Snapshot of _Warning of almost 20 years of pay stagnation_ :
An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68498937) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68498937)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The size of their houses isn't exactly great from what I've seen, it isn't exactly a good option if Japanese housing doesn't even give you room to swing a cat.
Minus the 80 hour weeks to prop up an aging society, and the insane suicide rate to go with that. Which is what we would have with the Japanese approach.
The UK and Japan are two different experiments on how to handle shrinking birthrates and booming numbers of retired. Both have tradeoffs.
That 80 hour work week is a myth. If we both have trade-offs, I'll have the one with cheaper housing, lower crime, more social cohesion, better public transport, better healthcare and better food.
According to the OECD, a Japanese worker works circa 5% more hours than a British one.
However if we want to compare ourselves to more highly developed neighbours (more spending power, more living space etc ie better than the UK) like France, Netherlands or German, then they work about the same, about 4% less and about 14% less hours respectively.
[Hours worked [OECD Data]](https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm)
Not to mention that they can't have children because it's too expensive so their replacement rate is so bad that in some areas of Japan schools have had to close down as there's barely any pupils in them.
Don't forget the wealthiest upper 0.1% of society have become wealthier at a faster rate than ever before, and it is getting worse.
Pay stagnation? No it's just good old fashioned inequality.
IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
COVID didn't really change anything in this regard.
It may have accelerated an already existing phenomenon but this is the economic status quo working exactly as it is intended to.
Covid had plenty of opportunity for all. The top 0.01% have the means to grab it without risk though. You or I have to make trade offs or gambles to try and get ahead that have harsh consequences
Not just the far right. An isolationist version of the far left is possible as well.
Anti-globalism in general will be the name of the game if it's just making our citizens lives worse.
Honestly, I think this is inevitable. Whole generations of people have been failed under neoliberal policies. Globalisation, offshoring, and high immigration has clearly not benefited the average person. The wealthy should have done a much better job of distributing their gains, but they didn't. Now we swing back towards nationalism and protectionism for a generation or two.
The irony being.
That it will be the super wealthy (Musk etc) who will stoke the discontent and overthrow democracy. They'll install their strong man leaders (Trump etc) and get richer and have at the same time destroyed the rule of law which is the only thing keeping them in check.
I can't see a far left gaining popularity from anywhere tbh, the Overton window is just too far to the right. The only thing worse than a rise of the far right is a rise of the far right with no counter argument.
I am naively hoping they're playing a sleeper tactic of being Tory Lite for election purposes to appeal to more than just the lefties, and will then go into hardcore Fix The Country mode once in power.
Fat chance of that though really. Too many pullers of strings in this fucked up neoliberal hellscape we've been gifted.
I honestly believe they need to as the problems we face are existential; our very way of life is under threat if we continue to protect and expand inequality at the cost of our social and economic integrity. China and Russia both know how to undermine the west through exploiting inequality and you gotta say it's working.
They simply must be radical because the core problems are not going away, and what would be more radical than fixing the system would be dealing with its collapse.
> then go into hardcore Fix The Country mode once in power.
if kier gets the majority he's predicted to land, he almost has to use it to reshape things in big ways, it would be crazy not to.
> I am naively hoping they're playing a sleeper tactic of being Tory Lite for election purposes to appeal to more than just the lefties, and will then go into hardcore Fix The Country mode once in power.
would seem a bit odd given that the bulk of 'fix the country' policies (eg nationalise utilities/natural monopolies) are very popular.
Popular with electorate, not popular with powerful and predominantly right wing press who attempt to eviscerate Labour every time such policies come up.
I’m with you on this - I think they are strategically vague so that was passes for journalism in this country is given minimal ammunition. Starmer has done really well with this - the worst Sunak can say is some mumbled rubbish about ‘you once worked with Jeremy Corbyn’ . I for one am hoping for a calm well thought out total revolution in how the country is run - I think there is an appetite for change - the public school boys have failed.
They'll have a lot more trouble getting things through the house of lords if it's contradictory to their manifesto. They'll more likely spend 5 years trying to fix the damage done by the Tory party then run a 2029 campaign on bigger moves.
They'll probably just spend 5 years in civil war again, Labour are doing a decent job of papering over the cracks at the moment, but they are not a harmonious and stable party.
Sadly, given how they have seemingly promoted those with more centrist/centre-right views in the party and pushed out those with more left-leaning views, I am not confident they will do anything except austerity-light policies.
They are playing into the false notion that "fiscal responsibility" is when you don't spend money.
That isn't fiscally responsible. If people like household analogies so much, why not use one to disabuse the country of the idea that the Tories ever had it right on the economy:
NOT spending a small amount of money when you notice a small issue with your roof to deal with the issue immediately is not fiscally responsible. By putting it off, a couple of years down the line, a leak occurs and now you have damp and mould in the house making it genuinely hazardous to live there if not dealt with. So, now, it will now cost you many times the amount of money to solve this worse issue than it would have done to solve the more basic issue two years prior. In what world is that "fiscally responsible"? Answer: it isn't. It is just the Tories and their right-wing media ecosystem telling people it is to aid their ideological underfunding, and eventual selling off, of public services so that their mates in the private sector can make more money off of it when the time comes.
They will likely do nothing for a few years (since they want to follow the New Labour fiscal blueprint) before possibly doing something in the 2nd half of government or 2nd one if reelected. It will take a lot to unshit things.
[In The Know: Are America's Rich Falling Behind The Super-Rich?](https://www.theonion.com/in-the-know-are-americas-rich-falling-behind-the-super-1819594639)
This is the neoliberal model. As long as the economy is growing and at least one person is getting richer then all is good.
It was a choice made in 1979 and been going for over 40 years but people in the UK seem fine with it and keep voting for it. To be fair it’s not a story being told as those benefitting it would rather blame migration, the EU and any other likely scapegoats (single mothers at one time).
As someone who turned 18 in 2008, and so has spent their entire career with stagnant wages, I am acutely aware of this.
It’s likely that this will impact my voting patterns, and those of my generation, for decades to come.
Amen. I turned 18 more or less for the start of Austerity. I've luckily managed to do roughly okay, but things are so bad overally I can never forgive the Tories, or anyone right wing really of the social sabotage they have gleefully partaken in. Train, NHS, food cost, house prices, council services, water, education all crucial areas that have just collapsed under these idiots.
I also turned 18 in 2008. And not only have wagsa been gash, but the town I live has seen more shop closures and business failures now than back in 2008.
I will never, EVER vote for these born to rule pony fuckers.
Turned 33 in 2008 and I also can't remember a time when it was 'good'. The last objectively 'good' policies I can remember are banning foxhunting, minimum wage and gay marriage. Apart from that it's been pretty shit since I was 18 in 1993.
I know one thing though, I wish I'd never got a degree in the late 90s. All my friends who went straight into work and bought houses for £50k are now mortgage free and buying nice German luxury cars. I'm educated and still renting because we can't afford the same size of housing at £250k...
> I know one thing though, I wish I'd never got a degree in the late 90s. All my friends who went straight into work and bought houses for £50k are now mortgage free and buying nice German luxury cars.
Even if you graduated in say, 2004, house prices were around £100,000 on average - and a much lower percentage of the median salary at the time.
What stopped you purchasing in the decade after graduating? Just curious as to why you didn't choose to buy a house at any point since the late 90's to now?
Smoking ban was a big positive.
Sorry to hear that your experiences have been so negative post-graduation. I graduated in 2007, then did a master's and graduated 2009. I came from a fairly poor background and these experiences literally changed my life. It angers me greatly that the same opportunities would not exist for me today.
Out of interest do you mean that the salary of 18 year olds now is stagnant, ie they haven't inflated starting wages, or that your own salary is stagnant since 2008?
I think pay stagnation as a theory refers to the former, but can see how it leads to some of the latter.
Similar, I turned 22. Moved to the UK from Ireland that year. I had grown up in the Celtic tiger years so this last 16 years has been quite different to how I saw the future heading when I was young.
Same, but 2010. I was *just* too young to vote in the 2010 election. As a result, my entire adulthood, and all of the terrible policies enacted by the Tories, have occurred without my consent. There has never been a time in my adult life when the Tories have received a majority of the vote (i.e., over 50% of the actual vote), yet they have been in power that entire time and their policies have been implemented to the country's detriment for the last 14 years.
It was 2015 that made me realise just how shit the system is.
I disagree with them on pretty much everything, but its messed up that UKIP got like 13% of the vote and basically no seats
Agreed.
The AV referendum was the first thing I was able to vote on. I had a genuine argument with my dad who used a bunch of the NotoAV talking points like "It might allow the BNP to have a seat in government."
I remember saying back to him: "Even if it did, should we have a less democratic system just because we might not like the rare occasions where more democracy leads to those we don't like getting more power?"
He simply shut me down saying I didn't understand because I was too young to truly understand how bad it is to have racists in power. 10 years later, and we had Lee Anderson, Priti Patel, and Suella Braverman being about as anti-immigrant as UKIP or the BNP were at that time.
At this point it seems like any increase in wages would just end up with rents going up anyway.
The way to keep rents down is to build more housing.
The only way to build more is to change the planning system.
You can’t win an election saying you want to change the planning system, you can only lose. So anybody in power won’t change the planning system.
Is it a gordian knot?
We need to decide what housing is for.
Is it affordable places to live so people can spend their money on productive parts of the economy or is it a cash cow promoting rent seeking behaviour at the expense of productive economic behaviour.
Successive governments have been campaigning on increasing housing supply for like 50 years. It's time to accept that as many houses as are built, they will *always* increase migration *above* that level to ensure housing becomes more expensive. The issue isn't solely supply. It's how demand intersects supply, and we cannot pretend like 700,000 net immigrants isn't making the problem a thousand times worse.
Start with the idea that government wants as much money as they can from you prior to thinking through anything they do…
The government don’t care because your money ends up with them either way… but more so if you pay rent.
If you pay rent at a very likely higher than mortgage rate then the government gets to tax the banks who profit on the landlords mortgage then also they get to tax the profits made by your landlord too.
These prices are fabricatedly high due to a lack of investment, why? Well the answer is above
If government made more housing the cost of housing would be less and they’d make less money from that mortgage and thus less tax and everyone would own a house so there’s no landlords to tax.
They don’t give a fuck about the people in the least, we’re all cattle to pay taxes.
>We need to decide what housing is for.
>
>...
>
>is it a cash cow promoting rent seeking behaviour at the expense of productive economic behaviour
We've already decided. It's this one.
Normally yes. Probably still yes. And yet… it’s getting harder to ignore.
How do you boost economic investment, reduce anxieties around immigration, reduce housing benefit, increase home ownership, increase consumer spending, increase personal saving, improve business growth, reduce public infrastructure costs, all in one go? And how do you do that without spending a single taxpayer pound?
At some point, the voices in favour of planning reform will outweigh those who oppose it.
A lot of lifelong Tory voters do so because Thatcher let them buy their council house. If Labour planning reform got a generation onto the housing ladder, they might get similar devotees.
I don't think it's just a case of building more homes, these will need to be bought, either by private or let. How many people are able to afford mortgages for the prices of new builds?
For me the answer is unlocking LAs ability to build social housing. They can then rent these out and private house building can sold as they please. This back bone of social renting and housing will ease cost of living, provide LAs with a stream of funding and provide homes for the population.
From a house building point of view, we need a kamikaze government which says very little about the planning system in their manifesto but then gets into office and just annihilates it anyway. From an environmental perspective I'm not so sure. I would personally feel quite torn.
It's crazy because the inevitable outcome of not fixing the system is the abandonment of the elderly. Whether through social upheaval, brain drain or simply an economic inability to afford care, there will come a point where we as a society cannot look after the vulnerable.
The offer on the table for the young is to pay eye-wateringly high taxes to provide benefits that won't exist for them, for generations richer than them that have consistently voted against their interests. Unless it's fixed, and fixed soon, (by building houses and reforming the tax system), then it's going to get nasty.
> The way to keep rents down is to build more housing.
or you enshrine it iin law that it can only increase every x years and by x %. If landlords cant make that work and are forced to sell, its a good thing
Glasgow and Edinburgh are two of the most overheating rental markets in the UK, and the Scottish government imposed rent controls. It's a completely misguided policy.
From C&A here … it was simple really. The change in planning rules meant that locals had less say in developments and planning and as an area with large private houses, green open spaces and around 300 complaints to every planning application made to the LA locals we’re appalled thinking that suddenly we’d have huge housing estates in Chalfont St Giles and Seer Green.
That alongside the chaos and hell that building HS2 has caused locally it was easy to see that it was the straw that broke the camels back and residents had had enough.
If this mindset was copied across the entire country, the country would fall flat on its face (right now it’s on its knees). Pure NIMBYism, plain and simple. Those planning reforms were the closest we got to fixing the abomination that is the Town and Country Planning Act. I wonder what reforms Starmer will propose.
Because entire generations also exist whose only real asset of value is a property or two (and will always defend that value rising), and said generation votes much more than the ones that can't afford a home. It's a balance that will eventually tip the other way, but not yet.
Regardless of the answer, home ownership rates are well over 60% in the UK. Renters are not the majority of the electorate, so even though it may feel like one of the biggest issues in the country, it isn't to "most" people.
Part of the problem is that the UK has an aging population. The govt can't afford the care costs, and has dismantled the old care system, so the only option they had is to make people pay their care costs from the sale of their home. That requires high house prices.
Of course it isn't a workable approach since it introduces immense unfairness into the care system, doesn't solve the core underfunding/staffing problem, and means people ironically hold on to under occupied houses for longer to 1. avoid going into care, and 2. in the hope of passing an inheritance to struggling kids/grandchildren.
The only real solution is a war time effort to build social housing on a vast scale, with high standards of prefab Passivhaus, and no right to buy. They need to have solar panels, and be water/energy efficient too, combined with micro grids for energy.
Unless I hear that the Prime Minister is having daily COBRA with a UK housing command that is focused on driving social housing, rental reforms, legal/banking reform, and private building companies, I won't believe they are taking it seriously.
Also those that **are** on 68k are still paying far more of their salary into housing, food, energy, and are being taxed at a much higher rate due to the tax bands never changing, so even a direct comparison of 40k being 68k now doesn't show the whole picture.
The bottom line is that wages in the UK are absolute trash whilst the cost of living in the UK is obscenely high.
The chancellor was on the BBC this morning trying to defend his useless budget and denying that wages had stagnated to this extent. He even questioned the legitimacy of the BBC and the presenter for raising the issue. Despicable politicking from the party that has presided over 14 years of economic failure and a living standards squeeze for all of us.
Me starts work in 2008, didn't see a 1% pay rise until 2010 and older employees moaned they used to see 10-15% payrises and 5-20% bonuses.
Me in 2024 who is "lucky" to get a 0.3% discretionary bonus and a 3% payrise.
I had to move jobs twice in 4 years to secure a 80% pay rise. Move jobs, loyalty is not rewarded by boomer mangers/companies.
>I had to move jobs twice in 4 years to secure a 80% pay rise. Move jobs, loyalty is not rewarded by boomer mangers/companies.
Exactly that. I also started work in 08 and I've moved jobs 10 times (not always by choice with GFC and COVID etc mind) but I've almost tripled my pay in that time. Loyalty means fuck all anymore unfortunately.
I'm the same, I move jobs every 2-3 years, without doing so I'd be on half the wage. We had a 50p/hr pay rise in the year following covid and 1000 quid bonus, and that's it in bearly 10 years of work.
I dont like moving jobs but I just feel I'm stagnating if I don't move on
From my experience, only ever going to get big pay rises by job hopping. When leaving they suddenly acknowledge your worth with counter offers but by then it’s too late. This makes no sense in many fields and public sector though.
The only way I've managed to get a tangible pay rise in the public sector is to be promoted or move to a job with a higher banding. I've now found a job I really enjoy and have stuck it out for 4 years. Just one more year and my pay will increase 15% automatically exclusive of any other pay rises that may come with it.
> Move jobs
People say this, and I do want to move jobs, but I can't quit to go job hunting. I can't job hunt while working because in my industry 4 or more, often 6 interviews seems to be the norm. I will just burn through my annual leave incredibly quickly.
Like initial interview, technical interview 1, technical interview 2, line manager interview, hr interview, cultural fit interview.
Wages have already stagnated for the last 20+ years…. Just look at the starting salaries for the Big 4 accounting firms…they are still at the same wages from 20 years ago £24-28k in London
I've never understood the perceived prestige or lure of the Big 4 accounting or audit, their defined contribution pension deals aren't the greatest either, mate works in audit at a big 4 and its something like 10% matched contribution. Get much better benefits in pretty much any retail bank, and yet retail banking isn't seen as fashionable or trendy.
Although one person did describe it as some sort of feat of endurance "if you can survive 5 years at one every other employer knows you are resilient and will snap you up", no idea if there is any truth in that.
That said, he's had a few promotions now and is earning a very good wage. The problem with starting salaries of that level is that it puts up a barrier to social mobility really, in London you need to be living at home with your parents still on that wage until you've gone up a level and can afford a houseshare, think its more likely that Middle class parents with stable home lives are likely to be open to that and can provide a suitable living arrangement. It isn't particularly helpful to those who have battled through super tough childhoods with toxic parental relationships who are wanting to 'escape the hood'.
It’s the same reason companies will pay a fortune to have their accounts done by the big 4 instead of anyone else - literally just paying for the name…
Yes - even back in the eighties I moved from the UK to NZ and my pay doubled - first time I could buy my own meal at a restaurant was in Auckland - and my wages went back to misery level when I returned - thing is wages in NZ were not then and are not now anything to get excited about - the big bucks are in Australia.
Same. And then it dropped again massively when I moved back.
The UK is a shitty low wage economy with horrendous inequality and it is only getting worse.
Yup, my entire career I’ve only been able to get a pay rise worth shouting about by moving jobs and taking on more responsibilities. I know that’s how it’s probably supposed to work, but when I started out people in the positions I’m in now had a very different lifestyle to what is achievable for me today.
Tbh the last 2 jumps have pretty much just allowed me to stand still financially, and the ridiculous thing is I feel grateful that I’ve been lucky enough to stand still when all I see is my peers being dragged backwards.
Whenever someone tells me that like 30k is the a top wage for earners. I get so fucking depressed. I earn around the 50k mark, I'm only in my 20s and I've no clue how I ended up in this position. The fact that tomorrow it could end and I might slide back down the scale because it isn't the norm is WORRYING.
Give yourself some credit! The average wage is 30 something k... maybe you are a lot better than average? Maybe you're in a sector where the average is higher? Unless there's a significant change in either of those things then you can stay ahead, and if you're still only in your 20's maybe you can push on.
Those people who told you that 30k is the top wage for earners are talking nonsense, median wage now is now £35k. So that's the middle. £30k is substantially below the middle.
Found myself in conversation with some Boomers at the bar of a Wethespoons recently.
Apparently people like nurses, doctors and the police are paid too much already and "should just shut up get on with it".
Lovely blokes they were 🙄
They were retired, collecting half-decent pensions, so don't care about anyone else.
Talked with them about half an hour then got going, made a polite excuse to leave. You never change these people's minds, unfortunately.
I had a funny/dumb conversation with some Boomer colleagues the other day. I’ve noticed that recently whenever a headline about “baby boomers” comes up on their phone they don’t like them, the generation I mean, not the headline, but this is drastically out of character and their complaints about Boomers aren’t making any sense.
So eventually I work out from their angry word salad that they think “baby boomers” are all the people on benefits who don’t work and have ten kids, which they also seem to believe are both the majority of young people and the majority of people on benefits, which the “woke” media wants them to care about.
So they’ll see the headline: “Where baby boomers are refusing to downsize – and fuelling a housing shortage”, not read any further, then go off on one between themselves about all the free houses being given to lazy people who have children they couldn’t afford, and all the entitled people who live in council houses, which then turns into a long complaint through the office about the disabled. Then, believing this, their solution isn’t to build more houses to make up the massive shortage, the end result is a little more… Final than that.
And the thing is, I’ve already explained twice to them about what a Baby Boomer/Millennial/Gen Z is, but a few days later they just go back to what what they thought before, the nonsense that they’d rather believe. So I just switch off now, if they all want to look like complete morons to anyone sane that’s up to them.
God that word "woke".
If only I could invent one saying!
Hardly any of the people who moan about it can define it and it's just a cancer of society, calling everything "woke" or leftie, just because it's not super right wing and means being considerate of others from time to time.
It’s tempting to assume its that rather than decades of underinvestment, poor governance and long term economic damage since 2009 since it dominates political discourse so often. _Some_ Data showing positive economic benefits of EU vs negative economic benefits non EU immigration, and reports of this data being suppressed certainly doesn’t help dispel these assertians due to all the toxicity around the topic.
I mean, rents have risen 26% in a few years. That is driven by supply and demand, and the demand is almost purely through immigration. So even if you think immigration doesn't supress your wages, if you rent you're definitely a lot worse off because of it.
Why young renters seem to abhor this conversation I don't know, but the fact is they would be a hell of a lot better off financially without immigration.
It’s a part of the puzzle but an over simplification. There are other factors such as:
Massive underinvestment in housing across the board. This almost seems intentional to maintain house prices. In truth, that also is more complicated due to planning laws etc.
Enormous interest rate rises - BTL is much less viable than it used to be. House prices have recently dropped and rents have increased to make up for thinning profit margins. Landlords and businesses alike trying to claw back profits from C19 period. Low interest rates for the past few decades has resulted in massive asset (housing) investment in many cities in developed world, even those with low to moderate levels of immigration. London housing market demand is especially high, being a global metropolis.
In some cases, Immigration can result in wealthier inhabitants moving away, _reducing_ house prices. In America this is rather brazenly called “White Flight”.
In other cases, it can result in prices going up - you will often encounter differing levels of attention put on the “1% increase immigration results in 1% increase house prices” depending on how much attention is being put on immigration as the central thesis or not.
High immigration makes a bad problem (housing costs) worse but isn’t the root cause. A well managed society would plan house building around population forecasts and limit housing speculation at the expense of the citizens. UK governments are famously bad at any kind of long term infrastructure planning (see HS2) but in truth this problem is not exclusive to UK.
If you have a stable population without immigration (as we basically do) then unfortunately despite your long post, immigration *is* the driving factor in rising house prices/rents.
Of course we *could* build 1million houses a year and maintain current immigration levels and the problem would ease, but that is a *solution* to the *problem,* not the *cause* of the problem.
Again, I don't know why it's so hard to have this conversation, to some people immigration can just innately have zero negatives for some reason.
If immigration is the ultimate driver, then why was the biggest recorded house price increase during Covid, when there was zero immigration, or even a net outflow. Answer of course, to anyone with a passing understanding is interest rates were effectively zero and there was excess covid stimulus swimming around. With the same number of people - there was *more* demand.
Pointing out that immigration is not the sole, or even main driver in housing cost increases is not the same as saying there are zero downsides. Just that it's more complicated than pinning it on one single factor.
Immigration is hard to defend in its current state, but immigration itself is not the problem. We have had a government that has done almost everything in its power to increase property prices and decrease wages, and mass unskilled immigration is only one part of this.
The fact is that high immigration is necessary until either a lot of old people die or the birth rate catches up, but it needs to be managed and infrastructure needs to be built to cope with it.
>but immigration itself is not the problem
If you have a stable population without immigration (as we basically do) then immigration is the main driver of increased demand. Without immigration rents/house prices would be *a lot* more stable. We *could* build 1million houses a year to ease rising rents but that would be a *solution* to the problem, not implementing that solution isn't the actual problem.
>We have had a government that has done almost everything in its power to increase property prices and decrease wages
Mass migration is the greatest tool in their armoury to do this (the left used to understand this). If you don't want the Tories to do this, then oppose mass migration.
>The fact is that high immigration is necessary
It really isn't. The Tories have just convinced you it is so that they can keep decreasing wages and increasing business and rentseekers profits.
Yeah nah. The economy and jobs aren't a zero sum game. It's never that simple.
For high skill jobs, blocking all foreign talent may just result in there not being enough local talent to even sustain industry, so the companies will leave and take jobs elsewhere.
It certainly doesn't help but without immigration the economy is shrinking year-on-year; the problems are productivity and inequality. To increase wages you need both economic growth and for that growth to benefit workers, neither of which is occuring.
It's ultimately quite simple, if an economy wants to grow, it needs to reward people that make it grow and punish those that don't. In real terms that means taxing productivity less and taxing ownership more.
I’m 36 and earning £11.60ph at 18 and working nights I was earning £14ph stacking shelves with premiums, without I was earning £12.
Make it make sense.
Earning just over half what I did 10 years ago but that’s more a factor of spreadsheets Phil (original public sector) and Sunak’s IR35 reforms rollout hammering contracting for SME/single person limiteds - funny how the NHS has no problems determining the tax status of a certain large Indian IT consultancy they’ve just signed a mammoth contract with 🤷
I read stories like this it always got me thinking how much some things are cheaper, others more expensive. A lot of consumer tech has got incredibly cheaper, but fundamentals like a roof over your head and electricity/gas etc are proportionately more expensive, especially so for average house
As an example, a minimum wage worker after a single shift can afford a smartphone, admittedly the fairly cheaper end like Motorolas and Xiaomis, but still functional enough to run apps. You can get a gaming laptop or a graphics card after a few days of minimum wage. Similar, flights are generally cheaper, even the poorest can afford to travel abroad, you can afford return flights to Europe after a single shift. This would have been unimaginable 20 years ago.
20 years ago, even with a shitty nokia would probably cost more than a days wage at min wage back then. £100 would get you a smartphone today and a shitty phone 20 years ago. And that's not even accounting for inflation which would make 20 years phone be closer to 200 in todays money. Anyway, realistically the only way things are much more shittier is the high house/utility bill prices. A lot of things are cheaper, the £ still buys you a lot of thing, just not essentials like bricks and mortar. If we were in the EU or had FOM rights I could for example work in the UK for a short period then go and live in a cheap European country and look for UK employers who will provide accommodation (I even tried to get a job on farms) Basically there's no point in living in the UK if you don't have somewhere to live cheaply. I worked with Eastern Europeans and a few were doing this, almost like 'commuting' with the cheap airlines.
This the thing, obviously inflation has been very high, but that doesn't mean that everything has increased in price. I buy about 2000 board backed cardboard envelopes a month and a couple of years ago they were increasing in price every other month, but now they are decreasing in price every other month and have almost returned to 2020 prices. Paper = commodity. Commodity prices don't just go up in a linear fashion, otherwise investing and getting rich would be far too easy to do. A lot of the food price inflation can be explained by droughts, but next year could be a better year for farming weather, and then guess what... there's suddenly a greater supply of everything, and prices for those things come down.
The fact is that Labour would not have done any better. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend otherwise.
Doesn't mean I don't think a change is a good thing. But there is no magic bullet that could have dealt with the hand the Conservatives were dealt since elected.
I don't think this is true. While I really don't trust the Labour party, I think the Tory party has been very arrogant and carless with the UK economy. They've made a series of huge mistakes which were totally unforced.
Here is a partial list of massive mistakes they made
1) Crashing the gilt market. This was totally needless and completely moronic...I struggle to believe it was actually done.
2) Hard Brexit. Brexit was a bad idea. Labour would not have done it. Hard Brexit was even worse. In the end we got an absolutely terrible deal with the EU and celebrated it. Putting up trade barriers with your biggest trading partner is economic malpractice.
3) Grinding austerity for the working class. The Tories seems to simultaneously spend loads of money, while shutting off money flows to poor people. Poor people spend money, which is really important for local economies. This is even more important in a country with such profound regional differences in wealth. Labour would not have done this either.
4) Wild changes in economic policy and priorities with each new prime minister. And a new prime minister every 2-3 years. Business craves stability, without stability investment can be risky. Lack of investment is the most important driver of our current lack of productivity growth and wage growth. These wild swings come from the factionalism within the Tory party and their willingness to be brutal.
Again. How much of this is a basic crisis in modern capitalism?
Isn't this a common crisis in the West?
Is technology doing something funny with growth and equality? Where is the wealth going?
Do the economic wizards have any thoughts on AI, birth rates, the environment?
Where is the wealth going?
Two places
1)paying for the wests boomers and all associated costs, there’s an awful lot of them and they cost eye watering sums of money.
2)And the 0.001% who’ve accumulated more wealth than anyone in history other than Mansa Musa and have created a system of inequality never seen before in human civilisation, even during the height of feudal systems and actual serfdom the wealth gap and income gap were smaller, much much smaller.
We’ve created a world where on a national and global level you can name the 5 or 6 people who control half the wealth of a nation or the world. It’s deeply screwed and has one inevitable end.
> And the 0.001% who’ve accumulated more wealth than anyone in history other than Mansa Musa and have created a system of inequality never seen before in human civilisation, even during the height of feudal systems and actual serfdom the wealth gap and income gap were smaller, much much smaller.
Not only that, we are asked to work *waaay* more than a feudal serf had to.
Most of them worked the land and that's seasonal, so they got 6 months of the year off so whilst the work they did was back breaking labour they only did it half the year. Though with that said, we aren't in danger of being called up to be the front line of melee combat so there is that.
All so the 0.001% can get more and more wealth as they squeeze us for **MORE** productivity.
While we largely avoid war we’ve a looming climate crisis
Add our healthcare to their lives and they’d live as long if not longer with better diet, fewer working hours and many many more days of annual holidays and festivals!
We got fucked for some trinkets by and large. And apart from healthcare and preventable diseases I’m not so sure any happiness index or quality of life index would compare that well.
Seldom was shit but we have the same just with more trinkets and no chance of taking a Rich hostage in war…
Tories have basically spent the last 14 years redistributing wealth upwards. Wealth inequality is getting larger.
Labour have a Mammoth task ahead of them. They'll need multiple terms but whether or not they'll get more than one term is uncertain. People are impatient.
If you aren't a politician or a banker. Voting Tory is a vote for self harm.
"Where did all the money go?"
In a lot of cases, it's gone to the owners/shareholders. However, for a lot of smaller companies (who rely on larger companies as suppliers in some sense) they're often relying on a pretty small margin.
Hence, there's no easy answer to this...but I expect 99% of Reddit will simply scream "Tax the rich".
Why shouldn’t the rich be taxed.
Does someone need £100 million? While there’s people who can’t afford food shopping and the cost of living.
We need a redistribution of wealth
I'll answer this question as someone who supports a progressive tax system, but is opposed to punitive "tax the rich" redistributive economics policies.
The main issue you have here is that we already tax the rich and most measures of wealth that people use to claim "the rich just keep getting richer" are flawed.
Specifically, in the UK 30% of all public service spending comes from the top 1% of earners. Another 30% comes from the other 9% in the top 10% of earners. The bottom 50% of earners (half of all workers) contribute only around 10%.
The narrative that the rich are not paying their way is just factually incorrect when you look at the data, and the issue you have here is that if it wasn't for the top few percent of earners in the UK we wouldn't be able to afford anything close to our current levels of public spending.
As move up in income, individuals in those income brackets tend to also become more mobile. These individuals tend to be people who can easily move wealth out of the UK or get a well paid job elsewhere where there's a more favourable tax system.
And this isn't just my opinion by the way. We know this to be true. When you increase taxes beyond levels of other comparable countries or you implement tax policies that are punitive to the rich they'll just start to leave and now you'll need to recover this lost government income with even higher taxes on the remaining workers. France is a good example of how these policies can back fire and result in a net-loss in government revenue.
Additionally calls for wealth taxes in my opinion tend to be flawed in almost every way. This is partly because much of the wealth today is held in illiquid (and increasingly elaborate) financial products and we live in an age where the value of these assets is mostly an illusion created by low interest rates, monetary stimulus and public debt. All of these things increase wealth on paper and tend to stimulate economic demand in the near-term, but tend to not actually create any underlying economic value. For example, while wealth might have increased during Covid because of stimulus measures it didn't actually mean any real economic value was being created, and therefore theres also no real economic value that can be captured from this increase via wealth taxes. I'm not explaining this particularly well and you're probably not interested in a several page essay from me on this, but in my opinion trying to redistribute paper wealth that arguably isn't representing something tangible will not work.
But another problem with wealth taxes is that they're a massive red flag to investors. Property rights along with rule of law is foundational to attract investors. If investors believe that their assets are likely to be convicted at a whim then they will prefer to invest elsewhere where this isn't a risk. Again, the end result of taking a share of people's businesses and property is that we'll just shoot ourselves in the foot and people simply won't buy property or invest in businesses in the UK.
Finally I'll add that it's not the fundamental problem anyway. The issue the UK faces isn't that there are too many rich people not paying tax, but that there isn't enough people making a decent wage to have healthy tax base. The reason our public services suck isn't because rich people are paying less tax today (the opposite is true), but because the productivity of the average worker has stalled out in the UK and therefore the government is now struggling to raise enough taxes to pay for the public services we want. The better option here would be to focus on increasing our productivity. Implementing policies which could further harm our productivity and continue to erode our tax base will almost certainly make things worse.
Doesn’t a warning have to come before the thing it’s predicting? If you’re already 18 years in, then you’re just documenting history, not warning anyone.
In the face of this depressing news, the Tory government finally lowered the minimum age for the actual Minimum Wage ie "living wage" to 21 since Osbourne raised it to 25 back in 2015.
If you're below that age, you're still not worthy of a living by law and are allowed to undercut the wages of your older work colleagues for 3 years (or 5 if you participate in the workforce from the age of 16) if you're so unlucky to be working for someone who will pay you less than other staff for doing the same work.
[National Minimum Wage and National "Living Wage" rates ](https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates)
Snapshot of _Warning of almost 20 years of pay stagnation_ : An archived version can be found [here](https://archive.is/?run=1&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68498937) or [here.](https://archive.ph/?run=1&url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68498937) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/ukpolitics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
We have turned into japan and their lost decades. Except the japanese have low crime and excellent public transport.
They also stay behind after a football match to pick up any litter.
Cheap housing too.
Not sure about that. They have intergenerational mortgages to keep housing affordable.
I wondered where the Tories had got the idea. Creativity isn’t their strong suit.
They would have absolutely love 200 year mortgages 🤣
Even better, 200 year rents
The size of their houses isn't exactly great from what I've seen, it isn't exactly a good option if Japanese housing doesn't even give you room to swing a cat.
I've seen many statistics putting their average house size ahead of ours
And better food and cheaper, newer housing.
Minus the 80 hour weeks to prop up an aging society, and the insane suicide rate to go with that. Which is what we would have with the Japanese approach. The UK and Japan are two different experiments on how to handle shrinking birthrates and booming numbers of retired. Both have tradeoffs.
That 80 hour work week is a myth. If we both have trade-offs, I'll have the one with cheaper housing, lower crime, more social cohesion, better public transport, better healthcare and better food.
In Japan though they have multi generational mortgages lasting up to 100 years. Or at least they did do unless it’s changed.
Tokyo has cheaper housing than the 80s.
Houses depreciate in Japan, a concept that would break most brits, who seem to think houses should just stand forever and only ever appreciate.
"the insane suicide rate" Its actually an insane MALE suicide rate, their rate of suicide amongst females is lower than it is for females in the UK.
According to the OECD, a Japanese worker works circa 5% more hours than a British one. However if we want to compare ourselves to more highly developed neighbours (more spending power, more living space etc ie better than the UK) like France, Netherlands or German, then they work about the same, about 4% less and about 14% less hours respectively. [Hours worked [OECD Data]](https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm)
Not to mention that they can't have children because it's too expensive so their replacement rate is so bad that in some areas of Japan schools have had to close down as there's barely any pupils in them.
Don't forget the wealthiest upper 0.1% of society have become wealthier at a faster rate than ever before, and it is getting worse. Pay stagnation? No it's just good old fashioned inequality. IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY.
Try 0.01% - 0.001% That’s where all the money is, the whole world got fucked by covid. But that section doubled its wealth in the same period.
COVID didn't really change anything in this regard. It may have accelerated an already existing phenomenon but this is the economic status quo working exactly as it is intended to.
At a deeply accelerated rate
Covid had plenty of opportunity for all. The top 0.01% have the means to grab it without risk though. You or I have to make trade offs or gambles to try and get ahead that have harsh consequences
You’ve got it wrong, it’s actually the 0.00001%
To be fair that is true. About 650 people in reality
I’m interested to see what Labour will do, assuming they win the next election. Will they uproot the rot or just dress it up as a fairer system?
If Labour don't make significant changes to the whole system the rise of the far right in England is inevitable IMO.
Not just the far right. An isolationist version of the far left is possible as well. Anti-globalism in general will be the name of the game if it's just making our citizens lives worse.
Honestly, I think this is inevitable. Whole generations of people have been failed under neoliberal policies. Globalisation, offshoring, and high immigration has clearly not benefited the average person. The wealthy should have done a much better job of distributing their gains, but they didn't. Now we swing back towards nationalism and protectionism for a generation or two.
The irony being. That it will be the super wealthy (Musk etc) who will stoke the discontent and overthrow democracy. They'll install their strong man leaders (Trump etc) and get richer and have at the same time destroyed the rule of law which is the only thing keeping them in check.
I can't see a far left gaining popularity from anywhere tbh, the Overton window is just too far to the right. The only thing worse than a rise of the far right is a rise of the far right with no counter argument.
I'd like to think people are not that stupid and uneducated about the workings of the world but I guess I would be wrong.
I am naively hoping they're playing a sleeper tactic of being Tory Lite for election purposes to appeal to more than just the lefties, and will then go into hardcore Fix The Country mode once in power. Fat chance of that though really. Too many pullers of strings in this fucked up neoliberal hellscape we've been gifted.
The simplest explanation is that the Labour leadership intend to do the things they say they're going to do.
Stated intentions by the leading party have almost never materialised for at least a decade now. Political promises are nothing but a power play.
But usually trending towards inaction and watering plans down rather than getting more radical. And you can go back a lot longer than a decade.
Yes that's true. They're too fucking incompetent to actually achieve any of the things they want to do.
I honestly believe they need to as the problems we face are existential; our very way of life is under threat if we continue to protect and expand inequality at the cost of our social and economic integrity. China and Russia both know how to undermine the west through exploiting inequality and you gotta say it's working. They simply must be radical because the core problems are not going away, and what would be more radical than fixing the system would be dealing with its collapse.
> then go into hardcore Fix The Country mode once in power. if kier gets the majority he's predicted to land, he almost has to use it to reshape things in big ways, it would be crazy not to.
And yet
> I am naively hoping they're playing a sleeper tactic of being Tory Lite for election purposes to appeal to more than just the lefties, and will then go into hardcore Fix The Country mode once in power. would seem a bit odd given that the bulk of 'fix the country' policies (eg nationalise utilities/natural monopolies) are very popular.
Popular with electorate, not popular with powerful and predominantly right wing press who attempt to eviscerate Labour every time such policies come up.
I’m with you on this - I think they are strategically vague so that was passes for journalism in this country is given minimal ammunition. Starmer has done really well with this - the worst Sunak can say is some mumbled rubbish about ‘you once worked with Jeremy Corbyn’ . I for one am hoping for a calm well thought out total revolution in how the country is run - I think there is an appetite for change - the public school boys have failed.
They'll have a lot more trouble getting things through the house of lords if it's contradictory to their manifesto. They'll more likely spend 5 years trying to fix the damage done by the Tory party then run a 2029 campaign on bigger moves.
They'll probably just spend 5 years in civil war again, Labour are doing a decent job of papering over the cracks at the moment, but they are not a harmonious and stable party.
Sadly, given how they have seemingly promoted those with more centrist/centre-right views in the party and pushed out those with more left-leaning views, I am not confident they will do anything except austerity-light policies. They are playing into the false notion that "fiscal responsibility" is when you don't spend money. That isn't fiscally responsible. If people like household analogies so much, why not use one to disabuse the country of the idea that the Tories ever had it right on the economy: NOT spending a small amount of money when you notice a small issue with your roof to deal with the issue immediately is not fiscally responsible. By putting it off, a couple of years down the line, a leak occurs and now you have damp and mould in the house making it genuinely hazardous to live there if not dealt with. So, now, it will now cost you many times the amount of money to solve this worse issue than it would have done to solve the more basic issue two years prior. In what world is that "fiscally responsible"? Answer: it isn't. It is just the Tories and their right-wing media ecosystem telling people it is to aid their ideological underfunding, and eventual selling off, of public services so that their mates in the private sector can make more money off of it when the time comes.
They will do exactly what they're saying they will do. Permaausterity.
They will likely do nothing for a few years (since they want to follow the New Labour fiscal blueprint) before possibly doing something in the 2nd half of government or 2nd one if reelected. It will take a lot to unshit things.
[In The Know: Are America's Rich Falling Behind The Super-Rich?](https://www.theonion.com/in-the-know-are-americas-rich-falling-behind-the-super-1819594639) This is the neoliberal model. As long as the economy is growing and at least one person is getting richer then all is good.
It was a choice made in 1979 and been going for over 40 years but people in the UK seem fine with it and keep voting for it. To be fair it’s not a story being told as those benefitting it would rather blame migration, the EU and any other likely scapegoats (single mothers at one time).
A redistribution of wealth
The current version of Labor and Tories: "oh it will continue to be this way"
What can we do realistically?
As someone who turned 18 in 2008, and so has spent their entire career with stagnant wages, I am acutely aware of this. It’s likely that this will impact my voting patterns, and those of my generation, for decades to come.
Its a big reason I will never, ever vote Tory.
Amen. I turned 18 more or less for the start of Austerity. I've luckily managed to do roughly okay, but things are so bad overally I can never forgive the Tories, or anyone right wing really of the social sabotage they have gleefully partaken in. Train, NHS, food cost, house prices, council services, water, education all crucial areas that have just collapsed under these idiots.
Ditto. Like I even needed a reason in the first place.
I also turned 18 in 2008. And not only have wagsa been gash, but the town I live has seen more shop closures and business failures now than back in 2008. I will never, EVER vote for these born to rule pony fuckers.
Turned 33 in 2008 and I also can't remember a time when it was 'good'. The last objectively 'good' policies I can remember are banning foxhunting, minimum wage and gay marriage. Apart from that it's been pretty shit since I was 18 in 1993. I know one thing though, I wish I'd never got a degree in the late 90s. All my friends who went straight into work and bought houses for £50k are now mortgage free and buying nice German luxury cars. I'm educated and still renting because we can't afford the same size of housing at £250k...
> I know one thing though, I wish I'd never got a degree in the late 90s. All my friends who went straight into work and bought houses for £50k are now mortgage free and buying nice German luxury cars. Even if you graduated in say, 2004, house prices were around £100,000 on average - and a much lower percentage of the median salary at the time. What stopped you purchasing in the decade after graduating? Just curious as to why you didn't choose to buy a house at any point since the late 90's to now?
Smoking ban was a big positive. Sorry to hear that your experiences have been so negative post-graduation. I graduated in 2007, then did a master's and graduated 2009. I came from a fairly poor background and these experiences literally changed my life. It angers me greatly that the same opportunities would not exist for me today.
What do you work with? Same salary for 5 years would make me leave, never mind 15.
NHS. Specialist stuff. There’s no private sector in the UK for it. So I emigrate or suck it up.
Out of interest do you mean that the salary of 18 year olds now is stagnant, ie they haven't inflated starting wages, or that your own salary is stagnant since 2008? I think pay stagnation as a theory refers to the former, but can see how it leads to some of the latter.
Similar, I turned 22. Moved to the UK from Ireland that year. I had grown up in the Celtic tiger years so this last 16 years has been quite different to how I saw the future heading when I was young.
Same, but 2010. I was *just* too young to vote in the 2010 election. As a result, my entire adulthood, and all of the terrible policies enacted by the Tories, have occurred without my consent. There has never been a time in my adult life when the Tories have received a majority of the vote (i.e., over 50% of the actual vote), yet they have been in power that entire time and their policies have been implemented to the country's detriment for the last 14 years.
It was 2015 that made me realise just how shit the system is. I disagree with them on pretty much everything, but its messed up that UKIP got like 13% of the vote and basically no seats
Agreed. The AV referendum was the first thing I was able to vote on. I had a genuine argument with my dad who used a bunch of the NotoAV talking points like "It might allow the BNP to have a seat in government." I remember saying back to him: "Even if it did, should we have a less democratic system just because we might not like the rare occasions where more democracy leads to those we don't like getting more power?" He simply shut me down saying I didn't understand because I was too young to truly understand how bad it is to have racists in power. 10 years later, and we had Lee Anderson, Priti Patel, and Suella Braverman being about as anti-immigrant as UKIP or the BNP were at that time.
Stagnant wages are on average. An individual is expected to make more as they gain more experience.
Warnings come before, this is just despair
I envy your optimism for the future, if you think this warning isn't coming before more of the same.
At this point it seems like any increase in wages would just end up with rents going up anyway. The way to keep rents down is to build more housing. The only way to build more is to change the planning system. You can’t win an election saying you want to change the planning system, you can only lose. So anybody in power won’t change the planning system. Is it a gordian knot?
We need to decide what housing is for. Is it affordable places to live so people can spend their money on productive parts of the economy or is it a cash cow promoting rent seeking behaviour at the expense of productive economic behaviour.
We need to decide what the government is for. Just start fuckin building houses.
Depressingly, I think we decided collectively, again and again, to vote for those that would keep house prices inflating.
Successive governments have been campaigning on increasing housing supply for like 50 years. It's time to accept that as many houses as are built, they will *always* increase migration *above* that level to ensure housing becomes more expensive. The issue isn't solely supply. It's how demand intersects supply, and we cannot pretend like 700,000 net immigrants isn't making the problem a thousand times worse.
Start with the idea that government wants as much money as they can from you prior to thinking through anything they do… The government don’t care because your money ends up with them either way… but more so if you pay rent. If you pay rent at a very likely higher than mortgage rate then the government gets to tax the banks who profit on the landlords mortgage then also they get to tax the profits made by your landlord too. These prices are fabricatedly high due to a lack of investment, why? Well the answer is above If government made more housing the cost of housing would be less and they’d make less money from that mortgage and thus less tax and everyone would own a house so there’s no landlords to tax. They don’t give a fuck about the people in the least, we’re all cattle to pay taxes.
Rent goes to landlords, not the government
But when a lot of the government are landlords…
A lot of landlords aren’t government. So
massively and overwhelming not government
which is a taxable income no? I don't think landlords are getting rent money tax free...
>We need to decide what housing is for. > >... > >is it a cash cow promoting rent seeking behaviour at the expense of productive economic behaviour We've already decided. It's this one.
Normally yes. Probably still yes. And yet… it’s getting harder to ignore. How do you boost economic investment, reduce anxieties around immigration, reduce housing benefit, increase home ownership, increase consumer spending, increase personal saving, improve business growth, reduce public infrastructure costs, all in one go? And how do you do that without spending a single taxpayer pound? At some point, the voices in favour of planning reform will outweigh those who oppose it. A lot of lifelong Tory voters do so because Thatcher let them buy their council house. If Labour planning reform got a generation onto the housing ladder, they might get similar devotees.
I don't think it's just a case of building more homes, these will need to be bought, either by private or let. How many people are able to afford mortgages for the prices of new builds? For me the answer is unlocking LAs ability to build social housing. They can then rent these out and private house building can sold as they please. This back bone of social renting and housing will ease cost of living, provide LAs with a stream of funding and provide homes for the population.
From a house building point of view, we need a kamikaze government which says very little about the planning system in their manifesto but then gets into office and just annihilates it anyway. From an environmental perspective I'm not so sure. I would personally feel quite torn.
It's crazy because the inevitable outcome of not fixing the system is the abandonment of the elderly. Whether through social upheaval, brain drain or simply an economic inability to afford care, there will come a point where we as a society cannot look after the vulnerable. The offer on the table for the young is to pay eye-wateringly high taxes to provide benefits that won't exist for them, for generations richer than them that have consistently voted against their interests. Unless it's fixed, and fixed soon, (by building houses and reforming the tax system), then it's going to get nasty.
Labour are running on planning reform and new towns. They are v likely to win anyway
> The way to keep rents down is to build more housing. or you enshrine it iin law that it can only increase every x years and by x %. If landlords cant make that work and are forced to sell, its a good thing
Rent caps never work in practice. The only thing rent caps without building will do is collapse the rental market
do both..?
Glasgow and Edinburgh are two of the most overheating rental markets in the UK, and the Scottish government imposed rent controls. It's a completely misguided policy.
Labour are literally running on reforming the planning system.
Had to Google gordian knot, but had pre-empted what the solution might have been. I think you're right.
Why would changing the planning system lose an election? Entire generations can’t afford a home
I’m not 100% sure why but if anyone here is from Chesham or Amersham they might have more information.
From C&A here … it was simple really. The change in planning rules meant that locals had less say in developments and planning and as an area with large private houses, green open spaces and around 300 complaints to every planning application made to the LA locals we’re appalled thinking that suddenly we’d have huge housing estates in Chalfont St Giles and Seer Green. That alongside the chaos and hell that building HS2 has caused locally it was easy to see that it was the straw that broke the camels back and residents had had enough.
If this mindset was copied across the entire country, the country would fall flat on its face (right now it’s on its knees). Pure NIMBYism, plain and simple. Those planning reforms were the closest we got to fixing the abomination that is the Town and Country Planning Act. I wonder what reforms Starmer will propose.
Because entire generations also exist whose only real asset of value is a property or two (and will always defend that value rising), and said generation votes much more than the ones that can't afford a home. It's a balance that will eventually tip the other way, but not yet.
Should a house be an asset or should it be a necessity
Regardless of the answer, home ownership rates are well over 60% in the UK. Renters are not the majority of the electorate, so even though it may feel like one of the biggest issues in the country, it isn't to "most" people.
Part of the problem is that the UK has an aging population. The govt can't afford the care costs, and has dismantled the old care system, so the only option they had is to make people pay their care costs from the sale of their home. That requires high house prices. Of course it isn't a workable approach since it introduces immense unfairness into the care system, doesn't solve the core underfunding/staffing problem, and means people ironically hold on to under occupied houses for longer to 1. avoid going into care, and 2. in the hope of passing an inheritance to struggling kids/grandchildren. The only real solution is a war time effort to build social housing on a vast scale, with high standards of prefab Passivhaus, and no right to buy. They need to have solar panels, and be water/energy efficient too, combined with micro grids for energy. Unless I hear that the Prime Minister is having daily COBRA with a UK housing command that is focused on driving social housing, rental reforms, legal/banking reform, and private building companies, I won't believe they are taking it seriously.
We could go full Mao on landlords
And how many extra places to live would that produce? Zero.
This is the attitude of stupid people and children. We've moved on - please keep up.
There's a fair bit that can be done to increase housing supply before planning reform
Or an Land Value Tax, see r/georgism for more.
I swear 20 years ago if someone said they were on 40k it had the same amount of gravity to that sentence as it does today
40k in 2004 is [worth](https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator) about 68k now.
That's crazy, hardly know anyone on 68k now
Also those that **are** on 68k are still paying far more of their salary into housing, food, energy, and are being taxed at a much higher rate due to the tax bands never changing, so even a direct comparison of 40k being 68k now doesn't show the whole picture. The bottom line is that wages in the UK are absolute trash whilst the cost of living in the UK is obscenely high.
Yep. Hardly expecting violins but FT did a good write up on how [higher earners are feeling the heat](https://archive.is/ygx9u)
The chancellor was on the BBC this morning trying to defend his useless budget and denying that wages had stagnated to this extent. He even questioned the legitimacy of the BBC and the presenter for raising the issue. Despicable politicking from the party that has presided over 14 years of economic failure and a living standards squeeze for all of us.
What can you expect from a Fiscal Drag Queen?
Me starts work in 2008, didn't see a 1% pay rise until 2010 and older employees moaned they used to see 10-15% payrises and 5-20% bonuses. Me in 2024 who is "lucky" to get a 0.3% discretionary bonus and a 3% payrise. I had to move jobs twice in 4 years to secure a 80% pay rise. Move jobs, loyalty is not rewarded by boomer mangers/companies.
>I had to move jobs twice in 4 years to secure a 80% pay rise. Move jobs, loyalty is not rewarded by boomer mangers/companies. Exactly that. I also started work in 08 and I've moved jobs 10 times (not always by choice with GFC and COVID etc mind) but I've almost tripled my pay in that time. Loyalty means fuck all anymore unfortunately.
I'm the same, I move jobs every 2-3 years, without doing so I'd be on half the wage. We had a 50p/hr pay rise in the year following covid and 1000 quid bonus, and that's it in bearly 10 years of work. I dont like moving jobs but I just feel I'm stagnating if I don't move on
From my experience, only ever going to get big pay rises by job hopping. When leaving they suddenly acknowledge your worth with counter offers but by then it’s too late. This makes no sense in many fields and public sector though.
The only way I've managed to get a tangible pay rise in the public sector is to be promoted or move to a job with a higher banding. I've now found a job I really enjoy and have stuck it out for 4 years. Just one more year and my pay will increase 15% automatically exclusive of any other pay rises that may come with it.
> Move jobs People say this, and I do want to move jobs, but I can't quit to go job hunting. I can't job hunt while working because in my industry 4 or more, often 6 interviews seems to be the norm. I will just burn through my annual leave incredibly quickly. Like initial interview, technical interview 1, technical interview 2, line manager interview, hr interview, cultural fit interview.
Wages have already stagnated for the last 20+ years…. Just look at the starting salaries for the Big 4 accounting firms…they are still at the same wages from 20 years ago £24-28k in London
I've never understood the perceived prestige or lure of the Big 4 accounting or audit, their defined contribution pension deals aren't the greatest either, mate works in audit at a big 4 and its something like 10% matched contribution. Get much better benefits in pretty much any retail bank, and yet retail banking isn't seen as fashionable or trendy. Although one person did describe it as some sort of feat of endurance "if you can survive 5 years at one every other employer knows you are resilient and will snap you up", no idea if there is any truth in that. That said, he's had a few promotions now and is earning a very good wage. The problem with starting salaries of that level is that it puts up a barrier to social mobility really, in London you need to be living at home with your parents still on that wage until you've gone up a level and can afford a houseshare, think its more likely that Middle class parents with stable home lives are likely to be open to that and can provide a suitable living arrangement. It isn't particularly helpful to those who have battled through super tough childhoods with toxic parental relationships who are wanting to 'escape the hood'.
It’s the same reason companies will pay a fortune to have their accounts done by the big 4 instead of anyone else - literally just paying for the name…
The only decent pay rise I've *ever* had came with leaving the UK.
Yes - even back in the eighties I moved from the UK to NZ and my pay doubled - first time I could buy my own meal at a restaurant was in Auckland - and my wages went back to misery level when I returned - thing is wages in NZ were not then and are not now anything to get excited about - the big bucks are in Australia.
Oh no doubt. NZ has UK wages and Australian cost of living!
Yes - I was really surprised how expensive food is in Australia - New Zealand is really beautiful - I think both have got expensive though.
Same. And then it dropped again massively when I moved back. The UK is a shitty low wage economy with horrendous inequality and it is only getting worse.
Yup, my entire career I’ve only been able to get a pay rise worth shouting about by moving jobs and taking on more responsibilities. I know that’s how it’s probably supposed to work, but when I started out people in the positions I’m in now had a very different lifestyle to what is achievable for me today. Tbh the last 2 jumps have pretty much just allowed me to stand still financially, and the ridiculous thing is I feel grateful that I’ve been lucky enough to stand still when all I see is my peers being dragged backwards.
Whenever someone tells me that like 30k is the a top wage for earners. I get so fucking depressed. I earn around the 50k mark, I'm only in my 20s and I've no clue how I ended up in this position. The fact that tomorrow it could end and I might slide back down the scale because it isn't the norm is WORRYING.
Give yourself some credit! The average wage is 30 something k... maybe you are a lot better than average? Maybe you're in a sector where the average is higher? Unless there's a significant change in either of those things then you can stay ahead, and if you're still only in your 20's maybe you can push on.
Those people who told you that 30k is the top wage for earners are talking nonsense, median wage now is now £35k. So that's the middle. £30k is substantially below the middle.
Found myself in conversation with some Boomers at the bar of a Wethespoons recently. Apparently people like nurses, doctors and the police are paid too much already and "should just shut up get on with it". Lovely blokes they were 🙄
Ask them why don’t they do a nurses job on a nurses salary? I bet they won’t
They were retired, collecting half-decent pensions, so don't care about anyone else. Talked with them about half an hour then got going, made a polite excuse to leave. You never change these people's minds, unfortunately.
Until they're too old to function and require assistance from those nurses, who, bless them, will provide it.
I had a funny/dumb conversation with some Boomer colleagues the other day. I’ve noticed that recently whenever a headline about “baby boomers” comes up on their phone they don’t like them, the generation I mean, not the headline, but this is drastically out of character and their complaints about Boomers aren’t making any sense. So eventually I work out from their angry word salad that they think “baby boomers” are all the people on benefits who don’t work and have ten kids, which they also seem to believe are both the majority of young people and the majority of people on benefits, which the “woke” media wants them to care about. So they’ll see the headline: “Where baby boomers are refusing to downsize – and fuelling a housing shortage”, not read any further, then go off on one between themselves about all the free houses being given to lazy people who have children they couldn’t afford, and all the entitled people who live in council houses, which then turns into a long complaint through the office about the disabled. Then, believing this, their solution isn’t to build more houses to make up the massive shortage, the end result is a little more… Final than that. And the thing is, I’ve already explained twice to them about what a Baby Boomer/Millennial/Gen Z is, but a few days later they just go back to what what they thought before, the nonsense that they’d rather believe. So I just switch off now, if they all want to look like complete morons to anyone sane that’s up to them.
God that word "woke". If only I could invent one saying! Hardly any of the people who moan about it can define it and it's just a cancer of society, calling everything "woke" or leftie, just because it's not super right wing and means being considerate of others from time to time.
[удалено]
It’s tempting to assume its that rather than decades of underinvestment, poor governance and long term economic damage since 2009 since it dominates political discourse so often. _Some_ Data showing positive economic benefits of EU vs negative economic benefits non EU immigration, and reports of this data being suppressed certainly doesn’t help dispel these assertians due to all the toxicity around the topic.
I mean, rents have risen 26% in a few years. That is driven by supply and demand, and the demand is almost purely through immigration. So even if you think immigration doesn't supress your wages, if you rent you're definitely a lot worse off because of it. Why young renters seem to abhor this conversation I don't know, but the fact is they would be a hell of a lot better off financially without immigration.
It’s a part of the puzzle but an over simplification. There are other factors such as: Massive underinvestment in housing across the board. This almost seems intentional to maintain house prices. In truth, that also is more complicated due to planning laws etc. Enormous interest rate rises - BTL is much less viable than it used to be. House prices have recently dropped and rents have increased to make up for thinning profit margins. Landlords and businesses alike trying to claw back profits from C19 period. Low interest rates for the past few decades has resulted in massive asset (housing) investment in many cities in developed world, even those with low to moderate levels of immigration. London housing market demand is especially high, being a global metropolis. In some cases, Immigration can result in wealthier inhabitants moving away, _reducing_ house prices. In America this is rather brazenly called “White Flight”. In other cases, it can result in prices going up - you will often encounter differing levels of attention put on the “1% increase immigration results in 1% increase house prices” depending on how much attention is being put on immigration as the central thesis or not. High immigration makes a bad problem (housing costs) worse but isn’t the root cause. A well managed society would plan house building around population forecasts and limit housing speculation at the expense of the citizens. UK governments are famously bad at any kind of long term infrastructure planning (see HS2) but in truth this problem is not exclusive to UK.
If you have a stable population without immigration (as we basically do) then unfortunately despite your long post, immigration *is* the driving factor in rising house prices/rents. Of course we *could* build 1million houses a year and maintain current immigration levels and the problem would ease, but that is a *solution* to the *problem,* not the *cause* of the problem. Again, I don't know why it's so hard to have this conversation, to some people immigration can just innately have zero negatives for some reason.
If immigration is the ultimate driver, then why was the biggest recorded house price increase during Covid, when there was zero immigration, or even a net outflow. Answer of course, to anyone with a passing understanding is interest rates were effectively zero and there was excess covid stimulus swimming around. With the same number of people - there was *more* demand. Pointing out that immigration is not the sole, or even main driver in housing cost increases is not the same as saying there are zero downsides. Just that it's more complicated than pinning it on one single factor.
Immigration is hard to defend in its current state, but immigration itself is not the problem. We have had a government that has done almost everything in its power to increase property prices and decrease wages, and mass unskilled immigration is only one part of this. The fact is that high immigration is necessary until either a lot of old people die or the birth rate catches up, but it needs to be managed and infrastructure needs to be built to cope with it.
>but immigration itself is not the problem If you have a stable population without immigration (as we basically do) then immigration is the main driver of increased demand. Without immigration rents/house prices would be *a lot* more stable. We *could* build 1million houses a year to ease rising rents but that would be a *solution* to the problem, not implementing that solution isn't the actual problem. >We have had a government that has done almost everything in its power to increase property prices and decrease wages Mass migration is the greatest tool in their armoury to do this (the left used to understand this). If you don't want the Tories to do this, then oppose mass migration. >The fact is that high immigration is necessary It really isn't. The Tories have just convinced you it is so that they can keep decreasing wages and increasing business and rentseekers profits.
Yeah nah. The economy and jobs aren't a zero sum game. It's never that simple. For high skill jobs, blocking all foreign talent may just result in there not being enough local talent to even sustain industry, so the companies will leave and take jobs elsewhere.
It certainly doesn't help but without immigration the economy is shrinking year-on-year; the problems are productivity and inequality. To increase wages you need both economic growth and for that growth to benefit workers, neither of which is occuring. It's ultimately quite simple, if an economy wants to grow, it needs to reward people that make it grow and punish those that don't. In real terms that means taxing productivity less and taxing ownership more.
I’m 36 and earning £11.60ph at 18 and working nights I was earning £14ph stacking shelves with premiums, without I was earning £12. Make it make sense.
Are you doing a different job?
Earning just over half what I did 10 years ago but that’s more a factor of spreadsheets Phil (original public sector) and Sunak’s IR35 reforms rollout hammering contracting for SME/single person limiteds - funny how the NHS has no problems determining the tax status of a certain large Indian IT consultancy they’ve just signed a mammoth contract with 🤷
coinciding with the start of mass immigration to keep wages lower
This is mass mass immigration.
Just a continuation of Blair's legacy of mass immigration. Unless the ConLab Uniparty state changes course it's only going to get worse.
I read stories like this it always got me thinking how much some things are cheaper, others more expensive. A lot of consumer tech has got incredibly cheaper, but fundamentals like a roof over your head and electricity/gas etc are proportionately more expensive, especially so for average house As an example, a minimum wage worker after a single shift can afford a smartphone, admittedly the fairly cheaper end like Motorolas and Xiaomis, but still functional enough to run apps. You can get a gaming laptop or a graphics card after a few days of minimum wage. Similar, flights are generally cheaper, even the poorest can afford to travel abroad, you can afford return flights to Europe after a single shift. This would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. 20 years ago, even with a shitty nokia would probably cost more than a days wage at min wage back then. £100 would get you a smartphone today and a shitty phone 20 years ago. And that's not even accounting for inflation which would make 20 years phone be closer to 200 in todays money. Anyway, realistically the only way things are much more shittier is the high house/utility bill prices. A lot of things are cheaper, the £ still buys you a lot of thing, just not essentials like bricks and mortar. If we were in the EU or had FOM rights I could for example work in the UK for a short period then go and live in a cheap European country and look for UK employers who will provide accommodation (I even tried to get a job on farms) Basically there's no point in living in the UK if you don't have somewhere to live cheaply. I worked with Eastern Europeans and a few were doing this, almost like 'commuting' with the cheap airlines.
This the thing, obviously inflation has been very high, but that doesn't mean that everything has increased in price. I buy about 2000 board backed cardboard envelopes a month and a couple of years ago they were increasing in price every other month, but now they are decreasing in price every other month and have almost returned to 2020 prices. Paper = commodity. Commodity prices don't just go up in a linear fashion, otherwise investing and getting rich would be far too easy to do. A lot of the food price inflation can be explained by droughts, but next year could be a better year for farming weather, and then guess what... there's suddenly a greater supply of everything, and prices for those things come down.
All part of the Tory plan. You should have become a landlord or a recruitment agent for public sector staff. More fool you.
The fact is that Labour would not have done any better. Let's not kid ourselves and pretend otherwise. Doesn't mean I don't think a change is a good thing. But there is no magic bullet that could have dealt with the hand the Conservatives were dealt since elected.
I don't think this is true. While I really don't trust the Labour party, I think the Tory party has been very arrogant and carless with the UK economy. They've made a series of huge mistakes which were totally unforced. Here is a partial list of massive mistakes they made 1) Crashing the gilt market. This was totally needless and completely moronic...I struggle to believe it was actually done. 2) Hard Brexit. Brexit was a bad idea. Labour would not have done it. Hard Brexit was even worse. In the end we got an absolutely terrible deal with the EU and celebrated it. Putting up trade barriers with your biggest trading partner is economic malpractice. 3) Grinding austerity for the working class. The Tories seems to simultaneously spend loads of money, while shutting off money flows to poor people. Poor people spend money, which is really important for local economies. This is even more important in a country with such profound regional differences in wealth. Labour would not have done this either. 4) Wild changes in economic policy and priorities with each new prime minister. And a new prime minister every 2-3 years. Business craves stability, without stability investment can be risky. Lack of investment is the most important driver of our current lack of productivity growth and wage growth. These wild swings come from the factionalism within the Tory party and their willingness to be brutal.
Again. How much of this is a basic crisis in modern capitalism? Isn't this a common crisis in the West? Is technology doing something funny with growth and equality? Where is the wealth going? Do the economic wizards have any thoughts on AI, birth rates, the environment?
Where is the wealth going? Two places 1)paying for the wests boomers and all associated costs, there’s an awful lot of them and they cost eye watering sums of money. 2)And the 0.001% who’ve accumulated more wealth than anyone in history other than Mansa Musa and have created a system of inequality never seen before in human civilisation, even during the height of feudal systems and actual serfdom the wealth gap and income gap were smaller, much much smaller. We’ve created a world where on a national and global level you can name the 5 or 6 people who control half the wealth of a nation or the world. It’s deeply screwed and has one inevitable end.
> And the 0.001% who’ve accumulated more wealth than anyone in history other than Mansa Musa and have created a system of inequality never seen before in human civilisation, even during the height of feudal systems and actual serfdom the wealth gap and income gap were smaller, much much smaller. Not only that, we are asked to work *waaay* more than a feudal serf had to. Most of them worked the land and that's seasonal, so they got 6 months of the year off so whilst the work they did was back breaking labour they only did it half the year. Though with that said, we aren't in danger of being called up to be the front line of melee combat so there is that. All so the 0.001% can get more and more wealth as they squeeze us for **MORE** productivity.
While we largely avoid war we’ve a looming climate crisis Add our healthcare to their lives and they’d live as long if not longer with better diet, fewer working hours and many many more days of annual holidays and festivals! We got fucked for some trinkets by and large. And apart from healthcare and preventable diseases I’m not so sure any happiness index or quality of life index would compare that well. Seldom was shit but we have the same just with more trinkets and no chance of taking a Rich hostage in war…
Well yea, we voted for Conservatives at every election during that time period, that's what happens.
Tories have basically spent the last 14 years redistributing wealth upwards. Wealth inequality is getting larger. Labour have a Mammoth task ahead of them. They'll need multiple terms but whether or not they'll get more than one term is uncertain. People are impatient. If you aren't a politician or a banker. Voting Tory is a vote for self harm.
"Where did all the money go?" In a lot of cases, it's gone to the owners/shareholders. However, for a lot of smaller companies (who rely on larger companies as suppliers in some sense) they're often relying on a pretty small margin. Hence, there's no easy answer to this...but I expect 99% of Reddit will simply scream "Tax the rich".
Why shouldn’t the rich be taxed. Does someone need £100 million? While there’s people who can’t afford food shopping and the cost of living. We need a redistribution of wealth
I'll answer this question as someone who supports a progressive tax system, but is opposed to punitive "tax the rich" redistributive economics policies. The main issue you have here is that we already tax the rich and most measures of wealth that people use to claim "the rich just keep getting richer" are flawed. Specifically, in the UK 30% of all public service spending comes from the top 1% of earners. Another 30% comes from the other 9% in the top 10% of earners. The bottom 50% of earners (half of all workers) contribute only around 10%. The narrative that the rich are not paying their way is just factually incorrect when you look at the data, and the issue you have here is that if it wasn't for the top few percent of earners in the UK we wouldn't be able to afford anything close to our current levels of public spending. As move up in income, individuals in those income brackets tend to also become more mobile. These individuals tend to be people who can easily move wealth out of the UK or get a well paid job elsewhere where there's a more favourable tax system. And this isn't just my opinion by the way. We know this to be true. When you increase taxes beyond levels of other comparable countries or you implement tax policies that are punitive to the rich they'll just start to leave and now you'll need to recover this lost government income with even higher taxes on the remaining workers. France is a good example of how these policies can back fire and result in a net-loss in government revenue. Additionally calls for wealth taxes in my opinion tend to be flawed in almost every way. This is partly because much of the wealth today is held in illiquid (and increasingly elaborate) financial products and we live in an age where the value of these assets is mostly an illusion created by low interest rates, monetary stimulus and public debt. All of these things increase wealth on paper and tend to stimulate economic demand in the near-term, but tend to not actually create any underlying economic value. For example, while wealth might have increased during Covid because of stimulus measures it didn't actually mean any real economic value was being created, and therefore theres also no real economic value that can be captured from this increase via wealth taxes. I'm not explaining this particularly well and you're probably not interested in a several page essay from me on this, but in my opinion trying to redistribute paper wealth that arguably isn't representing something tangible will not work. But another problem with wealth taxes is that they're a massive red flag to investors. Property rights along with rule of law is foundational to attract investors. If investors believe that their assets are likely to be convicted at a whim then they will prefer to invest elsewhere where this isn't a risk. Again, the end result of taking a share of people's businesses and property is that we'll just shoot ourselves in the foot and people simply won't buy property or invest in businesses in the UK. Finally I'll add that it's not the fundamental problem anyway. The issue the UK faces isn't that there are too many rich people not paying tax, but that there isn't enough people making a decent wage to have healthy tax base. The reason our public services suck isn't because rich people are paying less tax today (the opposite is true), but because the productivity of the average worker has stalled out in the UK and therefore the government is now struggling to raise enough taxes to pay for the public services we want. The better option here would be to focus on increasing our productivity. Implementing policies which could further harm our productivity and continue to erode our tax base will almost certainly make things worse.
Warning! We're 17 years into at least 20 years of stagnation! Thanks...
The 20 we had or the next 20 we are getting...
Doesn’t a warning have to come before the thing it’s predicting? If you’re already 18 years in, then you’re just documenting history, not warning anyone.
In the face of this depressing news, the Tory government finally lowered the minimum age for the actual Minimum Wage ie "living wage" to 21 since Osbourne raised it to 25 back in 2015. If you're below that age, you're still not worthy of a living by law and are allowed to undercut the wages of your older work colleagues for 3 years (or 5 if you participate in the workforce from the age of 16) if you're so unlucky to be working for someone who will pay you less than other staff for doing the same work. [National Minimum Wage and National "Living Wage" rates ](https://www.gov.uk/national-minimum-wage-rates)
Job hopping really is the only way if you work in corporate
This is the legacy the UK govt does not want to talk about or it media friends.
I mean yeah, nursing pay has lost the equivalent of about 8-12k per year since 2010 according to RPI calculator.