Is our town a shithole..

Only place I've seen men in groups drinking on the street in the last ten years locally have been homeless people, although when I say locally, I do mean in one of the worst towns in the county and around a 40 minute drive. I live rurally, lots of villages between and around small towns. Nothing like this in those.

I did notice a big change in street drinking in a town in the Lake District a few years back. Polish community, not rowdy at all, just drinking with friends. Our impression from speaking to other Polish people in the area was that they didn't feel awfully welcome, especially in pubs, so they were congregating to stay social and support each other.

Your husband’s theory might need assessing. Don’t know of many runaways in the seaside town I grew up in 🤷‍♀️ Maybe they were able to run away even further?

Sounds absolutely wonderful 🥰 where is this utopia?

Seaside towns also have river walks. Depends where they are.
But I think the main problem is that no-one is allowed to live somewhere that's nice anymore. We have not this problem, but half-way houses of various sorts dotted into residential areas that are pleasant, whether MC or WC - it's as if it is deliberate upon the part of the council, because everyone should have to live in a shithole because some people do (no idea that they might do something about the shitholes).

People complain about the NEETs and long term benefit claimants - 'They should get a job!' everyone says. But what jobs? There aren't any. You cannot expect people to conjure their own jobs up out of thin air.

De-industrialisation has been going on since the 1980s and successive governments have done nothing to counteract this, they should be encouraging business to invest in these areas. The current government has decided to make energy the most expensive in the developed world and make hiring labour difficult and expensive, but they are just the latest in a long line of useless government.

Well let’s say you have three light bulbs.

Two don’t work. The third one, you haven’t tried yet.

Do you just keep trying the first two hoping for a different outcome - I’m sure there’s a saying about that.

It’s not that bad in my small town (we have one barefoot bloke who wanders about reciting rubbish to himself who clearly has issues and we had one homeless man who recently disappeared) but as a pp said, I’ve noticed it a lot in seaside towns.
I go to seaside towns regularly and in every one I’ve seen groups of drunk middle aged men congregated around town. My husband’s theory is that people with issues run away from home and end up at the coastal towns when they can go no further.

Nothing like this in our town. There have always been a few street drinkers but they generally keep themselves to themselves

Surely that depends on what the new party is offering? New doesn’t mean better.

I visit the lakes a lot and it's been popular for hen and stag parties for years.......it's always been a bit of a posh booze crawl.

And don't even get me started on Bowness. Even Grasmere doesn't escape. It's ridiculous.

I do voluntary litter picking. Street drinking has caused a huge spike in litter over the last few years, probably because the pub is so expensive. Our front bush is used as a vodka bottle bin almost nightly. I’m almost considering leaving a note as it’s likely the same person as it’s the same brand every time.

They don’t. They’re too busy working for their paid for suits, and spending billions telling us what we can’t do, whilst jumping on private flights and jetting off to fancy conferences.

Might as well give a new party a go.

Yes, I recognise this. We live in an expensive village which is lovely but all the surrounding villages and towns have the issues you describe. One has an openly functioning brothel, anti social behaviour everywhere, I absolutely wouldn’t visit any of them at night.
I went to one particular town at 2pm on a Tuesday and the amount of people who were clearly inebriated/on drugs was alarming.

Absolutely not my experience where I live, no. Can you plan to move? It does sound grim.

There are plenty of places in Sussex that are still perfectly pleasant and don't have the sort of problems mentioned here, as long as you avoid the bigger seaside towns where homelessness is more of a problem.

Many of them are commutable to London, too.

😂How on earth is OP to blame? That's really funny.

It sounds a lot like my town......I think a lot of it is a direct result of cuts to MH services and drug and alcohol services being so hard to get tbh.

We also have the large groups of Eastern European men drinking and being general twats.

Alongside that our local council decided it would be a good idea to place hundreds of predominantly male asylum seekers in our already deprived town. They have little to do so they spend the day sat in the town centre using the free WiFi, occasionally one will be arrested for harassing women (( there have been a number of sexual assaults, lots of incidents of theft and constant fights breaking out )) some of them are clearly mentally unwell yet are just left to their own devices. They're bored and restless which never ends well. I actually sympathise with the decent ones, but there's no doubt that the handling of this situation has had a negative impact on where I live.

It no longer feels safe here. And this isn't because of asylum seekers or migrants. It's because people are being accepted in without proper consideration then left to rot........and I can't help but notice that the naice town a few miles up the road has had refugees placed with them.......only they only have Ukrainian families placed there......can't be having a load of blokes pissing on the cobblestones can we. 😶

I’m afraid I disagree.
Labour will have no choice but to raise taxes on working people. They already have in a roundabout way. So people will have even less money and feel even more resentful, seeing it given away in subsidies to what’s his face who builds windmill farms or what ever.

Amazon took over a customer need; before Amazon there were local shops...they were undercut by Amazon and driven out of business. Easy to undercut if you treat your staff badly.

The underclass of society - drug addicts alcoholics, feckless with low intelligence have their lifestyle and wants facilitated by society / councils and NOT helped and stamped out.

Sadly, they go on to procreate with people in a similar situation and this perpetuates the cycle as it multiplies out of control.