Welcome to the Euro Intelligence Podcast. I'm Wolfgang Munchau and with me, I'm Susanne Muncheng and Jack Smith.

Today we will talk about the UK. Now, we're not going to talk about Andy Burnham and what happened last weekend.

That's not really interesting for us. What we can add to this discussion is sort of our comparisons between the UK and the rest of Europe and the rest of the

world and to put what happens in the UK politics in a broader context. Because, you know,

as I feel, and we will discuss this in a second, the way this is being addressed at the moment,

discussions that we have about UK politics are not really addressing the underlying

issues. And there is sort of a sense that whatever's going to happen, they're likely to repeat

whatever mistakes they made before. Jack, what is your diagnosis of the situation in the UK?

I think there's both a long-term and a short-term component to it, a long-term component that's really primarily economic and a shorter-term component that is more political, partly caused by the economic situation. So the longer-term situation is that the United Kingdom has seen stagnant productivity growth really over the last almost 20 years now since the 2008 global financial crisis.

Now, slowing productivity growth is not a problem that's unique to the UK, but it has been a

problem that in some respects has hit the UK quite hard, has led to stagnant wage growth, has led to

basically reduced revenues indirectly for the government, which has led to a

deterioration of the public realm in the UK, and that has driven, I think, a sense of popular

dissatisfaction. Now, the short-term situation is that, well, through most of this time,

the conservatives have been in government in the UK. Then in 2024, the conservatives were voted out

after a succession of prime ministers, after Brexit, and labor was voted in. What's happened is that a

third party has emerged. So Nigel Farage and the Reform Party. Previously, what most of us would

have expected to be the case, and certainly I think what a of us would have expected to be the case, and certainly

I think what a lot of political analysts expected to be the case coming into the 2024 election,

is that a new government would get a certain honeymoon period. They would get a certain amount of

grace, maybe to do some more politically on popular things, to establish their agenda, because voters,

having voted a new government in, would be wary of just turning back to the other option,

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