As we stand at the dawn of a new decade, Data2Dash has created a UK Political Economy Decade Dashboard 2010 – 2019, to bring together a selection of key UK Economic and Political indicators from the last decade.

Highlights:

Economic Landscape

• The UK Unemployment rate has halved during the last decade from 8% in 2010 to 4% in 2019.
• The value of Pound Sterling against the Euro is nearly down by 20% since 2015, making imports from the EU to the UK, which accounts for 56% of all UK imports, more expensive. For the same time period, Pound Sterling has also decreased in value against the US Dollar (-16%).
• In the past decade there were four years in which inflation was above the government’s 2% target, in 2010, 2012 and 2017 it was 3% and in 2011 it was 4%.

Socio-Political Landscape

• There were four general elections and one referendum in the last decade, which is double the amount of general elections than any other decade when just looking at the last century. For each of those elections on average 15m people did not cast their vote, which is around 30% of the electorate.
• In each of the 4 general elections there is not one political party that achieves 50% of the vote or more, yet in the 2019 general election, the party with the highest percentage of the vote (45%) gets 56% of the seats in the House of Commons.
• There was a positive net migration to the UK for every year in the last decade whereby net migration was down by 16% in 2019 to 277,000 compared to 329,000 at the start of the decade in 2010. The 2019 net migration figure consisted of 17% from the EU and 83% from Non EU countries.