Yes, it's terrible.
Energy prices are absolutely shocking and the government, as usual, is allowing and condoning the absolute greed of energy companies who are makes hundreds of billions of profit from this. Meanwhile many, many people are freezing cold in their houses, scared to use their heating. They will increase again in April.
Local council budgets have been cut back every year for 12 years - ours has lost 88 million a year so far. Our local services are shit.
Food is very expensive and many items have almost doubled, or more, in price. Food bills have rocketed and supermarket profits have increased by tens of millions which indicates supermarket greed.
Fuel is another rip-off with car owners filling the pockets of supermarkets and fuel suppliers who refuse to lower prices despite them now pying significantly less than they were.
Every service is worse- small traders are overwhelmed by work and charging a fortune for small jobs. It's almost impossible to find oddjob people who will come for a day and sort out several small issues. Builders prices have increased dramatically.
Prices for insurance of all types has increased significantly more than usual.
There are shortages of many items, across the board. Pharmacies are struggling to keep ontop of drug and medicine supplies, food shortages, always empty shelves to be seen in supermarkets.
Many people are poor- literally poor, unable to buy decent food, clothing or heat their homes.
There are more people homeless than in the last 25 years.
The gap between rich and poor is at its widest ever.
The NHS is in a terrible state having been ground down over 12 years. We spend less on healthcare per person than any country in Europe by a huge amount.
Public service salaries have been significantly de-valued by this government. There are large shortages (over 50,000) of teachers, nurses, police officers. People leave these professions in droves and recruitment is poor to all 3. We need to train at least 8,000 more Drs every year.
We have few high-level skills based industries any more and there has been a complete failure to develop our manufacturing base. That means our jobs market is mainly low-level skills based- so although there are jobs they are badly paid and have no career path so do not motivate anyone.
Let me give you some recent examples I have come across:
3 local pharmacies, when I asked about medicine availability, explained they are finding it very difficult to maintain supplies due to Brexit. Most medicines are made in the EU- paperwork is a nightmare and prices to UK have shot up.
A friend of ours owns a builders merchant business. He told me yesterday that:
a) He buys his wood supply for woodburners from a place in the Scottish borders- good quality, properly prepared, proper paper trail etc so no issues, always fair prices. The wood comes from Latvia. Germany (who previously bought very little) have bought all the wood this Latvian company can produce because they are not buying gas from Russia so everyone is getting woodburners.The Latvian company prefers to supply Germany. The company in the borders is now looking for another supplier but prices will shoot up. I asked why he does not buy British wood. He said we have the wood but we have no processing industry to support it.
He also buys Indian sandstone paving. It has not increased in price for 10 years. This year the price has rocketed- not because the price of the sandstone has increased, (it hasn't) but because the carriers have increased their carriage costs- shipping and road- from £600 a container to £6,200.
All of these costs are passed on to us. The British public are being screwed by greedy capitalists using the excuse of the pandemic, the war in the Ukraine, economic recession etc.
DH, who is a Head in a secondary school, has had a surplus budget for years and uses it to improve resources in the school. This year he will be £400,000 in deficit- and that is the lowest secondary school deficit in his LA where every single secondary school has a deficit budget - only 2 had last year.
We have a culture where we have somehow encouraged a large group in society, who could work and should work, to not work - they rely on benefits and feel entitled to them. I'm not talking about the old/disabled/sick, I'm talking about the idle, sub group we all know about . They cost us a fortune, don't want to work, want their rents paid, benefits to live on, have a range of allowances, are big users of our public services in crisis- police, social services, children's services, addiction services, Mental Health services, NHS, ambulances. They are known to all of these services. If you mention this group on MNET you are shouted down.
Britain is filthy. It's a horrible place- shallow, offensive, entitled, lazy attitudes amongst many residents, it has a corrupt government who are tipping hundreds of millions of ££s of public money into the bank accounts of their capitalist friends.
It will take decades to get us out of this mess and the fall-out will cost lives and futures of our most vulnerable people.