Why Britain’s economy has never been worse, with Duncan Weldon
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 January 2023
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Will Dunn, the New Statesman’s business editor, is joined by the journalist and former political adviser Duncan Weldon to discuss how Britain is facing a decline like never before.
They talk about the country’s long history of economic woe and what we can learn from it, why we are feeling the current crisis more acutely than our neighbours, and if this calls for big ideas or – as Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng attempted in their disastrous mini-Budget – suffers from them.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, I'm Anouche, and on today's episode of The New Statesman Podcast, my colleague, |
| 0:12.8 | our business editor, Will Dunn, will be speaking to Duncan Weldon, the economist and writer, |
| 0:17.8 | about how Britain has never faced decline like this before. |
| 0:30.0 | Hi, I'm Will Dunn, I'm the business editor at The New Statesman, and today I'm joined by |
| 0:36.4 | Duncan Weldon to talk about his latest article for us. It's about the economics situation in which |
| 0:42.6 | the UK finds itself and how that is relatively concerning compared to other countries. I recommend |
| 0:49.7 | you go and read it on the New Statesman website. It's a relatively short read, but it's packed with |
| 0:55.0 | revealing information about the current state of the UK economy, and the state of decline that |
| 1:01.2 | has for a long time been part of the narrative of the British economy, and you have some interesting |
| 1:06.8 | points about the history of that narrative of British decline. It is part of our national story, |
| 1:11.4 | in a way, isn't it? How far does that go back? On one grand sort of macroeconomic, economic |
| 1:16.4 | history level, the story of the British economy for the past 150, 170 odd years is a story of relative |
| 1:24.1 | decline. And sort of on one level, inevitable, inevitable decline. Britain was the first country |
| 1:30.8 | to industrialise, the industrial revolution started here. Britain was the first country to |
| 1:35.8 | experience modern economic growth. So in the very late 18th, early 19th centuries, Britain |
| 1:43.6 | forged out this sort of lead over pretty much every other country on the earth. In an income |
| 1:49.4 | per head, Britain was just the richest place on the globe. Unless you think there's something |
| 1:54.0 | very special about these islands or something in the water here, that was never going to last |
| 1:59.2 | forever. Once that technology, those production techniques, that method of organising your economy |
| 2:05.0 | spread to other countries, it was a story of them catching up North America and Europe and |
| 2:10.7 | Japan, and then more recently, Eastern Europe, China. That's the story of relative decline, |
| 2:16.4 | Britain not growing as fast as other countries. That's the big picture. But we shouldn't |
... |
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