Things can’t only get better
It wasn’t always like this.
The last Labour prime minister to win big before Starmer was Tony Blair. When he came to power in 1997, the U.K. had a bigger economy than China’s, was a leading member of the growing European Union trade bloc, and was approaching peak oil and gas production in the North Sea. Blair led Britain for 10 years.
Nearly three decades on, Starmer inherited a country that has never really recovered from the economic shock of the 2008 financial crisis, is menaced by Russia, and now relies on imports for its energy security.
It has found no lasting remedy for the resentment felt by many communities (outside London, the still-flourishing finance capital) who — over several decades — have seen traditional manufacturing roles move inexorably overseas. as the global economy tilts towards China and other rising powers.
“We had a pretty incredible run from the mid-to late-1980s, through the 1990s, until the [2008] crash,” said Jim O’Neill, a former chief economist at Goldman Sachs and an ex-Treasury minister, who coined the term “BRICs” to describe the economic powers that challenged a Western world order Britain helped to build.
That was when everything changed, O’Neill argued. “The country’s had a dreadful productivity performance since the financial crisis,” he said. “That links to the … absence of real wage growth and exaggerates the feeling of those that have been left behind by historic decline of manufacturing.”