BRITAIN IS A POOR COUNTRY NOW. THE PROS AND CONS.

You know the central conceit of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, of course you do. A lad of sun kissed beauty is presented with a stunning likeness of himself. Disturbed at the notion that he will grow old while the painting doesn’t, he locks it away - where it is the portrait that ages and uglifies while Dorian stays boyish and beautiful.

The story has come to many Britons’ mind as the foulness of British politics becomes even harder to ignore in the land of cricket whites and orderly queues. The New York Times and Der Spiegel report in bewilderment on a country with pockets of deep poverty and unslaked anger and again rasps in a hoarse voice. The horror was hidden all along.

Now it is all out in the open. In one of the richest societies in human history, inhabitants are starting to twig that by 2030 or thereabouts they will earn less per head than the Poles they so recently patronised. The British rulers have trumpeted every false success while ugly facts have been waved away as anomalies : from the former manufacturing suburbs and towns turned into giant warehouses of surplus people, to the fact that 15% of adults in England are on antidepressants. We are winning the global race, claimed James Cameron, even as the population’s life expectancy fell far behind other rich countries. We shall not stunt future generations with debt, he boasted, as the five-year-olds of Britain became the shortest in Europe.

Has Britain become a poor country !!

Labour leaders used World Bank data to warn that, without a change in leadership, Britain's economy will be overtaken by its eastern European rivals over the coming few decades.

It is not rocket mathematics for the Englishmen to find out that their economy would fall behind vibrant Poland by the end of decade.

The data showed that GDP per capita in 2021 was USD 50,522 in Britain and USD 34,915 in Poland, and that Poland - should it maintain its 3.6% average annual growth - will overtake Britain by 2030.

Romania, with 3.8%, and Hungary, with 3%, would overtake Britain by 2040 !!

All of these are quite evident from the below graph. Britain’s GDP more or less remained stagnant in the period 2011 through 2017 with Govt. debts more than 80% of GDP at any point in time during this period. The rot did start from 2016 itself. In 2020 under Boris Johnson Govt. debt rose to unfathomable 102.6% of GDP !!! (GDP growth in %, GDP per capita in USD, Govt. debt shown as % of GDP).

The increase in total debt came after government borrowing soared to 20 billion pounds in May, pushed higher by the cost of energy support schemes, inflation-linked benefit payments and interest payments on debt. (Please visit www.cheekychatur.com for article on Venezuela and know more about GDP).

The Finance Secretary was nevertheless very quick to defend the borrowings. We rightly spent billions to protect families and businesses from the worst impacts of the pandemic and Putin’s energy crisis. But it would be manifestly unfair to leave future generations with a tab they cannot repay. That’s why we have taken difficult but necessary decisions to balance the books in order to halve inflation this year, grow the economy and reduce debt.

Topsy turvy. The fairytale ride had become topsy turvy, gone horribly wrong !! There is a seething discontent among the Englishmen waiting to explode. Finance Ministry’s calculations are based on the assumption that Britain’s gross domestic product (GDP) continues to grow at an average of 0.5%

annually in real terms. But IMF projections define Britain’s GDP growth as pretty haywire with practically no growth in 2024 and GDP growth actually decreasing from 2025 through 2027 !! (GDP per capita in USD). (Please visit www.cheekychatur.com and read article on Venezuela to know more about GDP. Go through the first article and tap See All at end of article to see all the remaining contents).

Poverty. By early 2000 approximately 14.5 million people (26%) were living in poverty in Britain according to PSE Survey. The poverty rates have risen sharply since the early 80’s. Between 1983 and 1990 the number of households living in poverty increased from 14% to 21% of the population!

About 8 million people cannot afford one or more essential household goods, such as fridge, a telephone or a carpet, to repair electrical goods or furniture when they wear out.

Almost 7.5 million people are too poor to be able to engage in common social activities considered necessary : visiting friends and family, attending weddings and funerals or having celebrations.

A third of British children go without three meals a day, denied having toys to play, are not part of school activities and do not have adequate clothing.

About 6.5 million adults go without essential clothing, such as warm waterproof coat or jacket because they have no money.

Around 4 million people are not properly fed by today’s standards. They do not have enough money to afford fresh fruits and vegetables or two meals a day for example.

Over 10.5 million people suffer from financial insecurity. They cannot afford to save, insure their house contents or spend even small amounts of money themselves.

Where the money is going my friend (?). Since 2020, food prices have soared more than 20%, and the supermarket chains Tesco and Sainsbury have enjoyed their best profit margins in a decade.

Multinational companies such as PepsiCo, Proctor & Gamble and Nestlé – the world’s largest food and beverages company – have cruised through the years promising shareholders bumper dividends while profits remain intact. And consumers of services from insurance to mobile phones, mortgages to energy have seen bills soar even as providers clock up huge profits.

Increasingly, the question is being asked - why it is that so many businesses have appeared to maintain or improve their results during a cost-of-living crisis in which households have suffered one of the worst periods of falling real incomes in a century? Are we living in rip-off Britain?

The clamour to find out whether Britons are being ripped off forced the Commons to call in the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the energy, water and communications watchdogs pressing them on whether there is a profiteering problem in their sectors, and on what they are doing about it.

Yes, the English population are in the clutches of a rip-off Britain !!

It is a sin to cloud reality with absurd unrealities. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face Dorian is told. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands. But you Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face and your marvellous untroubled youth, I cannot believe anything against you.

The picture of Dorian, which would have revealed the grotesque truth, is hidden away, so too has the United Kingdom avoided admitting its ills. Even now in a country where patently so little works for people who rely on work for their income, the Nigels, the Jeremys, and the Starmers – all push growth and jobs as the remedy for what ails Britain.

Yet the growth in Britain is falling not because of Ukraine or Covid or Brexit but because of the fact that the economy has become ever more stagnant and dependent on debt. It is fatuous to pretend that it is going to turn around through magicking Britain into AI free-for-all or a jolly green industrial giant – one in four employees are on low weekly wages – either because the pay is too low or the hours are not enough; the average real wage has flatlined for many years.

Politics of poverty gets its ugly face popped out in the fascinating book When Nothing Works – From Cost of Living to Foundational Livability - by Luca Calafati, Julie Froud, Colin Haslam, Sukhdev Johal and Karen Williams. It is an essential text for all English people to understand British Government in all its joking mimicry; the polarised politics of a highly unequal and increasingly stagnant society.

Well then, what is to be done now (?). Today, as Britain is in such doldrums, the actions to be taken to revive productivity and assist the population developing confidence in British polity should be the prime agenda on every British minister. It should occupy the front pages of every newspaper and bulletin.

Yet it is being almost wholly ignored as English largesse quarrel about equality, obesity, trans rights and other ephemera. The discussions should hinge on how to come out of one of the lowest productivities in the developed(?) world. Clearly the Britons are generating less stuff per hour ! Slovenes are overtaking UK now and Poles are on course to do so in the 2030s. South Koreans, who had a third of British income per head recently have already surpassed Britain. Yet the Government refuses to acknowledge, let alone address, the causes of this grand decline.

But this is some relief - amidst all this Britain’s GDP becomes less shocking to glare at if we compare with that of USA period to period. The GDPs of Britain and USA have been plotted between 2008 through 2021 along with the GDP of India.

And what we see (?). Apart from the year 2020 the GDPs of Britain and USA have friendly cohesion and the similarity in the curves is very striking, but USA, by all counts, is a different kettle of fish ! India’s GDP has always been high, (except in 2020 when due to Covid pandemic Delhi had a horrendous task of saving its population from the dreaded virus), more so because it was growing at a fast pace and the two already developed countries had reached a plateau from where further growth, as one looks up to India’s, calls for a massive change in policy and fresh drive.

The British Government has to take a different drive, a drive which they are very reluctant to take.

A grim task ahead, we can all understand that but then the British white collars and blue bloods have to shed their Dorian faces and come all prepped up for an ugly face off with their working population, the huge swathe of innocent people - who always believed in their prime ministers, their home ministers, their finance secretaries, and the self-ordained lords of the Banks - are so bitterly disappointed with them and with their two hooded faces that, now, these plainspeak, disgruntled Britons have chosen an Asian as their premier who, with hope surmounting over all hopes, would see them through, guide them, resurrect their lost pride and bring happiness to their sweet homes !!

So be it, Rishi Sunak. We wish you all the very best.