'I am not a stupid person, I've got a BA and an MA. I am genuinely struggling to get my head around how we as a country have sleep walked into this situation'.
Because we are a nation where the greedy and entitled make up the majority. They voted Tory for the last 12 years and, those of them who are Tory party members, are about to elect Liz Truss- who will be a financial and environmental disaster- as PM.
We have spent 12 years as a country stripping money out of public services and our local councils until they are on the point of collapse. We have no substantial industry to compete on the world market because the only investment has been in low-skill, low-quality service industries like hospitality, catering, retail- which are quick to collapse as soon as the shit hits the fan in a recession. They are also the reason our country is full of hideous out of town 'retail parks' which suit big retail businesses and fast food places, create huge amounts of litter as the British public drive through the fast food joints, scoff their cheap, unhealthy, cruelly produced burgers and chicken bits and then chuck all the containers out of the car window as they drive. They do the same on our seafronts with fish and chip and fast food wrappers and in our towns and cities. Thry dump their rubbish in the countryside and don't card what damage any of this causes.
We have elected a government for 12 years who are only interested in the richest 10% and in making them richer. More billionaires, by a huge margin, have been created since Johnson came to power than in any equivalent time period ever. And more children and vulnerable people have fallen into poverty than in any equivalent time since the second world war. Yet people have continued to vote Tory.
We have allowed water companies to dump millions of hours of raw sewage into our rivers and seas snd now have the filthiest beaches in Europe. 18% of our beaches and rivers are clean. Denmark is 90%, Germany 89%. Portugal 89% .Why? Because water companies are privately owned and put profit before everything. They have not invested in maintaining and developing infrastructure so our sewers are struggling, pipes are unrepaired and we waste over a trillion litres of water a year in leaks, and we have not developed future clean water processing systems to meet the needs of a growing population and ridiculously huge house-building programme (that is not about providing 'desperately needed homes but about making very rich Tory builders even richer). Truss cut millions from the Evviro agency earmarked for protecting and developing clean water
www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/aug/22/liz-truss-environment-agency-cuts-sewage-water-pollution?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other.
We voted for Brexit which will reduce us to a small, struggling, isolated nation and we are already seeing the effects of it and there are many more to come over the next decades.
We are a nation where a large percentage of us never read anything intelligent about any of these issues- and are then shocked by the effects of the issues but we still sit back and do fuck-all about it. We elect our PMs based on 'charm' it seems and are already regretting Johnson going and saying Starmer doesn't have much 'charm' so we can't see how we would vote for him. We are stupid- the Daily Mail is the biggest selling and read paper and people believe its lies hate-stirring and fear-mongering.
We sold off energy companies and are in the same shit with them fir the same reasons as we are with water companies. Meanwhile they are making billions. Neither the government (who approve of them making billions) nor the regulators will intervene. And we just grumble.
We are nowhere near food self-sufficient. We import potatoes, carrots, broccoli, swede, brussel sprouts, apples, tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries- things we could be self-sufficient in. it's sll to do with profit. Buy it at Sainsbury's or another supermarket and they buy in such bulk they pay really low prices, haul it round the country or fly it in on planes and make millions. We could pay our own farmers more to grow more- but there's no one to pick it. There are other low-paid jobs that unskilled British people prefer because they are warmer, easier to get to. Farmers buy in foreign workers from across the world. If we paid them more, they could pay better wages and attract local people.
We insist on eating massive amounts of meat. We kill 150 million animals a month in this country for food. It's disgusting. Many are reared in sheds where hundreds are penned together under electric lights, never see daylight and are then taken, terrified to abattoirs. We now have over 1000 mega farms doing exactly this. That's where most of the meat you eat comes from. It's inhumane and terrible environmentally. Most British people don't care as long as they get their steak, lamb, chicken, Sunday roast, cheap burgers.
We are obsessed with trivial rubbish and status,: celebs, the car we drive, the clothes we wear, the electronic devices we own, jewellery, trainers, smart holidays- all as cheap as possible please and replaced next year to keep up with next door/friends.
We are rotting our country with landfill because we are wasteful - food, packaging and perfectly decent, usable clothes/furniture/toys that we just throw away because we feel like it.
We've involved ourselves in a war that is not our war. Ukraine is a highly corrupt place where the power is held by oligarchs not the government, where law and order mean very little there is so much corruption. Russia is the same. We should have let them get on with it. We have spent billions creating this mess and sooner or later they will have to settle it.
We have an NHS on the verge of collapse and about to be sold off and asset-stripped by American private equity companies- we will be paying for our healthcare at the point of delivery within 5 years, either through insurance or cash.
We're a selfish nation with a view of this country based on 75 years ago. We have no industry, the lowest wages, lowest living standards, biggest child poverty figures in Western Europe. We have the most polluted beaches snd rivers, are paying thousands more for energy than countries which relay much more than we do on Russian gas because we are a capitalist country with a government that has a very right-wing agenda and does not intervene to reduce profits and protect people.
I am sick of this country - of our political, our selfish, ignorant people and the empty, shallow, culture that exists. I would happily emigrate to somewhere cool in northern Europe or Ireland but they wouldn't have us anymore as citizens, just as migrants.