Status Updates From Britannia Unchained: Global...

“The bald fact is that the only successful approach to poor performance has turned out to be hard work”

Section on lowering the bar and having high quality qualifications does not explain why Cuba has so many doctors

“This lack of people with mid level qualifications in science and technology is a drag on the economy”

Chapter the revenge of the geeks addresses problem of UK falling PISA scores. “In modern culture of instant gratification students go for easier option”

Britain has not defaulted on its debt in modern times even coped with massive debts rising during war time therefore don’t understand “it turns out that a country’s budget is not so far away from a household budget”.

Unpick statement that figure of 5.7 million people in receipt of a benefit demonstrates that Britain has descended into a dependency culture

Weaponising work ethic is fostering fear

“The horror of the riots was an aberration “

Ch2 cherry picking countries to suit narrative in the first it was France now we are on to Canada. By the way what happened to the B in BRIC? Something to be said about examining all the history and reaching the right conclusions about what is driving future behaviour

Definitely setting up a certain narrative “the draining of effort from our National psyche has been replaced by a sense of entitlement “

“Britain once ruled the Empire on which the sun never set” is it not the nostalgia creep that is the problem in our national psyche?

It seems that in 2010 as in 1979 the conservative hijacked the narrative to suit a particular ideological pathway

A quick google uncovers other more substantive reasons.
-higher real debt ratio due to ww2
- industrial capital not wiped out in ww2 therefore just patched up rather than renewed
- further non productive drain on resources: contribution to Cold War and decolonisation

After hearing a lot about how the ideas ideas in this booked have sparked a lot of economic madness over the past 15 years I thought it was time to take a closer look. The opening chapter remarks that in France 1979 income per head overtakes Britain for the first time in 300 years which sets the book up for a particular blame game industrial strife type narrative.

Wow. This is truly grim. Awful book. Deluded.