Reasons to be cheerful

Fed up with hearing the UK is going to the dogs? Here, our City Editor says there are plenty of...

THE opposition iti parties’ ti ’ relentlessly bleak message is that Britain is a basket case, with a crumbling NHS, widespread poverty, homelessness and a stuttering economy.

But the truth is different. There is so much of which to be proud and optimistic.

Unemployment is at its lowest level as a proportion of the workforce since the 1970s. Wages are rising and educational standards are improving dramatically.

Most critically for the future, the UK is blessed with some of the best research-based universities in the world, and our record on discovering new medicines is second to none. The City and financial services are delivering big surpluses on the country’s ‘invisible’ trade and by Alex Brummer keeping tax revenues – which pay for public services – pumped up.

There is much more to be done, but with supportive policies for enterprise and entrepreneurship the outlook is remarkably positive.

JOBS MIRACLE

THE labour market has been transformed by the Tory government since the financial crisis. Some 3.7million more people are in work as firms fi create t jb jobs. Cl Claims i th that t th they are all low-grade, zero-hour contract or part-time roles are false.

Eighty-two per cent of employment growth in the past year has been full time, with 68pc of this outside London. Every new set of unemployment data from the Office for National Statistics shows more part-time and zero-hour contract jobs are becoming full time. Unemployment shrank to just 3.8pc of the workforce in November.

The youth jobless rate has fallen 48pc since 2010 to 488,000 and is now 11.2pc, compared with 33pc in Greece and 19.2pc in France.

Wages are growing at their fastest pace in a decade, rising by 3.6pc in the last quarter.

EDUCATION

THIS week, the OECD said there were ‘positive signals’ from the UK’s results for tests taken in 2018 which showed ‘modest improvements’. We’re 14th in the league table in reading for 15-year-olds, up from 22nd. In science, the UK is 14th, up from 15th. In maths, the country came in at 18th, up from 27th – improvements largely due to the Government’s insistence on higher academic standards and more rigorous testing.

THE NHS

IN TERMS of delivering free care to every part of the population, our state health system is seen as a gold standard. The notion – cynically put about by Labour – that the NHS has been starved of cash is wrong.

In a period of economic austerity following the financial crisis, the NHS has been ringfenced from cuts. Indeed, the OECD has reported that there have been budget increases of 3.5 per cent a year, far outstripping inflation. Tory governments under Theresa May and Boris Johnson have made commitments to pump a further £20bn into the service. The cost of the NHS, at 9.6pc of national output, is in line with most European nations. This compares with America, which spends 17.3pc of GDP on health care, but leaves millions without full access to it. The great

UK teaching hospitals offer the best critical care available.

The NHS is able to bulk-buy drugs at competitive prices.

SCIENCE, R&D AND PHARMACEUTICALS

OUR four leading research universities – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial and University College London – are the only ones in the EU in the world’s top 20. Some of our greatest companies, such as £29bn chip developer Arm Holdings (now owned by Japan’s Softbank) were nurtured by Cambridge science. Pharmaceutical giant Astrazeneca is about to finish building a £1bn openaccess research campus in Cambridge. The firm is the leader in developing new immunology drugs that are transforming the treatment of cancer.

FINANCE & FINTECH

OFFICIAL figures show financial services is Britain’s most successful exporting industry, achieving a £60.9bn surplus. The sector employs 2.3m and lured £15.9bn of foreign investment in the year after the EU referendum. Accountant PwC says our banking sector paid £39.7bn in tax in the year to March.

The UK has become the powerhouse of fintech, which uses digital technologies and artificial intelligence to drive financial services. Worldpay (now owned by the Americans) is a global leader in payment systems. Starts-up such as Monzo and Bo (part of Natwest) are changing the face of banking by moving transactions to mobile devices.

Last year, fintech made £7bn in revenue for Britain’s economy. The City is the top global foreign exchange trading centre, with £5trillion in transactions a day. London is the main overseas centre for trading China’s currency.

CREATIVE BRITAIN

THE creative sector has been the fastest-growing part of the economy since the financial crisis and contributes an estimated 10pc to national output. It includes James Bond films, singer Adele, author JK Rowling, architectural design and TV shows. Sky is ploughing billions into new studios at Elstree.

POST BREXIT

FAILURE to exit the EU has taken a heavy toll on the economy. But while economies such as Germany have become stagnant, ours has been resilient and continued to grow at 1.5pc a year – below trend expansion but enough to propel employment.

The Bank of England says that once a Brexit deal is agreed, business confidence will return and the economy could be first to emerge from the global slowdown. But that can only happen if the economy isn’t crushed by the high-tax, anti- corporate, nationalising policies in Labour’s most Left-wing manifesto ever.