Tell me the bad things about living in the UK

[alwayscrashinginthesamecar1]

In the interests of equality, as we have had other threads for other countries, I thought I'd start this thread.

I'll start it off with

Bloody awful weather
Obsessed with class
Racist and in some places sectarian too
Filthy cities.

Dominic Cummings attitude.

@deydododatdodontdeydo you clearly just don’t appreciate dill! Eastern European food is the best!

Not really into denigrating a country that offers so much, as you can see from above post.

Ooh, just thought of one - tomatoes.
Tomatoes taste of nothing here, hardly worth buying them.
Unless you pay more for vine ripened.

I love this country. The scenery, the lifestyle, the culture...

I don't love what's happened the last few years, Brexit etc and I'm really unhappy with the government at the moment to the point I can't watch the news without calling someone a c-word.

Eastern European food is the best!

Knedlicki?
Not sure how it's spelled.
Heavy, tasteless dumplings.
Anyway, I was half joking. British food isn't the tasteless stereotype it once was, and I'm sure Eastern European isn't either anymore.

Tiny crumbling old houses with ugly extensions and postage stamp gardens.

The crab bucket mentality
The pettiness
The passive-aggressive backstabbing and gossiping
The curtain twitching
The endlessly ugly sprawling newbuild suburbs
The tabloid press
The judginess
The delusional sense of superiority
The lowbrow culture
The philistinism
And hardly anyone other than immigrants speaks a second language with any competence (unlike our European neighbours)
Some of the worst food in Europe

Hmm I really like the U.K. I think it everytime I go away. Dh now looking at jobs abroad as his job pool has dried up.
Everytime I consider moving abroad and research all the healthcare system, the school systems, the fact that even within Europe I doubt I'll be treated as a local and how difficult it is to get a job vs coming into the U.K., so many more hoops to jump through even within the Eu!

So I suppose to add a negative, it's hard for us to find a job right now, that will hopefully be solved soon enough though?!

The snobbery and class obsession and preoccupation about doing things that are "common". Just look at the baby names threads - awful.

The littering. The prohibitive cost of going to places like castles or other attractions.

The good things though: the free world class museums and galleries, Alan Partridge, variety shows and pantomimes (naff but great), the retro entertainment of seaside towns, the huge regional variations in accent, cultural quirks, food.

Love following rules blindly

Clearly they aren’t are they? Lockdown would have been more successful if people had followed the rules

The food is overpriced and low quality

I disagree. The meat I buy is from a local butcher who sources all his meat locally, which isn’t difficult as I live in a rural area. I buy my vegetables from a local farm that grows a lot of its own vegetables, and have often picked up vegetables that still have dew on them because they have just been picked.

We have some fantastic farm shops that sell locally produced artisan products. As we don’t have a local wine industry to protect we can buy wines from all around the world.

The only class obsession I come across is on mumsnet, never in real life.

Poor choice of vegtables, its getting better, but I would love more variety of vegtables.

Seriously frumpety? I have to disagree there. If you want a wider variety of vegetables from other countries there are loads of specialist shops, but then you have to consider the carbon footprint.

It’s not like the UK lacks space to make houses a comfortable size

It depends where you live Stumbling. Land prices in central London, for example, are astronomical.

I think that apart from Brexit, none of the negative aspects of living in the UK are unique to our islands. You encounter poverty, inequality, classism, racism, dirty streets, homelessness etc in most parts of the world.

We are very lucky in the UK - excellent infrastructure, etc.

the bad things are
getting your foot on the property ladder

Not sure this thread has raised my mood! Of course there's lots of problems here and it varies from place to place (nice countryside, some dirty parts of cities) but there are much worse places around the world - I've been to some of them.

I do despair when I read about the behaviour of some Brits here and abroad - louts, drunks, lowlife, racists. I'm not sure there's any country in the world that is perfect though. Finland?!! So think of another country that doesn't have some of the things you don't like about the UK then you'll find there's other stuff which ain't so great there.

bad things about UK - winter / spring / autumn weather

@EdwinaMay. I'm assuming you're Australian? I find it hilarious how Aussies in the UK moan so much about it and yet, here you are

The rule of law is now unimportant, post the Cummings debacle.

People who think that because something doesn’t affect them directly (e.g. racism, class division) it possibly doesn’t exist or isn’t a problem.
Over-sentimentality about the Royal Family.
Fractured, ineffective political system with few inspiring examples of leadership or genuine values on either left or right.
A skewed understanding of what’s important in education that has led to obsession with targets and league tables and decent teachers being driven out of their jobs just before the goalposts change again.

Lots of good things though. History, landscape, British humour and comedy, pub culture and actually
I quite like the weather.

Try living in another country for any length of time and you will probably appreciate life here more. I’ve travelled and lived abroad for periods of time and, trust me, our country is a so much better place to live than most other countries out there. But negative people tend to focus on the negatives in life unfortunately.

Disclaimer - I'm in Scotland.

The weather is awful, housing is a disaster unless you earn well above average, the education system is failing and the government's solution is to lower the attainment bar. You are categorically not allowed to voice any opinion that isn't leftist, independence-supporting, remain-voting wokeness, especially if you are under 35.

Racism, classism, sectarianism are all rife. The crime rates are shocking for pretty much every type of crime.

Public transport is prohibitively expensive and poorly managed in the cities, it just doesn't exist outside of the cities and big towns.

I love living in the UK. However, the things I don’t like are the knife crime epidemic that has grown so prevalent in youth culture. The lack of empathy and general respect for living that has pervaded that section of society has astounded me and made me very sad. I also find our mental health support to be lacking and have had numerous scary encounters with people on the streets with severe mental health issues who are a danger to themselves and others. I can not stand Boris, he was a hopeless Mayor and is now proving to be a hopeless Prime Minister. Is it too much to ask to have a leader we can look up to and respect who cares more about the people they are serving than serving themselves? My experience of primary state education has been amazing, but my DD is starting secondary this year, so I am apprehensive that state secondary might fall short of my expectations. But staying open minded for now.

It's crowded. Houses and people all over the place, damn them for wanting homes, the bastards.

Traffic. Too much of it, because it's too crowded.

Obsession with so-called "celebrities".

An education system which places more emphasis on regurgitating facts than encouraging critical thinking.

Inequality between the affluent south-east and the rest of the country.

The obsession with class is a real thing. I know few people who manage to sneak "I am from working class, you know" into nearly every conversation 🙄
No one. Gives. A. Fuck. Love. Especially my foreign arse.

Weather? Oh shush. I like it It's stable. Hate heat.

Lack of general education. Great they read Shakespeare, but maybe knowing which countries are in Europe would be more practical...

Cities ARE dirty. Compared to lots of other first world countries they are dorty with rubbish everywhere. Shame. They are otherwise beautiful with an impressive architecture!

British food is amazing, but rarely anyone can actually cook it as it appears🤔

There are only three things I can think of:

Poor public transport unless you're in a city. I live in a market town and have a two hourly bus service that starts at 7.30am to our nearest next town (about 10 miles away). And before anyone says 'well you shouldn't have moved there if you knew that' - the bus used to be a 30 minute bus service, the bus company cut it. But it's similar in a lot of places. We like going to UK destinations on holiday and would happily go by train, but there's often little or no bus services from stations to more outlying villages so we use the car.

NHS investment. When DS was born, 13 years ago, my sister had a health scare. She went to the GP and was seeing an NHS consultant within 3 weeks. Recently (pre-Covid) she had the same thing reoccur. This time her wait was 13 weeks.

Education investment. I was taught in a class of 30 children, my DS is taught in a class of 30 children. There are always calls for more teachers, but they're replacing rather than extending the education for our children.

But filthy cities? I don't recognise that. Many of them are old but I don't see that much litter compared to some equally old cities.

Food? Depends where you eat. We have great little cafes, teashops, restaurants. We also have rubbish. I've been lucky enough to travel to France (Paris specifically), Germany, Spain, Australia (Sidney), America and New Zealand, along with all the UK countries, plus others I can't even remember now. I've eaten well and poorly in all of those countries, in both little cafes or street stalls and, what appeared to be, very naice restaurants.

And weather? The great Billy Connolly said 'there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes'. There's nothing like a walk in the rain IF you're waterproofed!

One thing annoys me: The reluctance of people to take responsibility for things like (a trivial example) Tasteless food especially tomatoes. A comment from a few pages ago.
The answer is stop buying the cheapest and ask the shops and growers to produce better, They can farmers and growers want to produce the best.

It might cost a little more but not premium.
We should speak up for these things. Reject the cheap and be selective over what we consider important.

We must stop expecting someone to fix our problem. Do a little bit more for ourselves.

@Livelovebehappy I think it’s a given that most people will answer this without having many (if any) points of comparison with other countries.