much anger that their govt isn’t spreading the wealth. This is of course where GDP per capita is a crude measure and doesn’t reflect quality of life or prosperity of the ordinary citizen. For example our fiasco with HS2 rather than investing in good infrastructure, policing and schools.
Hi
I did not forget to mention those two things at all.
What good are low taxes if we have low pensions, a decimated Armed Forces, trains that don’t run properly and are far more expensive to use than other countries, planes that can’t fly because of a rubbish Air Traffic Control System etc etc.
Our NHS is not free we pay for through tax, it is much slower and worse than in many EU Countries.
Since 2013 and at breakneck speed since Covid, the Tories have been doing their best to create confusion, chaos and devastation of services.
Accountability seems to be a dirty word these days.
Oh crumbs Annie haven’t you learnt yet not to take any notice of predictions.
People on low pensions can get other benefits and if they rent a property they get their rent paid.
Yes we pay for it through tax which is one of the lowest in Europe, but we also have the option of taking out private insurance.
I’m unclear how the existence of free-to-use, paid by taxation on all, universal health care is anything to do with Brexit. Did the NHS change after Brexit? Or because of being in the EU? Did the health care model of other EU countries have to adapt to some EU directive? Is the UK’s NHS inherently better than the model other countries use?
Nope.
So why are we discussing health care models on this thread? What’s the relevance?
so we aren’t going to overtake Germany’s GDP per capita by 2028?
Hi
Wendeey, the Government are very good at making misleading statements.
They have made an artform of it.
Yes, some can get additional benefits, but not all… even those that do find them very difficult , if not impossible, to live on.
There are very strict conditions, if you are in a high rent area the payments are not sufficient to meet your rent and service charges, hence the very high and increasing number of families placed in Temporary Accommodation, which is very often much more expensive than increasing Housing Benefits.
Each area has a set limit, this has not been upgraded in line with the rising costs of rent.
Even if Housing Benefit was uplifted, for many it would not be paid because of the Benefit Cap.
The exemptions from the Benefit Cap are minute, extremely limited to a fraction of the UK Population.
Yes, those who can afford it, can pay for private medical insurance.
However this only covers routine things, not emergency, life threatening events.
You are having a Heart Attack, ring your Private Medical Insurer and see what happens, zilch.
You will wait, often hours for an ambulance and then you could be waiting hours.
You then go into a queue outside the hospital and it could be another day before you stop laying in a corridor with no bell to summon aid.
There is no safety net as you claim.
Earning good money and have a good pension is absolutely no guarantee of being able to live a reasonable life.
I have the usual British reticence about money.
I earned well, not massively, but my Pension after Tax is well above the after tax wages of the majority.
Because of the system, I have to pay for my care costs, which are substantial.
We don’t actually have capacity in the private healthcare sector for everyone who uses the NHS to be treated privately, plus they do not cover a large number of conditions. I don’t think you can even have a baby with health insurance. A friend who has cancer is being treated privately through her (very good) corporate cover and has had to wait and wait possibly longer than in the NHS. She has had to mix and match with A&E too, also had a bill come through for £1k for meds because of some loophole about pre-diagnostic fees. This is because she was sick as they were taking so long to work out which cancer she had and between every test there was a week’s wait to see the consultant then another week’s wait for another test. Totally unimpressed with this model. It’s no longer the luxurious experience it used to be last century. You have room service food which is nice but that’s about the only difference I have seen. The NHS provides far more in additional therapies and support services for cancer patients. She is going to the same building as NHS patients for many treatments.
Dunno ask Swim he was the one who brought it up.
I dunno I haven’t got a crystal ball.
Swim this is way off topic and you’re now discussing families getting housing benefit, when we were discussing pensioners, this might be of interest to you:
Currently, over 1.4 million pensioners in Britain receive Pension Credit. However, many are still not claiming this extra financial help and it is estimated up to £1.7bn is being left unclaimed. This is why the DWP is renewing calls for all pensioners to check if they could be eligible.
I didn’t say everybody could go private, but we do have a choice and if those that can afford it could take some of the pressure of the NHS. If you wish to discuss this further I suggest you open a new thread or else Lincoln will be telling you off, well he should do as he tells me off, if it’s off topic.
Good suggestion to start a thread on this issue, thanks.
I’d be interested to chip in as you raise a key issue - does going private take pressure off the NHS or end up detracting from the NHS services? Same issue as for private schools.
(Off topic, note to self - don’t get sucked in)
We only have a choice while most people don’t use the private system. When things go wrong patients end up back in the NHS. We have had plenty of threads on this topic and people assume it’s somehow better treatment or faster.
Lincolnshire you are welcome to start a thread on the topic, but the answer to the question is that going private will only make queues for free NHS treatment longer. Most of the delays in the NHS are down to staffing capacity and if more staff are needed for private patients, those who cannot afford to pay are not prioritised. Not sure I understand the parallel with private schools. Do state schools have 7.5m pupils waiting for a place?
We went to a private hospital a couple of weeks ago .
It’s was chocker
We saw a surgeon perhaps we could have seen him in the NHS - some time next year so we paid and it was worth it to get his opinion .
The doomsayers’ predictions weren’t just project fear – they were project nonsense
The UK economy is larger than first thought, according to figures released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. Can I hear the distant sound of Mark Carney dry-retching in the style of Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s former director of communications, after the EU referendum result was announced?
No, because I can guarantee that you won’t hear a peep from the Remainers about Britain’s GDP now being 1.8 per cent above pre-Covid levels.
When they’re not too busy listening to Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart furiously agreeing with each other on a podcast, they’re studiously ignoring any positive economic news about Britain.
The last thing these “despite Brexit” types want to hear is that UK growth has been stronger than that of both Germany and France. Hell no! They’d much prefer to see Britain as critics like Canadian Carney do, recently deriding us as “Argentina on the Channel”.
But the trouble with that theory is that, if we’re Argentina, who on earth are Germany right now?
Weak on the war in Ukraine, economically stagnant, and riven with political infighting that has spurred the rise of Right-wing populists AfD, Germany has now been Scholz to pieces.
By comparison, instead of performing worse than France and Germany since the start of the pandemic (and since Brexit, which took effect six weeks before the lockdowns began), little old Blighty has outperformed them both.
Of course we shouldn’t get too carried away, since the whole of Europe’s GDP remains sluggish – just look at Italy.
And let’s face it, Britain’s glacial growth rate is hardly anything to write home about. Indeed, we should really be comparing ourselves to the much more dynamic markets outside the European Union.
But it is tempting to write to the former Bank of England governor and all his mates pointing out that their prediction Britain would be irreparably harmed by Brexit while the EU thrived wasn’t just project fear – but project nonsense.
The UK’s economy may be dismal, but the bloc is crashing into austerity and recession
The Italian budget deficit is spiralling upwards again. France is about to have to make perhaps its first serious cuts of the free-spending Macron presidency. And Germany is facing a round of cuts to every form of government spending with the sole exception of defence.
In the background, the bond markets are increasingly staging the kind of revolt against wild spending that the UK endured a year ago. The British economy may well be in dismal shape, but the eurozone is heading straight back into austerity and recession, and as it does so all the flaws in the single currency will be painfully exposed all over again.
The latest round of upgrades to the UK’s growth figures published on Friday revealed that our performance has been middling compared to the rest of the G7 since the start of the pandemic. We have done significantly worse than the US or Canada, but, despite three years of propaganda from hardcore Remainers, better than Germany or France.
It turns out – surprise, surprise – that leaving the EU hasn’t made much difference to the economy one way or another. But it is about to become increasingly obvious to everyone that, while we have plenty of challenges to contend with, we were lucky to escape the mess across the rest of Europe.
Over the last week, the economic outlook on the other side of the Channel has taken a decisive turn for the worse. Italy has just published forecasts that its deficit will rise to 5.3pc of GDP, from earlier projections of 4.3pc, while its growth estimates have been cut to less than 1pc.
It turns out that the billions of euros of funds from other member states under the Coronavirus Recovery Fund, with the EU borrowing on its own account for the first time, that were designed to reboot the Italian economy have essentially been wasted. Italy is in a worse mess than ever, with its debt set to rise forever.
France’s President Macron may present himself as a centrist reformer, but he has also been quietly spending money on a scale that even Boris Johnson might have felt queasy about, and this week the bills started to fall due. Its budget for next year includes cuts to welfare payments – usually a touchy subject in riot-prone France – and postpones corporate tax breaks as it struggles to bring a debt to GDP ratio of 112pc under control.
Earlier this month, Germany published budget plans with cuts to everything except defence even though its infrastructure is creaking and public services are so old-fashioned that many still use fax machines.
It is probably no surprise that the bond markets have turned as jittery as they were during Liz Truss’s ill-fated premiership. Over the course of the week, the yield on 10-year Italian bonds rose to 4.89pc, the highest level since 2013. Everyone already assumes Italy is a basket case, but the rise in French yields was far more worrying, with rates spiking to 3.5pc, the highest level since 2011.
Under Macron, France’s debts have ballooned to the third largest in the world in absolute terms, behind only the US and Japan, while the size of the state is still enormous. If traders start to have doubts about France, that will be far more serious than anything that happens in Italy. It owes more money, and the debt is far more widely held globally.
Add it all up and one point is clear. At a point when the eurozone risks crashing back into a recession, governments are being forced into austerity programmes that will crush the life out of the economy. The flaws in the single currency are about to be exposed all over again.
First, its bizarre rules demand cuts to government spending at the time when it will do most damage. No one with a basic acquaintance with an economic textbook would argue that Italy or Germany require an austerity programme right now, but the rules of the euro require it so there is no other choice.
Next, the eurozone prevents countries from devaluing when they need to. Italy’s currency has been consistently too high since it replaced the lira with the euro and the country has barely grown in the 23-year-old experiment of sharing a currency with its neighbours.
Germany’s currency was too weak for most of the last two decades, but now, with no more cheap Russian gas, and with its prized auto industry getting destroyed by the Chinese, it is probably too high. Even so, it can’t devalue its way through a restructuring of its business model.
Finally, countries have lost the ability to control their own finances. The markets are quite rightly getting worried about the French state’s addiction to spending, and the refusal of its truculent workforce to accept changes to generous pension and welfare schemes.
But if it still had the franc, the central bank could always print the money to pay for it all even if it had to accept a weakening currency. That option has now been closed, with consequences that are becoming painfully obvious.
Two years ago the massive transfers within the zone in the Coronavirus Recovery Fund were meant to fix all the fault-lines in the single currency, while a massive blast of quantitative easing from the European Central Bank papered over the cracks and just about kept the show on the road.
The ECB’s balance sheet, a rough measure of the amount of money printed, hit 82pc of GDP at the peak, compared with 36pc for the US Federal Reserve, and 39pc for the Bank of England.
Over the next year it will become disturbingly clear that the zone is crashing right back into austerity and recession. And that, whatever its other challenges, the UK is at least well out of the mess on the other side of the Channel.
UK real GDP growth in 2023 is -0.3%. Our Growth in real terms is the lowest of the three countries you have mentioned. Probably the Truss effect.
We do seem to need a little more “Support”
