The UK is a Warning to the Rest of the World

Believe it or not, nearly 700,000 people packed up their lives and left the UK last year. That's the highest number since it started being reliably tracked and 3/4 of them were under 35. And this isn't slowing down. The data shows this number accelerating year after year. They're not running from a war, food shortages, or a collapsing currency. They're running from houses that cost 10 times their annual salary, a tax system raiding their paycheck, and an economy that's been stagnant for nearly 20 years. So, how did one of the richest countries in the world, a G7 nation, the birthplace of the industrial revolution, start to collapse? And what can other countries learn from this before it's too late? I've been doing some digging into this, and I've identified seven key mistakes the United Kingdom made. So, let's unpack them together, and by the end, your eyes will be open to exactly how far along the road your country is, and whether you still have time to turn it around. I want you to imagine for a moment that you're running a small business that's had a bit of a rough year. How are you going to revive it? Well, you've got two options. Option one is to council the new equipment, stop training staff, and survive on what you've got. Option two is to take out a loan, buy the better equipment, and trust that your output will pay for it. These are the exact same choices governments have when the country is failing. And when the UK faced this issue, they decided to pick option one, which is known as austerity. On the surface, it sounded responsible and grown up, like the hard but necessary thing to do. But the things that got cut weren't luxuries. They were infrastructure projects, research and development, skills programs, adult education, the exact things that make workers more productive, businesses likely to invest and grow the overall pie for everyone. Essentially, Britain didn't just tighten its belt, it canceled its gym membership, too. And the workingclass person felt this pain more than anyone else. You know that feeling when you get a pay rise, but somehow nothing actually feels any better. That feeling in Britain is pretty much universal at the moment. Rent is up, weekly food shops cost more, energy bills are terrifying, and the things you could afford 5 years ago now make you wse slightly at the checkout. Wages are technically rising. But the quality of life is falling. And the gap between those two things is one of the most important economic stories of the last few decades. And to understand why, we need to go back to 2007. Back then, Britain was genuinely an impressive place. A G7 economy, a global financial hub, and home to some of the most recognizable brands on the planet. It seemed like nothing could go wrong. And then 2008 happened >> cuz we're now down 43%. >> A history making 777 point nose. >> This truly is a global financial crisis. >> But that was the same for every major economy. What made the UK different is what they decided to do next. The response, as I said before, was austerity. The UK cut spending, raised taxes, and tried to balance the books. And the economy became increasingly reliant on financial services concentrated in London, which is completely the opposite of countries like Germany and their middle stand. If you haven't heard of that before, it's basically thousands of midsized, highly specialized manufacturers spread across the country. It's quiet and boring but productive work. The kind of businesses that don't make headlines but keep workers earning and exports flowing. Britain had those too once but over the previous few decades we'd sold them, broken them up or just let them drift away. Then just as the economy was starting to find its feet. 2016 happened. >> The British people have spoken and the answer is we're out. >> I think the country requires fresh leadership to take it in this direction. Well, we're going to wave you goodbye. >> The Brexit vote froze business investment almost overnight. Before the referendum, UK business investment was growing at about 6% a year. But from the morning after the result, that growth collapsed to basically zero. We'll come back to why a bit later in this video. And so, for 17 years, the gap between Britain and its peers just grew and grew. Today, the average American worker is about 28% more productive than the average British worker. And it's not just the US because a French or German worker is also about 14% more productive. Look, I understand a German worker, but a French worker, that's just crazy. Of course, I'm only joking, but on a more serious note, it's not that British people are lazier or less intelligent. is that they're working with older tools in older buildings with less training inside an economy that has consistently chosen to play defense to protect what it already has rather than invest in what it could become. Out of every G7 country, Britain has been the only one that can say real household income is still below where it was before the pandemic. When times get hard, cutting is easy and investing is difficult because cutting shows up on the next spreadsheet, whereas investing shows up for the next generation. If you're from the US and that sounds a bit too familiar, it definitely should because the exact same debate is happening in Washington right now, word for word. But this is where things get strange. Because if the economy has genuinely been stuck for 17 years, you'd expect Britain to actually look poorer, right? shabier high streets, cheaper cars, a visible drop in the standard of living. But that's the weird thing because for the most part it doesn't look like that. From the outside, Britain still looks like a wealthy country. So, we need to answer the question, how has a stagnant economy kept up the appearance of prosperity for nearly two decades? The answer comes down to one asset, one thing that went up and up while everything else stood still. And it's the single most politically protected thing in the entire country. Imagine you own a house that's worth 400K. You wake up one day, check right, move, and that house is now worth half a million. Amazing. You're 100K richer, right? Well, that's not really how it works because you still have to live somewhere and every other house around you went up by the same amount. So, if you wanted to move somewhere bigger, nicer, or closer to work, you can't because that house got more expensive, too. In any practical, spendable, meaningful sense, rising house prices don't make existing homeowners any richer. Because you can't exactly eat your house or drive it to Spain for a vacation, unless you're planning to downsize by selling the big family home, move somewhere smaller and cheaper, and pocket the difference. And that's exactly what a huge chunk of people in their 60s are planning to do right now. So there's a very specific group of people that permanently rising house prices are genuinely beneficial to and they tend to be older, own their homes outright, and crucially vote predictably at every single election. The political system has been working in these people's interests for decades. Let me show you what I mean. The average home in England now costs 7.7 times the median annual salary. in London is 10.5 times and in some parts of London it's 25 times what the average person earns in a year. Historically, a house is considered affordable at around 3 to four times someone's salary. Britain blew past this threshold a generation ago and has been accelerating away from it ever since. That's why I get so annoyed when older people in my generation say it was just as hard for them to buy a house and young people need to work harder. It's just not the case. New home building has fallen so badly that the Center for Policy Studies says London is now facing its worst house building challenge since the Second World War. Meanwhile, rising rents are swallowing a bigger share of wages for everyone under 35. Young renters aren't building any equity of their own. They're just funding the retirement plans of their landlords. I should say that as a landlord myself, I don't think landlords are the villains here. They're just doing what makes financial sense inside a system that was designed, whether anyone intended to or not, to make property the single most reliable way to build wealth in Britain. The solution to this problem isn't exactly complicated. Build more homes to increase supply. Let prices stabilize and allow a new generation onto the ladder. Every serious housing economist agrees on this. But here's the thing. Building enough homes to make housing more affordable would by definition mean house prices come down. And house prices coming down would reduce the paper wealth of the single most reliable voting block in the country. Imagine a game of musical chairs where the people already sitting down get to vote whether new chairs are added. Well, funny enough, the vote tends to go against adding new chairs because the entire value of the chair you're sitting on depends on there not being enough to go around. That is in one sentence, the British housing market. This should concern you if you're watching from any wealthy English-speaking country because the UK isn't some strange outlier. Australia's housing market looks almost identical. Canada's might actually be worse. New Zealand has had to pass emergency legislation and parts of coastal America are already there. Wherever housing has shifted from being a place to live to being an investment asset, this exact pattern plays out. The people already on the ladder vote to keep the ladder short. California, New York, and Austin, Texas, which was supposed to be the affordable alternative, have seen prices more than double in a decade. It's the same political landscape. Homeowners vote. Renters mostly don't. Britain lost his fight 20 years ago, but America is having it right now. But here's where the story takes a turn. Because in 2016, while all this was already happening under the surface, Britain looked at his slow motion disaster and decided to detonate something enormous right on top of it. And this decision is still widely argued about today. Brexit is when the United Kingdom decided to leave the European Union. And it's one of the most controversial and divided subjects throughout the UK. And I want to be clear that this isn't about whether Brexit was right or wrong. I'm not going to tell you how you should have voted in 2016 because people can weigh sovereignty and identity however they want. That's their call. This is about what actually happens to your paycheck, bills, and country's future when a major economic decision is made. And the execution of that decision doesn't give the results it promised. Brexit was never going to look like a car hitting a wall and instead more like a slow puncher that you can drive on for miles thinking everything's fine right up until the handling goes and suddenly you're skid and you can't work out why. Let me take you back to 2017, a year after the referendum. If you remember, there was quite a lot of predictions before the vote that the moment Britain voted to leave the EU, the economy would collapse, the stock market would drop, and an immediate recession would begin. Here's what actually happened. Before the referendum, UK business investment was growing at around 6% a year, which was one of the strongest rates in the G7. The morning after the vote, that growth collapsed to almost zero. And this wasn't businesses making a political statement or anything like that. It was completely rational behavior. Think about it from a business perspective. You run a factory in the UK and you're considering spending £50 million on an expansion, but your biggest customers are in France and Germany. So you have no idea what the rules for selling to them are going to be in 2 years time. So what do you do? Well, you wait and see how the government follows through on new trade deals and it implements Brexit. You don't spend £50 million when you don't even know what the basic operating environment will look like when the concrete dries. And that's essentially what every major company in Britain did for years. And a lot of them eventually gave up waiting and just invested somewhere else. Just to reiterate, I'm not saying Brexit couldn't work. I'm saying that the government messed it up. The most comprehensive study of Brexit's economic impacts was published in 2025. They found that UK GDP is now 6 to8% lower than it would have been without the version of Brexit that we got. That's somewhere between 100 and200 billion pounds missing from the British economy every single year. Paid quietly by every household in the country through slower wage growth, higher prices, and fewer opportunities. or because politicians couldn't do their job properly. Business investment is 12 to 18% below where it would have been. Goods exports are still below their 2016 level, and financial services firms moved over a trillion pounds of assets out of London and into EU cities like Paris, Dublin, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam in the years that followed. But I think the biggest impact on everyday people that no one really talks about is labor shortages. Sectors like agriculture, hospitality, construction, care homes, and parts of the NHS used to rely heavily on EU workers. But that flow completely stopped and got replaced with a pointsbased immigration system designed to sound good on the nightly news. But that didn't work as well as it should have. And sounding good on the news doesn't pick strawberries, staff a care home at 3:00 a.m., or run a building site on a cold January morning. And 6 years later, those gaps still haven't closed. None of this was visible in 2017 or even 2019. It's only when you lay the real line next to the predicted line that the gap becomes undeniable. And of course, by then, the damage is already done. Again, this isn't an argument for or against Brexit as a choice. It's a case study in what economic nationalism actually costs in practice when the wrong people are elected. And the reason this matters right now is that economic nationalism seems to be having a global moment. Trade barriers are going up everywhere and tariffs are definitely back in fashion. Any country currently entertaining some version of that idea should study Britain's numbers before they do. Not to be told what to think, but because Britain has already run the experiment for you. The cost of cutting yourself off from your biggest trading partners are very real. They compound over time and they don't land on the politicians who made the call. They land on ordinary people 20 years later wondering why their wages have been flat for the last decade. So the picture is now three layers deep. Layer one is a stagnant economy that's been underinvesting for nearly two decades. Layer two is a housing market so broken that it's locking an entire generation out. And layer three is a poorly implemented Brexit that's quietly costing the economy up to 200 billion pounds a year. That's already enough for any country to be in serious trouble. But of course, the world decided to throw two more crises at Britain. And the damage those crises inflicted, combined with everything we've just talked about, is how Britain ended up in a trap it genuinely can't tax, borrow, or cut its way out of. Believe it or not, there's a stealth tax increase that's happening without a single vote in Parliament. Let me explain. Now, let's say your wages went up. Maybe not by much, but just enough to keep pace with inflation. Congratulations. Except the threshold at which you start paying the higher rate of income tax stayed exactly where it was last year and the year before and the year before that. So, a small slice of your raise slipped into the higher tax bracket, which means you're paying more tax and taking less home. Nobody announced it. Nobody voted for it. It just kind of happened. This is known as fiscal drag. And I know it sounds a bit technical, but all it really means is that your wages go up, but the tax thresholds stay the same. So you end up paying more tax without actually being any richer. In Britain, fiscal drag is set to affect around 18 million people by 202728. And almost 2 million additional workers have been dragged into the higher tax band. But here's the genuinely crazy bit. Some workers are now facing effective marginal tax rates above 60%. Meaning if they earn a bit more, they actually take home less money. The number of people trapped in this band has more than doubled since 2017. And the HMRC now counts around 725,000 workers caught by it, and researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies have shown many of them are deliberately holding their earnings back just below £100,000 to avoid it entirely. Think about that for a second. In a country that desperately needs economic growth and higher productivity, Britain has accidentally built a system so backwards that hundreds of thousands of people have decided it's not even worth trying harder. Now, you might be wondering how on earth it got to this point because fiscal drag isn't how most countries raise 55 billion quid. It's the kind of policy a government uses when it's run out of options and is scared of backlash. started with two big crises in 5 years. COVID required state spending on a scale not seen since World War II. Then came the Ukraine war. Energy prices exploded. Gas bills tripled almost overnight. Another massive support package went out to shield households and businesses, which of course was more debt. Together, those two crises added roughly half a trillion pounds to the national debt. COVID spending alone cost between310 and410 billion pounds and the energy support package after Russia invaded Ukraine added another£100 billion on top. Then, and this is where it really hurts, interest rates rose sharply to fight the inflation those crisis had caused, which means the cost of servicing all that debt suddenly exploded. Annual interest payments on UK government debt jumped from about40 billion pounds a year to over a hundred billion a year. For context, the entire UK defense budget is around60 billion. And Britain now pays nearly double that every single year just in interest on what it owes. And I'm concerned this is a trap that can't be escaped. They actually told me this face to face when I was sitting in Downing Street. And when they showed me the pie chart, I was shocked at how much of the UK's tax money was going towards paying down this debt. And they honestly didn't seem like they knew what they were going to do about it. The only genuine exit route I see is faster economic growth. But this is the exact thing Britain has failed to produce for 17 years. Borrowing itself isn't the problem. The problem is what you do with the economy while you're borrowing the money. If you borrow to invest in productivity, infrastructure, skills, and industries that will generate returns, the debt is manageable because your income eventually catches up. But if you borrow to survive and increase benefits, all the while cutting the very investments that would have generated growth, you end up exactly where the UK is now, paying more every year, getting less for it, and running out of options. The US national debt just crossed $39 trillion and annual interest payments are over a trillion which is bigger than the entire Pentagon budget. America has a larger runway shore but it's a similar trend. Now when a country is this broke and every pound is already spoken for something naturally has to give because you can't fund everything properly anymore. So the question becomes what do you cut back on? And the service that gets starved in Britain is the one that when it breaks takes a million people out of the workforce with it. Let me describe someone to you and I want you to hold this person in your head for the next few minutes. Her name's Sue. She's 44 and 2 years ago she developed a hip condition. It's not exactly life-threatening, but painful enough that she can only reliably work 3 days a week. She's on the NHS waiting list for the operation that would fix that, but she's been on that list for 14 months. And now she's been told to expect another 12 to 18 before she actually gets the procedure. In the meantime, her employer is struggling with her hours. Her income has fallen and she started claiming support from the state that she never wanted to claim. Now, multiply her by a million. That's roughly the number of people who have dropped out of the UK workforce entirely due to long-term sickness since the pandemic. These people aren't retired or taken a gap year. They're out of work completely, unable to contribute because of conditions that in many cases could have been treated if the waiting list weren't so long. Britain is the only G7 country where the number of people out of work due to long-term illness is higher now than it was before COVID. The NHS, which is the UK's National Health Service, has 7.3 million people on its waiting list, which means 1 in 11 people in the UK are waiting for treatment. Every single person who falls out of the workforce while waiting for treatment stops contributing to the economy and starts drawing from it. You underfund the NHS, waiting lists get longer, more people fall out of work, tax revenues shrink, even less money goes into the NHS, and waiting lists get even longer. Britain has been cycling through this loop for over a decade. And each rotation leaves the country slightly weaker, poorer, and less able to fix itself. And that's the lesson that applies to every country listening. Public services aren't a drain on a productive economy. They're an input into one. A country where people can see a doctor quickly has a healthier workforce. A healthier workforce is a productive workforce. A more productive workforce generates more tax. And more tax funds better public services. That's the same loop just spinning the other way. And it's available to any country willing to treat health care not as a cost to be minimized, but as an investment in the people who make everything else work. Now, I know some of you in America will be thinking that's your NHS problem. We have private healthcare. But ask yourself this, how many people do you know who've put off going to the doctor because what it might cost? Well, one in three Americans have done exactly that, leading to decreased productivity in the same way the long waiting list have done in the UK. Now, if you're paying attention, you've probably already worked out where this story is going next. Put yourself in the shoes of a 25year-old in Britain, someone who's actually grown up inside everything we've just described. What are you supposed to do? Well, there's really only one option. Leave. Which brings me on to Due to my other channel, I have the pleasure of being stopped on the street on a regular basis and speaking with the younger generation. And recently, I've been having conversations that have shocked me. Not the usual stuff like expensive pints, rubbish landlords, and the weather. Everyone complains about those. They've been asking me whether Britain even has a future for them. And it's really not just the people I'm speaking to because in late 2025, the UK's Office for National Statistics quietly published a correction. For years, they've been reporting that around 77,000 Brits were leaving the country each year. But it turned out that once they' properly checked their data, the real figure was roughly three times higher. About 252,000 UK nationals immigrated in the year to June 2025, which is one of the highest figures since the ONS started tracking British immigration properly. Let's be real, it's not an easy thing leaving the country you grew up in. Because you're not just packing a suitcase. You're leaving your parents, your friends, the pub that knows what you drink, boss man from the corner shop that always remembers you. Essentially, you're giving up a network that took your entire life to build. People don't just do that lightly. A recent poll by the Adam Smith Institute found that more than a quarter of all 18 to 30 year olds in the UK are either seriously considering leaving or already actively planning to do so. The most popular destinations are, of course, Australia, Canada, Spain, and the UAE. These people aren't refugees. They're not fleeing hardship. They're almost by definition the most mobile, most skilled, and most economically productive people the country has. Meanwhile, on the other side of the same coin, nearly 1 million young people in the UK aged 16 to 24 are classified as neat. They're not in education, not in employment, and not in training. So, the high earning, taxpaying, ambitious young people are leaving, and the most vulnerable young people are stuck and getting less support every year. Britain is losing both ends of the same generation at exactly the same time. When they leave, the tax base shrinks slightly. Services get marginally worse, and the opportunities for everyone left behind contract a little, which makes it slightly more rational for the next talented young person to consider leaving. And the loop continues. And this is where the story stops being about Britain and starts being about anywhere with an aging population, an expensive housing market, and a tax system that punishes hard workers. We've already seen this play out in LA with thousands of people fleeing to Vegas and Miami. So, the real question every country or state should be asking itself right now is what do we look like to a 25year-old? Because if younger people feel like they're getting a bad deal, they'll just leave and flock to the countries or states offering them fair tax treatment for their hard work and a higher standard of living. If all of this is so obvious, why hasn't anyone fixed it? Because this isn't some buried secret. Politicians read the same reports we do. Economists write about it every week. And every party talks about these problems at every single election. And yet for 17 years, nothing has actually changed. I voted in a lot of elections throughout my life and sat across a table from enough politicians to know the biggest problem isn't that they're corrupt, stupid, or don't care. It's actually something far more uncomfortable than any of those things. The political system in Britain, which influenced many parliamentary systems worldwide, doesn't fix long-term issues that need addressing and instead optimizes for short-term fixes that gain fast votes. Let me show you three places that almost every serious economist agrees is making Britain worse, but keep surviving every election, every government, and every promise to finally do something about them. Let's start with the triple lock on UK state pensions. Every year in the UK, the state pension rises by whichever is the highest of three things: inflation, wage growth, or 2.5%. The idea is that pensioners incomes never fall behind. But in practice, it's a one-way ratchet that only goes up. It now costs roughly 12 billion a year more than if pensions simply track wages. And the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts it will add 15.5 billion pounds annually by 2030 and potentially 80 billion pounds a year in the long run. So pensioners who are on average wealthier own more property and have more savings than working age people get the most generous deal in the entire tax and benefit system. And it's paid for by working age taxpayers who are on average poorer than the retirees receiving the money. So why doesn't anyone change it? Well, older voters turn out to vote at dramatically higher rates than younger voters. In UK elections, turnout among over 65s is roughly double that of under 35s. And obviously, no party on any side of the political spectrum is going to cut pensioners incomes before an election. The second place is the housing market, which we spoke about earlier, because causing older people's houses values to drop is a political death wish. So, it just doesn't happen. And the third place is any kind of long-term investment like an infrastructure project or productivity program that takes 10 years to pay off. It requires a politician to spend money now and let another political party take credit for it later. 5-year election cycles just don't reward that kind of thinking. So the quick visible win beats the slow invisible one every time, even when the long-term cost is enormous. Those are the three areas. And in every case, the people who would benefit from the change are outvoted by the people who benefit from things staying exactly as they are. This should make you feel uncomfortable wherever you are in the world. Because this isn't uniquely British. Every mature democracy with an aging population faces some version of this. In America, the equivalent of the triple lock pension is social security and Medicare. $2.5 trillion a year, ring fenced and politically untouchable. or because the people who depend on them vote and the people who most benefit from them being scrapped don't. So wherever you are in the world, be that the UK, Europe, or America. If you're a young person, now is the time to make your voice heard and go out and vote. I know this might sound pointless, but every year you leave it, it gets less and less likely that your vote will count. When you take a step back and look at everything we've discussed, it really is the perfect trap. Britain has been inside it for 17 years. The US is walking into its own version, and so is most of the developed world, which is why this video wasn't just about Britain. If you want to know how Iran is using the war to replace the dollar, then I'm going to leave that video right up there. But don't click on it just yet. Make sure to subscribe if you want to grow your wealth. Okay, I'll see you over