Why Britain’s Economy Has Been Stuck For 20 Years

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Support for today's show comes from Atio, the AICRM. When was the last time your CRM actually helped you close a deal? Atio is the AICRM built to do exactly that. Connect your emails, calls, and product data, and Atio instantly builds a complete picture of every deal and customer. Then, ask Atio to plan your next move, run deep research on prospects, prep for any call in seconds. Always know where to focus. Over 8,000 businesses already run on Atio. Yours should too.
Ask more from CRM. Ask Atio.
You can go to atio.com/profg and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's attio.com/profg.

**Ed Elson** (0:44)
Support for the show comes from Odoo.
Running a business takes everything you've got, and a lot of the tools out there that are supposed to make your life easier just aren't great at talking to each other. And that means you end up having to toggle between a dozen different apps and services just to keep the lights on. Enough of that. Now there is Odoo, the all-in-one fully integrated platform that might actually help you get it all done. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:21)
When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account, like if between won the lottery.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:28)
I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro.
With the helipad on the roof, the contractor said it's structurally unsound, they're just being babies.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:42)
But switching to Geico saved me hundreds, so my bank account is safe.

**Brian Kersmanc** (1:46)
It feels good to save some hard earned cash. It feels good to Geico.

**SPEAKER_6** (1:58)
That building is hell.

**Ed Elson** (2:05)
Welcome to Prof G Markets, I'm Ed Elson. It is June 23rd. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The S&P 500 and the NASDAQ fell as tech giants declined. Google shares fell 5% after two top AI researchers left the company for rivals. Meanwhile, SpaceX stock dropped 16% for its third straight day of losses, dropping to its lowest price since its IPO day. Meanwhile, the Dow rose on hopes for negotiations with Iran. The Russell 2000 closed above 3000 for the first time ever. Oil fell and finally, treasury yields climbed.
Okay, what else is happening? The UK is about to get a new prime minister. Keir Starmer announced he will step down after losing the confidence of his own party. Andy Burnham, former mayor of Manchester, has emerged as his most likely successor and could assume the post by mid-July.
Prime Minister Starmer's resignation comes almost 10 years after Britain's vote to leave the EU. A decade on, the promise of faster growth has yet to materialise, and the UK economy continues to struggle with sluggish productivity and a cost of living crisis. So what exactly went wrong for the UK economy? And how is it that the country is on its seventh prime minister in the span of 10 years? Well, joining us to discuss this, we're speaking with Paul Johnson, economist and provost of The Queen's College at Oxford. Paul, thank you so much for joining us on Prof G Markets. Just to refresh our memories here, it was roughly two years ago that Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, won this election to become prime minister. And he won in a landslide against, of course, the backdrop of many, many years of conservative leadership. And now he's stepping down. It feels like almost yesterday that we talked about him getting the position. So I guess the first question that I'd love to know the answer to, what has gone wrong?

**Paul Johnson** (4:09)
The Labour Party won an enormous majority, having been out of office for 14 years, and actually in 2019, looking like they might be out of office for another 14 years. It was an amazing turnaround. It was a big, big victory a couple of years ago. But the prime minister lost, Keir Starmer lost popularity very quickly, partly because the manifesto on which he ran didn't really reflect the decisions he was going to take as soon as he got into.
So he started doing what some of us would argue were quite sensible things like small reductions in some of the benefits that pensioners, people over the state pension age received. There's some very big tax rises that were introduced, despite the fact his manifesto said that he wouldn't introduce big tax rises. And then there have been a series of missteps around personnel. Peter Mandelson turned out to have unhealthily close connections with Jeffrey Epstein.