[1andrew1]

The Telegraph, sometimes seen a guide to Conservative party sentiment, urged under-50s to leave the UK.

The historian Niall Ferguson once remarked that “if young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party”. If young British people knew what was good for them, they’d be on the next plane out of the country. Emigration is, after all, the time-honoured path to prosperity for those trapped in stagnating countries.

And the UK is not so much stagnating as it is fossilising. Fifteen years of anaemic growth mean that real wages are still below their 2008 peak – there are 30 year olds who have seen their entire working career go by without seeing meaningful growth in wages. The result is that countries we are used to thinking of as our peers are surging ahead.

Our GDP per capita, adjusted for actual purchasing power, is closer to Slovenia’s than it is to Denmark’s or Australia’s. American levels of prosperity are so far out of reach that we would need an economic Apollo mission to bridge the gap between us; the general manager of a Buc-ee’s petrol station in Texas is paid more than our Prime Minister.

Young people wanting to start families are finding things previous generations took for granted to be effectively out of reach. It’s hard not to connect this dysfunction with the birth rate reaching record lows. Fertility intentions – the number of children women want to have – have been pretty much at replacement level in Britain even as the number of children they actually have has fallen.

To the extent that it is no longer possible for many to have the family lives they dream of in Britain, that’s a pretty convincing reason to leave

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