How much worse can the cost of living get before society breaks down?

[TheGardenRose]

I'm genuinely getting worried. Weekly shop now £72. It was around £40-50 not so long ago.

This sums it up perfectly. You only need to go back 100 years to see that (as a society), we’ve experienced much, much worse without anything disastrous happening.

What we’re living through now (high fuel and food costs) are absolutely nothing, really.

Was it 4 or 5 years ago that petrol went up into the 170s? Until this last wobble it had gone down to 129.99. Now it's gone up again and the last time I filled up it was 154.99.
When threequarters of the people in the country have been without any food for the last five mealtimes, that is when a break-down will happen. Meanwhile I will make do and mend and eat liver and bacon and drink water. If we have a hot summer some big, bad boys will have some riots that are relatively small.

I'm not going to spend time looking it up and writing it out here but if you want to know exactly what Margaret Thatcher said, please don't be 'all ears'. Be 'all eyes' instead and google it, and get the whole of the quote, not just that first sentence. I found the whole statement interesting when I first read it. I'm sorry I can't remember it exactly, but in the same way that one big ocean is made up of individual droplets, I think she was meaning that 'society' is made up of individuals - something like that.

However did my great-grandmother manage to live without 24 cans of Red Bull a week?

It’s been worse and we all pulled through.

You’re saying similar to my earlier post. Since reading some of the responses since, I think I could predict the decade of birth for many. Those hard times in the seventies were over 50 years ago, most certainly way before some of those stressing about what oldies like me understand as the nice to haves were born. No internet may seem catastrophic to many, and it can’t be denied it’d certainly mess the food supply chain up, but we’d still survive. As we would with limited access to foreign grown foods and everything else we didn’t have back then. Read books, eat spuds. Live.

I posted earlier the full quote. Yes, it’s about not relying on the state to solve everything for us. Look after yourself , your family and your friends and neighbours. Read the whole passage, it’s so annoying when only the first six words are ‘misquoted’.

I did google and tried all eyes. Couldn't progress. Go away. I expect you are loaded and a Thatcherite.

The woman was an utter monster and sold off anything of shared value.

Selling everything of has left the UK incredibly vulnerable in so many ways.

Just think the profit British Gas and BP are making would have gone back into the government's pockets.
Instead they were sold off for a quick buck.

British Steel - no more
Car industry & ship building - no more
Scotland can barely build a ferry, the same country that built the QE2, and the Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary before it.

It sounds as though a lot of those people might be tourists from out of the area

The internet isn't just something to connect your iPad to. A lot of critical infrastructure relies on the internet.

Our steel industry has diminished, but it still exists, in Port Talbot and Scunthorpe among others.

We still build cars, just under a million in 2025

As far as I know Royal Navy ships are still being maintained in Rosyth in Scotland, and HMS Glasgow was completed there in 2025, HMs Cardiff is under construction.

You can blame Margaret Thatcher for the demise of British industry, but 1990 was a long time ago, what have any party of any colour done to rectify the situation in the last 36 years!

Yes surely the majority of peoples work wouldn’t function without internet. Certainly whenever we had a power outage in hospital it was the lack of internet that was the issue - without it you can’t look at the medical records, the test results, the imaging, they are all online. We had to start prescribing by hand on pieces of paper. Care definitely suffered, it’s undeniable.

I think we have about 30 years before civilization starts to break down. The trigger will be the knock on effects of climate change on food production, uninhabitable climates causing migration, insufficient post-oil energy infrastructure. The rise and rise of AI will also make more people unemployed while the rich gets richer. It's bleak, and NO politicians want to address it because the voting public are entirely self-interested and only vote based on their own metaphorical weekly shopping trolley.

I agree with this but it makes me so sad.

I am financially comfortable. Live in a good area. Suburban.

Like many affluent people in politics, many of the issues don’t directly touch me.

But the idea of my kids growing up in a protected little bubble, where many of their peers are struggling and society is breaking down is horrifying.

I can’t understand why people would want to live in a country like that. Where you and the people in your little set are ok, and screw everyone else.

It’s so fundamentally unpleasant at a human level that I just can’t get my head around it.

(To clarify: I’m not incredibly rich. But I live in a leafy area where nobody needs to use food banks, there is no unrest or rioting or poverty. But I and other are aware of it and are concerned. It’s the “I’m alright, Jack” attitude of those who just don’t give a shit which is so horrible).

Terribly sad about Scotland. My GF was a steel maker. Those little boats were such an icon.

I do blame her, I was there I can remember it. She detroyed something, the fabric of society. We never recovered.
Then the racists destroyed what was left with Bexit.