00:00Your weekend essay would be what?
00:01My weekend essay would be basically to say that England is a poor country that too often thinks that it's
00:08a rich country.
00:12And that that misperception distorts many of our policies.
00:16There are many rich countries that have poor parts.
00:19The United States, a rich country that has Appalachia, or Germany, a rich country that has eastern Germany.
00:26We are a poor country that has a rich part, which is the south of England.
00:32Our average income is about 20% lower than the average income of most northern Europeans.
00:41Six of the ten poorest regions in northern Europe are in Britain.
00:48Once you're outside the south of this country, this is a very poor country, and quite often a very astonishingly
00:54poor country.
00:55We have a rich top 3%, let's say, and a very poor majority.
01:01And this misperception of our wealth comes from the fact that we have Oxford and Cambridge and all these great
01:08institutions,
01:09that we have the City of London, which used to be a very successful part of the country.
01:14We have the Inns of Court.
01:15You can go from, you know, Eton to Trinity, Cambridge to the Inns of Court, never get outside this tiny
01:22bubble of affluence.
01:23And that affluence is also supported by the fact that we have global industries which work on a global level.
01:30But in fact, we are overwhelmingly poor.
01:33And because we misperceive our wealth, we are taking on all sorts of responsibilities that we shouldn't be taking on.
01:40And I think we overestimate our military might and our ability to support and sustain our military might.
01:47We are spending a lot of money on humanitarian issues.
01:51The 0.7 has gone down, but the 0.7 was a classic example of thinking we're so rich we
01:57can dish out money to the rest of the world
01:58when we have big chunks of our own country which are exceptionally poor.
02:02And now we are sort of following international human rights law to the letter in ways that are very expensive,
02:12make a handful of lawyers exceptionally rich, and ignore the fact that most people in this country are doing really
02:18badly.
02:18And if you go to the emergency services in the NHS, if you look at what the police are doing,
02:25if you look at the... I was in Turkey the other week and the roads are a lot better there
02:30than they are where I live in, in Hampshire.
02:32You are seeing a country that is beginning to crumble and fall apart because productivity has been dead.
02:37So a poor country that thinks it's rich and is making mistakes on the basis of that misperception.
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