From the US (where we have problems of our own, believe me), the UK, and especially England, look like a powerful case for federalism. As far as I can tell, the entire country is run by and for rich Londoners, with no countervailing local power having the opportunity to make sane government decisions.
We do have devolved powers, so Scotland and Wales* have functioning Regional Governments, with devolved funding from a formula that gives them substantially more money than they collect in tax.
So they should be doing great right? Wrong. They massively struggle and yet live in a "best of both worlds" scenario, they can run the health service, transport, taxation policy and all things that affect regular people without having to worry about the annoying stuff like defence and foreign policy. So why do they still have very poor outcomes? Look at the welsh NHS, it's horrific.
Essentially most of our productivity comes from London and the SE. That means by the way if you're smart and educated but grew up in the welsh valleys, the first thing you do is move to London/SE where all the jobs are. Can Wales attract a google office to Cardiff when all the talent is in London?
Then when you need to buy a house you have to leave.
Net migration to London from the rest of England and Wales is only positive for those aged 20 to 27
There's plenty of great experienced people outside London, but all the rich (business owners) are openly prejudice to everywhere else. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/cwy57v07gn2o
The issue is actually that there aren't, let's say I go to derby, how many ML engineers will I find, or infrastructure coders, Biomed researchers or industrial chemists.
