Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated

One of the authors is from the Centre for Policy Studies. Another is from the Adam Smith Institute. These are the gang of shady right-wing think tanks that brought us Truss and Kwarteng. That tells you everything you need to know about their economic competence.

> Again many would argue that was actually the start of the decline which we are feeling the pain of now with things like a terrible and fractured rail service and not enough housing.

I agree, this is pretty wild and made me immediately look up who was behind this. Conservative think-tanks gotta conservative think-tank.

If the asset prices don't grow, how will the rich people get paid for being rich? Won't anyone think of the poor rich people!

None of what the website says is actually contentious outside of Labour/left wing circles. Economic growth isn't that complicated when coming from behind - but as they say, it's hard if there isn't enough energy or housing.

> I think that many would argue that the growth following the second world war was the result of massive state investment

I don't think anyone with a strong grip on economics or British history would argue that. The fact is that post-war rationing continued longer in the UK than it did in Germany, the country that actually lost the war, and Germany recovered far faster in other ways too. Decades of very left wing governments left the UK in a terrible state by the 1970s relative to its peers - it was called the sick man of Europe and needed an IMF bailout - a situation fixed only by Thatcher. This history is well known not only in the UK but internationally. The website provides supporting evidence if you aren't familiar with this.

> our water companies that have been private since the 80s and have done nothing but pay dividends to shareholders

That this sort of absurdly false belief gets repeated unchallenged so often in Britain is exactly why it's falling behind. Thames Tideway, one of the largest engineering projects in Europe and the biggest upgrade to London's sewage system ever, is organized and financed by the private sector.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tideway_Tunnel#Funding_...

In August 2015, the independent investors to finance and deliver the scheme were confirmed. Bazalgette Tunnel Limited, a new special-purpose company appointed to take the project forward, received its licence from Ofwat as a new regulated utilities business, separate from Thames Water.[76][77] The special-purpose company is backed by pension funds and other long-term investors represented by Allianz, Amber Infrastructure Group, Dalmore Capital and DIF.[76]

It's literally being built right now and yet you claim the private sector hasn't invested. The reality is the opposite. As the website points out, British governments have historically struggled to do capital investments because the moment money becomes available the unions always take it all. Only the private sector has sufficiently good labour relations to actually build things and the water industry is a good example of that in action. Compare to the NHS where the government has regularly tried to ringfence money for capital investments (repairing leaking hospital roofs etc), only to see its direct orders ignored and the money used for pay rewards instead.

> 55% of stations were axed due to a /reduction/ of state infrastructure

The stations were axed due to long term decline in passenger numbers, a situation that reversed immediately upon privatization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...

Indeed, this is spun nonsense. The problem with the UK right now is brexit. You can see it on a GDP graph: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/GBR/uni...

It's growing steadily through the 60's-2000's, has a notable dip[1] at the 2008 financial crisis, then starts growing again until just about 2015. And it's been flat since.

The UK had found a profitable niche as the transatlantic hub of finance and commerce, and threw it out the window in a fit of nativist pique over the wrong languages being spoken on street corners.

[1] More pronounced than comparable nations, to be fair. The UK was always more dependent on finance.

Water quality by country.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/water-qua...

US is good while countries with more left leaning setups do bad.

It is not as black and white as you imply.

The financial crisis was a specific event and other countries had put it behind them within a few years. The UK's growth inflected around that time and never recovered since. It doesn't make much sense to argue a temporary event changed UK productivity or economic growth permanently, especially as the only reason to think that is rough temporal proximity. There were other things going on at that time too that are equally or more plausible e.g. mass immigration from eastern Europe was kicking into gear around that time as well, which created a glut of cheap labour. Cheap labour always kills productivity growth because there's no reason to invest in automation.

> Yes, despite what that British lady said, there is an emergent phenomenon called "society" and if you deny its existence you will get devoured by demons of its own creation.

Thatcher was responding to people who asserted that for any given problem, "society" should solve it or pay for it. Her answer made the obvious point: when it comes to taxation, there really is no such thing as society. To complete the quote: "they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families".

The "new Government" has not yet been in power for 100 days. How exactly have they not "come through on their promise to address it"? Given the old government didn't come through on similar promises on planning for 14 years, I think we can give them another year or so to get policy and statutes in place, no?

> Unfortunately these supply-side policies causing stagnation are representative of what our ageing population actually wants.

This is basically it. The pensioners don't want change. They might theoretically want some nebulous "improvement", but only if it doesn't cost anything, doesn't involve building anything, or even a change of use, doesn't make any noise, doesn't increase traffic, and doesn't involve any immigration.

The people demand stagnation.

It appears to have been produced by a right wing think tank, justifying its seeming lack of focus on how public funds could help build infrastructure vs the author's seeming obsession with private financing.

I don't think this is about the number of civil servants so much as the attitude of running everything from the Imperial core. Becomes apparent when you ask questions like "now that there is a Scottish Parliament, what exactly does the Scotland Office do?". There's no California Office in the American government, no Jura office in the Swiss government, because those are federal systems with a clear division of power across different levels.

See also terrible attitudes to local government. Part of London's recovery is getting its own governance back after the abolition of the GLC. Ihe Assembly is also slowly imposing sensible ideas like Regent Street pedestrianisation on London's councils. Andy Burnham is doing great as mayor of Manchester.

We ran the empire with a lot less civil servants than we have now: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/uk-government-did-we-ru...

The Indian Civil Service was always tiny. There were so few British in India that in 1950 when the Indian government surveyed the populace to try and see if they knew the British had left they discovered the average Indian wasn’t aware there had ever been a British Empire. The British Empire in India and the British Army in India at all but the most rarefied levels were staffed by Indians and there weren’t even that many of them.

> At the time of the partition of India and departure of the British, in 1947, the Indian Civil Service was divided between the new Dominions of India and Pakistan. The part which went to India was named the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), while the part that went to Pakistan was named the "Civil Service of Pakistan" (CSP). In 1947, there were 980 ICS officers. 468 were Europeans, 352 Hindus, 101 Muslims, two depressed classes/Scheduled Castes, five domiciled Europeans and Anglo-Indians, 25 Indian Christians, 13 Parsis, 10 Sikhs and four other communities.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Civil_Service

> It’s readily apparent the new government won’t save us already.

I dont follow this line of reasoning too well. The conservative party was in power for fourteen years, 2010 to 2024. The new Labour government has been in power for less than fourteen weeks. Isnt it too soon to make any claims about their performance fixing the structural issues identified in this report?

I've been to my GP half a dozen times in the last year, always same day.

Last time I went I was sent for a chest x-ray, which wasn't done at the GP, I had to drive to the place and wait 40 minutes for that, bit of a pain.

Main problem I see is housing. It drags the entire economy -- people are living in overcrowded, people in their 30s living with parents etc.

Anyone living on their own sees all their income drained by landlords, who then pump it into ever increasing housing costs as they out-bid each other. Anyone else never becomes an adult and pumps their money into things like onlyfans and coke.

> And all whilst we have one of the highest tax burdens in our history.

It's easy to have a low tax base when you subsidise the state spending with North Sea Oil from the 80s onwards... Prior to that we had really bad balance of payments crises from the Second World War onwards as the empire fell apart.

Low and middle earners in the UK pay pretty much the lowest taxes in Western Europe. We've eroded our tax base all over the place and somehow expect European services.

Quack medicine products used to be sold (and sometimes still are) by asking in adverts "do you feel vaguely unwell?" and promising to vaguely cure the condition. Similarly, it's easy to sell the public on a vague sense of national decline, and this is a long-standing key part of populist politics.

I don't agree, and your data points don't match my own. How is it readily apparent the new government won't "save us" when they haven't even got to 100 days in, yet?

I've been able to see a Dr on the day I've called several times in the last couple of years. Operations happen reasonably quickly if they are "required", it's the non urgent ones that now have ridiculous waiting lists. The economy/wages issue, seems to be worldwide since covid and the various recent wars.

The new Government has had no real time to do anything yet everywhere on twitter/fb I see hundreds of people complaining, who didn't do enough complaining in the last 14 years. What happens with the current Government is yet to be seen, but it's certainly difficult to make any meaningful change in a single term.

It's hard to understand how people view the NHS. Some people claim it's the national treasure, but how does that work if service is as abysmal as what you describe ?

> 2 weeks to see a Dr, a year for an operation

Its the same in USA if you want to see a specialist. There is a worldwide shortage of qualified doctors.

I waited about 1.5yrs to get a routine endoscopy at northwestern hospital in chicago. We've gone to northwestern in downtown for decades and have never seen waits this bad.

Same in Scotland. And our tax burden is even higher (if you’re a middle or high earner at least)

> real stench of decline in England at the moment

Real GDP per capita has been flat since 2008 while official population figures show population has increased by 10m. Total failure to grow the economy in 14 years of Tory rule and Labour aren’t exactly showing signs of having ideas to grow either.

The US has a huge internal market, with free interstate trade and no need for localization.

The US has accumulated colossal scientific and R&D resources, which regularly produce industrial breakthroughs. Lower taxes help, too. (Lower taxes is what a country can afford for general benefit, not a sloppy pro-rich policy.)

But most importantly, USD is effectively the world's reserve currency, so the US can literally print money, and much of the rest of the world would gladly take it; it's like gold, only buttressed by the US's economic and military might.

The UK has none of these advantages. The British Empire had some of these, but it's gone. Another large factor is that the US emerged from WWII relatively unscathed, while Britain was badly hit, and could not grow as fast.

(Edit: typos.)

I don't think "state funded" is the important part to take away from the piece, it's a shortage of infrastructure in general, both state and private, in part due to incredibly restrictive rules. These days you can easily trap a planned piece of infrastructure in court cases for years for largely spurious reasons.

US is energy independent and is desirable place for middle and higher class specialist. Compared to overtaxed and energy starved England which live from legacy sectors and cheap immigration workers and is not desirable for anyone not working in finances.

An important aspect is that the US is that its economies and regional cultures are diverse and dispersed. The US is simply too decentralized to stagnate effectively. It is not a monoculture in any practical sense which creates a system that can respond quickly to evolutionary pressure. Everything good and bad you hear about the US usually only applies to a subset of the country and often only a handful of cities.

There is a high degree of regional specialization in the US as a consequence. No matter what happens in the world, some part of the US is perfectly positioned to take advantage of that. Combine this with general American risk tolerance and business acumen, and you have a country that is unusually organically adaptive to changing global economies.

The US has a more robust system for supplying infrastructure through private investment - including in the energy sector.

Since the crisis of 2008 the USA has had several trillion dollars in stimulus spending. Very roughly speaking, Europe pursued policies of austerity, whereas the USA followed a more Keynesian route of big spending. On this matter, the Keynesians have been vindicated. In 2007 the GDP of the EU was slightly larger than the USA, but now it has fallen far behind: $16 trillion ($18 trillion if it still had the UK) versus $25 trillion for the USA. And the most important policy difference since 2008 has been large stimulus spending in the USA, versus relative austerity in Europe. More recently, President Biden was able to push through some big infrastructure bills, which should power the USA through the 2020s. (There are some qualifiers to be added about weaknesses in the USA system of funding and allowing construction, in particular the aggressive system of "substantive due process" that allows for any project to be stalled by lawsuits, but despite that, the USA has done better than Europe.)

A lack of infrastructure development combined with a population being artificially increased by high levels of immigration, which is applying downward pressure on wages while pushing property costs (the source of most of the UK's problems) ever higher.

A population increase of around 1% per year may not seem huge until you consider what 1% of the UK road network or 1% of the NHS actually looks like, and what it'd take to build infrastructure and expand services at that rate year upon year.

The reality of building infrastructure in the UK is HS2 - a 20+ year project to build a little over 100 miles of high speed railway (with future northern phases predictably cancelled), at a cost over over half a billion quid per mile - it'll likely put any government off attempting any significant infrastructure construction ever again.

Its also that its really expensive. The reasons given are the cost of planning but I also suspect given all that has been exposed over the past 40 years that widespread corruption by governments in power is actually a big part of the ballooning costs.

I'm not so sure counting lights on at any given moment is a good measure of occupancy.

The resident might be at work, at the gym, out for dinner or at the cinema, at a friend's house, in another room, might have good blackout curtains and only use lamps for ambience instead of the ceiling light, on holiday. I bet if you stood outside one of these buildings where "most of the lights are off" for the entire evening, you'd see lights come on and off, and in aggregate find that most of the flats were in fact occupied.

By the same logic, I could look outside my window right now, count zero cars driving down the road and declare it a useless waste that nobody uses.

The French are richer than the British. They have more stuff and a higher quality of life. It would be good for more British people to have more stuff and a higher quality of life. Building more housing allows both for more people to afford a (better quality of) primary residence, and for more people to have a holiday home. Those are all good. Focussing on utilisation is Green Party, NIMBY, degrowth, pro-poverty thinking. It sees a fixed pie and thinks how to distribute it instead of trying to make everything better for everyone.

More housing. A holiday home should be an utterly normal thing for a middle class family like in Finland or Spain.

I live in the catchment area. The amount of consultations etc they have to hold to mollify the general anti-growth fanatics and newt-fanciers is insane: https://nationalhighways.citizenspace.com/ltc/lower-thames-c...

I believe this Map Men video has the answer : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWZ9ZVRQ0Nw

If most of that are technical drafts going down to smallest details, I can imagine how it could be sort of reasonable. Large things like, say, nuclear power plants or huge ships have literally millions of parts.

Seems pretty reasonable actually. Final reports contain -everything- and I really do mean everything.

Design docs and drawings obviously (easily 1k pages more if you fit it on a4), since each trade needs it's own views. Specifications are included, as a legal document that calls out which regulations every possible system will follow and calls out exceptions (proof they apply). All possible testing from receiving it (and documentation including pictures), proof of setup, proof of commissioning (IE construction essentially needs to do what a tech bro would do with automated testing, by hand with with each step documented and signed for, and each possible state the system could be in). Any other type of test report NETA/material quality/thermography/whatever (a single breaker easily comes to two pages of test report, a voltage/current meter easily comes to three pages per phase). Pictures are likely kept to only two per A4 page.

Basically it's a "declaration from ignorance", since big numbers sound scary and wasteful to others who haven't worked in the field.

The UK's manufacturing sector is comparable to France's in size.

>it seems obscene to spend all that money in so small an area

Greater London has a population nearly three times that of Wales. So the bang-for-buck in this small area is much greater. I completely agree that we under-invest in areas like Wales. But that doesn't mean that under-investing in the most productive part of the country is a good idea.

It's hard to find any European country that didn't have any government projects that went wildly over budget or were very much delayed. So I don't think this is a UK specific problem, and it doesn't explain why Britain has stagnated compared to most of the EU.

> Yes. France has a better housing supply, and roughly the same area. But France has over twice the area, and under half the population density, even before you account for the almost uninhabited mountainous areas in Wales, Northern England and Scotland. So our populations are squeezed into smaller areas.

If you compare population density maps of France vs the UK, you can see that it's pretty similar - there are clusters of population in certain locations, and wide areas with barely any inhabitants.

As for Wales ... This pattern repeats itself all over Europe. Only a few places "made" the transition from industrial settings to current economy.

I am from a former mining city of Ostrava, CZ. It is not completely dead, and it has been slowly improving lately, but it sorely needs something like high-speed rail to become relevant again. (The location is favourable: almost equidistant from Prague, Vienna, Warsaw and close to Krakow; a major railway hub.)

But the pattern really repeats itself all over Europe. Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Germany, Czechia, Poland - former heavy industry hotspots tend to collapse in a very similar fashion. As far as I have seen, Bilbao (ES) and Katowice (PL) were able to rebuild and reinvent themselves the best. Everyone else struggles or gave up the fight entirely.

> Prestige based on family lineage is considered a big deal

Are you in the UK? The monarchy and House of Lords are an obvious anachronism and they need abolishing [1], but I would say it's a very small minority who care who you parents are/were (mainly people who think their own parents are/were a big deal) — and a similar small minority who might also ask "which school did you go to?".

[1] e.g. https://www.sortitionfoundation.org/

> The UK was, and to some senses still is, a culture that strongly values who your parents are vs what you’ve personally accomplished.

I think this statement's accuracy depends heavily on how you're defining things.

If I go up to the average Brit and tell them my father is the deputy editor-in-chief of some newspaper? They won't be impressed, they'll think I'm a prick.

On the other hand, if I want to pursue a career in journalism? My father will have made sure I've studied the right things, funded me through the right unpaid internships, and will be able to get my job application in front of the right hiring managers.

Does "UK culture strongly value" who my father is, if 99.99 % of brits don't care, but the remaining 0.01 % can have an outsized impact on my career?

(Of course if I've inherited a hundred million quid some people will think I'm important / suck up to me due to the power such wealth confers - but there's nothing uniquely british about that)

Not sure who could be down voting you, because you're right. If your parents didn't send you to the right school to learn the right plummy accent, you don't stand much chance.

One of the exceptions in the US seems to be around the White House. For a while, when Hillary Clinton was running for President in 2008, it was possible that the US would have had a member of the Bush or Clinton families as either VP or President every year from 1981 thorough to 2017. Such political families are not unique to the US, of course, and the UK has a fair few, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_family

Worth pointing out that not only is the UK more American-style entrepreneurial than the rest of Europe (London gets about as much VC investment as France and Germany together), but that UK wealth inequaslity is low by European standards.

Like, there's work to do here, but by European standards the UK is doing pretty well.

I don't think that's really true, outside some niche cultural arenas. Sure, if you're at a posh member's club or a party of aristocrats people might be impressed by your lineage.

I would concede that in politics a degree from Oxbridge has an outsized cachet, and those universities traditionally recruited from elite private schools. However, this is diminishing over time, both because those institutions are proactively recruiting from a wider base, and because people are pointing out the unrepresentitive composition of political parties, which then self-correct to stay politically relevent.

The hereditary parts of the House of Lords are increasingly unimportant, and the Lords is of minor importance to the political process anyway. Royalty has been politically vestigial for more than a century.

But in industry and most business spheres your lineage is unimportant. Just like those other parts of the world you mentioned, it's personal accomplishment that matters.

Britain has big problems, but I think archaic veneration for family lineage is only a small force within them.

Isn't socio-economic status more heritable in the US than the UK? In the UK, inheritance tax is 40% and there's probably more redistributive taxation in general.

Revolutionary France never made it across the channel... On the other hand, this significantly dismiss the UK contributions to the world on global trade and during the industrial revolution.

I've been here for 5 years and am almost thirty years old. I still have people regularly asking me where I went to secondary school. They are obsessed with class.

To a certain extent I agree, however the head of state is only token position (albeit well paid!). It's not very different in the US, the "name" - Kennedy, Clinton, Obama, Bush, etc takes you most of the way there... Trump too I guess!

Sometimes I'll read a biography of a famous British person and the first chapter is dedicated to the full family lineage of them. You won't even hear the subject's name until chapter 2 because it was more important to discuss what his grandfather did in India in 1895. I think biographies of Americans tend to start at the childhood of the subject and will mention their family life and parents when relevant

The same last names are mentioned in the context of many US elections. US is not as far removed as you might think.

>Passing off wealth and prestige by lineage has long been shown to be a bad idea. The next generation typically just screws it up.

In Japan there's an old saying that the success of a family is determined with the third generation.

The first builds the family empire. The second grows up seeing the first build it up and thus knows how to maintain it. The third grows up already having the empire and doesn't know how to maintain it, whether he can pass it on is essentially a dice roll. The fourth generation onwards, if the third succeeded, can refer to the family records and keep things going mostly indefinitely or realizes it's time to hand it off to different blood at that point.

"People value you a lot more because of what you’ve done vs who you are and, with some exception, nobody cares who your parents were."

Maybe on individual level, but as far as economy goes, mainland EU is still stuck with very old corporations and rarely generates some interesting startup (not just in IT). There has been a notable dearth of new European corporations since the 1970s at least. The old guard controls everything.

And London is full of European youngsters who came there to study and do some business, because the possibilities are broader there, including some VC culture. Try founding a new company in Germany; you will be met by a merciless paper storm that can only be weathered with help of a professional specialized in dealing with bureaucracy, and may take several months to overcome.

The UK is too complicated to fit into one neat box. It has its peers in medieval gowns, but at the same time, London is a very modern 21st century city, more modern than many metropolises on the continent. Perhaps Warsaw is more modern than London.

Probably a decline in North Sea oil revenue

"These are not just disconnected observations", says the article. Yeah, but they might be actually. For instance the one about France producing more electricity is because France famously over-invested in nuclear power stations and that's why its electricity price recently went negative. Meanwhile the UK probably needs to increase supply slightly, but the comparison is misleading.

The fact it's a whole site dedicated to this article means there's some angle to it. Would be interesting to know who paid for this.

If you only look at the price, then you don't get the full picture.

Whenever you ask someone in the creative industries, they point to the aggressive tightening of the benefits system. People could write music and books while on the dole in the 80s, and become commercial successes. Now it's an area that's only accessible to people who can afford to have their parents "loss leader" their first few years in the industry, and as a result has lost all "realness".

I don't think it's entirely off-topic, though I only have a vague sense of the connection. I knew 1980s Japan, a society of supreme confidence, and contrast it with modern Japan, a society that has really lost its mojo. What I think happened is that the depression of the 1990s so thoroughly shook their confidence that they still haven't recovered.

I've only observed English culture from abroad, but my sense since the late 1990s is that the English have become somehow ashamed to be openly proud of their culture. I don't have a feeling for what brought this about.

> There's no point listing specific examples, they are numerous.

Four of them, if you include Ringo.

I'd expect the cultural stagnation to lead the economic. The article is clearly political but it is pointing out some really obvious long term trends. The fact that the UK elite haven't been able to grapple with them at any point in the last few decades showcases that, as a culture, they've lost the spark of competence.

The UK media and upper class have failed to identify energy, housing or infrastructure more generally as requiring serious responses too. Their entire system appears to be off the rails. Their failure relative to countries like China really is quite astonishing, although it doesn't set them far apart from the greater western bloc. It makes sense that we aren't seeing cultural leadership out of them; where would they lead us too? Nowhere good.

I'm not sure 15 years is enough to look back. I'm struggling to think of a time since the 80s that some formerly strong areas of British culture were vibrant and interesting.

See eg. BritPop, a vacuous derivate outpouring of jumped-up pub rock relying on waving the flag to justify it's existence.

Some areas have still produced decent stuff, eg comedy (The Office, Borat, Peep Show), etc. Our twists on black American music (eg grime, drill) seem ok.

But it's a real struggle to think of much that is vital and original as a culture from Britain in the last 30 years I'd say.

If only there was some factual evidence to point to to suggest were wrong and Labour might do better than the Tories.

They were thinking...about the backhanders. Look at Cyprus, gateway for dirty Russian money in to the EU, swimming in Russian money, all sanctioned by the government and EU thanks to all the bribes they receive

As I understand it from a couple of my British friends talking about insulation, the old homes were built to breathe, so you can't just seal them up and put insulation in, because you'll end up with humidity problems.

I think Karl Marx only serves as an expensive lesson in what destructive ideas look like. Everywhere that has implemented any version of it has ended up impoverished, unfree, and frequently with millions killed. China's success came only after they junked Marxism, and Xi Jinping's quasi return to it has seen Chinese prosperity slowly drop.

England your England by George Orwell is essential background reading for understanding why the UK looks the way it does in my opinion.

But the UK is nowhere near full in terms of housing. The Netherlands is the densest large country in Europe, and rocks double the population density of the UK. Despite this, the two countries have a roughly equal ratio of people to homes (~2.2). It's not as if a country actually needs that much land to build homes - humans simply don't take up that much space in terms of housing.

This doesn't really seem relevant since no one is disputing whether the UK as a whole has enough space for more houses. The relevant comparisons are Paris vs London and then the various 2nd tier cities in the countries. Paris has a MUCH HIGHER population density than London, in part due to the housing mix, e.g. Parisian mansion blocks.

Prosperity comes from cities where densification is allowed (far too much of inner London is only 2-storeys) and being able to affordably put in supporting infrastructure.

Which, since these people are from the CPS, they would have supported by the way.

Have you renounced your British citizenship? Couldn't you keep both?

Why, and which one?

Europe failed to keep its bureaucracy at bay.

There were times in the 1990s when people like the Dutch commissioner Frits Bolkenstein sincerely tried to liberalize and open the internal market.

But at least since Brexit, possibly earlier, the EU has made a turn towards protectionism and closedness (at least economically; as you mention, it is way, way easier to ship people from Africa into the EU than bananas), a French attitude so to say.

Frankly, we the Czechs are missing Britain in the fold. It was a balancing power against the Franco-German attempts to micromanage and regulate absolutely anything. Together with NL and DK, they were a force for economic freedom within the Union.

BTW other nations are threatened by the very same development, see the shenanigans around FAA and their überlengthy process of licensing of space launches. But I am more optimistic about the US being able to cut red tape than the EU.