2040: Britain Climbs to 5th, Citizens Fall to 21st
Population growth drives UK to $6.8 trillion GDP. Households lose £11,000 versus pre-2008 trends.
By 2040, Britain will be the fifth-largest economy on Earth.
And most Britons will be worse off than they are today.
The Centre for Economics and Business Research projects the UK will hit £6.8 trillion in GDP, overtaking Japan, cementing second place in Europe.
But here’s what those same projections actually say: GDP per capita will fall from 19th to 21st globally.
The country gets richer. The people get poorer.
Britain’s rise has nothing to do with innovation or productivity. It’s pure demographic math. More people means more GDP. Net migration keeps the numbers climbing. Japan’s population is shrinking, so their economy contracts no matter how efficient they become.
Britain imports labor and calls it growth.
Strip away the migration and the entire forecast collapses. Britain’s fifth-place ranking depends on keeping the borders open in a political environment that increasingly wants them shut.
So the GDP grows. And wages don’t.
The average British household is already £11,000 poorer than if pre-2008 trends had continued. Families have lost £20,000 in potential income over the last two decades. Eroded slowly, year after year, through stagnant wages and rising costs and austerity that never ended.
2040 doesn’t fix this. It accepts it as permanent.
The forecast assumes Britain grows at maybe 1.5% a year. Grinding along. Never catching up. The scars from the financial crisis, Brexit, the pandemic? They’re the new normal.
Meanwhile, the United States pulls away. Singapore stays comfortably ahead. Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland. Nations with half the population delivering double the living standards per person.
Profit inflation has decoupled wages from everything else. Prices rise faster than pay. Real wages flatline for people who haven’t seen meaningful growth in twenty years. The tax burden hits record highs as fiscal drag pulls low earners into brackets designed for the middle class.
Pensioners, though?
They’ve seen 21% income growth over two decades. The triple lock protects them. Their housing wealth compounds. The young rent from them at rates that eat a third of their paycheck.
By 2040, one in five people will be private renters. One in ten will have social housing. The rest? Paying landlords forever, never building equity, never escaping.
The infrastructure is crumbling. Congestion costs are forecast to hit over £30 billion by 2030, worse than France. Time wasted in traffic because the roads were never built.
And the workforce is getting sick.
By 2040, 3.7 million working-age adults will have major illnesses. Eighty percent of this increase hits the most deprived areas. The North, Wales, the regions already abandoned. These workers will be less productive, retire earlier, drain resources exactly when the system can least afford it.
Wales alone will see per capita GDP fall more than a thousand pounds short of pre-pandemic levels. Not in 2040. Now.
The leveling up agenda failed before it started. The infrastructure to connect northern workers to jobs? Never funded. The training for green tech roles? Never delivered. Regional inequality isn’t closing. It’s widening.
London thrives. The Flat White Economy of fintech and digital services pulls in global capital. The rest of the country watches from a distance, choking on underinvestment.
Britain’s productivity crisis has a simple cause: nobody invests anymore.
Businesses cite Brexit uncertainty, political chaos, tax changes. They hoard cash instead of building or innovating. The government, obsessed with debt targets, cuts capital spending first. Roads decay. Trains delay. Broadband lags behind Estonia.
There’s a skills gap nobody talks about. Britain produces university graduates but lacks skilled technicians. Management quality trails America. The missing middle of vocational training means the country can’t capitalize on AI or life sciences.
Female entrepreneurship has declined. From 19% to 14% of small business leadership. Closing that gap could add £250 billion to the economy. But the barriers remain, and the opportunity rots.
What Britain built instead is a housing market designed to extract wealth.
High rents transfer money from young to old, from workers to landlords. Families can’t afford to live where the jobs are. The inheritance economy locks in class divisions. Property-owning parents pass down stability. Everyone else rents forever.
This is a forecast of managed decline dressed up as success.
References:
CEBR World Economic League Table