AIBU to hate these things about England vs Italy?

[ItalianPoster]

As an Italian who has spent the last decade in England, I have grown fond of the country, but there are also a few bugbears which totally drive me nuts. Clearly a light-hearted rant, not a profound economic, sociological and anthropological analysis!

1.  No bidet. I. Will. Never. Get. It. You don’t clean your hands, or a baby’s bottom, with a dry towel, right? You wash the parts! Ideally with water, or at the very least with a wet wipe. Why should an adult’s bottom be any different?
   

2. No ID cards. I will never get it. You are opposed to ID cards because you don't want a compulsory document but you have made the passport practically compulsory. Don't say you don't need a passport - Windrush proved you wrong. Note that a system of ID cards, like in most of the civilised - and developing - world, would have avoided the Windrush scandal.

3.  Leasehold. The middle ages are over. Ius primae noctis has been abolished. Why does leasehold persist?
   

4.  Carpets. I understand them in offices. I understand them in flats with no noise insulation. But in houses? Whether you like them or not is subjective. That they are filthy and almost impossible to clean effectively, compared to wooden or tile floors, is not – that’s a fact.
   

5.  Separate hot and cold faucets. Why, oh, please someone explain why!
   

6.  Rodents. No, they are neither normal nor harmless. They carry diseases. In many continental European countries, having rodents is shameful and dealt with swiftly – here they are just accepted passively. Councils don’t seem to conduct periodic exterminations like abroad, and most homeowners seem happy living in properties full of rodent-friendly holes, or just accept with a shrug that, when a house is being refurbished, mice will move to the neighbours!
   

7.  State schools. Admission by distance, ie by whether you can afford to live close enough. Faith schools funded by the State! It would be outrageous to have hospitals for Christians only but funded by all taxpayers, yet this is what happens with State schools.
   

8.  School uniforms. Why are you so obsessed with them? While they might have some merit, the obsession with which some schools apply their dress codes is shocking. Every September there are stories about repressed,  control-freak headteachers who check whether pupils are wearing the right shade of grey etc.
   

9.  Construction standards. Even without bringing up the Greenfell tragedy, construction standards are incredibly low compared to continental Europe. Is there maybe a tax for building stuff straight, not crooked, and for sealing holes? I had never seen crooked angles or ceilings in Italy, Germany or Spain – here they seem to be the norm. And doors? Why do your doors almost never seal the entrance properly? Having an energy performance certificate which looks at whether there any energy-saving light bulbs, but ignores that the front door is all bent and allows lots of draught in, makes no sense at all! Ancient Greece used to build straight stuff - why can't modern England, too?
   

On the plus side:

1. English mother-in-laws don't seem as overbearing as the Italian ones. Extended families are, in general, less "suffocating". Italian families tend to give more financial support, but that support tends to come with huuuuge strings attached. English kids are brought up to be independent, unlike their Italian cousins.

2. Work. There's much more of it, and the country is incredibly more open and meritocratic. In Italy, you'll struggle to find non-white non-Italians who have progressed in their career and are heading teams of white Italians. Not here. Foreigners for very high-profile jobs (Carney)? Forget it.

3. There is no concept of "concorso", these huge, theoretical exams which are needed to hire people in the civil service, and which, idiotically, totally disregard soft skills. A job "concorso" typically involves thousands of applicants locked in a huge gym answering mostly irrelevant and theoretical written questions.

4. The immigration bureaucracy is shameful (Windrush), but, in general, English bureaucracy is miles ahead the Italian one (I know, it doesn't take much!). Receiving a new driving licence, for free, in a few days, or receiving a tax refund 3 days after filing your tax return are unthinkable and cause the envy of our friends in Italy.

5. Green spaces and kids' activities. At least in London, there are so many, mostly well-kept gardens, parks, green spaces and play grounds; the difference with the large Italian cities is shocking.

6. Free motorways. Privatised railways have been an utter failure (Govia/Southern Fail), but at least you didn't privatise the motorways and gave too good a deal to a bunch of well-connected local entrepreneurs like we did (by the way, the fact they are the key investors in the Italian motorways is one reason why I never buy Benetton).

I really wish people would stop saying g England is colder than Italy. It is absolutely is not in the North (or pretty much anywhere north of Rome).

The climate in the he UK is generally less extreme but definitely not colder overall. Even in most parts of Scotland, the winter is not much colder than winters in the North of Italy. Placed like Milan have snow and absolutely freezing winters most years and boiling summers ( much like New York for example)

My parents are Italian ,(I was born here) and I agree with most of the OP, apart from the rodents thing . I loathe carpets as well for their impracticality and the fact that they are never propetly clean

The OP has a couple of good points (religious state schools is a huge bugbear of mine and I hate uniform) but the rodent and building standards points are truly baffling.

The ID card point is pretty ingrained in our psyche. There's a long history. They were a wartime thing in the UK and getting rid of them relates to peacetime. We are also a nation of libertarians!

I haven't lived in Italy but I have lived in two other European countries and they all have good and bad points.

@ThenCameTheFools, you say a quick call to the passport office, but if no one in the family has ever had a passport, what then? I don't understand, can you please explain?
After all, my example is similar to some Windrush cases: people being formally British but being unable to prove it because, other than a passport, there is no single document certifying it. Oh, you can request a citizenship certificate, but it costs more than a passport!

Brits prove their citizenship, should they have to, like Italians do, by their birth certificate and/or passport

A birth certificate doesn't prove anything. I am spanish (my partner too), my DD was born here, so she has a birth certificate, but she is british only beacause me and my partner have been living in the UK for longer than 5 years, we have sent proof of it (P60's) and we can now prove that she is british because we got her a passport. If we would have been living here for say, only 3 years, we still would have a birth certificate but she wouldn't be bristish.

ID cards say if you are a citizen or not, there is no confusion.

OP, have you not lived abroad before? Everywhere does things differently and there are pros and cons.

If this is what Italians do in a country that is hosting them, it says something about your manners. If you think this is light hearted, I am struggling to find this funny, having grown out outside the UK and now call this home.

How about this. My best friend told me never to marry an Italian man. Hilarious.

What I find funny in Italy -(more now I am older and more confident) is the number of people who made open comments about my weight in public. By this I mean complete strangers (usually almost exclusively women, and generally the older ones). Comments like 'my goodness what a large arse' as they pass you . Nowadays I answer my goodness what rude old hag on reply. They generally don't like that

Also, women don't really get a good deal at all. Hence why they are voting with their feet and only having one or no children.
There is a real lack of good childcare but women are expected to work and still somehow collect children from school (often at lunchtime) and cook wonderful meals with fresh ingredients that are bought daily. Italian men really are incredibly unreconstructed and do little to help . Though maybe things are improving with younger people. I am not sure.

As for people stopping at zebra crossings, I visited Parma for the first time in a few years at Easter and was astonished that drives stopped to let me cross It almost felt like the UK. In the past you really did take your life in your hand when crossing roads, even with pedestrian crossings.

I really wish people would stop saying England is colder than Italy. It is absolutely is not in the North (or pretty much anywhere north of Rome).

Okay, but how you make your rooms warm in the winter then? I've lived in an old house in temperate England with terracotta tiles in the living room. It looked beautiful. In the winter it was miserable.

I find it interesting to know what people from other places think of our ways. It is not rude at all!

Ha this is great. My Aussie DP would agree with everything you say, but when we lived in Australia I desperately missed carpets and soft furnishings! What a saddo. But hard cold floors, blinds instead of curtains, leather furniture... all so cool and easy to clean, all cold AF in winter!

The Windrush scandal came about not because of the lack of one central ID but because the UK Home Office threw away archived material in order to cut costs. Unfortunately, that material - thrown away in the face of protests by some civil servants - included all the Empire Windrush landing slips.

I'm not sure how ID cards would have helped the situation, unless it had been the law that ID cards were irrefragable evidence of holding citizenship - which would be a great reason to forge them.

Sorry, did I put passport office? I meant nationality office.

The Windrush fiasco (and it has been) is not new. In the late 80s/early 90s, there was a similar outcry when the first generation of immigrants, virtually overnight, were informed they weren't British, and might have no legal right to remain. This was due to the fact that when they came over, their countries of origin were British, they held British Subject documents, as we all did before the BNA81 came into force) Many of them, upon their country's independence, became citizens of that country, and some of them duly lost their British citizenship. (in most cases, they didn't, but in the days before the internet and mass information, they didn't know, and panic ensued) The govt quickly added a clause to the BNA approving registration (which is generally a right, unlike naturalisation which is discretionary) for this group of people, as British Citizens.

I haven't read a lot about the Windrush people- but it's, I believe, connected. I guess we have a nastier govt now, than we did then, when Thatcher's govt dealt with the fiasco pretty sharpish. I do remember a lot of scaremongering in the press telling people they were going to be deported. That was never the case.

piscis, the people who work in nationality use your birth certificate (and the registry of births etc) to establish citizenship.

driving at people at speed while they are crossing their road with a green man

that happens in the UK doesn't it - well once the green man has changed to flashing amber, anyway.

*HerpDeDerp

Flushable bum wipes are very common where I'm from.*

I bet blocked seeers are too then!

And don’t get me started on all the tax exemptions on Church owned buildings and businesses. There probably would be a much lower public deficit if the church paid the same taxes as everyone else

Surely that is the same as the UK - where charities aren't taxed because a) they don't make profit or b) channel profits from businesses owned by the charity back into the charity.

• a charity being something for the public benefit such as alleviation of poverty, advancement of education, advancement of religion or some other public benefit (as it is or was defined in English law).

You guys really did not understand my question about proving citizenship. Let me retry rephrasing it. Child born in 2018 in England. Father born in 2000 in England. Grandfather born in 1982 in England. None of the 3 has ever had a passport. Since they were all born after 1981, for all of them, being born here is not sufficient to establish citizenship. Simplifying, you need to determine whether the parents were citizens or legally settled. How do you do it if none of the 3 has ever had a passport? My understanding is that you need to go back to the great-grandparents's status and documents. If you don't have them, you're screwed, Windrush-style.

This is my understanding, and is an example of why ID cards and a population register make sense. Happy to be proven wrong, of course.

I am from Spain. I said in a previous post that Spain and Italy are incredibly similar, I am going to list some things I cannot stand from Spain after nearly 13 years here:

• the level of corruption that people accept from politicians (disgusting!)

• not being treated with respect in the workplace. As there is a lot of unemployment, people have to put up with a lot of crap, you cannot really complain...because you need the job, it is not as easy as to say "I'm leaving, I'll get another job"

• people being very narrow-minded in general. If something has been done in a particular way for ages, it is very difficult to change, people keep doing it...because it is the way it is done, that's it. For example, most non religious people will still marry in a church and will christen their babies. It is beyond me. I've got a friend who is very against the church and all that but she Christened her baby (the father is not religious either). If you ask someone why would they do that they will be surprised by the question...it is just what you do when a baby is born

• Piercing a baby girls ears when they are born is the norm. The worst is that if you don't do it, you need to justify yourself because the default is that you have to do it, there can be even family pressure to do it. People know the sex of a baby there by the earrings, so even if your baby girl is wearing a pink sparkly dress, they will ask if she is a boy because she hasn't got earrings (this is not a joke!)

• People is quite narrow-minded about food too. They would say spanish food is the best and in the UK people eat really bad. How boring...I am a foodie and I LOVE living in London, the range of ingredients I can get is insane, I couldn't dream of getting so much choice in Spain. People who say that you eat badly in the UK is because they don't have mummy cooking for them anymore and they do not cook themselves (and they buy the cheapest ready-made meals), otherwise I just do not understand this.

• Independence is not encouraged. Plenty of people living with their parents in their 30's or 40's...if you don't get married you stay with your parents (not everyone of course, but this is not rare or frowned upon). This without a contribution to the household is the norm and many parent would consider a son/daughter paying some kind of rent insulting.

I am pretty sure most of this will apply to Italy as well.

Wouldn't it just be a matter of proving where they were born?

The three b/certs in your example would prove the nationality of the child. If they lost them, they could get copies from the registry office.

Just three words:

Italian justice system

Tom- UK nationality law is a mix of where/to whom. An anomaly only in recent years sorted out is that unmarried British men couldn't pass on their citizenship- so child A born to an Italian mother and a British father would not automatically be British- especially if born outside of the UK.

"Wouldn't it just be a matter of proving where they were born?"
The great-grandparents of the child born in 2018? Not always. If the greatgrandparents were born in the UK, they are British by birth, and so are all the UK-born descendents. But what if you don't find records for these great-grandparents?

If instead the great-grandparents were foreigners but legally settled, again, you need to prove that. Again, if you can't get hold of the documents to prove it, then what?

Also, thanks to the hostile environment policy, employers landlords etc must verify the immigration status of employees tenants etc. When, 18 years from now, someone will want to employ this kid born in 2018, they will have to... what? ask for his great-grandparents' documents??

These hypothetical people seem to be having very bad luck with their important documents, don't they?

Tom Pinch no, it’s nothing like charities. The Catholic Church owns some of the most expensive real estate in the centre of historic cities like Rome, Milan, Florence etc., and much of this houses commercial businesses, such as bookshops, hotels, b&bs, restaurants, Run by church affiliated entities, or rented out to other businesses, friends of cardinals and so on. The church pays no property tax on any of this real estate. I remember seeing on a news report that in order to avoid paying property tax it is sufficient to hold mass at least once a year so the place is considered a place of worship. Therefore you have the bizarre spectacle of a small mass being held in a bookshop once a year dodge taxes. There are also exemption on business rates, although I don’t know the detail.

Another irritation is the 8 per thousand of your annual taxes that go automatically to the Catholic Church unless you opt out and divert it elsewhere. In tax return season the church runs expensive ad campaigns to encourage you to give the 8 per thousand to them, showing charitable enterprises, implicating that the money ends up going to the poor. It emerged recently, however, that only 20% of the funds emanating from this tax donation actually go on charitable works, the rest goes in financing the Vatican and the clergy.

Needless to say I give my 8 per thousand to someone else...

@Joinourclub

"I bet blocked seeers are too then!"

I don't know how faulty psychics tie in with flushable wipes. 🤔