>>18089162
>So do you think it was the austerity that killed the dream because market primacy failed to deliver on the promise of continuous economic growth
There's so many things that killed the British economy that it's really hard to point the finger at any one thing. I'd say overall it's a combination of a few factors:
1. Austerity. Intending on cutting down an established postwar European welfare state to stimulate the economy while failing to have a serious strategy or approach, thus resulting in a piecemeal, broken, and often bankrupt state. Not that this can't be done successfully (as it was in former Warsaw Pact states like Czechia and Poland), but the way the UK has gone about it has particularly been disastrous, especially with the two other major factors sinking the UK.
2. Mass migration. Britain since Blair went all-in on the idea that mass immigration would be a silver bullet for the demographic crunch that could topple the fragile, battered welfare state, modelling post-Brexit UK off of Singapore's migration laws; only for them to do so in a fashion so incompetent and haphazard it could be argued it was intentional or had ulterior motives. And finally,
3. Overambition in foreign policy. The UK is grossly overextended internationally, pretty much following or even goading the U.S into any and every intervention possible abroad, be it Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, etc. For a country trying to downsize and settle down (presumably like Japan), the UK literally can't afford to be everywhere all at once, not to mention the fact that these interventions often blow up or have negative consequences long-term. The UK either needs to pick it's battles or let the U.S do the heavy lifting, because these wars have seriously fucked with the British economy and military since the 00s.
There's other issues like social policy and internal integration of the economy, but these three are the big and unaddressed issues that have sunk the 21st century UK.
