British Decline Redux: What's gone wrong this time?

Guest Lecture: by Duncan Weldon (CAGE Media Fellow)

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Date: Wednesday 8th March 2023

Time: 18:30-19:30

Location: Faculty of Arts Building FAB0.08

Overview

The British economy is in a period of relative decline. Consensus forecasts point to a deeper recession and a slower recovery in the U.K. than in any other G7 economy.

But the problems run deeper than a bad few years. Productivity growth since 2008 has been abysmal. Real wages for the median worker look set to be no higher in the mid 2020s than they were in the mid 2000s.

The country has already had two lost decades of growth.

Decline is, on one level, nothing new for the U.K. In a broad sense the economic history of Britain since the 1850s is the history of relative economic decline.

Looking back at previous supposed periods of decline - especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the immediate post-second world war decades - is a useful way to measure the current crisis.

About Duncan Weldon

Duncan Weldon is an economics writer and broadcaster. He was previously the Britain Economics Correspondent at the Economist, the Economics Correspondent for Newsnight and a columnist for Prospect magazine. His first book, Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through, was published in 2021. He also has written and presented several documentaries for BBC Radio 4. An economist by background, he began his career at the Bank of England, before working in asset management and then public policy as the senior economist at the Trades Union Congress. Nowadays he regularly writes for the Financial Times, New Statesman, Guardian, Political Quarterly and City AM, and is a regular commentator on television and radio.

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