Does anyone else feel the UK is heading towards a crisis?

[whatnextt]

Price rises not coming down, cost of living gone mad, car crashes, heatwave after heat wave, wild fires.
NHS is falling, NHS dentist is like winning the loto, threats from russia.
Bills cost more than anything.
Benefit bill is out of control.
People getting attacked.

I may have missed a few things, but it feels like the UK is just building up to something big gonna kick off.
Im sure it won't but life is just crap right now.
Not to mention we are gonna get a hell of a winter with this EL nion predicted.

I feel like saying lets have a full war and end this crap then re start again( figure of speech), not living just surviving.
And the cost of being a parent now is unreal.

Rant over.

Bye.

Yes, more and more liberal women I know are beginning to say that they are starting to see and understand the problems, which is good.

That’s actually quite shocking they are allowed to self ID.
That actually renders the statistics as not accurate.
Not that statistics paint the whole picture but as you say seems to be jumped on by those who seek to gaslight as a gotcha.

You haven't mentioned the illegal immigrants reports and the complaints about the amount of money spent on housing and social problems, thus warranting more emergency services.

This seems to be given as a reason for unnecessary further expenditure. Hotels being paid a fortune, free meals, instant access to personal NHS care etc.

As usual, I act as devil's advocate, read a lot and like to gauge people's reactions to contemporary opinions.

My personal ones are simply life's too short, why so much hate amongst us. We have a whole world which we should feel the need to make better, yet we all live within our own bubbles, which of course is natural.

most people I know are sick of paying for this though

We have a lot of people/cities/towns on a small island. Think somewhere like Norway has half the population of London in the whole country. Living standard is so different.

I know

Yes it's very bad

illegal immigrants who don't know what rape is being welcomed to stay

public section inflated like a big balloon that needs popping

no economic growth for 10 years. No sign of any on the horizon

All the youngsters coming through have special needs. All the teenagers coming through have mental health issues.

babies pushed around in prams with phones blaring videos at them

Yes- he did end up passing away. FIL , emergency services, on call that day , found the chap running around on fire like a headless chicken. They’d rented out a unit and put a fake wall up- they made the alcohol behind it. Chap lit a cigarette and it instantly the place went up in flames. I’ve heard so many stories off him about incidents and gang torture between the different groups. There was another major one that made the news when I man was tortured by a rival gang neat the park- they found him alive but had been subject to electric drills on his body. Again he did pass away. The house struggled to sell after this. Anyway 😅 those are quite some stories!

That's shocking.

I saw an interview with an educated Iraqi man who said that it is a common view amongst young men in the Middle East that if you want to improve your life through hard work then try and get into the United States and if you want to improve your life through welfare benefits then move to Western Europe.

You missed AI replacing human jobs.

I feel we are taken for mugs, Border Control is a joke ,NHS failing but to even get near sorting it it needs reform, but social care is where to start.
How is it that our children cannot even afford to Rent let alone buy? Wages are just not inline with the constant costs of living.The government should tackle the water companies & utilities.
Rant over , ive never felt life is so bad tbh.

2008 was the trigger as we, as a country, were ill-prepared for the financial crisis having seen spending and debt rising during the so-called "boom" years when we should have been running a surplus.

Leading economists said it would take a decade to get back to where we were in 2008. Then, of course, covid was another economic seismic shock in 2020, which will take another decade to recover from, IF, and only IF, we can start to grow the economy, which simply isn't happening.

Yup, nothing works anymore and housing cost inflation is something like triple the rate of wage rises over the past few decades. Everything is a mess and none of the major political parties have the courage nor ability to do what's required.

Leadin economists actually predicted strong growth every year after Covid, but it never happened- this is because they did not take into account the profound change in wealth distribution which was happening before Covid and was massively sped up during Covid. Economists such as Thomas Picketty and are own Gary Stevenson are among only a handful of economists which predicted the decline we have seen. Seeing a growth economy as an answer is really no longer viable, it won't happen and even if it did it would only slightly slow th worsening wealth distribution.

What kind of future can we have without growth? We'd just go further and further into debt and end up in hock to the IMF who would insist on spending cuts and tax rises which would make things worse. We NEED growth and need to find ways of making it happen rather than lazily accepting managed decline. A good start would be a long term plan to reduce reliance on imported goods and services to help reduce the balance of payments deficit, i.e. increase manufacturing and farming and energy creation.

No

I see this posted on MN every few months and I have been many many years (when Labour were in power before) I am sure there are some on here that love this idea but it isn't happening

Things are not great at the moment and there are some very serious issues, NHS is broken, cost of living and stagnant wages, crime is some areas, and immigration and people taking things into their own hands is worrying

but we are not on the verge of society breaking down and we are not at war with lives being destroyed all around us but life should be better in the UK for how much wealth there is here

Increasing manufacturing requires a huge amount of investment no one is willing to make- all of our manufacturing has been wound down , and we can only compete at the very high end luxury market anyway because of wage costs- wages need to rise not fall , manufacturing jobs will not provide that.
This is the same chestnut Trump is trying to promote- but there is no investment into increasing manufacturing capacity so it it will fail, and it would similarly fail here- if you wanted to rely much harder on home produced goods you would have to go back to the 70's before all the assets were stripped from manufacturing companies - you can't go back there is no way we can compete on low value goods with the likes of China and India. We have to accept we need a different solution.
Making better farming policies and energy creation are certainly possibilities- but you need to let go of the idea of constant growth- it was never viable because resources are limited and the planet can only take so much battering.

But investment in manufacturing is cheaper than spending tens/hundreds of billions on welfare. Manufacturing has changed. It's not as labour intensive as it was in the 70s. Even in China, there are automated factories rather than small armies of low paid workers. No reason at all why we can't invest in modern manufacturing technology, i.e. injection moulding machines, 3d printers etc to make stuff in a modern way. Remember that we do have modern factories in the UK that produce "heavy" and "bulky" consumer items that aren't viable to transport half way round the world, i.e. canned drinks and food, toilet rolls and kitchen rolls, crisps etc - i.e. low value items, so it can be done. The manufacturing World has changed with automation, robotics, etc. We need to transition away and leave China to produce the mass produced plastic crap and labour intensive goods.

You havn't answered how you think the country can survive financially without growth.

‘Growth’ in the economy means bugger all by itself. It is perfectly possible - in fact, it is what we have seen for the last 20 years - to have growth in the economy that is caused entirely by the richest being enabled to rip the poorest off, by buy to let and poor construction techniques or outright fraud as at Grenfell. We know law made in the public interest is in the way of making money for the unscrupulous rich: that’s why law itself has been undermined for 20 years, following the destruction of decent public-interest led media and information.

In the early 00s, the last time working and intelligent plebs were allowed to discuss such matters, there was a widespread suggestion that eternal ‘growth’ was simply unviable. We only have one planet and it is finite. Its resources are finite. What we need is to sustain.

I think that there is a misconception in that many people believe that the UK is richer than it actually is. The UK is most definitely declining. economically in comparison to other countries. If you look at the below chart, since 2000 the UK has declined in GDP per capita from 15th in the world to 22nd and more importantly in term of purchasing power parity that takes our cost of living into account from 17th to 30th.

The only way to reverse becoming ever poorer is through economic growth, but that now seems to be a dirty word.

There’s plenty of money here. The amount that some people have is sickening, whether you measure it as fiat currency, or as resources.

We cannot ‘grow’ ourselves out of this kind of inequality.

And ‘growth’ of the sort they tell us has been happening since Thatcher, is a lie. Most of us of the generations after the boomers are working harder yet have less. If that is what you call growth, then it should indeed be a very dirty word.

https://equalitytrust.org.uk

I see you've missed out Brexit. It weakened the UK along with the EU.

While other countries were recovering from the Global Crisis of 2008, our Tory government spent those years playing out their psychodrama in Culture Wars rather than governing. Eventually Boris Johnson's premiership broke the Social Contract completely.

SInce then, foreign governments, one in particular, have used this to further weaken liberal Western democracies.

See also Covid and numerous, unnecessary wars.🌻