Why the United Kingdom Will Be Poorer Than Poland In 5 Years 🇬🇧🇵🇱
Americans and Canadians should pay attention to the collapse of their British big brother
Pay attention, Americans and Canadians.
The U.K. is a case study about what happens when you allow corporate sociopaths to take total control of a nation and culture.
Remember Britain? That western island nation that revived democracy with the Magna Carta, lifted the world from poverty with the industrial revolution, and abolished slavery for the first time in human history under William Wilberforce?
Remember Poland? That eastern European nation that got ravaged by the Nazis (6 million murdered) and then survived decades of dictatorial communism as a USSR satellite state.
Well, based on the current trajectory, by 2030 — can you believe 2030 is only five years away?!— people in the United Kingdom will be poorer than those in Poland.
How did this happen?
UK elites are obsessed with GDP growth
GDP basically means “money spinning.”
The UK’s GDP is $3 trillion.
Way more than Poland.
But the UK’s GDP growth has collapsed.
Poland’s GDP has grown by 3.88% annually from 1996 to 2024, compared to the UK’s 1.1% since 2009, and zilch for the past few years.
But none of this matters.
If you and Bill Gates have a combined GDP of $2 billion this year, it doesn’t mean you’re going to Bali for Christmas.
Who cares about GDP if most of it goes to the rich?
I’m only interested in that which affects everyday people.
For instance, the cost of living is 30+% lower in Poland than in the U.K.
That’s why I prefer after-tax take-home median household income adjusted for purchasing power parity.
In other words: How much does the average family in the UK get to keep, and what sort of standard of living does that buy them?
When you look at those figures, the truth is dismal:
North East England, Wales, and Northern Ireland already have median after-tax take-home household incomes (PPP-adjusted) lower than Poland’s.
Folks in the West Midlands and parts of Yorkshire have the same standard of living as Poles.
Basically, only London and the South East are still doing better than your average Polish person.
UK elites worship at the altar of high finance
The UK attracts way more investment ($2 trillion vs $250 billion), but it mostly goes to fueling asset bubbles like London real estate.
Poland, meanwhile, pushes the lion’s share of investment not into banks and insurance companies and hedge funds, but into, you know, actually making stuff.
Cars.
Electronics.
Machinery.
Construction.
Clean energy.
New, usable, tangible wealth.
The British establishment crushes the working poor
Britain’s elites — from King Charlie on down — hate the plebs.
The blue-blood aristo-corporatists say they love their country, but their investment accounts and tax policies prove otherwise.
16 million Brits in poverty.
5 million children.
350,000 homeless.
Poland’s tax system is less brutal on the poor thanks to a higher tax-free allowance, and added family benefits, meaning lower-middle-income families often have negative tax burdens.
Meanwhile, the UK establishment jack-boots the working poor while they are down, not only having less support for single parents, people without kids, and employer-side “National Insurance contributions” (which are just additional income taxes by another name), but then they slap Britons in the face with a disgustingly regressive council tax, where a dilapidated semi in a small town literally pays more than Buckingham Palace.
Plus, the UK has a 10-million home shortage. That’s purposeful, because it keeps property values high and interest flooding into banks. House prices are 9–10 times median earnings in southern England, versus 5–6 in Poland.
The result? The Resolution Foundation found that UK low- and middle-income families are 20% worse off than OECD peers.
The UK establishment adores inequality
After all, inequality is what makes the elites feel elite.
If you can’t look down on people, they might discover you’re small.
The UK has higher income inequality (Gini coefficient 35.6) versus Poland’s 30.5.
Poland’s income inequality is actually lower than the OECD average.
In the UK, shareholders are sovereign
The UK’s shareholder-driven economy puts profits ahead of workers.
The top 100 UK companies paid out £78 billion in dividends in 2023, while real wages for low- and middle-income workers have fallen 2.7% since 2008.
Seventeen years of wage increases have been stolen by shareholders who have done zero work in nearly two decades.
Things today
In the past 20 years, Poland has seen millions of people lifted into the middle class. Public investments have modernized industry, roads, highways, airports, water, and rail networks.
But in the UK, when you mix up a poisonous cocktail of real wage stagnation, property hoarders sending the cost of housing soaring, corporatist governments piling on the austerity and inequality, corporations privatizing energy and water and mail and everything else, plus a move by globalist financiers to deindustrialize the nation at the risk of total national insecurity, you boot millions of Brits over the chasm and into generational poverty with the 20+% of the British population who’s already there.
Things tomorrow
Within five years, Poland will have pulled even with the UK.
By 2035, Poland will be sending foreign aid and missionaries to those poor islanders.
By 2050, Britain will be a neo-feudal corporatist state that makes Mississippi look like Paris.
It’s not personal or political, it’s just math.
Americans and Canadians should take note.
You can’t center a civilization on shareholder returns.
You can’t structure a country to cut taxes for non-working shareholders and load the tax burden on the workers.
You can’t design a nation where the cost of living is less than the price of goods sold by corporations.
It cannot hold.
It cannot last.
The rich are breaking Britain.
And they will not stop until they are stopped.