Accepting the analysis, what's the solution?

Andy Beckett, in The Guardian, proffers an analysis of the British economy:

Britain’s new reality as a relatively poor country on the fringe of Europe is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. If you’ve paid off your mortgage, work in finance or a senior corporate role, use private rather than public services, and live in a prosperous part of London or the home counties – still one of the wealthiest regions in Europe – then Britain’s decline may seem little more than a melodramatic media story. This year, the pay of FTSE 100 chief executives has risen by an average of 23%.

But for the rest of us Britain has undeniably become a poorer, colder, less healthy country. Deprivation that is common today, such as people living without heating or regular meals, would have seemed dystopian to most Britons only a few years ago.

We’d not agree in all detail there, obviously. But the idea that Britain is, economically, a largely middle income Northern European country with an absolutely world beating SE and capital city grafted on is true enough to be a useful starting point for an analysis. The question then becomes, well, what do we do next?

The standard view shared by everyone to the more authoritarian side of our position - that’s near everyone of course - is that we should collectively stop doing those things that make the SE rich and do more of the things that make the rest of the place not rich. We must stop doing all this selling high value services to foreigners and make more low value things that can be dropped on feet. We must add less value within the domestic economy that is.

Which really doesn’t sound all that good a solution to us. We have in front of us the results of an experiment, a market experiment. Selling law, accounting, banking, insurance and all the rest to the world makes people rich. Crafting whippet flanges less so. Our solution to make more people more richer would be to sell more of those high value things to foreigners and mourn the mistily flat-capped past rather less.

We’ve gone out and done the experiment that is. These things make the populace rich, these other things don’t. Since we desire that more of the populace be richer let’s do more of the rich making things and less of those that don’t achieve that goal.

The elite view is the opposite of this good sense of course. The entirety of some political stances seems to be that if only we stopped people doing those value additive things then, well, umm, something something. Which does leave us with an interesting if annoying question.

The SE and London are rich, globally rich. Many other parts of the country are not. The Establishment view is that the rich parts should stop doing what makes places rich and everyone should do more of what makes places not rich. The question is then how did we end up with a consensus which is so entirely demented?