To not want to raise a child into this vicious, dog-eat-dog, cut-throat country?

[summergal250]

Really I'm pretty close to giving up on the idea of one day having kids.

Why?

Unless you're rich, everything in the country is just an endless, ceaseless, dog-eat-dog fight over scraps. Day after day, month after month, year after year. I don't want my child to have to deal with this crap.

Examples:
. I'm currently having issues with the landlord over various repairs he's dragging his feet on. His attitude is, if you don't like it move. I pay £700 for this crappy shoebox. I could just move - again - or threaten court action, which as empty as any money I'd get from that would be wiped out by legal fees.

. This is like my 10th rental in 12 years. EVERY single one them had at least one serious issue with it - mice, damp, noise issues, no washing machine, landlords entering property etc. Out all of them only one landlord was actually a decent person - all the rest having been lying, cheating, two-faced money-grubbers. Of course, not a problem if mummy and daddy can give you a deposit. In my 30s yet feel as I'm trapped in a permanent state of being 21.

. I work full time and do freelance in my spare time. I constantly look for new, better paying roles and I have been saving for a deposit for years and as house prices just rise and rise it feels I'm getting nowhere. I'm almost at the point of saying, why bother? How is it fair to raise a kid in some crummy tiny flat? The housing issue has been a problem for 20 years and NOTHING has been done - every year it just gets worse and worse. Meanwhile smug boomers who bought their semi for £80K in 1979 bang on about avocados.

. I got conned into doing a degree which every adult in my teens said would be a ticket to a great future. Instead, all it represents is a massive pile of debt and a waste of three years. Yet, even a receptionist job now insists on a degree, so you have to do it, even though only a degree from Oxbridge or a top redbrick is worth anything these days.

. Jobs - graduated into the recession. I've had jobs where I've been bullied, others with psycho bosses, others with vicious backstabbing 'colleagues'. Constantly the implicit threat of - if you don't like it we'll fire you. Felt I was finally getting somewhere in my old job and then was made redundant during covid. Cue several months of soul-destroying unemployment. The job I have now is ok but less well paid then my old one - so, more struggle, more jostling for favour, wasting more of my free time looking for a better paid jobs, more endless rounds of interviews. I feel like I've been going up the down escalator the entire time. Every year it seems the jobs market gets fiercer, more competitive, more brutal and cut-throat.

. The low pay means I spend large chunks of my free time freelancing. I enjoy it but it can be exhausting. Atm I'm embroiled in a dispute with a client who is refusing to pay for some completed work (with £700) - turns out he's con man with a dodgy past. I'm having to take him to a small claims court - yet more of my time and energy wasted.

. Similar to an occasion a few months back where a hotel Cornwall was nothing like the pics when I got there - it was in a disgusting state. I cancelled and went elsewhere, and then was embroiled in a 3 month battle to get my money back, with the owner only relenting when I got the local council involved.

Spotting a pattern?

If you're not rich in this country everything's just a pointless, exhausting fight to keep your head above water. Every economic interaction is just a vicious bare-knuckle fight, with people out to shaft you for what they can. Honestly, if it wasn't for my family and friends I really would have just given up on the human race.

I won't go into the this country's general lack of manners, the yobbish behaviour of many people here, the rows of homeless tents in out high streets, the crappy education system, the utterly broken and corrupt political system, and the general utter madness society seems to fall further into with every passing year. The quality of life here just deteriorates every year.

So, basically, I don't want to inflict this on a child. My life is worse than my parents - fact. I'm doubt I'll ever reach their level. If you're not rich, children have no future in this country - just an endless treadmill of debt and exploitation. And every trend I've discussed above is getting worse - I just dread to think how things will be when they grew up.

And before people start saying, 'maybe it's you' - believe you me, I've fought coming to these conclusions tooth and nail. Grew up in a firm Old Labour home - solidarity and all that. I used to be the classic caring, sharing, naive people-pleaser - after years of being taken advantage of and shafted I've bit by bit given up. Now all I care about is myself, my family and my immediate friends.

I hear you OP.

The cost of housing is ludicrous, it’s so hard to get onto the property ladder without inheritance for the deposit or a really big salary which includes decent bonuses. This wouldn’t be such a big problem if our rental sector wasn’t so insecure, landlords can give notice of two months (has this changed or still the case?) which is particularly problematic if you have kids in a local school and the prices in the areas have gone up since the start of your tenancy so you’re then priced out of the local market. Landlords very often drag their feet on repairs (just as you describe) and so much rental accommodation is subpar anyway. Some landlords are great but they seem to be in the minority.

We don’t make it easy for families here. Childcare is extortionate especially in London and south east where it is very often as much if not more than your rent or mortgage. Oh and we don’t provide funded hours until age 3!? Two working patents earning 49,000 so combined income of 98,000 can claim child benefit (which isn’t much anyway) but households where one parent is in work and earning between 50 and 60k (not that much for a family in London or south east) have to pay it back in increments.

We also have huge inequality in our education system where the wealthy middle classes either pay for private schools, pay for 11+ tutoring or pay to live near a good comp. The disparity in wealth in this country is shocking. This is one of the reasons we’ve only had one child, I’d love another but worry we just can’t afford it.

There is a lot about the U.K. that is great but the Tories have really trashed the country since they got into power and Brexit (another Tory disaster) is going to make it even worse, it already is. We have made it significantly harder to trade with our closest trading partner and our growth rate is already lagging behind other G7 countries and have labour shortages in many sectors exacerbating this.

The problem with our tax system is that no distinction is made between rich people and people with a high income. There are a lot of wealthy people - especially people in their 60s or older now - who never earned a particularly high income but ended up rich, normally through a combination of buying a house in the 1970s or 1980s that has increased in value many times over and through having a defined benefit pension. Some of them were even able to snap up extra properties through extremely leveraged loan products earlier in the housing boom.

On the flip side there are people in their 30s on £100k incomes in London who can barely get a mortgage on a family home over an hour's commute away. Yet whilst we tax the high income quite heavily, the person with housing wealth barely gets taxed at all. The primary source of wealth increases in the last decade have not been work but home ownership so the main driver of wealth has not been taxed!

Also, it's problematic that income tax does not take into account lifetime earnings. I earn a decent whack these days, not six figures but I pay quite a lot of 40% tax nonetheless. However, in my 20s I didn't earn much, averaging out at about £29k per annum for my first decade in work. In contrast my brother earns similar amounts to me now but started earning good money in his career a lot earlier, averaging out at £50k per annum in his 20s. I think we need to be a bit more lenient in how we tax people who only earn a high income for the last few years of their careers, like teachers who become headteachers only in their 50s for example. Lifetime earnings should be a factor in the rates people pay. This would also go some way to address the gender pay gap as women tend to spend more time out of the workforce than men.

The tax system here does need reform. In France, one of those countries where average families are £8800 per year better off than British families, inheritance tax is 60% and kicks in at £0. In the UK, the ridiculously low inheritance tax rates not only mean that luck of birth is still more important for most people than how hard they work, but it encourages all sorts of bad practices to avoid selling the family home to pay care home fees or ensure inheritance.

In The Netherlands, another of those countries where families are around £8800 per year better off, income tax kicks in at a much lower level as the personal allowance is significantly lower. People might not pay much tax but even paying tax at all makes you feel as if have more say in society.

In the UK, this massive personal allowance has been developed by successive governments as a vote winner and has encouraged businesses to pay low wages because their employees will barely be paying any tax. To have so many workers not paying any tax is a really bad idea.

I don't agree that the UK is low tax. It all works out equally in the end. The equivalent of council tax on my house in France is 815 euros per year but the previous owner only paid 105 euros because she was retired. In The Netherlands, tax rates look higher but there are more allowances. For instance, you can deduct all your travelling to work expenses up to a maximum of 120km per day from your income tax bill (or at least your employer will at source). Mortgage interest tax relief for first time buyers still exists. Rental income is taxed on a set level, so if you work harder to provide a nicer property, you don't pay any more tax than a slummy landlord who puts in no effort does. And its much cheaper and simpler to administrate.

When you take into account other countries' deductions and council tax rates, the UK isn't that low tax for people in the middle at all. Its actually quite high tax. But the system isn't very redistributive because wages are too low and costs of basic services too high. And you can't educate yourself out of it without incurring massive debt. Tuition fees in The Netherlands are around 1900 euros per year, and they were reduced last year because the economy is doing well.

What is cheap here is car tax and other taxes relating to cars.

@AchatAVendre completely agree

@BetterFuture1985 yes wealth is the issue & big source of inequality

I agree I certainly wouldn't call the UK low tax. And the taxes people pay in the middle are eye watering. A graduate with two children earning £60k a year technically pays a marginal tax rate (marginal tax rate being the amount they pay on the last £1 they earn) of 70.25%. That's made up of 40% income tax, 3.25% national insurance, paying the higher tax charge on child benefit is 18% and repaying student debt - to all intents and purposes a graduate tax - is 9%.

This brutal squeezing of the graduate middle class affects us all. If you're a highly skilled graduate in the private sector you demand higher wages. That's why it's difficult for people to afford solicitors these days for things like divorces. People in the middle cannot do that because their skills are more common. So they end up like the OP; even with a good wage they can't save much because their taxes are so high. As a result, they cannot pass on what they're earning through any kind of trickle down because they can only buy the essentials. The only people really keeping a lot of companies going in the luxury markets, holidays etc are baby boomers.

I think one of the hardest things is so many people seem to think the solution is more government spending. I'm in the squeezed middle and the only government service I regularly use is a repeat prescription for the pill.

We don't have kids yet and at this stage the amount of tax we have to pay and not see is staggering (income tax for two £50-60k salaries + we're about to pay £17k in stamp duty as FTBs who get no tax break). I didn't grow up in the UK so didn't use healthcare or education here, so I'm a net benefit to the system - and I love this country and so appreciate the opportunities I've had but it's been expensive; I potentially would've been better off staying put.

I support redistributive taxation but the spectre of more and more badly targeted government spending and no solutions when you know you're going to be the one to pay for it forever is quite scary.

Then leave.

Standing ovation for that banger of a post 🙄

Some would love to but the Brexit geniuses made that a hell of a lot more difficult.

@Crankley was an enthusiastic Brexiter and Boris Johnson supporter. Perhaps she still is. Thanks for making it hugely more difficult for the rest of us to leave, Crankley. Are you happy with how things in the UK have progressed since the Referendum? NB you may have noticed that Boris Johnson has been rather keen to get out of the deal you were boasting about on a previous thread.

Work overseas. Meet a hot man, settle down and have kids there. You need a break. Go swim in the sea, relax and have some fun. You are stressed, drained and fed up.

It’s always someone else’s fault isn’t it? Their fault the OP did a sit degree, their fault she has to rent crap flats, their fault she can’t earn much money and now their fault that she can’t even move somewhere better.

Thank God it's so easy to work overseas. You could just pop over to abroad next week, OP, and pick up a job.

The Brexit thing is cause and effect, yes. The same people who very deliberately voted for most people not to be able to work in the EU, are those still telling us to bugger off out of the UK if we don't like the massively deteriorating situation here. Deteriorating largely because of the politicians these very same people enthusiastically voted in.
Do you expect to be popular too?

I agree OP, I feel badly out of step with contemporary mores. I know it's just an example, but all the cars I see where the owner has paid someone to make them a set of illegal number plates shows to me that I am out of step and that there is no enforcement of minor law breaking, and deliberate law-breaking as an aspiration.

This place is finished and I'll be leaving as soon as I can - and I never thought I'd say that.

Expect to be popular?

No, it’s never popular to tell people to take some responsibility for where their life is going.

What an astonishing level of ignorance !

This 100%

I’m all for people taking responsibility for their actions. Please will you take responsibility for voting for this dire economic situation that is making so many people’s lives hell?

This - life can be really shit, it's how you deal with it that matters.

Er, what?

What are thinking I voted for?

OP I think you’ll find that all human society is pretty cutthroat and dog eat dog.

I’ve lived in another country that’s seen as very desirable to people in the U.K.. the weather is ‘better’, but whether public services and education are any better I don’t know. There are terrible substance abuse problems and wealth inequality in that country too.

I’m not a raving Tory by any means.

But if you’re lucky enough to have your health and people around you to give moral support it’s not too bad.

Where I live, you can be in central London by train in under two hours. You can rent a studio flat for under £500 pcm. There are some, not loads, of graduate jobs. The transport network is ok. It’s green and feels quite safe.

As a PP has said, for generations people have moved for quality of life, and work. The concept that there was a time when your average single young person, of even couple could afford a property of their own is simply not true. For generations, millions of people in the UK have lived in tied accommodation, in boarding houses, in extended family groups, and in vastly overcrowded and substandard properties. It was common where I live for newly married couples to live in their parents parlour or similar to save up for their first house until not that long ago.

It’s not a race to the bottom, but it shows that personal security and fulfilment has through the generations, always taken a lot of effort and a little luck.

I’m thinking of my four great grandmothers, as far as I know anyway. One had eight children, of whom four died in infancy and she was widowed very young. One moved from a very rural area to a city when newly married and had 11 children. Another did similar and had 12 children. Another lived in a two-room cottage with a dirt floor and died young leaving her four sons orphans.

In contrast, I’ve been away to university, lived overseas, had various mortgages, owned a limited company, had some interesting jobs, and got married to the person I wanted, when I wanted. We were fortunate with fertility, and decided when to have our children.

i’ve also been on a financial precipice at one stage, had truly awful jobs and managers, and thought that there was no hope. There have been no inheritances in our family ever as far as I know.

The truth is, all we can know is that the grass is greener where it it’s watered. And what might be better for society may or may not be good for us personally.

Whilst I know for a fact that all sorts of people live in grinding poverty in the U.K. , I just can’t see that it’s so bad overall when there is a huge market for complete luxury items like fancy TVs, gaming, balloon arches, concerts/festivals, fireworks, eating out, tattoos and fizzy drinks.

Get your head up OP, start to take and feel more in control of your own life. Then perhaps you’ll feel more equipped for some of the big life decisions that you clearly would like to make.

I sympathise with you, op. It just feels like everyone else wants their hands in my bank account.

poor quality expensive stuff, constant never ending steam of choices, overwhelming bombarding of marketing.

all make life so complicated!

Actually, there is only one photo of such a sign. It's held by the London Metropolitan University and it's provenance is not certain; academics have said it might be a fake.

However, we have to take a step back and think about this. How important is a photograph? I'd say not very. You don't need a photograph to know that members of the Windrush Generation struggled to find lodgings in the 1950s. There are literally thousands of first hand accounts we can rely on.

But we also have some reason to be sceptical about the signs themselves. Anti-Irish sentiment was much more rife before the war than after it and we don't have the same volume of accounts of Irish people facing prejudice in the postwar era. In fact, claims of such Irish sentiment appear to largely stem from claims at the height of the Troubles in the 1980s.

What certainly did exist were signs saying "No Coloureds" and "No West Indians." That can be found in BBC archive footage. But the sign including the Irish probably never happened.

I read your post last night, and have been considering my response to it ever since. No, you are not unreasonable to not want to have a child in what you consider a hostile world......however, I would urge you to recall the thousands of your ancestors that did exactly that, then sit back and enjoy the ride; it will all be over very soon. And if you don't take a moment to appreciate the enormity of the gift of your life on this planet, you might miss it, and that would be a shame.