Transcription
This week, following the sudden resignation of Kier Starmer on Monday, the United Kingdom is preparing to appoint its seventh prime minister in just 10 years. At this point, holding the highest office in British politics has started to look less like a prestigious constitutional honor and more like a temporary zero hours contract at a local retail store where the management changes constantly. The customers are permanently furious and you really shouldn't bother unpacking your personal belongings because you've seen how things went for the last six people who sat at that desk. The revolving door at 10 Downing Street has become such a fixture of British life that the only part of the economy showing reliable growth appears to be the London removal firms that specialize in transporting executive furniture at very short notice.
Now, it would be easy to look at all of this political churn and conclude that Britain has simply become the Italy of northwestern Europe, but that would be unfair to Italy, which over the same 10 years has looked like an oasis of predictability by comparison. This run of political volatility isn't just a matter of rotten luck. It's the direct legacy of an event that took place exactly one decade ago this week: the Brexit referendum of June 23rd, 2016.
Now, there were two stories told about Brexit at the time. And the interesting thing, the thing that makes it such a good topic, is that both of them turned out to be wrong. The first story was told by the Leave campaign, who drove a large red bus around the UK with the words, "We send the UK £350 million a week. Let's fund our NHS instead." The pitch was that Britain was hemorrhaging money to Brussels, money that was being wasted, and that leaving would let the country reclaim its borders, slash bureaucracy, revitalize the health service, and most importantly, bring back the Bendy Banana, which the EU had supposedly outlawed. This was promoted heavily by right-wing populists and, more surprisingly, by a smaller group of left-wing Eurosceptics who wanted to leave the EU not to deregulate the economy but to regulate it far more aggressively than Brussels would ever allow. The two groups agreed on the destination and on absolutely nothing else. For the Leave campaign, Brexit was framed as a patriotic act to take back control of the nation's laws, money, and borders. A democratic strike against the metropolitan elites in London, who had spent decades managing a globalized economy while leaving the old industrial heartlands behind.
The second story was told by the Remain side, and it was that Brexit would be an immediate catastrophe. In May 2016, one month before the vote, Her Majesty's Treasury published an analysis predicting that a Leave vote would tip the country straight into a year-long recession, cost around half a million jobs, leave GDP 3.6% smaller, collapse house prices, weaken sterling, and lower real wages. They had an even gloomier scenario in the same document, too, in which 820,000 jobs went. This was the official position of the British government. Vote the wrong way on Thursday and the economy falls over by the weekend.
What actually happened was worse than Leave promised and a good deal milder than Remain threatened, which is the least satisfying result for everyone involved and the reason that the argument has never really ended. There was no immediate recession, and half a million people did not lose their jobs that summer. Now, this does not mean that Brexit was fine, as we'll get to. It's been a disaster in ways that took years to show up. But it means that the question was always going to be more complicated than either camp was willing to admit on the side of a bus.
The part of this story that matters most is who voted for Brexit and why. During the boom years, Britain's welfare state had partly compensated the people who lost out from de-industrialization and globalization. Then the financial crisis arrived. Austerity followed, and the cushion was gradually removed from the people who were sitting on it. In the poorest parts of the country, cuts to benefits made a bad situation considerably worse. According to a recent piece in The Atlantic, the share of British children growing up in long-term poverty, meaning poor for half their childhood or more, rose from about 14% to 23%. So you had a large group of people who, by their own fairly reasonable assessment, had very little left to lose. When the referendum came along, this group got to take a free shot at the metropolitan liberal elites who they felt, not entirely without justification, had caused the financial crisis and then handed them the bill. They were also angry about immigration, which was the single biggest driver of the Leave vote. The promise to control it was explicit. It was central to the campaign, and it was the thing that they came back to again and again. So that's the setup: two wrong stories, one understandably furious electorate, and a referendum result that almost nobody in charge had planned for.
Now, let's look at what happened next.
Before we dig into that, let me tell you about this week's video sponsor, Cape. Cape is a mobile carrier designed specifically for people who prioritize data privacy. The main difference between Cape and standard carriers is how they handle your personal information. Most providers collect a lot of personal data just to set up an account, and this data can be accidentally leaked, shared, or sold. Cape operates differently because they don't collect any unnecessary details like your social security number or your address when opening an account. They don't track your location either. They've set up the service so that they don't even have your data to leak. They've just added some new security features. IMSI rotation changes the identifier your phone broadcasts to cellular networks every day, so to anyone monitoring tower logs or running a Stingray device, you look like a different subscriber each time. Secondary numbers gives you two additional real phone numbers, not VoIP numbers, included in your plan, which work for two-factor authentication and banking, so you can keep your main number private. And SIM swap protection removes humans from the verification process entirely, replacing it with a 24-word cryptographic phrase, the only way to move your number to a new device. Right now, they're offering early adopter pricing at $70 a month, locked in permanently if you sign up this year. And there's a promo code in the description for an additional 33% off for the first 6 months.
To understand why the immediate post-referendum period confused so many people, you have to separate financial markets from the real economy. On the morning the result was announced, the currency desks in London panicked. Sterling took an immediate and violent thumping, dropping to its lowest level against the US dollar in 30 years. And the FTSE 100 opened deep in the red. But in a nice piece of financial irony, the stock market bounced back quickly. And the reason why tells you something important about what the FTSE 100 actually measures. People treat the FTSE 100 as a kind of national scorecard for Britain, but it isn't really. Its 100 companies are listed in London, but they're mostly enormous multinationals: oil majors, miners, banks, drug companies, and consumer goods giants that earn the majority of their money internationally. By the index provider's own reckoning, well over half of their sales are made overseas, and some estimates put it closer to 80%. So, when you watch the index to gauge the health of the British economy, you're largely watching how well a group of global companies is doing in countries that are not Britain. It is, in that sense, one of the less useful things you could be looking at.
This is why the falling pound looked like good news for the index. If a company earns its profits in dollars or euros and the pound suddenly drops, then those profits convert into more pounds. So the share price measured in pounds goes up, even though absolutely nothing about the business has improved. The number on the screen was rising mainly because the unit it was being measured in, the British pound, had shrunk. A British investor looking at this hadn't really gained anything because the larger pile of pounds they now owned was made of individually less valuable pounds. What looked like a recovery was mostly just a measurement problem. If you were a trader staring at a Bloomberg terminal 10 years ago, it looked like the world was ending. If you were an ordinary person walking down the high street, nothing had changed at all. There was no immediate recession. People woke up, grumbled about the news, and went to work as normal. The sky didn't fall.
The reason for the disconnect is that Brexit didn't really happen on that Friday morning. Brexit was a bureaucratic process that took years to grind through. And instead of an immediate exit, the UK spent four grueling years trapped in political infighting over whether it was pursuing a hard Brexit or a soft Brexit. A distinction that nobody could ever fully define, which made it an ideal thing to argue about indefinitely. It was during this gridlock that the traditional relationship between business and the Conservative Party broke down. When major international manufacturers like Airbus and BMW publicly warned that leaving the customs union would threaten thousands of British jobs, Boris Johnson, a former game show host and the star of the Leave campaign who was serving as Foreign Secretary at the time, summarized his economic policy at a private reception in two words: "Business." Which has not traditionally been the Conservative Party's position on business. I don't think that was Margaret Thatcher's position.
Anyhow, eventually the politicians patched the deal together. The United Kingdom officially and legally left the European Union on January 31st, 2020. But because of a pre-arranged transition period, the actual trading rules didn't change for another 11 months. So Brexit really took effect on December 31st, 2020. And this is where things became scrambled. By the time the new trade barriers went live in January 2021, the global economy was in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every supply chain on Earth was already broken. Container ships were stuck outside ports, and factories worldwide were shutting down. The pandemic didn't soften the economic hit of Brexit, but it did camouflage it. When a small business couldn't import components or a supermarket ran short of fresh tomatoes, it was almost impossible to say how much was down to Brexit and how much was simply the global chaos of COVID. This turned out to be enormously convenient for the people who had promised Brexit would be painless, because the one period when the cost should have been the most visible was also the period when nobody could isolate them. The damage was still happening; it just had been handed a perfect alibi.
But while the virus masked the immediate pain, the broad damage to the economy was accumulating in the background. So, with the pandemic no longer providing cover, how much damage has actually accumulated over the last decade? Well, this is where you run into the counterfactual problem, which is the single hardest thing about judging Brexit. And it's worth understanding before we throw numbers around. The trouble is that we only get to run history once. We can see how Britain has done since 2016, but we can't see how Britain would have done if it had stayed in the EU. And how it would have done is the entire question.
To get around this, economists build what is essentially a ghost ship: a synthetic version of Britain that never Brexited. They take a basket of other countries whose economies closely track the UK's before the referendum, weight them together into a kind of statistical clone, and then watch how the real Britain performs against this imaginary one that stayed in the EU. It's a slightly eerie exercise, conjuring up a parallel Britain where nothing big changed. But the gap between the two Britons is the estimated cost of Brexit. A widely cited NBER paper used this approach and concluded that by the end of 2025, leaving the EU had reduced British GDP by somewhere between 6% and 8%. To put that in perspective, an 8% hit to output is the kind of damage a country usually only sustains during a war.
The problem with the ghost ship, though, is that it's only as good as the countries you build it from. And a big chunk of that clone was made of the United States, which over the last few years has done unusually well. The American economy has roared ahead over the last 10 years, fueled by enormous tech and AI investment and a government deficit that would make a 1970s socialist blush. And it was largely spared the European energy crisis that followed the invasion of Ukraine. So the synthetic Britain raced off into the distance, partially because it was built out of a country having an unrelated boom, one that Britain just wouldn't have had. Critics of the paper argue that once you strip out the American outperformance and Ireland's famously distorted, multinational-inflated GDP, the realistic figure comes down to something more like 2% to 4%, which, conveniently, is roughly where the UK's own official forecaster, the Office for Budget Responsibility, has long put the long-run cost.
But here's the thing that the headline percentage misses, and it might be the most important part. The worst of the damage didn't come from any single tariff or customs form. It came from the chaos itself. For most of the last decade, no British business could say with any confidence what the rules were going to be. Deal or no deal, hard Brexit or soft, which checks, which tariffs, which government, which prime minister this month? And a business that doesn't know what the rules will be doesn't build a new factory. It doesn't hire extra workers. It sits on its hands and waits. Economists now treat Brexit as a near-perfect natural experiment in what uncertainty does to an economy. And the answer is: a great deal. The Bank of England estimated that business investment was running around 11% lower than it should have been within 3 years of the vote. And later studies put it as much as 12% to 18% below where it would otherwise have been. That is years of businesses not invested in, employees not hired, and machines not bought. The measurable price of a country that could not tell its own businesses what kind of country it intended to be.
And whichever number you take – 2%, 4%, 8% – none of them are small. In a three-trillion-pound economy, even the modest end means tens of billions of pounds of lost output every year, which doesn't come back. It acts as a ceiling, and the losses compound over time. You end up with a country that's permanently poorer, collects less tax, and watches its living standards stall.
This slow stagnation is why the British press keeps returning with a kind of grim fascination to a single question: Has the United Kingdom finally become poorer than Mississippi, the poorest state in America? For years, the answer was a comfortable no. It's no longer comfortable, however. British output per person is now only just above Mississippi. And even that narrow lead depends almost entirely on one city. Britain has a uniquely unbalanced economy in which the capital city generates a wildly outsized share of national wealth and then pays the fiscal transfers that keep much of the rest of the country running. According to the Financial Times, if you removed London's output and headcount from the national accounts, you would knock 14% off British living standards, just enough to drop the rest of the country below the last US state on the list. By way of comparison, removing San Francisco and the entire Bay Area from the United States would shave only about 4% off American GDP per head. Take London out of Britain, and "Left Behind Britain" really is poorer than Mississippi.
Now, the "poorer than Mississippi" headline is a great headline, which is the main reason it keeps being brought up. As a description of what it's actually like to live in either place, it's not that helpful. Life expectancy in Britain is nearly 10 years longer than in Mississippi. Mississippi's infant mortality rate is the worst of any American state and more than double the rich world average. A baby born there is roughly twice as likely to die before its first birthday as one born in the UK. And a poor Briton who gets sick is treated by the NHS and grumbles about the waiting list. A poor Mississippian is amongst the most likely in America to have no health insurance at all, and a serious illness can mean financial ruin. Mississippi has the highest incarceration rate in the United States, too, with an adult imprisonment rate of almost 1%. Stoke-on-Trent has a great many problems, but life there might be a bit more pleasant than in Mississippi.
There's also a bit of a statistical joke buried in all of this. A good chunk of America's higher GDP per head is simply the United States spending roughly twice as much on healthcare as Britain does, and getting shorter lives in return. All that spending counts as output. So, part of what makes Mississippi look richer in a spreadsheet is the cost of Mississippi being less healthy. The number that's supposed to prove the place is wealthier is partially just measuring how expensive it is to get sick there.
The real point of all of this isn't that Britain turned into Mississippi. It's instead where the damage landed. Brexit's costs did not fall evenly. They fell hardest on the very people who voted for it. And to see why, you have to look at the difference between the businesses that could work around Brexit and the ones that couldn't. The people who voted for Brexit were heavily concentrated in the old industrial and manufacturing heartlands. And the deal that Britain struck with the EU was, on paper, generous: zero tariffs and zero quotas on goods. The catch is that modern trade barriers often aren't about tariffs at all. When Britain left the single market, it didn't face a wall of taxes. It faced a mountain of customs declarations and rules of origin forms. Adding 10 or 20 minutes of paperwork to every truckload of tomatoes crossing the channel might not sound like much, but multiplied by thousands of trucks, and the friction eats the profit margin away. If you're a giant multinational, you can simply hire a few people to fill out the forms. If you're a small British shellfish farmer or a family-run manufacturer in the Midlands, you can't afford a customs department. The result is that Britain now has roughly 16,000 fewer businesses exporting to the EU than it did before the referendum. The people who wanted to take back control were instead handed a stack of forms to fill out, and a good many of them simply stopped exporting. One of the few British industries to enjoy a genuine post-Brexit boom was, unsurprisingly, customs agents. The country had to train tens of thousands of them just to process the paperwork required to move goods a few miles across the channel.
Now, you'll sometimes hear that London proves that Brexit wasn't so bad, that the city was supposed to collapse and it didn't. And there is some truth to this. Before the referendum, the head of the London Stock Exchange warned that up to 100,000 financial jobs could flee to Frankfurt or Paris if Brexit occurred. In the end, the number that actually relocated was around 7,000. The Great Exodus never came. London lost some specific business. Euro share trading drifted to Amsterdam, some asset management to Dublin, but the city as a whole barely flinched. Today, it employs more people than it did in 2016. And in the most recent Global Financial Centres Index, the standard ranking of the world's financial hubs, the gap between London and New York at the top is so small that the people who compile it are quite open that the gap is meaningless.
But this is a point that often gets missed. The city didn't survive because Brexit was good for it. It survived in spite of Brexit because it happened to be the one part of the British economy most able to work around the damage. The reason for this is that you can't easily move a thing like the City of London. It's a few hundred thousand highly qualified people – lawyers, insurers, bankers, accountants – sitting on centuries of accumulated trust, knowledge, and expertise. And much of what they do isn't gated by Brussels at all; it's chosen by the entire world. More than a third of all of the foreign exchange traded on the planet, out of a market worth around $9.5 trillion a day, passes through London. And an American bank swapping dollars for yen through the city isn't doing so because the EU permitted it. The London Metal Exchange still sets the benchmark prices for metals globally. Lloyds of London has been writing insurance since it was a coffee house in 1688, and the entire value of the place rests on a reputation for paying out when the worst happens. There's no rule the EU can pass that forbids the rest of the world from dealing with London. So, the city absorbed the blow, but it's entirely reasonable to think it would have grown faster still without Brexit. It wasn't so much a winner as it was just the best-armored loser.
And that is the real shape of the whole thing. Britain's economy is dominated by services. And the great thing about a service is that you don't have to put it on the back of a truck and queue up at Dover. Between the referendum and the end of 2025, British goods exports took a massive hit, while services exports went the other way. The pre-referendum models had predicted services exports would fall by around 14%, and instead, they grew. The pandemic had accidentally trained the entire corporate world to work over a video call. And a Zoom call doesn't get stopped at customs to have its rules of origin checked.
But even within the services industry, there was a sharp divide, and it came down to red tape. As Swati Dhingra of the Bank of England has pointed out, the services workers who got hurt were the ones whose work depended on their qualifications being formally recognized in Europe: architects, certain lawyers, and other regulated professionals. If you were in an unregulated line of work like advertising or software, you were largely fine. If your job needed a treaty to confirm that you were allowed to do it, you were slowly strangled by paperwork.
So, a pattern emerges, and it's the opposite of the one Brexit was sold on. The mobile, the highly qualified, the globally chosen – the people the Leave campaign cast as the ruthless metropolitan elite – turned out to be precisely the people who could shrug Brexit off. The small exporter, the regional manufacturer, the factory worker – the people who actually voted for Brexit – were the ones left holding the forms.
Which brings us to the strangest reversal of the entire decade. The ultimate irony of Brexit is that the one group all of this friction was explicitly meant to keep out was immigrants. Instead, the new rules triggered the largest wave of immigration in British history. What happened next is the strangest part of the whole story.
To understand the scale of the great immigration illusion, it helps to look at exactly what happened when the UK closed its doors to Europe. When free movement officially ended in January 2021, the pool of European workers dried up almost overnight. But the British economy did not suddenly stop needing people to staff its corporate offices, look after its elderly, or run its hospitals. To fill the gap, the government under Boris Johnson introduced a strikingly liberal visa regime for non-Europeans. The result was a wholesale shift in where Britain's immigrants came from: a wave that right-wing populists now refer to, not affectionately, as the "Boris wave." At its peak, in the year to March 2023, almost 1.5 million people arrived in the UK, pushing net migration to a historic high of 944,000. Work and student visas granted to Indians tripled, and those granted to Nigerians rose tenfold.
Now, the dominant story amongst populist politicians was that these new arrivals were all low-skilled and a drain on the public purse. But once again, the data doesn't cooperate. According to figures in The Economist, the average India-born employee in Britain earns around £32,400 a year, and the average Nigeria-born employee around £34,000. The average British-born worker, by comparison, trails both at just under £31,000 a year. The people who were supposedly a burden were, on average, out-earning the people worried about them.
Faced with a mounting revolt on the backbenches of Parliament, the government panicked and began pulling every administrative lever it could reach. Over two years, it hiked salary thresholds, raised the surcharge that migrants pay to use the NHS (which, since they also pay income tax, amounts to charging them for it twice), and barred care workers from bringing their families over with them. The Home Office then launched what was effectively a scorched-earth campaign against employers. Of the roughly 124,000 firms licensed to sponsor skilled workers from overseas, The Economist reports that the government revoked 4,369 licenses in a single year – more than it had cancelled in the previous 8 years put together. Purely as an exercise in moving a number, the crackdown worked spectacularly. Net migration fell by more than 80%, collapsing from that 944,000 peak to 171,000 people last year, the lowest level Britain has recorded since 2012. If you set aside the pandemic, applications for skilled worker visas have fallen so far that at least one academic quoted in the piece thinks that net migration could actually turn negative in 2026. In the space of about 3 years, Britain has gone from one of the most open countries in the developed world to one of the most closed. A remarkable achievement, if not an especially advisable one.
There's also a nice detail buried in how the filter actually works. The government built an elaborate machine to let in only the highly skilled and highly paid. And the machine is not really doing that. Visas for IT professionals, for instance, have dropped from around 28,000 in 2022 to 10,000 last year. These are not the low-paid care workers that the policy was aimed at. At one point, Keir Starmer complained that too many visas were going to engineers. For a country worried about its stagnant productivity, turning away engineers is not obviously the picture of a plan coming together.
The real comedy of the whole exercise is that the political class starved the economy of workers in order to crush the figures, and the public reward for doing so has completely failed to appear because almost nobody in the UK believes that it actually happened. According to recent polling, around two-thirds of the British public are convinced that immigration has risen over the past year, even though it's collapsed. Among Reform voters, four out of five believe that the numbers are still climbing. The reason for this disconnect is that the two things have come apart completely in the public mind. Economic migration has crashed, but the daily news cycle is fixed on the roughly 40,000 people a year who cross the English Channel in small boats. Those crossings are vivid. They're filmed and they're shown on TV. So the politicians have managed to make the country less attractive to the world's engineers, doctors, and entrepreneurs, while leaving the small boats footage and their own voters' fury exactly where they found it.
With the costs of the experiment compounding over a decade and the public firmly gripped by buyer's remorse, a new story has begun to take over British politics, promoted by progressives, center-left leadership hopefuls, and a fair number of people who simply want their old EU passports back. The story is called "Rejoin." The pitch is that since leaving was a clear growth-sapping mistake, all the next prime minister has to do is trigger Article 49, sign a few papers in Brussels, and 10 years of stagnation will evaporate. It's an attractive idea, particularly for the center-left politicians currently auditioning for what has become Britain's least secure job. Both Andy Burnham and Wes Streeting have made warmer relations with Europe part of their pitch to Labour members because promising to mend fences with Brussels is an easy win in a modern Labour leadership contest. It's the political equivalent of telling the voters you're going to turn back the clock.
But look at the continent for a moment, and "Rejoin" turns out to be the original Brexit story, just told backwards. It runs on the same magical thinking: the belief that one quick constitutional fix can dissolve deep structural problems. And the people who actually run the EU are not especially keen to play along. Jean-Claude Juncker, who presided over the original divorce, said this June that a British application to rejoin would be "cold-shouldered" by a still-wounded Europe. And, more importantly, that the extraordinary, comfortable deal Britain used to have is gone for good: no budget rebate, no opt-out from the Schengen travel zone, and no exemption from an eventual commitment to join the euro. If a future British leader turns up in Brussels asking for their money back, the answer is going to be that there isn't any money there for them.
Michel Barnier, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator, has made clear why Britain can't simply pick the parts it likes. If Brussels allowed the UK to cherry-pick the rules it wants, every populist on the continent would demand the exact same exemptions, and the whole project would start to unravel. Then there's the colder, more practical reason, which is the one running through this entire video. As Jo Vale de Almeida, a former EU ambassador, put it, "The worry for the EU is negotiating a deal with a center-left government today only to end up dealing with Nigel Farage tomorrow." Sander Toroir, chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, summed up the EU's position more bluntly: "You don't want to get married to someone who you don't know is committed to the relationship." From Brussels, it's basic counterparty risk. They've watched Britain rotate six prime ministers through Downing Street in a decade, with a seventh now filling in the onboarding paperwork. You don't sign a 30-year contract with a partner who reorganizes its entire board every 18 months.
But here is the part British politicians work hardest to avoid, and it's worth pulling the camera back to see it. Because Brexit was never only a British story. In June 2016, Brexit looked like a peculiarly British act of self-harm. With 10 years of hindsight, it looks more like the first crack in the post-Cold War assumption that more trade, more integration, and more open borders were simply the direction of travel globally. What followed was a global drift away from integration and towards blocs. Tariffs came back into fashion. Supply chains had to be derisked, and countries began retreating behind their own walls. Britain just got there first.
Now, I should be clear about the limits of this. It's impossible to say whether Brexit caused any of that or was simply the first symptom of forces arriving anyway. This is the counterfactual problem once again. And anyone who claims to have cleanly separated cause from coincidence is overselling. But one coincidence is not much in doubt: the country that voted to "take back control" has ended up with conspicuously less of it. Now that it's outside the EU, Britain is a medium-sized economy standing on its own between three giants: America, Europe, and China, courted enthusiastically by none of them. It's less useful to Washington as a bridge into Europe, and it has no vote in the bloc that still writes the rules for its largest market. Taking back control in a world reorganizing itself into blocs mostly meant leaving the bloc you were in.
Which brings us finally to the thing British politicians least want to admit. The source of the country's stagnation is not in Brussels. It's made at home. For 10 years, the endless argument over Europe served as a vast national distraction. It led one government after another to dodge the difficult, unglamorous domestic reforms that actually moved the needle. Leaving the single market certainly made Britain poorer. But rejoining a customs union will not fix a planning system so slow that major infrastructure projects can drown in tens of thousands of pages of environmental assessment and spend more than a decade in legal limbo before anyone lays a brick. A trade treaty will not bring down industrial electricity prices that are the highest in the developed world, around four times those in the United States. And a new relationship with Europe will not unpick a tax system that discourages senior doctors from taking extra shifts or a housing market that runs as a multi-trillion-pound machine for moving wealth from the young to the old.
So the real lesson of the past 10 years isn't that leaving a trading bloc is expensive, though it plainly is. It's that you cannot summon economic growth from the top down by rewarding a treaty in either direction. Brexit was sold as a single magic switch that would fix the country, and "Rejoin" is now being sold as the same switch flipped the other way. Both are far easier to campaign on than fixing a grid, reforming a planning system, or building things in the physical world. And until the political class gives up on the magic switch, the prime ministers will keep cycling out at short notice, the removal vans will keep their engines running outside Downing Street, and the stagnation will stay exactly where it is.
If you found this video interesting, you should watch my video on the real reason you can't afford a house. Next, don't forget to check out our video sponsor, Cape, using the link in the video description. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.