I’m sure someone will be along to tell us now how that’s not a bad thing or how their favourite culture war holds the key.
We have been let down if not abandoned by the political sphere. The labour centre tries to imply things are going well while tripping over scandals. The right aren’t telling us anything but they’ll fix it even though it’s their mess and someone will tell us that a non gender bathroom is somehow behind this or the lack of it is.
Change is needed. A party that will actually govern on old boring politics and clear material gain for all instead of managing the decline of the shutting down factory of GB
LeftAndRightAreWrong on
But on the upside we have billionaires now….. 🤦♀️
Porthowl on
Articles like this kind of break my heart. People in this country are so intelligent and capable, I don’t understand how we ended up in this situation.
willNffcUk on
i’m pretty sure this will be the fault of the unemployed claiming benefits
Electricbell20 on
This is why productivity is so important. We’ve not returned to the curve since the financial crisis and the last decade has been pretty much a loss.
It’s frustrating how we find ourselves in this situation. I am struggling to pay to commute once a week but the wage growth is staggeringly bad and when I’ve proposed taking on more responsibility at work for more pay I get shut down.
Ever since of talk of a recession last year there has been a risk-averse attitude throughout industries in order to stay afloat. It’s shocking really.
vaskopopa on
It was never about the economy – it was about freedom from unelected bureaucrats and sovereignty. People aren’t stupid, they knew what they were voting for and £90B a year is the price worth paying to have our blue passports back and the pint of milk for the same price of a litre.
Brexit vote won – get over it.
(/s just in case)
bigroundoughnut on
This is such a crappy article. Clearly blames labour when things like this can’t be fixed within a couple years. This is a multi generational issue and will take time. At least labour are starting to do somehting with removing the child cap etc
planeloise on
What is going with the jobs market? People with multiple stem degrees and years of experience used to earning 100k+ are struggling to find jobs. You spend years climbing up from poverty, study hard, build a career only to end up considering taking a job at Tesco and losing your home??
klydefrog89 on
Meanwhile Farage .. get into the office yous lazy can’ts!!
Treqou on
One of my boomer colleagues was trying to tell me I should be thankful for what I earn. Call me gobsmacked.
jacksj1 on
9% interest on student loans and freezing the pay cap will help.
/s
dayheim on
It’s a great time to slow down, do less hours and spend less money and start connecting with friends & family instead of chasing the grind. Lots of my colleagues work for takeaways, fancy cars and clothes, weddings and lavish holidays anyway. Just shed those things and start living for experiences and friendship instead of things!
Automatic-Yak4555 on
Living standards will continue to fall whilst there are billions of people from developing and third world countries that will be willing to work for less. It’s too easy for the corporations to access this labor.
squeakybeak on
So what do we do about it? Maybe it’s time to take a page out of the French book.
faceman230 on
I mean taxes are higher across the board to pay for the welfare state, businesses pay more and workers pay more which is why everyone working feels squeezed. In the mean time, welfare spending (yes, including pensions) keeps going up.
Those are the simple facts of the matter.
Puzzleheaded-Bad-722 on
Someone will be along in the comments now telling people that they just need to live off plain rice and plain vegetables.
jodrellbank_pants on
Same in every country we’re no different. Visited Sweden, Finland, Germany, Spain, France all in the past month, everyone told me the same thing.We’re all in the same boat. We just have to ride this wave till be hit that distant crest.
HDS2211 on
And they’re being tricked into voting to work even harder, for even less, with the swindlers at Reform.
cjc1983 on
Property prices are the sole cause of this.
So remember to hate the people behind the supply/demand equation. We havent built enough houses and we have too many people entering the country.
Our parents did not need to spend 50-70% of 2x full time incomes to afford the roof over their heads.
If people retained more of their take home pay we could absorb things like energy price shocks, food price shocks, we would be able to pay more money into the social care system for better services. We would have more money to spend in the economy.
All the time money goes into property costs it’s then lost to the the consumer economy which is essentially the engine of the country.
knitscones on
14 years of Tory mismanagement coming home to roost.
Thanks England for your terrible judgement.
dbxp on
The reality is with an aging population and the rise of international economic competitors the UK economy is going to suffer. IMO parties may act like it’s something they can change to win votes but they don’t really have much control over it. There’s no getting around the fact that a lot of the things we used to export to the developing world as they didn’t have the expertise to manufacture them we now import from those same countries.
Odd-Reach-1518 on
The die was set in the 80s when the Thatcher government truly began the sell off of state assets and infrastructure. Now we have utilities and infrastructure run as financial vehicles, with billions that should be invested here being extracted from the economy. How that is corrected is beyond me, but the fact that the government wouldn’t allow nationalisation to be even considered in the commission on the water industry shows that our politicians aren’t seriously grasping fundamental problems.
Exact-Seaweed5805 on
keep blaming the rich and the tories – labour are making a hash of this parliament
CartoonistConsistent on
Just look at changes in pay UK to pretty much any other European country.
We (and I take it back to boomers) let ourselves be convinced that unions were evil, payrises were disgusting and we had to enrich companies and shareholders for…. reasons?
Trace it back to the unions being killed off and it went wrong from then onwards. If certain sectors are getting regular payrises other areas WILL go along with them, but we settled for shit all round and you see it to this day where British people will say “well I’m not getting X, so they shouldn’t” rather than “yes, they should get X, and I should it get it next.” Race to the bottom mentality.
To note, the unions aren’t blameless in what happened back then, but as a collective we signed our own financial death warrants by getting behind Thatcher.
Legendofvader on
Slowdown is a understatement. unless your upper bracket of middleclass or HENRY living standards have decreased .
AccomplishedAct5364 on
The left will still defend migration, the right will still elect the rich.
Turkeys voting for Christmas no matter where you look.
God help us all when AI arrives in full force
bos_well_ on
Don’t worry though, Nigel will fix everything. . . /S incase it was needed
happenedtoyoureye on
You look at the average worker to ceo pay ratio over the last 50 years and it just keeps getting bigger. Same with average house price as a multiple of average income.
The planets population doubling over the last 50 years combined with the rise of China and India means the West just doesn’t have any advantage in manufacturing or education anymore.
Getting to the stage where you can work a full time job on minimum wage but still struggle to rent a one bed flat, stay warm and buy food. Forgot about actually running a car, buying a place and raising a family.
ailcnarf on
Until more wealth taxes get brought in obviously? This will keep going indefinitely as the rich get richer and poor get poorer
Lt_Muffintoes on
Taxes are too high
Regulations are too onerous
Benefits are too generous
Chance_Land_9828 on
Brexit, my dear friends. It was a huge mistake, the effects are there.
anewpath123 on
Get used to it.
Our population is ageing and we aren’t having enough kids. The tax take will start to falter year on year and welfare will only rise as average age continues to increase.
The only way out of this is to stop siphoning capital from the young to capitulate the elderly.
crappy_entrepreneur on
This is the natural consequence of gradually being outcompeted by other regions globally
We are slowly becoming Argentina (former 10th richest country)
RijnKantje on
Euro here: why is there never any green or trees in houses in British streets?
Or is there usually but media always picks streets without any? Even the gardens seems completely devoid of any plants.
srogijogi on
Working harder? Stats: UK productivity levels are about 10% lower than G7 averages. Countries like Germany and France have 20-30% higher productivity per hour than UK.
martymcflown on
And it will be even worse under the Reform government who are now favourites to win the next GE. British people are actual masochists.
darqy101 on
Importing hundreds of thousands of people from 3rd world countries will do that 🤣
goodtitties on
it’s a completely hopeless place, but at least it’s getting worse every day.
CrumpledKiltSkin on
This is news/content for people whose reading comprehension and critical thinking skills are advanced enough to see how stupid tabloid headlines are and make fun of people who read tabloids, but not advanced enough to critically analyze their own sources of information.
There are nine hyperlinks in the article, they all link to other Independent articles. Follow the links in *those* articles? More links to other Independent articles, including many circular rabbit-holes. These are often articles which present information from reports from government agencies or think tanks, but *never* link you off site to go and look at the data yourself.
The article the OP links is ostensibly based on “research” from the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank. There’s a hyperlink embedded in the term ‘Resolution Foundation’ in the text of the article, does that take you to the Resolution Foundation’s website? Nope. Does it even take you to an article the Independent published about the Resolution Foundation? Nope. It takes you [here](https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/resolution-foundation) to the ‘topic’ page of the Independent’s site about the Resolution Foundation which contains…..nothing. There’s no article or text or anything, it’s just a full page of ads for other articles and sections of the site, algorithmically determined to drive further engagement based on what clicking the Resolution Foundation hyperlink says about how to hack your attention.
The Independent is owned by Russian and Saudi billionaire families. The Resolution Foundation was set up by Clive Cowdery, a billionaire. This doesn’t make the claims in the article true or false in my view, but heavily upvoted comments such as *”But on the upside we have billionaires now”* (quoted in full) suggest that some of you aren’t very good at thinking a thought all the way through before expressing it.
[This](https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/living-standards-outlook-2026/) appears to be the “research” referenced in the article. I could write an essay on the lack of credentials of the authors and the superficiality of the research itself and the fact that it isn’t actually research it’s just more opinion and analysis masquerading as primary data.
It says living standards in real terms are improving.
It says that child poverty is falling.
It has three recommendations, these recommendations do not include increased corporate tax or increased income tax on billionaires. No, they are;
*1. Direct government support and corporate welfare for the kinds of businesses owned by the people who own the institutions informing you about the situation. Shocking.*
*2 + 3. Link Local Housing Allowance to rents and index social security benefits to earnings, energy bill handouts. Redistribution policies which in the absence of increased corporate, wealth or high earner income tax will be paid for by the middle class not by the billionaires who own the institutions informing you about the situation. More shock.*
Ruling elites are monetizing the outrage they generate in you on the basis of misrepresentations of reality to make you act and speak as though you’re living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland when in fact you’re just living in a highly economically stratified society, while maintaining that stratification because the solutions they offer you do not address the stratification or indeed anything real at all, *and you are paying for the privilege with the limited and valuable resource of your attention*.
You get *exactly* the politics you deserve.
dalehitchy on
You know what will fix this….attacking trans people
BaBeBaBeBooby on
It has been like this since 2008. No economic growth. And in the current fiscal environment, I have no hope of real economic growth. Suspect we may have to bankrupt first, similar to the 1970s.
42 Comments
I’m sure someone will be along to tell us now how that’s not a bad thing or how their favourite culture war holds the key.
We have been let down if not abandoned by the political sphere. The labour centre tries to imply things are going well while tripping over scandals. The right aren’t telling us anything but they’ll fix it even though it’s their mess and someone will tell us that a non gender bathroom is somehow behind this or the lack of it is.
Change is needed. A party that will actually govern on old boring politics and clear material gain for all instead of managing the decline of the shutting down factory of GB
But on the upside we have billionaires now….. 🤦♀️
Articles like this kind of break my heart. People in this country are so intelligent and capable, I don’t understand how we ended up in this situation.
i’m pretty sure this will be the fault of the unemployed claiming benefits
This is why productivity is so important. We’ve not returned to the curve since the financial crisis and the last decade has been pretty much a loss.
Here’s a recent article on how we are starting to see the zombie firm die raising productivity. https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/uk-productivity-grew-more-in-the-last-year-than-in-the-previous-seven-combined/
Overall it takes time to turn it around.
It’s frustrating how we find ourselves in this situation. I am struggling to pay to commute once a week but the wage growth is staggeringly bad and when I’ve proposed taking on more responsibility at work for more pay I get shut down.
Ever since of talk of a recession last year there has been a risk-averse attitude throughout industries in order to stay afloat. It’s shocking really.
It was never about the economy – it was about freedom from unelected bureaucrats and sovereignty. People aren’t stupid, they knew what they were voting for and £90B a year is the price worth paying to have our blue passports back and the pint of milk for the same price of a litre.
Brexit vote won – get over it.
(/s just in case)
This is such a crappy article. Clearly blames labour when things like this can’t be fixed within a couple years. This is a multi generational issue and will take time. At least labour are starting to do somehting with removing the child cap etc
What is going with the jobs market? People with multiple stem degrees and years of experience used to earning 100k+ are struggling to find jobs. You spend years climbing up from poverty, study hard, build a career only to end up considering taking a job at Tesco and losing your home??
Meanwhile Farage .. get into the office yous lazy can’ts!!
One of my boomer colleagues was trying to tell me I should be thankful for what I earn. Call me gobsmacked.
9% interest on student loans and freezing the pay cap will help.
/s
It’s a great time to slow down, do less hours and spend less money and start connecting with friends & family instead of chasing the grind. Lots of my colleagues work for takeaways, fancy cars and clothes, weddings and lavish holidays anyway. Just shed those things and start living for experiences and friendship instead of things!
Living standards will continue to fall whilst there are billions of people from developing and third world countries that will be willing to work for less. It’s too easy for the corporations to access this labor.
So what do we do about it? Maybe it’s time to take a page out of the French book.
I mean taxes are higher across the board to pay for the welfare state, businesses pay more and workers pay more which is why everyone working feels squeezed. In the mean time, welfare spending (yes, including pensions) keeps going up.
Those are the simple facts of the matter.
Someone will be along in the comments now telling people that they just need to live off plain rice and plain vegetables.
Same in every country we’re no different. Visited Sweden, Finland, Germany, Spain, France all in the past month, everyone told me the same thing.We’re all in the same boat. We just have to ride this wave till be hit that distant crest.
And they’re being tricked into voting to work even harder, for even less, with the swindlers at Reform.
Property prices are the sole cause of this.
So remember to hate the people behind the supply/demand equation. We havent built enough houses and we have too many people entering the country.
Our parents did not need to spend 50-70% of 2x full time incomes to afford the roof over their heads.
If people retained more of their take home pay we could absorb things like energy price shocks, food price shocks, we would be able to pay more money into the social care system for better services. We would have more money to spend in the economy.
All the time money goes into property costs it’s then lost to the the consumer economy which is essentially the engine of the country.
14 years of Tory mismanagement coming home to roost.
Thanks England for your terrible judgement.
The reality is with an aging population and the rise of international economic competitors the UK economy is going to suffer. IMO parties may act like it’s something they can change to win votes but they don’t really have much control over it. There’s no getting around the fact that a lot of the things we used to export to the developing world as they didn’t have the expertise to manufacture them we now import from those same countries.
The die was set in the 80s when the Thatcher government truly began the sell off of state assets and infrastructure. Now we have utilities and infrastructure run as financial vehicles, with billions that should be invested here being extracted from the economy. How that is corrected is beyond me, but the fact that the government wouldn’t allow nationalisation to be even considered in the commission on the water industry shows that our politicians aren’t seriously grasping fundamental problems.
keep blaming the rich and the tories – labour are making a hash of this parliament
Just look at changes in pay UK to pretty much any other European country.
We (and I take it back to boomers) let ourselves be convinced that unions were evil, payrises were disgusting and we had to enrich companies and shareholders for…. reasons?
Trace it back to the unions being killed off and it went wrong from then onwards. If certain sectors are getting regular payrises other areas WILL go along with them, but we settled for shit all round and you see it to this day where British people will say “well I’m not getting X, so they shouldn’t” rather than “yes, they should get X, and I should it get it next.” Race to the bottom mentality.
To note, the unions aren’t blameless in what happened back then, but as a collective we signed our own financial death warrants by getting behind Thatcher.
Slowdown is a understatement. unless your upper bracket of middleclass or HENRY living standards have decreased .
The left will still defend migration, the right will still elect the rich.
Turkeys voting for Christmas no matter where you look.
God help us all when AI arrives in full force
Don’t worry though, Nigel will fix everything. . . /S incase it was needed
You look at the average worker to ceo pay ratio over the last 50 years and it just keeps getting bigger. Same with average house price as a multiple of average income.
The planets population doubling over the last 50 years combined with the rise of China and India means the West just doesn’t have any advantage in manufacturing or education anymore.
Getting to the stage where you can work a full time job on minimum wage but still struggle to rent a one bed flat, stay warm and buy food. Forgot about actually running a car, buying a place and raising a family.
Until more wealth taxes get brought in obviously? This will keep going indefinitely as the rich get richer and poor get poorer
Taxes are too high
Regulations are too onerous
Benefits are too generous
Brexit, my dear friends. It was a huge mistake, the effects are there.
Get used to it.
Our population is ageing and we aren’t having enough kids. The tax take will start to falter year on year and welfare will only rise as average age continues to increase.
The only way out of this is to stop siphoning capital from the young to capitulate the elderly.
This is the natural consequence of gradually being outcompeted by other regions globally
We are slowly becoming Argentina (former 10th richest country)
Euro here: why is there never any green or trees in houses in British streets?
Or is there usually but media always picks streets without any? Even the gardens seems completely devoid of any plants.
Working harder? Stats: UK productivity levels are about 10% lower than G7 averages. Countries like Germany and France have 20-30% higher productivity per hour than UK.
And it will be even worse under the Reform government who are now favourites to win the next GE. British people are actual masochists.
Importing hundreds of thousands of people from 3rd world countries will do that 🤣
it’s a completely hopeless place, but at least it’s getting worse every day.
This is news/content for people whose reading comprehension and critical thinking skills are advanced enough to see how stupid tabloid headlines are and make fun of people who read tabloids, but not advanced enough to critically analyze their own sources of information.
There are nine hyperlinks in the article, they all link to other Independent articles. Follow the links in *those* articles? More links to other Independent articles, including many circular rabbit-holes. These are often articles which present information from reports from government agencies or think tanks, but *never* link you off site to go and look at the data yourself.
The article the OP links is ostensibly based on “research” from the Resolution Foundation, a think-tank. There’s a hyperlink embedded in the term ‘Resolution Foundation’ in the text of the article, does that take you to the Resolution Foundation’s website? Nope. Does it even take you to an article the Independent published about the Resolution Foundation? Nope. It takes you [here](https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/resolution-foundation) to the ‘topic’ page of the Independent’s site about the Resolution Foundation which contains…..nothing. There’s no article or text or anything, it’s just a full page of ads for other articles and sections of the site, algorithmically determined to drive further engagement based on what clicking the Resolution Foundation hyperlink says about how to hack your attention.
The Independent is owned by Russian and Saudi billionaire families. The Resolution Foundation was set up by Clive Cowdery, a billionaire. This doesn’t make the claims in the article true or false in my view, but heavily upvoted comments such as *”But on the upside we have billionaires now”* (quoted in full) suggest that some of you aren’t very good at thinking a thought all the way through before expressing it.
[This](https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/publications/living-standards-outlook-2026/) appears to be the “research” referenced in the article. I could write an essay on the lack of credentials of the authors and the superficiality of the research itself and the fact that it isn’t actually research it’s just more opinion and analysis masquerading as primary data.
It says living standards in real terms are improving.
It says that child poverty is falling.
It has three recommendations, these recommendations do not include increased corporate tax or increased income tax on billionaires. No, they are;
*1. Direct government support and corporate welfare for the kinds of businesses owned by the people who own the institutions informing you about the situation. Shocking.*
*2 + 3. Link Local Housing Allowance to rents and index social security benefits to earnings, energy bill handouts. Redistribution policies which in the absence of increased corporate, wealth or high earner income tax will be paid for by the middle class not by the billionaires who own the institutions informing you about the situation. More shock.*
Ruling elites are monetizing the outrage they generate in you on the basis of misrepresentations of reality to make you act and speak as though you’re living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland when in fact you’re just living in a highly economically stratified society, while maintaining that stratification because the solutions they offer you do not address the stratification or indeed anything real at all, *and you are paying for the privilege with the limited and valuable resource of your attention*.
You get *exactly* the politics you deserve.
You know what will fix this….attacking trans people
It has been like this since 2008. No economic growth. And in the current fiscal environment, I have no hope of real economic growth. Suspect we may have to bankrupt first, similar to the 1970s.