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If you’re under 50, it’s time to jump ship – get out of Britain while you can
The UK seems incapable of solving its own issues, and things are set to get worse
SAM ASHWORTH-HAYES
17 August 2023 • 6:00am
Sam Ashworth-Hayes
Young People Protest UK
Overworked and underpaid... and they do not have the CMS to contend with!!!!
Migration risk becomes widespread as a toxic combination of economic stagnation and surging growth elsewhere lure young people away CREDIT: Anadolu Agency
The historian Niall Ferguson once remarked that “if young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party”. If young British people knew what was good for them, they’d be on the next plane out of the country. Emigration is, after all, the time-honoured path to prosperity for those trapped in stagnating countries.
And the UK is not so much stagnating as it is fossilising. Fifteen years of anaemic growth mean that real wages are still below their 2008 peak – there are 30 year olds who have seen their entire working career go by without seeing meaningful growth in wages. The result is that countries we are used to thinking of as our peers are surging ahead.
Our GDP per capita, adjusted for actual purchasing power, is closer to Slovenia’s than it is to Denmark’s or Australia’s. American levels of prosperity are so far out of reach that we would need an economic Apollo mission to bridge the gap between us; the general manager of a Buc-ee’s petrol station in Texas is paid more than our Prime Minister.
With a tricky election looming, Rishi Sunak may come to regret giving up his US green card.
Economists think of migration as being driven by a combination of push and pull factors, things which drive you away from your home country and things which draw you to your destination. We’ve grown used to the stories of doctors trading soul-sapping shifts on NHS wards for higher pay and fewer hours in Australia, or finance professionals heading to Dubai.
The risk for Britain is that this trend now becomes widespread as a toxic combination of economic stagnation and surging growth elsewhere lure young people away.
It’s not as if the push factors are lacking. The housing market has passed beyond dysfunction and into catastrophe. Record numbers of adults still live with their parents, trapped by surging rents and unaffordable house prices. Those who do strike out can expect to spend well over 20 per cent of their incomes on housing costs, double the proportion that baby boomers spent when they were young. The average deposit on a family home would take that family around 19 years to save, compared to three years in the 1980s.
Young people wanting to start families are finding things previous generations took for granted to be effectively out of reach. It’s hard not to connect this dysfunction with the birth rate reaching record lows. Fertility intentions – the number of children women want to have – have been pretty much at replacement level in Britain even as the number of children they actually have has fallen.
To the extent that it is no longer possible for many to have the family lives they dream of in Britain, that’s a pretty convincing reason to leave.
This isn’t helped by the Government’s seeming preference to charge Scandinavian levels of taxes to deliver American levels of public services. The tax burden is creeping towards a post-war high of 37.7 per cent of GDP, while the NHS, unreformed and possibly unreformable, seems to be falling apart. International comparisons score the health service highly for being free at the point of use and treating people equally. The problem is that it’s bad at keeping people from dying.
Live expectancy vs number of tax payers
Meanwhile, other countries are becoming ever more attractive. We’re used to young people from Central and Eastern Europe coming here to work. Yet Poland is now growing so quickly that, if you project pre-pandemic growth rates forwards, it’s set to overtake us in output per person in ten years’ time.
In the meantime, it has a few other perks to offer young people, including exempting those under 26 from paying income tax. It’s a particularly appealing proposition if you can find a way to wrangle remote working at London wages while paying Warsaw prices.
The tax burden, 1945 to present. The part after 2023 is projected. Largely due to Covid-19.
The best reason to leave, though, is not that other countries are richer, or growing fast. It’s that the UK seems incapable of solving its own issues, and if anything they look set to get worse.
Britain has been an old state for centuries, but it is increasingly an old country. People living longer is obviously a good thing. The problem is that, combined with decades of low birth rates, these improved life expectancies have flipped the population pyramid on its head. The proportion of the population aged over 65 has crept up from 15 per cent in 2000 to 19 per cent in 2022, and is set to reach nearly 30 per cent by 2070.
The result is that caring for Britain’s elderly is set to impose an ever greater burden on the working-age population. The record tax burden in 2027/28 could easily be passed in the 2030s, and the 2040s too. The spending pressures are there to do it; the cost of the state pension and old age benefits is set to rise to nearly 10 per cent of GDP by 2070, while health and social care budgets will take up nearly 18 per cent of output.
We don’t have to reach these heights for living in a stagnating economy with ratcheting taxes to be unappealing, particularly when cuts are likely to fall towards the end of this period on the spending today’s workers are meant to benefit from.
The German economist Albert Hirschman framed the choice of consumers facing deteriorating quality as one between voice and exit: either stay and try to fix things, or leave for a better alternative. For young people in Britain, “voice” seems to be failing. There is precious little political impetus to fix any of these issues.
Successive governments have found planning to be a political live wire, with the NHS run almost as its own private kingdom, issuing demands for tribute from ministers unable to effectively interfere in its running; no party seriously wants to shrink the state.
That leaves exit. Those who can go, should.
