It’s not looking good is it?

[User15384]

Cost of living crisis
Choice between heating v eating
Pound dramatically falling
Higher interest rates
NHS on brink of collapse

And now the warning of a flu-covid “twindemic” this Winter

It’s all quite overwhelming and sad and seems to be never ending 😞

So did I and you're right about the economy but not combined with public services falling apart. And I don't remember governments then prioritising the rich while the economy tanked.

I, as you might realise, despise the Tories but do you really think this is planned for personal gain or rather pure incompetence and arrogance?

They haven’t changed tack even after seeing the resulting carnage, so I’d say this is actually wilful damage now. Pension funds would have been obliterated yesterday if it wasn’t for the BodE pulling the handbrake.

And yet they carry on as if it’s all fine. It’s not fucking fine at all, and we may well have more to come over the coming days.

Seriously it's amazing what people will say - don't watch the news, don't worry about the big picture, one foot in front off the other, we'll survive etc. Some people will put up with literally anything for a "quiet life" (or as I've surmised, are in no danger from and may actualy be benefitting from the current disaster capitalism being deliberately engineered by the govt).

How do you "you've only got one life, just ignore it all, anger is bad for you, enjoy the 'little things', try to be happeeeeeee" people think any positive change has been made, or injustice overturned? By everyone just sticking their hands in the sand and saying it could be worse? The civil rights movement - should the oppressed black people of 60s USA just have go their heads down and got on with it, after all they weren't actually enslaved any more - should they have just focussed on their families and 'the little things', lived modestly, listened to bloody classical music? What about the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall? Sometimes righteous anger is what it takes to move the needle of history.

It's not the media that are mismanaging the economy, raising interest rates and decimating our public services.

This sort of mass disengagement is, by the way, one of the things the current political approach is designed to engender. Disengaged citizens don't make trouble for the government as they continue to asset-strip the nation. They're too busy trying to survive.

The Trussbot turned out to be faulty, so they've sent her back to the factory for a reset.

I think the thing is everyone, (I include myself) expected life to be better 50 years on from the 70’s, and yes I also grew up then. We survived, it’s true, but life was bloody miserable. Do I want to go back to that, hell no.

I have pre payment meters for energy, yes I know all the arguments about cost etc. But yesterday when I was reading a thread full of people scared to put their heating on, mine was on because I have over £100 in there (kept topping up a minimal amount through summer). It gives me some control and I personally find it easier to budget that way.

At the moment I’m lucky enough not to really need the NHS, not for anything major, so I’m not thinking about it. I don’t see the point in taking on more worries unnecessarily. I’m also in SH so no mortgage worries. In all the current circumstances I am in a very fortunate position.

Of course I feel for people who are struggling. People who do need the NHS, people who are worrying about losing their homes and/or can’t afford to heat them etc. But me being upset or depressed about it, won’t help those people.

It’s not about burying your head in the sand, it’s about thinking “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it”. When I look back in my past there were things I worried about that either didn’t end up happening or a solution came up before it happened. So now I just take a wait and see approach. Which is what I’m doing now.

I teach political economy at university and British political history and I can tell you categorically things have NEVER been this bad. I was in utter shock yesterday that the government was prepared to let pension markets collapse. Thank god we have an independent Bank of England to steady the ship because the Treasury can’t manage the economy.

The IMF have never had to issue a warning to the UK before. The government are acting like a fucking banana republic and are at risk of destabilising the whole global economy. Truss and Kwarteng are a fucking disgrace. Sunak repeatedly warned of this during the leadership debates and was accused on here of mansplaining. So yes, things are really, really bad.

Yes, when you look at it like that.....

Traders saying the BoE intervention is nothing like enough and will have to happen on even grander scales in future, Gilts (10yr) yields are still way higher than pre mini budget 4.1% vs 3.5%

Thats historically a huge jump in Govt borrowing costs, German Gilts are 2.2%, France is 2.7% Japan 0.24% !!!

But sure its a global problem.

To take the strain off the NHS this winter ?

It's much simpler than that - bad news sells. News items are always going to skew to the most dramatic element with the most potential impact.

They haven’t changed tack even after seeing the resulting carnage,

Yes Truss and Kwarteng still acting as if all is well and insisting they did the right thing! And Truss being deliberately misleading and trying to twist questions about the mini budget and making her answers about helping with the energy crisis. That's mindboggling. It's like burning your house down and standing there saying it's fine, you did the right thing, you just lit a nice candle, neglecting to mention you also started a chip pan fire then went to the pub.

When the BoE and the IMF both go fucking hell this is a total disaster and emergency, you can't just go "nah it's all fine". That's taking Bojo-style gaslighting and evasiveness to new levels. I'm sure at this point that response is purely to avoid u-turning and having to resign, but it's just delaying the inevitable.

Thanks but maybe I wasn’t clear in my post; I’m referring to the difficulty elderly people in my local area have of obtaining a flu jab this year.

My parents have had their covid boosters booked by me online and I’ll be driving them to the nearest place this Saturday (half an hour away).

Why doctors surgeries can’t vaccinate their patients I don’t know. Not all pensioners have the means to travel/organise online appointments.

And climate catastrophe and worldwide upsurge in corrupt a fascist rulers.
horrible times to live in.

Yes she was on Radio Norwich. I was waiting for Alan partridge to pop up.

Agreed. I’m bloody angry with the Tories’ reckless behaviour. I’m feeling ready to revolt.

This is a feckin hell moment as she did the rounds of local radio this morning to avoid big guns of the MSM. She hasn't a clue ....and on the day after the private pensions nearly went insolvent - they are breaking everything they touch.

twitter.com/SpillerOfTea/status/1575396970029617152

Doesn’t make what the government are doing right though does it ? Harking back to war days is hardly helpful. So many fought and died for our freedom and a better life, and for what ? Here we sit 77 years later, a first world country with so many reliant on food banks, others having to choose between heating and eating, a broken care system, broken NHS, no effective ambulance service, housing in crisis and mass strike action. And how does the government plan to tackle all of this ? By making the rich richer and hoping the crumbs will fall off the table to the starving folk underneath. They’re asset stripping the country, their rich mates are getting richer and all we can say is ‘don’t worry we’ll be just fine !!’ And they’ve only been in charge for two weeks !!

I left school and started work in '72, so I remember it well, and yes, the 70s/80s were grim.

Inflation was high for most of the 70s. Prices doubled over about 5 years, so averaged 20% pa.

Unemployment more than doubled over a couple of years. When it hit 1m, that was shocking, then a few years later (1983-ish) it got to 3m, or close to it. But for those who were in work, we got pay rises that more or less kept up with inflation and the benefit system was a much better "safety net" than it is now. When I was unemployed for a few weeks, my mortgage interest was paid by my benefits.

There were still council houses for people that needed them, energy was nationalised and the govt kept the prices down, the NHS remained functional, public transport was efficient and affordable, and public services generally functioned well. People talk about nationalisation as though it's a form of Sovietisation, but it meant that energy, fares etc remained pretty much affordable.

I think things are much worse now than they were then. I know we had strikes, and the occasional shortage of things, but the poorest were protected by an effective welfare state.

Why doctors surgeries can’t vaccinate their patients I don’t know. Not all pensioners have the means to travel/organise online appointments.

GPs have gone AWOL in our area. Two week wait just for a phone appointment - face to face seems to be a thing of the past. Don’t do vaccinations, don’t do blood tests and if you don't have online access you’re pretty much screwed. It’s no accident, it’s by design.

The very fact there WERE strikes shows things were better then - people felt they had a mechanism to use against the powerful, there was community and collectivity. People are so ground down now and so atomised. Easy pickings for Truss and co.

It is called resilience, and yes we struggled in the 1970s with no power, little food and many other issues. Throughout history this has happened,

Yes wars, disasters and economic crises have happened, and yes it's good if people manage to get through hard times, but they are still not ideal, they are not what we're generally actually aiming for. Bringing financial disaster on your country by deliberately cutting tax drastically, mainly for the rich, as a purportedly economy-boosting measure, is avoidable.

The daftest thing of all is Liz Truss studied economics and worked as an economic director! She can't even claim not to know how this stuff works because she's a lawyer/chemist or whatever.

Why doctors surgeries can’t vaccinate their patients I don’t know. Not all pensioners have the means to travel/organise online appointments.

Because they're too bloody busy! I'm going for mine later, and I'm taking an elderly neighbour for hers. The nearest place is 6 miles away, and a nightmare to get to by public transport.

Pound dramatically falling…. So is the euro. It’s the market’s correcting the dollar…but that doesn’t really fit the narrative does it???

I think people saying that this is incompetence/lack of understanding of the markets from Truss and co are wrong - this policy is an ideological choice.

They think the pain of interest rate rises/rising costs is worth it for what they want to achieve. It's infuriating listening to them on the radio this morning, firing out nonsense about Putin and savings on fuel bills and the international markets when they have literally just crashed the pound.

This government do not give a shit about ordinary people. Ho hum maybe if we all sit quietly like good little robots they'll stop pissing all over us whilst telling us it's raining?