There is a video doing the rounds of social media where a young man wearing what appears to be a striped dressing gown explains at some length why he is leaving Britain to set up business in Vietnam. The young man explains that he and (especially) his wife don’t feel safe in London, that it is a “low trust” society. The young man goes on to complain about how much he pays in tax and how little he gets from the state in return. We’re regaled with tales of the overcrowded London tube and with the general grottiness of life in London. The crunch is, however, when this young man tells us how much easier and cheaper it is to live, work and do business in Vietnam. And that he has some friends and former colleagues already living and working in South East Asia.
In one respect this video is a parable of life for young, ambitious and skilled people in Britain. It seems at times that everything is stacked against those keen to get on, to achieve what their parent’s generation achieved, to own a home, raise a family and enjoy a good life in a great country. It is hard to argue against when some young engineer decides to take their skills to New Zealand, Australia, the USA or, as with the young man in the video, Vietnam.
Up here in the North of England we’ve long talked about the ‘brain drain’ to London but now the clever kids who got study engineering at university from Wigan or Barnsley aren’t going to London:
“One in 10 students who will graduate from UK universities this summer are planning to leave the country for better job opportunities, according to a new survey.
Research conducted by High Fliers Research has revealed that the proportion of final-year students who said they will look for a job overseas has risen by a third in just two years, from 7.8 per cent in 2024 to 10.2 per cent this year.”
And who can blame them? I was talking to a slightly older graduate recently who is being made redundant. This bright young person showed me the wages on offer for their level of experience observing that they weren’t a whole lot better than minimum wage. Why would a young person get hocked up to the eyeballs with student debt so they can earn barely ten grand more than they’d get in a minimum wage job. And that sort of assumes there’s a job available.
“Graduate job vacancies in the UK have sunk to their lowest level since they started being tracked a decade ago, according to a recruiting website.
Just 8,383 jobs for people leaving university were advertised in July, Adzuna reported on Monday, down 45% compared with the same point last year and the lowest since the company started gathering the data in 2016.”
If we want to understand what’s wrong in Britain, we need to start with the almost complete lack of opportunity for young, ambitious people. And that, even if such young people find exciting jobs at growing companies, they quickly discover that their wages barely cover the rent and that’s after nearly half those wages have been snaffled by the state in taxes. Nearly everywhere (but especially anywhere within 100 miles of London) young people look at their financial circumstances and prospects then conclude that there’s no chance of them buying a house let alone starting a family.
Meanwhile my generation and the politicians who pander to my generation carry on with militant NIMBYism, opposing new housing, data centres, power stations, solar panels, roads, railways, airports and anything that looks remotely like a factory. In Wilsden, the next village to Cullingworth, outline planning permission has been granted for up to 100 new houses on what was green belt land at the northern end of the village. You’d have thought the apocalypse had arrived. Everywhere we see little campaign groups set up, always infected with cynical political campaigners from every political party, to oppose development of every kind. If you drive anywhere in England you’ll encounter protest banners taped to fences protesting new homes, new jobs and new infrastructure.
Meanwhile government, nationally and locally, presides over a vast regulatory state where anything and everything that enterprising and ambitious people might want to do requires an avalanche of forms, applications, assessments and permissions. From a planning system that wants to control advertising posters and the colour of shop fronts to unaccountable quangos like Natural England and the Environment Agency that have given themselves the power to just say ‘no’ to anything they don’t like.
Then there are those taxes. It isn’t just that the government wants to take half your income, they also want to tax you if you employ someone, tax your company, tax your property and, if you dare run a business involving things the government thinks are sinful, whack enormous duties on the goods you sell. What’s worse though is that politicians and the media cheers at each and every new and petty restriction on our lives.
“When the government interrupted everybody’s Friday evening two weeks ago with a howling text message urging them not to have a barbecue, those who complained that it was a bit much were confronted by nanny state appreciators reciting the usual script. “It’s just a text message! You can turn the alerts off if you want to! Haven’t you got bigger things to worry about?”
It was the same story when Birmingham City Council announced plans for a blanket 20mph limit this week. Could there be any ill effects from slowing every vehicle in England’s second city down to the speed of a pushbike? Dare to ask and you will be met with a familiar refrain. “What’s the big deal? So you’ll reach your destination a few minutes later? It’s not the end of the world!””
Chris Snowdon is right to complain about these petty and mostly pointless little restrictions on our lives and to point out that it isn’t simply a matter of us being irritated by them but that this fussbucketry has a real economic cost. Imagine if, instead of disappearing down the horrible rabbit hole of American moral panic about vaping, we embraced this groundbreaking and life-saving innovation? How many jobs and business have we lost because of fussbucketry? Hardly a day passes without some self-serving politician telling us that the pub is the heart of the community. But they’d look at you like you’d two heads if you suggest they might like to reduce beer duty, liberalise planning and licensing, and make it easier to employ kids to serve at the bar.
I don’t think the numbers leaving Britain will become a torrent but I do fear that the ones who do go are the young, ambitious, enterprising people we need if we’re to have any chance at all of a bright future in Britain. Ministers, opposition leaders and the media constantly blather about economic growth but faced with the realities of stagnation prefer to indulge in populist nonsense about postal voting, setting up a state version of Checkatrade, blocking housing development or calling for rent controls. All while cheering on every pettifogging new regulation aimed at stopping us sinning, saving the planet or protecting us from wholly imaginary technology bugaboos.