To think the 90's/early 2000's was when we peaked and everything has gone downhill since due to technology

That is shocking! Can she not see that she is also in the firing line of the far right??

I remember reading a book called Hard Work by Poly Toynbee who had gone undercover as a min wage agency worker and thinking how tough it was for her and people in that situation in their real lives, scraping by.

It was written in the mid 00s!

I don't think I can see this objectively. I'm always nostalgic for the late 90s to mid aughts period but I was young then. My DF is always harping on about the 70s so same issue. I am worried about my future employment prospects with AI though....

My parents thought everything went downhill after about 1962.

Get some perspective. Read a history book.

It was definitely before this that things started to go downhill.
With respect, there's a certain amount of privilege to have not noticed it before then - I guess not relying on services or living in an area where cut social services became obvious.

I think it was a combination of:
The 2008 financial crisis
Brexit in 2016
Covid in 2020
An increase of 10 million in the UK population in the last 20 years.

Any one of those would be bad enough on its own but together...

Yeah not surprised to hear that unfortunately, and I think we are paying for the lack of surestart centres now in some of the issues we see in schools/young people now. Those early years are so important and Surestart was great for a lot of families who needed more support.

Before the tories came in we had more or less been told our 18 month contract would be made permanent, but as the end date drew closer it became apparent that wasn’t going to be possible despite the schools and parents really valuing our work.

Fortunately for me in 2011 I was able to find a great permanent position in another (very affluent) London borough a few months before the contract ended.

Yes, I was working in a similar field at the same time. I got my first job easily, even though I was straight out of school. It came to an end in 2010 and I struggled to find work. I had an opportunity to work for a local Sure Start group but it didn’t come to fruition in the end due to lack of funding.
My next job, working for my local authority, came to an end due to withdrawal of funding as well.

Serious public sector cuts started in 2006. 2008 was the result of financial mismanagement and privatization, not the cause. Some of us saw it coming at the time, with the shift to running the economy on debt where once £100 debt was a big issue.

I don’t disagree bailing out the banks was a bad move though. Iceland, the true oldest and only democracy, famously did not.

We bailed out the banks in 2008 -
from wiki
’During the period 2007-2009, the UK government intervened financially to support the UK banking sector, and four UK banks in particular.
At peak, the cash cost of these interventions was £137 billion, paid to the banks in the form of loans and new capital. Most of this outlay has been recouped over the years.’

Thats what did the damage.

It really is :/

I had a childhood friend of mine contact me with an anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-refugee, anti-labour tirade. She was saying “they” have ruined Europe and this country is now communist.

Unbelievably she’s a white immigrant from a EE country who has non-white children and she was never like that growing up. I’ve know her since our teen years when she moved to the Uk.

I was so shocked. She doesn’t realise that while she may not be the main enemy of the far right, she and her multi-racial family would still be considered part of the problem by many who are pushing the same narrative she’s espousing.

I agree. I was working as a parent support worker from january 2010 and I saw a rapid almost immediate decline in public services and funding/support available for families and individuals who may be struggling as soon as the Tory/Dem came
into power that spring or summer. It quickly became increasingly difficult to signpost families to services.

The number of youth worker jobs shrank drastically. And various surestarts centres and other initiatives started being rolled back. It was all done very quickly.

2016 was the start of the rot. Brexit and the Orange monster in the same year. What was to like?

MSN messenger was like a challenge, 12 windows open, messages pinging in, trying to type fast enough to keep up with them all…fun times 😂

I noticed it starting to go downhill, slowly, from 2010, then rapidly from the late ‘10s. COVID was the nail in the coffin. I was lucky in my area that things like healthcare didn’t go to pot as soon as other places though.

I’ve heard right wingers dismiss stats from the frontline too many times simply for being from that area to pay any credence as well.

In Britain poverty is on the increase. Now let’s start dismissing poverty in Britain as ‘not real’.., it does not matter who says or proves what, as long as those in power and who would be in power have no reason to listen because they do not want to.

Agreed. It's all very depressing.... :(

i think the key points that have led to a deterioration in both the economy and the quality of life since the 1990s are:

1. Population increase from 57 million in 1990 to 70 million today. This 13 million increase or an increase by 22% means greater pressure on housing, roads, water supply, etc etc.
2. The 2008 financial crisis- where the debt accumulated by both the Government, Companies and individuals (esp mortgages) that funded the post 9/11 growth.
3. Brexit - firstly the economic uncertainty it created followed by lower growth because of it.
4. Covid and the £500 billion spent on it plus the persistent reduction in productivity.

I knew an Oxfam exec for a while. I'm not sure I'd use data from them as a benchmark for anything I'm afraid.

Directionally I'm sure I'm right. I spend a fair bit of time in China and just that one country has seen astonishing success in defeating poverty over the time range we are discussing.

I agree we should be concerned to help climate refugees, but thats ~20 million people, not going to directionally change what is happening when we are talking about poverty reduction at a global scale. Even accounting for them, net, we are seeing tens of millions a year exit poverty now, and over the period in discussion the average was probably 45M+ per year. Yes, it has slowed, but that's a positive - it's indicative of the success already achieved.

We are now in the hard rump, mostly people in Africa now that India and China have done so well. Hopefully Africa is next, though it has a unique set of challenges, in particular driven by the fact its a continent not a country, making co-ordinated action hard, and the worst hit areas are conflict zones. But what we have learned is that poverty is solvable, and technology is a key factor.

Could have chosen another example, like healthcare.

Or this, having mentioned climate change. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-have-blown-through-their-fair-share-carbon-emissions-2026-just-10-days

I think that’s a lie. The thing with extreme poverty is that it comes with extreme powerlessness and usually being ignored. We see it in Britain, land of ‘we’re all middle class now’, all the time.

Is it even counting the climate refugees? Do you know how many there are around?

Try this instead https://www.oxfam.org/en/resisting-rule-rich

I do look back at the mid to late 1990s as a golden age.

• Still had lots of nice, smart shops. There was a beautiful, shiny, three storey Debenhams in my town, a smart two storey Next, and a lovely big Waterstones. All shut down now.
• Smaller population. So many fields and woods have been destroyed and replaced with new houses since the ‘90s.
• Less traffic. The roads are now a living hell.
• More of a sense of national identity, shared history and shared culture. No identity politics. We hadn’t been taught to hate and reject our identity yet.
• No social media. People actually held conversations instead of staring at their phones.
• Britain still in the EU, and, much as I hate Blair and hate the Left, I did like Blair’s positive attitude to Europe and to being European.
• Less sense that we were heading towards disaster. I can see several things looming up at us in the near future. In the ‘90s there wasn’t the dread of AI taking everyone’s jobs. And though people were aware of climate change, it still felt distant. Now it feels more real. The world’s population is going to peak at ten billion just as climate change is causing havoc. And that is coming in a decade or two.

To me 1982 to 2007.

Kids aren’t arseholes??

Are you absolutely sure about that one?

Like many things it depends on your perspective. The share of the global population in extreme poverty has fallen from about 40% in 1990 to around 8% today. In absolute terms, the number of people in extreme poverty dropped from about 2.3 billion in 1990 to roughly 700 million now, despite large population growth. It was technology that significantly boosted poverty reduction by driving agricultural productivity (e.g., better seeds/irrigation doubling yields, lifting rural millions), digital finance (e.g., mobile money like M-PESA raising consumption 8–44% and cutting poverty 2%), and broader ICT growth enhancing GDP, jobs, and trade. In the UK poverty hasn't improved as much. Relative poverty (below 60% median income after housing costs) peaked at 25% in 1996/97, fell to ~20% by 2010, but hovered around 21% recently, mostly due to the effect of Covid undoing some gains. Look at the world, and things have gotten much better, and technology has been the enabler. Why does it seem worse to you? Age I expect.