Keep in mind, as long as trade is conducted in pounds, today's "imports" are tomorrow's export. At the most basic level, trade is an exchange of goods. Currency serves to "store" the value of a trade until the recipient can exchange it for something they want. If a country runs a negative trade balance to long, their currency will decline to encourage those who hold it to spend it by buying the "currency discounted goods".

If you want to raise the standard of living of people, again there is no magic. You have to make more stuff. Today governments are so focused on how things are distributed, they ignore the more important fundamental requirement for making people's lives better. Make more stuff. Every government policy needs to be considered in this context, does it contribute to making more stuff or detract from it.

Social entitlements can be neutral to this question or negative (they can even be positive, if those entitlements are tied to "making more stuff".

Interestingly, the magic to "making more stuff" is also relatively simple and does not require any rocket science. It requires two things... people aggregately working more hours (either people working more hours or more people working) and making people more productive (capital equipment, investing in "people" skills, or eliminating administrative burdens and redeploying people to make stuff).

All the financial engineering, government redistribution, etc. will not solve the problem. In fact, the more people rely on voodoo economics rather than the simple process of making more stuff, the poorer they will become waiting for something to happen.