Footnotes

  1. “U.S. Index of Systemic Trends 2019,” The Next System Project. Available at: https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2019-05/Index_Systemic-Trends-2019-web.pdf; “U.S. Index of Systemic Trends 2024, second edition,” The Democracy Collaborative. Available at: https://index.democracycollaborative.org.

  2. Aditya Chakrabortty, “This is the future for Kamala Harris: unless she solves this economic mystery, Trump wins,” The Guardian, 10 October 2024. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/10/kamala-harris-presidential-election-us-economy-wages.

  3. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence & Wishart 1971), p. 276.

  4. “As the UK lurches from crisis to crisis, is it becoming ungovernable?” Independent Thinking Podcast, Chatham House, 13 February 2026. Available at: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2026/02/uk-lurches-crisis-crisis-it-becoming-ungovernable-independent-thinking-podcast.

  5. HM Treasury, Implementing Privatisation: The UK Experience (London: HM Treasury, 2002), p. 4.

  6. Joe Guinan and Thomas M. Hanna, “Privatisation, a very British disease,” openDemocracy, 5 November 2013. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/privatisation-very-british-disease/.

  7. Julian Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: William Morrow & Company, 1928).

  8. Stephen Wilks, The Political Power of the Business Corporation (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar 2013), p. 115.

  9. Joe Guinan and Howard Reed, “No, We Haven’t Run Out of Money,” Tribune Magazine, 3 July 2024. Available at: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/07/no-we-havent-run-out-of-money.

  10. Annualized GDP growth in the early 2010s was artificially bolstered by the recovery from the Great Financial Crisis of the late 2000s. The 10-year annualized average from 2005 to 2015 was just 1.3% (0.5% per capita).

  11. Dirk Bezemer, Michael Hudson, and Howard Reed, “Exploring the capital gains economy: the case of the UK,” New Political Economy, Vol. 31, Issue 1, 20 February 2025. Available at: https://www.democracycollaborative.org/whatwethink/exploring-the-capital-gains-economy-uk.

  12. Richard Roberts and David Kynaston, City State: A Contemporary History of the City of London and How Money Triumphed (London: Profile Books 2002), p. ix.

  13. Aditya Chakrabortty, “End these offshore games or our democracy will die,” The Guardian, 7 November 2017. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/07/end-offshore-games-democracy-die-paradise-papers.

  14. Craig Tindale, “Systemic Risk: A 12-Order Cascading Analysis of a Zero-Flow Strait of Hormuz Closure,” Substack, 4 March 2026. Available at: https://ctindale.substack.com/p/systemic-risk-a-12-order-cascading.

  15. Sam Fleming and Jim Pickard, “IMF cuts UK’s growth forecast by more than any other G7 nation,” Financial Times, 14 April 2026. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/6f350603-1f57-4e03-893f-c6eb08a979b9?syn-25a6b1a6=1;  “Global Economy in the Shadow of War,” World Economic Outlook, International Monetary Fund, April 2026. Available at: https://www.imf.org/en/publications/weo/issues/2026/04/14/world-economic-outlook-april-2026.

  16. Joe Guinan, “Port Talbot’s Betrayal Shows Britain’s Lack of Direction,” Tribune Magazine, 23 January 2024. Available at: https://tribunemag.co.uk/2024/01/port-talbots-betrayal-shows-britains-lack-of-direction.

  17. Neil McInroy and Joe Guinan, “Beyond Cake-And-Eat-It: The Limits of Trendy ‘System-Change’ Frameworks,” The Democracy Collaborative, 6 August 2025. Available at: https://www.democracycollaborative.org/blogs/beyond-cake-and-eat-it-the-limits-of-trendy-system-change-frameworks.

  18. Nicholas Bloom, et al., “Brexit’s slow-burn hit to the UK economy,” VoxEU/CEPR, 5 December 2025. Available at:https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/brexits-slow-burn-hit-uk-economy.

  19. “National Income, 1929-1932,” United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, 1934, p. 7.

  20. Dirk Philipsen, The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do About It (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

  21. See, for instance: Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Books, 1972); Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

  22. Real weekly household income BHC is uprated using the Retail Prices Index measure. More details are provided in the “Note on the Data.”

  23. Thane, P. The Rise and Fall of the British Welfare State: From Poverty in 1900 to Poverty in 2023 (United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024).

  24. For this indicator, we use the UK government’s preferred relative poverty measure - a household is in poverty in a given year if its net income (adjusted for family size) is below 60% of median household income for that year. See the “Note on the data” for more details.

  25. “Current UK fiscal rules,” Institute for Government. Last updated 19 November 2024. Available at:https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/current-fiscal-rules.

  26. David Kynaston, Till Time’s Last Sand: A History of the Bank of England 1694-2013 (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).

  27. Barry Eichengreen, Asmaa El-Ganainy, Rui Esteves, and Kris James Mitchener, In Defense of Public Debt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 2.

  28. Joe Guinan, “Modern Money and the Escape from Austerity,” Renewal: a journal of social democracy, Vol. 22, No. 3/4 (2014).

  29. Andrew Berkeley, et al., “The Self-Financing State: An Institutional Analysis of Government Expenditure, Revenue Collection and Debt Issuance Operations in the United Kingdom,”Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 59, No. 3, pp. 852–880.

  30. “Debt interest (central government, net of APF),” Office for Budget Responsibility. Updated 26 March 2025. Available at: https://obr.uk/forecasts-in-depth/tax-by-tax-spend-by-spend/debt-interest-central-government-net/.

  31. Natalija Atas and Vicki Dabrowski, “Understanding the cost-of-living crisis in the United Kingdom,” Social Policy & Administration, 59(2), 195–196 (2025). Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spol.13124.

  32. Common Sense Policy Group, Act Now: A Vision for a Better Future and a New Social Contract (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), p. 160.

  33. Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd, and Laurie Macfarlane, Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing (London: Zed Books, 2017), p. 108.

  34. Isaac Rose, The Rentier City: Manchester and the Making of the Neoliberal Metropolis (London: Repeater, 2024), p. 276.

  35. “Unions help reduce disparities and strengthen our democracy,” Economic Policy Institute. 23 April 2021. Available at: https://www.epi.org/publication/unions-help-reduce-disparities-and-strengthen-our-democracy/; “Fall in trade union membership linked to rising share of income going to top 1%,” Institute for Public Policy Research. 10 June 2018. Available at: https://www.ippr.org/media-office/fall-in-trade-union-membership-linked-to-rising-share-of-income-going-to-top-1.

  36. Alessandra Sciarra and Marco Albertini, “The relationship between union membership and workers’ well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis,” Transfer: European Review of Labour and Research, 31(4), pp. 467–484 (2025). Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10242589251350220.

  37. Dirk Bezemer, Michael Hudson, and Howard Reed, “Exploring the capital gains economy: the case of the UK,” New Political Economy, Vol. 31, Issue 1, February 20, 2025, available at: https://www.democracycollaborative.org/whatwethink/exploring-the-capital-gains-economy-uk. See also: Michael Hudson, “Rent-Seeking and Asset-Price Inflation: A Total-Returns Profile of Economic Polarization in America,” Review of Keynesian Economics, Vol. 9 No. 4, Winter 2021, pp. 435-460.

  38. Dirk Bezemer, Michael Hudson, and Howard Reed, “Exploring the capital gains economy: the case of the UK,” New Political Economy, Vol. 31, Issue 1, February 20, 2025, available at: https://www.democracycollaborative.org/whatwethink/exploring-the-capital-gains-economy-uk.

  39. Dirk Bezemer, Michael Hudson, and Howard Reed, “Exploring the capital gains economy: the case of the UK,” New Political Economy, Vol. 31, Issue 1, February 20, 2025, available at: https://www.democracycollaborative.org/whatwethink/exploring-the-capital-gains-economy-uk.

  40. Sophie Huskisson and Lizzy Buchan, “Keir Starmer blasts Tory plan as 'Jeremy Corbyn-style manifesto',” Mirror, 11 June 2024. Available at: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-keir-starmer-blasts-tory-33004561.

  41. Joe Guinan and Martin O’Neill, “The Institutional Turn: Labour’s New Political Economy,” Renewal: A Journal of Social Democracy 26, no. 2 (2018). Available at: https://renewal.org.uk/archive/vol-26-2018/the-institutional-turn-labours-new-political-economy/.

  42. John Boughton, Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (London: Verso, 2019), p. 105.

  43. Christine Berry and Joe Guinan, People Get Ready: Preparing for a Corbyn Government (New York and London: O/R Books, 2019), pp.67-68.

  44. “Race Report 2021,” The Stuart Hall Foundation. Available at: https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/SHF-Race-Report-2021.pdf.

  45. Sarah Butler, “UK awarded its lowest ranking for workplace gender equality in a decade,” The Guardian, 2 March 2025. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/03/uk-awarded-its-lowest-ranking-for-workplace-gender-equality-in-a-decade.

  46. Andy Westwood and Michael Kenny, “How is regional inequality affecting the UK’s economic performance?”, Economics Observatory, 23 January 2024. Available at: https://www.economicsobservatory.com/how-is-regional-inequality-affecting-the-uks-economic-performance.

  47. For instance, Conservative Governments launched (in 2015) the “Northern Powerhouse” and (in 2019) “Levelling Up” agendas designed to tackle regional inequality, and the current Labour government has articulated a “Power Up Britain” plan focused on devolution to address regional imbalances.  For more on regional inequality, see Colin Mason, and Michaela Hruskova, “The UK has a regional inequality problem – levelling the playing field for entrepreneurs could help,” The Conversation, 1 October 2025. Available at: https://theconversation.com/the-uk-has-a-regional-inequality-problem-levelling-the-playing-field-for-entrepreneurs-could-help-261822.

  48. “Social Determinants of Health,” World Health Organization. Available at: https://www.who.int/health-topics/social-determinants-of-health#tab=tab_1.

  49. Data for 36 of the 38 OECD countries comes from: “Maternal and infant mortality,” OECD Data Explorer. Available at: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/; Data for France is from: “France: Gender Data Portal,” World Bank. Available at: https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/economies/france; and Data for New Zealand is from: “New Zealand: Gender Data Portal,” World Bank. Available at: https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/economies/new-zealand.

  50. Data for 36 of the 38 OECD countries comes from: “Maternal and infant mortality,” OECD Data Explorer.  Available at: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/; Data from New Zealand is from: “Mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births) – New Zealand,” World Bank. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?locations=NZ;  Data from Colombia is from: “Mortality rate, infant (per 1,000 live births) – Colombia,” World Bank. Available at: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.IMRT.IN?locations=CO.

  51. Tobi Thomas, “UK life expectancy falls to lowest level in a decade,” The Guardian, 11 January 2024. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/jan/11/uk-life-expectancy-falls-to-lowest-level-in-a-decade.

  52. The unemployment benefit was renamed “Jobseekers Allowance” in 1996.

  53. The RPI inflation measure is used to calculate the real value of the state pension and unemployment benefit.

  54. Ilya Vinitsky, “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt: A Dostoyevsky Quote Revisited,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 22 June 2020. Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/beyond-reasonable-doubt-dostoyevsky-quote-revisited/.

  55. “Inside England and Wales’s Prisons Crisis: Summary,” Institute for Government, 7 March 2025. Available at: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/performance-tracker-local/england-and-wales-prisons/summary.

  56. From 1991, the data for England and Wales changed to aged 16 and over. The data for Scotland has remained at 15 and over throughout the time series.

  57. “UK Climate Change Projections,” Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA). Available at: https://www.daera-ni.gov.uk/articles/uk-climate-change-projections.

  58. Isabella Weber and Evan Wasner, “Sellers’ Inflation, Profits and Conflict: Why can Large Firms Hike Prices in an Emergency?” University of Massachusetts Amherst Working Paper, 2023. Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/669e543e-5b6f-44c7-a657-641e024740ee/content.

  59. Nicholas Beuret, Or Something Worse: Why We Need to Disrupt the Climate Transition (London and New York: Verso, 2025).

  60. As discussed in the “Note on the Data,” for most of the period covered here (up until 2010) the RPI served as the UK’s primary measure of inflation. From 2010 onwards, however, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) became the official benchmark, aligning the UK more closely with international standards, particularly those used in the US and across Europe. Despite this shift, RPI continues to be published and remains relevant for certain contracts and historical comparisons.

  61. Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2017).

  62. R. H. Tawney quoted in: Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press 1973), p. 173.

  63. The OECD dataset for this indicator does not include member-state Luxembourg. It also uses a different measurement than the UK-specific indicator.

  64. Arthur Miller. “The Year It Came Apart.” New York Magazine, 30 December 1974– 6 January 1975, pp. 30–44.

  65. Anita Sangha and Will Snell, “The Canaries: How unfair inequality is poisoning Britain,” Fairness Foundation, 30 June 2024. Available at: https://fairnessfoundation.com/the-canaries.

  66. Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013).