Great Britain will be outpaced by Poland by the end of this decade. Once the wealthiest country in Europe for a century, Great Britain’s trajectory has been on a downward slope since the end of World War II. Aside from a brief recovery during the 1980s and at the beginning of the Tony Blair era when its economy appeared capable of converging with those of the United States, Germany, and France, the British economy has suffered decades of stagnation. This is revealed in “Foundations,” an interesting and well-documented work by Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman, which shows that energy costs borne by industries in this country have tripled in 20 years, well before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This essay demonstrates that labor productivity is 15 to 18 percent higher in France and Germany, and this gap continues to widen. Electricity production barely reaches two-thirds of what France generates and is, according to the authors, much more comparable proportionally to the electricity outputs of nations like South Africa and Brazil than to its G7 counterparts.
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In fact, entire regions of the country are falling into poverty and decay, populated by workers whose median salary is 7 percent lower than in 2008. France being the most logical country to compare with Great Britain, the authors concluded that it boasts 37 million homes compared to the 30 million available to the British, who are only slightly more numerous. French residences are also reportedly newer and much better concentrated in pleasant, prosperous areas where life is good. The authors cite a shocking example: the Greater London area has experienced virtually no growth since 1945, while the geographical area around Paris has tripled during the same period.
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There are 3.4 million French families with second homes compared to only 800,000 for the British. France has 29 tram networks compared to 7 in Great Britain, and 6 underground metros compared to 3. Since 1980, France has built 1,740 kilometers of high-speed rail compared to just 111 for the UK, and 12,000 kilometers of highways compared to 4,000… Simply put, according to the authors, France has created as many kilometers of highways in the last 25 years as the entire British network!
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The splendor of Great Britain seems to have faded. Cities like Cardiff indeed enjoyed a 1,000 percent growth over 45 years in the 19th century, in a massive movement that attracted workers northward as well as to the Midlands and Wales, who benefited from the boom in heavy industries driven by coal. This is how the authors explain, a country becomes rich: when its population moves to its most dynamic regions and cities. Manchester saw its population explode from 90,000 in 1800 to 700,000 a century later, while Liverpool surged by over 1,000 percent during the same period. This boom continued into the 1930s, spurred by the services sector, which significantly benefited cities like Birmingham, Coventry, Leicester, and Nottingham.
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Those who migrated to these flourishing areas allowed the remaining workers to leverage competition and labor shortages against employers, thus improving their own incomes in these neglected regions. However, this situation has reversed in recent decades, as the scarcity and expense of homes and properties in prosperous regions of Great Britain operate a ruthless selection that only benefits the richest and most educated. As only they can afford to live in the prosperous cities of the UK, entire parts of the country are transforming into social and economic deserts, and it is obviously the economy of the entire country that suffers.
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What has become of this prestigious country that once had the best transport network in Europe? Who built—back in the 18th century!—nearly 36,000 kilometers of toll roads and 6,500 kilometers of canals? Who constructed an impressive railway network in the 19th century… of which only half remains today? Who inaugurated the world’s first underground metro line as early as the 1860s? Who equipped 90 of its cities with tram lines—almost all of which have been dismantled today? All these advantages significantly fostered and stimulated its phenomenal economic growth, which also made London the undisputed economic capital of the world.
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Today, they are crushed by design, construction, modernisation, and renovation costs, which are certainly the highest in Europe. The authors compare the construction cost per mile of the metro, which was GDP 68 million in Madrid, to GDP 1.4 billion for the Elizabeth Line, or Crossrail, which serves London and its extensive suburbs. Urban expansion, improvements in quality of life, and growth necessarily go hand in hand with mobility and electrification, allowing France to equip all its cities of 150,000 inhabitants with trams because its costs are 2.5 times lower than those of Great Britain, whose level of electrification is (according to the authors) comparable to that of India. For comparison, the city of Leeds, with its 800,000 inhabitants, does not have a metro system.
The very same country that had as many nuclear power plants as the United States in 1965, along with Russia and all others worldwide, has not built any in 30 years and now only derives 13 percent of its consumption from nuclear energy, compared to 70 percent for France. From an energy superpower, Great Britain has become a dwarf, and this is reflected today (according to the authors) in the height of its citizens, who were 5 centimeters taller than the French at the beginning of the 19th century because they consumed 600 calories more.
It takes 10 years from the conception of an infrastructure project to its commissioning in the UK. In France, it’s 3. The Lower Thames Crossing project connecting Kent to Essex required a report of 360,000 pages costing GDP 300 million, and it is not yet completed. The Sizewell C project for constructing a nuclear power plant using EPR technology required an environmental report of over 44,000 pages and has yet to see the light of day. According to Ben Southwood, Samuel Hughes, and Sam Bowman, Great Britain is the developed nation that lacks energy the most in the world.
In my opinion, its elites have failed. I also believe that it is obviously not Brexit that is responsible for the decline of Great Britain. Brexit was, in a way, the result of the poor—or non-choices—of the British over the last 40 or 50 years.
For more on the author, Michel Santi, visit his website here: michelsanti.fr
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