Homes in England are more cramped than those in New York City, according to new analysis that showed UK property offers the worst value for money in the developed world.
The Resolution Foundation found that the UK has the oldest properties in Europe and English homes have less floorspace than many international peers, notably Germany, France and Japan. With 38 square meters on average per person, London homes are even more cramped than those in New York City.
The findings, which also show UK housing costs are also more expensive relative to general prices than in any OECD country, underscore the scale of the housing crisis in Britain. Many younger Britons are struggling to get a foot on the property ladder due to soaring prices, and the issue is rising up the political agenda ahead of an election expected later this year.
“By looking at housing costs, floorspace and wider issues of quality, we find that the UK’s expensive, cramped and aging housing stock offers the worst value for money of any advanced economy,” said Adam Corlett, principal economist at the Resolution Foundation. “Britain’s housing crisis is decades in the making, with successive governments failing to build enough new homes and modernize our existing stock. That now has to change.”
The Resolution Foundation found that if all UK households were “exposed to the full brunt of the housing market, the UK would devote the highest share of overall spending to housing” to every OECD country except Finland.
Some 38% of UK homes were built before 1946, higher than the level of 29% in France, 24% in Germany, 21% in Italy and 11% in Spain. That means British properties by comparison are poorly insulated and come with higher energy bills.
Most of the wealth was from trade. That’s how the empire started. Money was made from trade and the industrial revolution then came empire. I guess you can say the empire started from stealing money off the Spanish but they didn’t exactly follow us home.
Empire and mass imigration aren’t related, unless you are talking about how brits spread to North America, Australia and New Zealand. But you aren’t. Lot of men died in WW2 and labour was needed temporarily to rebuild and man the factories, there was a lot of damage in ww2. The government realised it is good for business to have cheap labour so kept the workers. Then they realised wages can be suppressed, houses prices and demand for other things can be increased, as well as gdp by importing loads of people from the third world.
By an huge amount most of the immigration has come post empire when the countries are independent.
Also the empire was expansionary in nature. It wanted to build Britain abroad, infrastructure, law, order, “civilisation”. Many countries got it’s independence through a vote, I think only two ever declared independence and one is very friendly with UK wouldn’t be more surprised if people leave the UK more than they get back, and the other country doesn’t exist anymore. Britain was never about importing people in, it was about exporting people and civilisation out.
Colonialism is a fancy word for armed robbery. It’s not trade if it’s done at the end of a barrel. The Indians could have easily grown and then manufactured their own cotton and kept the proceeds, if it was just about “trade”. Furthermore, much of that “trade” came about from the proceeds of slave labor on land that had been stolen. The important words in all of this are - theft, stolen, force and violence. That doesn’t sound much like trade to me.
And yes, empire and mass population movements do tend to be related. Creating instability and then taking credit for quelling the disquiet that they caused or blaming some third agencies for the anarchy caused by the empire is what empires tend to do.
Tell the Brits to suck it up. They made their flea ridden bed and now it’s time to take a nap in it.
Think the stability came from the empire, countries did a lot worse of the stability front post empire.
Britain spent an awful lot of money ending slavery and spent a lot of money policing the ocean.
IAre you saying Indians in UK are the “flea ridden bed. They can sleep in it”
Britain ending slavery after they used the proceeds of their criminality to build up a technological advantage is not the noble feat that you’re making it out to be. The fact that the British government elected to compensate the criminals and not the victims of that evil trade should tell you everything that you need to know about how Brits viewed enslaved Africans at the time and arguably how they continue to view their descendants (see the offer to build a prison in Jamaica in lieu of reparations). The money spent on the navy was to protect the British monopoly and destroy competition, let us not deceive ourselves. If Britain was really as offended by slave labor as you claim they would not have replaced enslaved Africans with indentured Indians whose life chances were just as bleak on those British owned plantations - 10 years to win your freedom doesn’t mean much if the life expectancy on a plantation is only 5.
As for your claims of stability. That is pure nonsense. The Brits are the ones who fomented anarchy in much of the world by imposing leaders upon the people of faraway lands who would do their evil bidding. They further compounded their evil by forcing peoples who had no legacy of unity into faulty systems that would inevitably fall apart. The only thing that united the peoples of the areas we now know as India, Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria was their disdain of an invading and exploitative force.