Britain stares at a second recession in a year and a half as growth stalls
https://www.standard.co.uk/business/britain-stares-at-a-second-recession-in-a-year-and-a-half-as-growth-disappoints-b1210698.html
Posted by tylerthe-theatre
Britain stares at a second recession in a year and a half as growth stalls
https://www.standard.co.uk/business/britain-stares-at-a-second-recession-in-a-year-and-a-half-as-growth-disappoints-b1210698.html
Posted by tylerthe-theatre
26 Comments
Not surprising tbh, the chancellor told businesses to hire fewer people, pay them less and give them less hours. That does tend to assist a recession.
I work retail and people just aren’t spending like they were, probably because they don’t have the money to do so. This last 12 months has been terrible, and this winter in particular is just fucking dire. It wasn’t this bad in 2008, or during the pandemic.
Not a shock everything has been pay more tax and we have no money. Watch us waste the taxpayers money.
Tax personal allowance stayed the same for what feels like decades (I know it’s not, don’t get your numbers out). Wages are stagnant. Infrastructure can’t be built in this country, we’ve castrated ourselves through incompetence, regulation, over reliance on consultants etc.
Housing costs more and more, rents are through the roof, businesses are allowed to price gauge and cars go up 10% in a year, regardless of inflation.
Everything is fucked beyond belief, no one’s got money and it’s grey 6 months of every fucking year.
How do you want this country to grow?
Before getting too angry at Labour for all this, it just shows how bad the economy was when took over. They took over a economy balancing on a recession as it was. They might not be doing the best job, I can agree with that, however it would take a lot more than taxing the rich to avoid another recession. Investment in the UK would be great, however there was no money or industry to do that. The Tories gutted the country, left our finances in a terrible state and left Labour to pick up the mess. Labour cannot be held entirely responsible when the Tories left them and impossible situation to fix.
When the necessities housing, energy, council tax, food and travel continue to rise whilst wages are stagnant alongside no increase in the personal allowance, there will be no growth. I used to upgrade my car every 3 years and buy clothes for every season. I have now kept my most recent car for 6 years and I’ve been WFH for 4 and a half years so clothes are a non-factor. People either don’t have the money or have given up on the shit show we were trying to keep up with and started saving/investing.
Tax is so high that the cafe I go to and know the owner said she’s closing down even though she’s profitable because it’s not worth the stress or losing all her revenue to tax to which she sees little to no value, and she’s just going to get a 9-5 job for the same salary. The issue with this is that the eight staff become unemployed in the process and another high-street commercial building gets left vacated.
Lower energy prices will give people more to spend in other places and will give small businesses a chance to grow.
We’re already in recession and have been for some
Time
Apart from a few rounding errors we never left recession.
The GDP figures are imprecise at best so 0.1% of recorded growth is not enough to be sure things are getting better.
Not to mention GDP is an awful metric anyway.
It’s time to admit the system we’ve got isn’t working. I’m in favour of burning it all down and starting with a clean slate.
Ridiculous this. I know government is scared after the Liz Truss debacle, but we do need radical change to the economy or the tax system to stimulate growth.
BUT
As others have said the single biggest thing the government could do is to drastically reduce energy prices. But no one seems to be able to agree how to make that happen quickly.
Genuinely don’t understand how they think they can keep doing this.
I’ve grown up with basically nothing but recessions and austerity since the 2000s.
Of course it will keep happening with the state of wage stagnation. And the state of certain entities hoarding all the money.
Imagine actually paying a minimum wage/living wage that makes the majority of the country able to have more disposable income/any disposable income to pump back into the economy and keep it cycling? It’s not fucking rocket science……
UK will be meeting its climate targets though. No other G7 country can say that.
All our companies that have the potential to be high growth drivers are bought up by the Americans and promptly transferred stateside. Businesses outright refuse to give pay rises despite larger companies having record profits. Pay is ridiculously low compared to other English speaking countries and prices are rising.
Therefore, nobody has the money to spend in small businesses so they can’t stay afloat.
Buying a house is almost impossible and young people have to flock to London for any job prospects so even with good salaries they can’t buy property in the area because of the price and they can’t buy up north to eventually move to because of the stupid buy to let rules.
Immigration is strangling any wage growth and negates any house building. Importing hundreds of thousands of people from very poor countries is tearing the fabric of society apart as well as building a consumer base who 1) transfers money out of the economy back home. 2) Doesn’t spend money in the local economy because they won’t go anywhere that serves alcohol.
There also doesn’t seem to be any incentive to actually drive growth through cheap means. Getting young people into fitness by replacing PE teachers with PTs? No. Encouraging educational app development with VR or AI integration? No. Rejoining the single market? No. A free movement deal with Aus,NZ,Can? No. Legalising drugs to introduce an entirely new market? No. Reducing the tax rates on alcohol served in pubs and increasing it sold in stores to encourage people to go out? No. Reducing restaurant food tax to standardise it with supermarkets? No. Reducing working hours with no loss of productivity, giving people the chance to spend money and do more? No. Citywide schemes that encourage people into new activities on cheaper days when businesses aren’t as busy like universities do with uni societies? No.
It’s a government so obsessed with the economy that they don’t have any ideas on how to grow it other than cutting services and raising tax.
The historic way of declaring a recession is meaningless in the modern economy, and only serves to damage the economy while giving lazy journalists something to write and sensationalise.
Growth has been +/- 0.X % for a long time.
If 2 periods of -0.1% growth is a recession then 2 periods of +0.1% is a boom.
The reality is that the economy is stagnant, but that’s too difficult to put in a headline and make as excising as the R word, which many people still think it means the economy is like it was on the 80s and 90s.
You know, back when I was a lad an we had proper recessions.
Turns out making it more expensive to hire people hurts the economy. Who knew
The government needs to stop saving and start spending. Give people a higher personal allowance, take back privatised industries like water and electricity that are necessary to living into public control, and overall reduce the cost of living.
If you look at the golden era of capitalism during the baby boom, it was because of the economic approach at the time and it gave birth to amazing things like the NHS. The government needs to do what it was always meant to do, provide services with the tax we pay and enact controls to prevent market crashes that harm the most vulnerable whilst also creating a welfare net that allows people to thrive and put money back into the economy.
Additionally, review landlord laws to prevent large private housing rentals that sucked up all of the cheap council housing that Thatcher sold off.
We need to cut public spending, we can either do it voluntarily or wait for the bond market to collapse and invite the IMF in to do it for us, like in 1974.
Don’t worry everybody; companies will still have record profits, CEOs will still get obscene salaries and bonuses, shareholders will get their returns. The people that count will be alright jack /s
Ohh the daily cycle where the news moves between:
‘We’re in a recession!’
and
‘Record growth!’
Britain isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed. Just not for you or me!
There’s no jobs and salaries are shite, of course there’s no growth
This country cannot grow without investment and that is impossible when it takes a decade to get permission for half of what was asked for. Tax the rich and I mean the actual rich not a wealthy couple on £50k each I mean companies and it’s executives
Well done Unionist MPs and Unionist voters. This is **all** on you.
Three things killing the UK IMHO: rent, regulations and energy prices.
And no chance of any of those abating