🇵🇱 Poland is about to be richer than UK

Everyone blames the chart. 3.7% growth against 1.3%. Compounding does the rest.
That's the lazy read. The chart is the symptom. Here's what the chart doesn't show you.
Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices of any developed economy the IEA tracks. Around 50% more than Germany. Four times more than the United States.
You cannot run a factory on that. So Britain stopped trying. Output from its heaviest industries has fallen by a third since 2021, the lowest level since records began in 1990.
British firms invest 11.1% of GDP. Second lowest in the G7, above only Canada. Below the group average every year since 2001.
The result is a British worker holding 38% fewer tools than his peers abroad. Nearly half as many on a factory floor.
Give a man worse machines for twenty years, then call the outcome a productivity puzzle.
Now the wages.
UK real pay has not grown since 2008. Not slowed. Flat. The longest stretch since the Victorian era.
Keep the trend Britain had before 2008 and the average worker earns £11,000 more a year. That money was never lost in a crash. It was quietly never created.
Poland did the opposite. EU money rebuilt the roads. Cheap skilled labour pulled in the factories Germany no longer wanted to run at home. Income per head climbed from 48% of the EU average in 2004 to 82% today, level with Portugal. This year it passed Spain.
Here's the part Westminster won't say out loud. The country that sent a million workers to Britain is now closing on Britain's wages.
The IMF says the gap shuts inside six years. This wasn't a tide that came for Britain.
It was a hundred small choices, each defensible alone, that priced out its own industry and called the bill a mystery.