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 😞

Completely agree!
At the start of the pandemic nobody i knew was panic buying until the media started printing/posting photos of empty shelves and frothing everyone up! When I actually went to my local supermarket the vast majority of stuff I needed was there. My local online paper even included empty shelf photos of local supermarkets with empty shelves - people were commenting saying they'd been there that day and stock was fine, and others pointed out that it looked like they'd deliberately taken the photos early in the morning/just before a restock.

Same with the fuel crisis, 90% of people causing the queues were those filling up "just in case" due to panic spreading - if the media hadn't reported on it the vast majority if people wouldn't have even known there was a shortage or would have just assumed it was just a short term supply issue (which it was!!!) affecting their local area only.

Any minute now...

"You were lucky...."

I agree, @Blossomtoes . A lot of those things were just how things were in the '70s: central heating in homes was really only for the well off, double glazing was a relatively new thing and the rate of car ownership was much lower. Very few families had 2 cars.

If you were to compare the price of a new family car to wages then to current wages and car prices, the difference would be marked. All of those things were much more expensive, relatively speaking. I remember being in awe of an older colleague who paid £1,000 to have central heating installed in 1974. Our jobs were relatively well paid, and our salary was £3k a year. That was a massive amount of money! Now, you could probably install CH for one or 2 months worth of average net pay. Things that were luxuries in the 70s are mainstream now.

No-one thought of this as in any way unusual in the way it would be now, and using a fan heater or similar to warm up the bedroom before going to bed was perfectly normal. And most people could afford it. I never heard of anyone having to choose between heating or eating.

The power cuts during the miners' strike in '74 were planned and organised. People got sent home from work early when the power went off, or started late, and you could plan round them. And one of the good things about not having central heating meant that a lot of homes had gas fires or open fires, so we could still keep warm!

And the "Winter of Discontent" was only approx 6 weeks, it didn't start until January, and it wasn't anything like a general strike. Iirc, the lorry drivers went out first, and were back at work around the time the gravediggers went out. They may have gone back to work before the bin men, but if not, it wasn't that long after.

I also think a lot of people conflate the two events, when they were actually 4 or 5 years apart.

Looking back, we actually had a pretty good standard of living for young people in their first or second jobs. I spent a fortune on clothes and stuff and we could afford to go to out practically every night, have holidays, meals out and still have money left at the end of the month. Our rent was tiny compared to our income, whereas now rents in the London area (we lived in Croydon) would take most of one salary.

To be fair, we probably were lucky. We just didn’t have much to start with. Most people now have got a hell of a lot to lose. What you’ve never had, you never miss.

The only ‘bad’ thing is; we’re blindly copying the USA in shock, horror soundbite media reporting.
Things have been far worse in the 70s and 80s and we’re still here living longer, healthier lives than we ever had. It was inevitable with interest rates so low for so long that there would be payback time, and unfortunately here it comes.

For the sake of everyone’s MH, turn off the TV, stop reading the online news and focus on resolving your particular issues re than panicking about the rest of the world.

Where have all these fake news people come from?

Do they really think we can't see for ourselves that prices have risen and there are empty shelves. And for the record nobody is reporting on empty shelves in supermarkets at the moment, but I keep seeing it with my own eyes.

Where have all these fake news people come from?

Tory Central Office.

Get an evening job, if you have any free time Already got one.

extend mortgage term not currently possible without paying out thousands I don't have to change the deal

heat only rooms using wont' be heating any rooms if I can help it.

cook basic winter meals hearty soups, stews, curry,s one pot stuff that can be reheated already doing this

Buy some fluffy throws and hot water bottles for all to snuggle under you assume I have spare money for this?

Ive just saved myself £30 per month, got rid of my i phone bought a basic Samsung, does all it needs to do, gone on Tesco mobile network unlimited calls ect £7.50 per month Already got a cheaper deal than this

Stopped having my nails done, saved £20 per month I don't have my nails done, or any other beauty treatments either in salon or at home. Hair is cut about twice a year.

Have stopped all takeaways and coffees to go. ( i only had 1 a month but its saved me another £20+) not had a takeaway or coffee in years

Have 3 lamps in lounge now just use 1 My lights are off when sitting.

Have cut back on using washing machine how? clothes need washing.

Stopped using my dishwasher You're doing a full time job plus an evening job and who knows what else but don't use the dishwasher? You think those of us doing more than one job should also do the washing up?!

Open oven door when finished cooking let the heat out to warm the room Ha! Using an airfryer. Never put the oven on.

Gas heating will only go on for an hour in the morning, perhaps an hour at night Lucky you can afford that. I can't.
.
I will not use my tumble drier, ive bought a clothes airer and will hang washing on it in the warmest room when i can't put it outside No tumble dryer. I do use an electric clothes airer as not at home during the day to put out/take in to avoid needing re-washing and re-drying.

Do you not understand that many people are at rock bottom already?

@LakieLady & @Blossomtoes spot on.
I loved the 70's, even though a poster on another thread called me out on it! (I was THERE...)
Thanks for backing up my memories of that time.

Not to burst your bullshit bubble, but life expectancy is dropping since the Tories' started austerity.

I'm not, I'm younger than you but despite having many stresses and worries in my life I prefer to keep a positive attitude and try to adapt to situations.
IMO it really is the only healthy way.

Many in this thread would rather get angry or cry woe is me and that is their prerogative, but that sort of thing is not for me 😊

No, it won’t. Nothing Labour has done in the past, nor suggested in this latest conference, will rectify what is going on now.

You’re talking about reversing decades of underinvestment, low tax, inflated property and reduced productivity causing a loss of confidence in this nation. Labour is not going to change that.

People need to get past this Brexit thing. Yes, it didn’t help, but it is nowhere near the cause of the culmination of things we have to deal with now. Successive gov’ts since the ‘70s are to blame.

@lannistunut ·Not to burst your bullshit bubble, but life expectancy is dropping since the Tories' started austerity.

Well is this necessarily a bad thing?

On other threads we have been told that it's the fault of people living too long that's bleeding the economy white. That pensioners ought to start paying for their own healthcare because they never put enough into the 'pot'.

So it looks like the Tories have solved all the problems of NHS overspend in a stroke. 😁

Toxic individualism at its best. "don't think bigger picture, don't think collectively, don't care about anyone but you and yours."

I've never lived through anything worse than this as an adult.

My mum says the 90s mortgage rate of over 15% crisis was worse so far "because we're not at the mass repossessions stage with this one yet"

Kill off the pensioners ! I bet that will go down well in the shires.

Are you just repeating ‘there’s no such thing as society’ over and over in your head? Because you might think it doesn’t affect you because you don’t have a mortgage and you don’t want to go abroad and you can afford a 20% rise in the cost of food and you don’t mind your energy bills rising. But when your relative dies because the NHS and social care are so underfunded or you have to keep fixing your car because of all the potholes or you get burgled and the police don’t have the staff to come out or your kids have to take blankets into school because there’s no money to put the heating on? Those things are happening because this is real and pretending it isn’t doesn’t make it go away.

Absolutely right. I'm less directly personally affected because I don't have a mortgage and I have a stable income. However, of course I'm indirectly affected if nurses can no longer afford to live in London. Or if teachers have to move out in order to buy a property. Or if we don't have a functioning police service.

I also don't want to see people thrown into poverty in a country that's extremely wealthy in world terms. I want to see people able to both feed their children and heat their homes. I want a government that's working towards reducing the gulf between the richest and the poorest, not increasing it. If only because countries that do so, show up as much happier and do better economically. But also because I have a social conscience and don't need to be better off.

Do I really want to see people like Jacob Rees Mogg or Rishi Sunak get even better off than they are? How does that really benefit this country? That degree of wealth does not rely on incentives: they have more money than they can ever spend already. It's about greed and power.

I don't mean to be goading but what did people expect to happen to the global economy? We never recovered properly from 2007 , the world effectively shut down on and off for 2 years. We paid healthy people to sit at home while they printed the money to enable it. Things weren't just going to go back to normal after COVID..

Do you think the 1990s are comparable? Young people today, certainly in the south east, can't even get on the housing ladder. It's a bit different to have to take a second job just to pay for your heating bill and to pay the increased mortgage of your landlord.

You don't have a pension @Bearsan?

Or you don't mind that that the pension funds would have collapsed yesterday afternoon without intervention from the Bank of England?

You don't mind that the money that rescue cost would have paid the NHS budget for years and years?

Because of our government public services will now face huge cuts.

It's only not real for you if you are independently wealthy landed gentry who can fly to Switzerland for healthcare, with your own private security firm, and no children in state schools etc. otherwise you're in this with the rest of us.

Who gave the green light for the lockdowns?
The conservatives
Why ? Because the NHs would have collapsed
Why ? Because of the Conservatives
Yet, let's blame the Labour Party eh?

What about the years the Government ran down public services before the pandemic? It's not just about Covid. It's about a general mismanagement of the economy and public services.

How many countries in the global economy are getting warnings from Moodys and the IMF this week?

It's only us isn't it. Cos our government is off its head. (Or off its face, one of the two.)

Just anecdotal but a few weeks ago a friend who works in tech was telling me that big clients were pulling contracts and they were considering cost cutting (redundancies?) and my DH’s company is making a couple of redundancies - these are companies that survived well through Covid and we’re doing well 12 months ago. My own employer has just redrafted budgets for next year with a reduction on expected income. All of these have nothing to do with this weeks news, but it won’t be helping!