To be disgusted with the government and increasingly negative about life in this country.

[nottherighttime]

I'm not sure if it is getting older and having more experience of things not going very well or that politicians seem to have becomes more and more dishonourable and self serving to the extent that many in the current cabinet are happy to tell bare faced lies to the general public and give extremely lucrative contracts to the chums.

I feel that the general public are increasingly manipulated by the very small percentage of super wealthy and privileged inidividuals in power and by the media who act in tandem with them. Johnson really seems to be a master manipulator and liar but still so many seem to think he is doing a good job. Williamson has been beyond incompetent and has made some embarrassing gaffs. Patel has been accused of bullying and there has apparently been a large payout made. Rishi professes to be honest and likes to 'level with us' (and apparently some believe him according to the polls) but has increased taxes for the poor and middle-higher earners but failed to increase capital gains tax or inheritance tax at all which would affect the wealthy and deliberately put a rocket under the housing market pushing the prices up a ridiculous amount and further out of reach of FTB and lower earners/ those without family money. Jenrick has been caught out telling lies on several occasions, the Cummings fiasco, enough said!

The media has served the government's purpose well. They are pitting public sector workers against private sector, furloughed workers against NHS workers asking for more than a 1% pay rise and it is working brilliantly. Instead of all working together and taking collective responsibility for the society we live in there is in-fighting and the wealthy happily taking more and more from people who can't afford housing or food for their children at the lowest end of the scale (and many others in the middle). There seems to be so much more of an 'every man for himself' attitude in more recent decades and less thought for society as a whole.
There is also the lie perpetuated about how there is no money for funding essential services, UC, free school meals, etc but yet there have been billions for track and trace, millions wasted on PPE which was substandard without any apparent thought. The government can create money via the B of E when it suits them and it is a political choice not to fund certain things and to fund others.

Does anyone else feel this way?

Yanbu. Im fucking sick of it all.

@nottherighttime they have closed business for a good reason and all the small business I know have been able to get help and many have adapted
Large business has also been closed but we are in a pandemic so thats kind of to be expected
As for the ones in the loophole , can someone explain why ? But regardless everyone and anyone can claim uc to top up income etc
I have lost my job to covid so know how tough it is
And again those who only surround themselves by people who vote as they do is small minded, in fact I don't know most if the ways my friends vote because its not my business and I don't think I am more superior to someone who votes another way

@RoseyMinerals so was it all so much better under labour ? Maybe it was for you but I had plenty of times where we had no food in the house then as well
What gets me is those that think any goverment will come along and make it all better

@smellyolddog but corporation tax is on profits so you have to have profits to pay it

@nottherighttime the goverment did buy the vaccines and hedged their bets on buying lots of different ones as we didn't know what would work , they have also donated a lot to covid to help other countries
You can't in one breath blame the goverment for the nhs when things go wrong , yet when they get vaccine going well say thats not the goverment thats the nhs

@donewithitalltodayandxmas- that's your opinion that it was reasonable to cloe businesses completely for such long periods. Obviously, small businesses will tend to suffer more because of this unlike huge firms.
If the government had been more competent from the start of the pandemic in the first place it wouldn't have been necessary.
The 3 million excluded were those with Ltd companies and those who only became SE recently, although I believe they have just included the latter group.

I haven't specifically blamed the government for the state of the NHS on here but obviously government are responsible for funding public services adequately. They have been badly under funded for well over a decade which was one reason we had to close society to manage NHS demand.
Indeed, it appears they made the right decisions re vaccine procurement but, as I said, NHS staff and others have been responsible for the efficient delivery.

I have missed these monthly 'the evil tories1!1!' political activists posts, we are at the cusp of a year on from lock down and we have the retrospective posts from the 'critical thinkers' OP on what they should have done.

This weak, uninformed, twitter hot take is why the terminally online a needing a reset.

I agree - I feel very worried for my children - would say 'our' children, but it doesn't apply to all children does it? That's where the problem lies.

It’s becoming a third world country, or similar to the Victorian or Regency times socially, when everything was geared to supporting the rich and family links were all that mattered. The economy is buggered because making and producing things here is uneconomic for the people compared to living costs. It reminds nds me of those 80s / 90s critiques of the third world countries that said local production was uneconomic because markets were flooded with cheap products from overseas - the cause of that may be different, lower standards over there rather than subsidies, but the net effect is the same. Meanwhile the excess wealth of the few drives up housing and their excess power drives up the immigration and increased population we absolutely cannot survive without, apparently. Lack of investment in public infrastructure and social infrastructure is very Victorian / 3rd world, as is the lack of public standards and increased corruption and nepotism. Overpopulation brings its own pressures by itself, but it is time to have a good think about moral and cultural standards and behaviour and why they existed. Not to mention public services. The baby boomers and early gen X, the first recognisable teenagers, threw out a lot that they did not understand imo.

TL;DR - you are very right op.

Yanbu. Agree with everything you said OP.

We’re the most educated the country has ever been, and yet... This.

No. I know of no country where the government is actually any better or worse. All are shitty in one way or another, it's just that the way differs.

Politicians have to lie - if they didn't then no one would vote for them and they wouldn't become politicians.
So voters get the politicians they ask for.

Sadly I think there has been a change for the worse as many politicians realise that voters think they lie so in which case why not go full out and lie big time for example £350 million for the NHS, 40 new hospitals to be built etc.

I have missed these monthly 'the evil tories

They are back

@nottherighttime loads of countried have had to close down and not all ltd companies were excluded I know of plenty that used furlough and grants etc
If recently self employed then yes its crap but you can't pay someone on figures they don't have and like I said they would be entitled to uc etc just like people like me who also lost their job, all in all the furlough etc has kept many places afloat and its never possible to help everyone , there will always be those that slip through
The nhs isn't totally badly funded it needs to also spend the money and it hasn't been great for more than just a decade, I had my kids 17!years ago and was about to be sent to a hospital an hr away because they didn't have a bed for me in my local hospital when I went into labour and this happened a lot
The nhs needs a huge overall and we need to be looking at other countries and how they run, it was not designed for this
And even germany / italy who have good healthcare were overwhelmed by this.
Maybe things weren't handled perfectly to start with but you only need to look across europe to see even with different measured etc europe has come out badly overall .
I just think they are all as bad as one another and a perfect world does not exsist

16:34MistressoftheDarkSide

^^

Awesome post, mistress

I agree but they were voted in by quite a substantial majority and a lot of poorer people voted for their best mate Boris too so we reap what we sow.

Completely agree. It’s astonishing that it’s taken a pandemic for some people to realise a fairer distribution of wealth is needed. Hopefully Labour pull their finger out by the next election and people will have realised that unless they’re in the 1% the tories will never be in their corner

The homelessness that is on the way will be due to these lockdowns.

I live in social housing and im childfree by choice. Because it is deemed that childless people dont need as much space, self isolating from my DH in a one bedroom flat should i catch Covid would be impossible. And my phone is too old for the Track and Trace app. . In a pandemic it has been proven that these policies have had massive consequences When i posted this on another thread the first reply i got was "were you expecting to be given a two bedroom flat. Thats one bedroom per person" We are still in a pandemic yet the default setting is still to worry more that someone is getting something you think they shouldnt have.
Surely this pandemic is proof that we need better quality and more spacious social housing. I laughed my socks off a year ago when we were being advised to use a seperate bathroom.

Well its not possible to have it both ways. Carry on the way we are and we can expect the next pandemic to be even worse.

The gig economy, zero hours contracts, low or no sick pay, overcrowded and cramped housing. All these policies contributed to where we are now. Which is why there has been such a concentrated effort to shift the blame.

And @Morgoth yes i completely agree.

@turquoisewaters

I have missed these monthly 'the evil tories

They are back

That's because they are.

It’s becoming a third world country, or similar to the Victorian or Regency times socially, when everything was geared to supporting the rich and family links were all that mattered.

We seem to have made a huge step back somewhere that now for many whether your parents own a house or not &/or can help you is a market of your future success.

I think one issue is people are aware of this & are scared they will not be able to help their dc so they vote Tory even though it's actually not about them if that makes sense.

One reason I refused to take the pandemic seriously at first (and even now, still extremely reluctantly) was because Blair lied so much. Since he cried wolf over WMD, I haven't believed anything the government has said, and even less the media when they stir things up; as soon as the papers started telling us how bad Covid was, I thought "yep, more press hysteria", like "your mobile phone is killing you", and "there are paedophiles around every corner".

If only there was a way to do something about sensationalist media; the trouble is, if we start censoring the press, there will be cries of "free press is essential for democracy". The thing is, we don't have a free press: only the illusion of one. It's becoming clearer all the time that the government has the press on a very tight leash, especially the BBC; and that the government regularly silences people who would speak, but don't toe their line.

Honestly, the future of the UK in general is not bright. It has extended itself far too much and is just loaded with debt. There’s a lot of talk about managed decline, but people just don’t want to believe it.

Does the UK even make anything anymore? How
can you expect the economy to run on services? If you can’t compete in the global economy (ie produce nothing of value) than things are going to get bleak. You can only squeeze the rich so much, eventually they’ll leave and things will stay pretty much the same.

This article is super old, but still very on point (nothing has really changed to stop the trends pointed out here): www.theguardian.com/business/2011/nov/16/why-britain-doesnt-make-things-manufacturing

I think it's the political system rather than the political party. It has been going in cycles like this for at least the last 40 years. Both the Tories and Labour revert to a certain type after a certain amount of time in power because power corrupts and it's a rare politician that escapes it. We will switch back to Labour soon, then back to the Tories and so it continues.

I don't agree with the PP who says stop teaching Politics, most politics students do not go on to be MPs or even work in Politics and it's only by teaching honestly about the system and how lobbying works that we can hope to one day have a generation that changes the system. You can't change something you don't understand.

On another note, I think we sometimes forget that the level of poverty we rail about here is riches compared to what poverty is in some other countries. Yes, we should be able to do better as a richer country but a lot of the things we worry about come from a position of relative privilege.

@teentipans

It’s becoming a third world country, or similar to the Victorian or Regency times socially, when everything was geared to supporting the rich and family links were all that mattered.

We seem to have made a huge step back somewhere that now for many whether your parents own a house or not &/or can help you is a market of your future success.

I think one issue is people are aware of this & are scared they will not be able to help their dc so they vote Tory even though it's actually not about them if that makes sense.

I think Tories know this and they are counting on people feeling like this and voting for them. Divide and rule

Yes they are scared they will lose more so cling on ever tighter to what they have however the vast majority of us still lose.