By Lipton Matthews

Britain’s relative decline is no longer a speculative talking point but a measurable trajectory. If current income, productivity, and cost-of-living trends continue, Lithuania is on course to overtake the United Kingdom in average living standards by 2030, with Poland following by roughly 2034. What once would have sounded implausible now reflects the arithmetic of growth: sustained convergence in Central and Eastern Europe versus stagnation across most of the UK outside London.

One of the most striking indicators of this shift lies at the bottom of the income distribution. The poorest households in Slovenia and Malta already enjoy higher real material living standards than the poorest households in the United Kingdom. This is not a marginal statistical quirk but a reflection of housing costs, energy affordability, local public goods, and labor-market attachment. In practical terms, parts of Birmingham and large areas of the North East are now poorer than the least affluent regions of Slovenia. Britain is no longer merely unequal; it is uneven in a way that places whole regions below the floor of prosperity reached by smaller, formerly poorer EU states.

This regional divergence is the........

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