to think we are entering a new age of feudalism

[shjjhs12]

Only a few generations ago home ownership was an absolute rite of passage, even the most average job could support an entire family, living standards were good, the retirement age was 65, a 9-5 really was just a 9-5, ect. Today things look completely different. Young people are forced to live at home until their mid 20s as it’s too expensive to move out, home ownership is becoming more and more unrealistic, both parents working far more hours still struggles to maintain a good standard of living, driving is becoming very expensive, holidays are becoming unattainable, fewer people are getting married and having children because of how expensive it is. Today the lives of many people have become far more meaningless with very little to show for, many of us are now just cogs in the machine making money for someone we will never meet. Living standards are materially getting far worse for the majority of people yet the wealth of the super rich keeps growing to the point where now 0.1% of people control massive corporations more powerful than some countries. Anyone else feel like we are entering a new age of feudalism where effectively everyone apart from the super rich is being reduced to a peasant class.

That's the point. If things improved so much that you and your family aren't now living in a slum or working down a mine, then why should we accept such a massive decline in living standards now?
It's not like there's a shortage of wealth, billionaires are getting richer, poor people still counting their pennies as always.

👏👏👏
Honestly people need to read some actual history books instead of parroting words and phrases they don't understand.

Not even true for the MC. Most of them rented too.

I agree totally! The public sector is soooo good in comparison. Both can be shit but the public sector is slightly less shit.

YANBU and I've been saying this for ages.

There is an international asset owning class - our cabinet, Trump, Zelenskiy et al are all members of it - and below it varying degrees of precarity.

Some people own the home they live in. Fewer in number than forty years ago, and actively stripped of whatever they've managed to accumulate by various mechanisms. We used to call them the middle class.

Others don't even own that one asset and never will. Their only wealth is in cash, value now eroded.

Others don't even have cash, just cashflow, diminishing, increasingly accompanied by debt as what they earn is worth less and less . They are the precarity, still holding onto the lie of working and doing the right thing.

They are the precariat

'Only a few generations ago.....living standards were good.' No they weren't......most British adults in the 1950/60s didn't have their own teeth. Clare Rayner (remember her) recalled working on a maternity ward in the 1960s, and placing a glass of water beside every bed.....for the nursing mothers to place their false teeth in. I grew up in Manchester in the 1960s: my father worked for British Rail, my mother a waitress. We didn't have a telephone, fridge, shower, washing machine, or car. My mother wheeled the washing in a pram, once a week, to a communal 'wash house'. I went to a 'posh' university (Exeter), where the bathroom was kept locked, and you were allowed access to it once a week. We considered this perfectly normal.

Hmm, not sure how well this thread sits with the other thread at the moment about how poor we all were in the 1970's. I don't think home ownership was normal a few generations ago, to be honest.

33% council rentals
33% private rentals
33% owner occupied

that’s the 1970s stats for homes

The spread of asset ownership has narrowed conspicuously since the 1970s though, and in the last 15 years cash has been devalued. If you don't own "stuff" now, you're more unlikely to do so with every passing day and what you do own (cash) is worth less with every passing day.

Just look at that budget-NOT-BUDGET on Friday. Once they'd got through with that, every citizen in the UK had had their personal cash wealth devalued, whether their personal cash wealth was a fiver or whether it was £5k. Every single person's money that they had gone out to work to earn was worth less by the end of Friday. And worth even less again by midday on Monday.

And that's just one day.

It's been happening for fifteen years!

Isleoftights The British were renowned for bathing once a week and not showering, it was how things were

Yes, what strikes me is not that we were only allowed to bath once a week (in the late 1960s), but that nobody ever commented on this fact - including my newly acquired best friend, who had been at Eton !

I don't think baths are the issue.

Nah, the last 50-70 years have been a blip historically. Lucky for those who could benefit in those times with large scale home ownership (due to widespread cheap credit and selling off social housing), foreign holidays, lots of disposable income, buying not repairing). It’s out of whack with the ways of the world. Why do people think these things are some kind of right? All these things only really existed in but a blink of an eye, if that.

it’s unlike those times will re-emerge. Probably likely to see the Uber so Italian/materialism on the wane

I wouldn’t call it feudalism but the situation is crap and getting worse for a lot of people, apart from those who are very rich.
I was listening Keir Stamer’s speech today and he said rightly that lots of people lost hope. And another thing that we should live not survive.

ps. A friend at Exeter University was sharing a house with an American student, who she said was 'really weird'. In what way is he 'weird' - I asked. 'Well, he has a shower EVERY DAY'. (True story !)

it’s unlike those times will re-emerge.

Well they won't ofc if we just lie back and take it.

But, y'know, we don't have to. We don't have to keep a cabinet of millionaires in power when they actively destroy the value of our work which is the cash we get for it, when it's all we've got.

I've never seen so many hysterical, drama laden posts in one night. Is this what Britain has become? Full of overwrought doom-mongers, competing to see who can become the most popular prophet of doom?

I don't see any of you trying to run the country. Maybe give it 6 months before we have yet another Prime Minister, because all of this chopping and changing is what is really damaging the economy.

It's a tough one! I think we want more. We all want a house with two toilets, foreign holidays. Take outs, phone contracts etc. These were all unheard of.
Living standards will drop and I think we have had it good for a long time. However, with the knowledge and skills we have now we should be able to make sure that we don't go backwards abs at least keep the standard of living we have worked hard for!

The OP has the attitude that a lot of people have now in assuming the past was rosy and the hardships of now are the first hardships ever faced
My parents bought their house in the early 60s and were the first people from either side of the family ever to do that. Living standards were far lower whether you owned or rented
I don't for one minute want my DCs or other young folk to have to back to that but we should not assume that the affluence and stability of the last 30ish years is the norm as it really isn't

I was public sector and worked those hours for only 37.5hrs pay…it was expected. True we were not generating profit, but we were trying to keep services afloat despite budget cuts. Austerity was bad for all concerned.

Some people own the home they live in. Fewer in number than forty years ago,

Fewer than twenty years ago, because actually more own homes now than did in 1982.

Don't put up with it OP. Somebody on here pointed me in this direction.

wesayenough.co.uk/

I don't think baths are the issue.

they are fundamental to the issue, they are part of the cultural differences between 1970s and 2022

we didn’t expect to bath more than once a week, central heating wasn’t widespread, a quick wash your face I. A cold bathroom was what you got. Things were different, not bad jyst a different way of living.

If anyone is interested in actual statistics and facts rather than made up definitions and utter bullshit based on their own very limited perspective this is interesting

propertyindustryeye.com/what-175-years-of-data-tell-us-about-house-price-affordability-in-the-uk/

Basically

• the majority (and literally i mean just edging over 50% of the population rather than a huge proportion) owning rather than renting their homes only started from the mid 1970s
• even at the absolute peak of home ownership in the mid 2000s this was only about 70% of the population
• in our now apparently completely unaffordable and feudalistic end times this has only decreased by about 6% from said absolute historic peak.

I think the difference is that unaffordable private rent is the norm now.

When I was a small child in primary school most families either had a mortgage or a council house.

We all had gardens, and pets.

So many children nowadays live in exorbitantly priced privately rented flats with no outdoor space and no hope of anything better.