Where did George Osborne get his figures from? Who writes his speeches?
A quick look at Wikipedia offers four sources of data for GDP per capita in 2012. The first and simplest comes from the IMF (as it omits odd places such as Monaco and Liechtenstein).
Of the top 30 no less than 14 are members of the EU, 7 are major oil producers, 3 are the great trading hubs of Hong Kong, Singapore and Switzerland and the remaining 6 are Australia, Canada, United States, Japan, Iceland, and Israel.
At 23rd in the list the UK is the 11th ranked nation of the European Union. With even Belgium and Ireland out-ranking the UK and even the EU crisis countries of Italy at 26th, Spain 27thand Cyprus at 28th not far behind. It hardly appears that George Osborne has grounds for criticising or offering advice to the EU. It is not the EU that is falling behind but Britain.
As the EU works its magic with the new members from Eastern Europe and achieves similar success to Ireland, the EU as a whole will move up from the equivalent of 26th to match the Irish position of 16th or better. Remember that before accession to the EU Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe.
No wonder the Scots want a referendum on leaving the UK and not one on leaving the EU!!
The Conservatives like to tell us we are in a global race, but the only race they are in is a race to the bottom. The EU is doing very nicely thank you, even where it has problems.
* Mike Biden is an Executive ordinary member in Winchester. A lifelong supporter of the Liberals, he has become an activist since his retirement. His career saw him in senior corporate positions in Sales & Marketing and as a Chief Executive.
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13 Comments
Well said. It’s amazing that Britain manages to lag behind Ireland, a country which has huge disadvantages in terms of location and natural resources.
Yes Ireland are steaming ahead, all the better for the £14 billion bail-out UK taxpayers gave them, to stop the Bank of Ireland imploding. And I bet Alex Salmond is well chuffed that the Royal Bank of Scotland went belly up BEFORE independence, and thus got bailed-out to the tune of £65 billion+, by (the whole!) of the UK taxpayers.
No wonder Britain are falling behind, if we have to keep getting our cheque book out to rescue all and sundry losers.
“The EU is doing very nicely thank you, even where it has problems.”
In the faint hope that democracy returns, when our political masters and ‘betters’, allow us an in/out referendum, we may get the opportunity to see if Europe continues ‘to do very nicely thank you’, when the maintenance cheques from Britain stop.
This “global race” thing is a myth anyway: economics is not a zero-sum game, and for the most part UK businesses are not directly competing with equivalent businesses in other countries. Why should it matter where the UK as a country ranks as long as its economy is prospering?
I’m not sure I agree with this analysis.
If you look at a more relevant measure of living standards, GDP per capita at purchasing power parity (i.e. adjusted for price levels) the UK is at number 21 in the total. Ignoring tiny city states like Singapore or resource-rich countries like Norway, we rank among the top 10 in the world, with $36,569 per capita, well ahead of the EU average of $31, 571. And that is even after going through a major structural crisis which has killed our financial services sector and the drastic decline of our North Sea oil and gas production, which combined have cost us a large chunk of our GDP.
What matters is the direction of travel and on that measure, our current prospects are better than most of the rest of the EU (apart from Eastern European countries, some of whose rapid development we are paying for ourselves by exporting our factory jobs and paying for their new infrastructure).
There is a lot to learn from other European countries like Germany and the Scandinavian nations about how to run successful and fair societies, but not from some kind of European “model” overall. This kind of approach of promoting the EU by running down the UK is not really that constructive and one which will chime poorly with the voters.
From the linked BBC article:
“If you cannot protect the collective interests of non-eurozone member states, then they will have to choose between joining the eurozone, which the UK will not do, or leave the European Union.”
This is a perfectly uncontroversial statement, it has been known for some time that Gladstones “power of the purse” is under potential threat from an ECB coordinated consensus managed through the instruments of the EBU:
http://www.openeurope.org.uk/Content/Documents/PDFs/EBAsafeguards.pdf
” De jure incentives to take common position: This incentive is reinforced by the way the Commission’s ECB/EBA Regulations are currently drafted. For example:
• The ECB Regulation envisions the ECB acting as a coordinator of eurozone national supervisors, with the view for them to take a common position. The ECB has already dropped hints that it intends to actively discourage dissenting opinions amongst eurozone national supervisors.
• Through a eurozone caucus, some member states will indirectly boost their influence as their voting weight amongst eurozone countries is proportionally much greater than in the EU-27 (EU-28 with Croatia). This is particularly true of the larger eurozone member states.
• The safeguards proposed by the European Commission (see Section 5 below) leave the eurozone with the upper hand. Given that the 17 eurozone countries already constitute a simple majority, these countries would only need to seek the support of three ‘outs’ – whereas non-euro countries would need at least four countries.
De facto incentives to take a common euro position: To avoid banks free-riding on taxpayers in creditor countries, the ECB, Germany and others could well insist on putting into place perfectly harmonised eurozone regulations before moving to financial backstops. This could include single-target capital requirements, rules on leverage or bonuses – and could even spill over to market access issues. In turn, this would heavily shape decisions at the EBA, as the eurozone is unlikely to accept an uneven playing field within EU financial services as a whole.De facto incentives to take a common euro position: To avoid banks free-riding on taxpayers in creditor countries, the ECB, Germany and others could well insist on putting into place perfectly harmonised eurozone regulations before moving to financial backstops. This could include single-target capital requirements, rules on leverage or bonuses – and could even spill over to market access issues. In turn, this would heavily shape decisions at the EBA, as the eurozone is unlikely to accept an uneven playing field within EU financial services as a whole.
Taken together, the EBA structure will therefore significantly shift the balance of power in favour of the eurozone, at the expense of the UK and other ‘outs’.”
We have made some progress in achieving the necessary safeguards, but it remains an ongoing process in response to the evolution of economic-union, and the outcome is not certain.
As to specific figures that might be disputable, i am at a loss to determine any to which you might refer in the article…
Osborne is using the threadbare tactic of putting up a straw man and then knocking it down. It was a remarkable achievement by John Major (a Prime Minister who deserves to be much better recognised by history than he has so far been) to get an opt-out from the single European currency – and it was right that Gordon Brown maintained that opt-out. This means the UK will only opt-in to the Euro if and when both its parliament and people say so. There is no question of any attempt to override this from Brussels or anywhere else.
At this stage and for the foreseeable future we are in an enviable position- full access to all that the single market and other institutions have to offer, including continuing to provide the location for major foreign-owned industries needing access to the European market (Nissan etc), while having the freedom to operate our own currency, set our own interest rates etc etc. What sort of knuckle-headed eurosceptic would want to walk away from that?
The EU will have to win Referenda in several EU states if it is to introduce Treaty changes which it will have to do to solve the challenges of fiscal consolidation – so it is more likely they will back off from some of the more extreme proposals that have been circulated for discussion around the EU. In the meantime Denis is right – we are in an enviable position – in the EU but not in the Euro or Schengen and still receiving a rebate! By the very nature of those exceptions demonstrating our power and influence within the EU. Ironicaly if we were to leave then the pressure on our interest rates and exchanger rates may be the very things that drive us back into a more full blooded embrace with the EU and Eurozone.
Denis dear chap, it obviously isn’t a straw man for the very reasons I gave above, and a lack of euro entry still represents a threat for the same.
The UK does not have enough clout to force all its fellow EU members to change radically the principles upon which the EU is based but it certainly has enough clout to see off any attempts to impose any changes deleterious to our current advantageous situation.
Despite the myriad efforts by the Tories to make the UK virtually a pariah in EU circles there is enough sense in our partners to recognise that the EU without the UK would be weaker, less coherent and highly subject to German/French disunity. But for heaven’s sake let’s not risk taking it so far that they are eventually goaded into saying – clear off.
you know what, Denis, you may be right. and i hope you are right, for a britain that remains essentially sovereign within the common market is the best of all outcomes.
but, if it isn’t possible then we return to this:
““If you cannot protect the collective interests of non-eurozone member states, then they will have to choose between joining the eurozone, which the UK will not do, or leave the European Union.””
that is the message here, and it’s pretty clear!
Mike, I am still intensely curious about what these disputable figures might be…….?
We play right into the hands of UKIP if we start talking about GDP per capita. The author of this article has to understand this, we should stop being so naive. We should talk about overall GDP instead, which of course increases as the population increases. GDP per capita tends to decrease as the population increases. We want to keep the open borders with the rest of the EU, so PLEASE we have to get our ideas straight, and not inadvertently back the policies of our political opponents.
UKIP are our deadly foe, look at the poll today, their popularity is ahead of Labour and the Conservatives now, and far ahead of us. If we want to turn this around we do need to think more clearly, otherwise UKIP will just run rings around us and the electorate will laugh at us.
The article in the Independent gives the poll results:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ukip-tops-independent-on-sunday-poll-as-the-nations-favourite-party-9069625.html