AIBU to think this might be it for the UK and will never get better?

[Desperado40]

I am sorry for a very pessimistic view, but I feel we are stuck in a downward spiral in the UK. Is it just me, or does anyone else think that we will be stuck in this loop with the effects of Brexit and a decade of austerity taking decades to ever recover from (if ever?).
If anyone has a better outlook, please let me know.

How many times do you think the UK or England has been like this over the past 500 years OP?

Things go up and down. Even when people compare to the 70s or 40s or whatever that is still very modern and recent history

Go back hundreds of years and see that bad times happened and it got resolved.

There are periods of history in our country that make this look like a walk in the park.

I cannot believe the amount of posters saying 'it's global'.

The appalling state of the NHS is not global, that has been a very conscious decision by the government.

Brexit is not global.

The government's behaviour during the pandemic is not global.

The devaluing of the work of 'normal' people, particularly the public sector.

The constant 'where is the money going to come from?'... Maybe from the people at the top that are hoarding it. Maybe (heaven forbid) shareholders of businesses in the private sector.

Maybe it is right that people who can afford it, pay for their social care. It looks like Social Care Reform has really been kicked down the road anyway. The reform is not going to make much, if any, difference to regular working people. If you get down into the detail, you realise it is another hand out to their mates.

The absolute lie that we live in some kind of meritocracy and we can all be like our friends with inherited wealth if we just work hard enough and make good business decisions.

It's a global economic problem and it comes in cycles. We've been here before and will be again.

But in between things will be better.

We live in some upside down society where every 2nd person has a Range Rover, but people with treatable illnesses and injuries are left (or turned away) to die, because there are no ambulances and no beds.

'There is no money' and people just accept this utter bullshit, despite masses of evidence to the contrary in front of their eyes.

There are lots of things going on globally also, we are right down at the bottom of the pile but most countries are affected. I was quite surprised to be honest that countries such as the US, Australia, Canada and NZ are also battling with severe shortages of healthcate staff. Conditions during lockdown certainly have played a part but they pay decent wages there for those staff and up until now have been universally better to work for than the NHS. We are deeper into the shit show for sure but yea was surprised.

Drama llama

Really hope you don’t have children and air these daft apocalyptic views

Globalisation, consumerisation & digitalisation was sold to us as a way we could access cheap stuff made abroad. It bought us a few decades where

Actually what it really was, was a way for capital owners to access cheap labour abroad, create markets for products we don't need, and generate a lot of waste.

The benefits of it in terms of profits were never distributed fairly, all it has done is concentrate wealth driven by labour and value creation, into the hands of an ever smaller pool of individuals, who are able to hide behind corporate structures.

In a village centuries ago, if one or two individuals were accruing more than their share of the local wealth it was obvious and easily redressed, in a global economy its easier to hide the inequality for longer.

Beds and ambulances are the easy part, the issue is not enough staff and pay would only somewhat fix that. How can we make working in healthcare more appealing?

It'll definitely be a self-fulfilling prophecy if people come to believe this.

Whilst it is a global problem, I do think that the UK is going to have to face reality , namely that we are not an empire, we are a relatively small island with great swathes of the population living in poverty. And we have deliberately made it hard to trade with our closest neighbours. As someone said recently we are the only nation to have declared a trade war on ourselves! Unless we stop lying to ourselves things are not going to improve.

Your final paragraph is a joke surely?

Do you know anything about history and how society was divided up pre and post industrialisation?

Of course it will get better, but the country needs to grow up, take stock and take responsibility.

Brexit was a disaster, because it tapped into fantasies about what people wished was wrong with the country, rather than what was actually wrong. Naturally it didn't solve anything, it made the situation worse.

So many things need reform. The political system, the nhs, social care, education, welfare. The U.K. needs people willing to grasp those very difficult problems and make the better. The country also needs a plan for growth and development.

Decline can only be stopped by working through the problems.

There is a larger global adjustment going on. The problems with supply, health services, etc, are by no means limited to the UK.

To some extent we've all been living for the past 100 years with expectations of more and more which have never been really sustainable, and which have been fueled by very cheap energy. There has also been a long push to global economic integration, and we are now all seeing the downsides of this in a real way. But this was not something that only the UK did, it was pushed by all the higher economic bodies, the banks, the stock market, the World Bank, IMF, etc. So far no one has figured out how to really start devolving that and creating a more resilient economy.

It's also true that there have been series of economic booms and busts for decades, as well as social or cultural fluctuations. Right now the cultural patrimony of the west is under attack in many ways so it should not be a huge surprise that people feel kind of depressed.

One of the things that concerns me most right now is how drugs have come to play such a huge role in social breakdown. It's difficult to see how we could put that genie back in the bottle. But it drives so much crime, homlessness, etc.

The appalling state of the NHS is not global, that has been a very conscious decision by the government.

And yet a large majority of the globe would be better off if they had the NHS, even in it's present state.

Brexit is not global

The vast majority of the globe are not in the EU, or anything like it, and never will be, and don't see that as a problem.

The government's behaviour during the pandemic is not global

Remember when everyone was moaning about the death statistics, how badly the UK was doing? I've looked at the cumulative figures recently, we are now middling for large European countries. We're not an outlier any more, things have equalised.

It isn't global though. There are global issues, but all the stats show the U.K. to be particularly badly affected.

And that's because of self inflicted issues like Brexit, lack of political reform, failing to tackle nhs issues.

Im in ROI and we have our own problems, but the mood of the country is far more positive than I see from my friends in the U.K.

Anyone who remembers the 70s, will know that this is cyclical. We'll have a few tough years and then we'll bounce back.

In a way, the fuel crisis is a good thing because it will force governments to stop fannying around and commit more effort towards net zero, in the same way it will force more home owners to upgrade their insulation, heating systems, cars etc to more economic, greener versions.

We are still rather an outlier though.

Because although people aren't dying of it so much, the impact isn't just death. Even with end of widespread testing, we still have the highest rates per 000 population in Europe

That's more people ill, more lost work days, more in hospital, more long covid.

The west/ developed world is in a terminal relative decline.

The GDP per capita still isn't back at 2006 levels in the UK, not even taking into account inflation!

When they say the economy is growing it's only because the population is growing. Of course more people = more money but it's not more per person. We are all getting poorer, that's why we feel poorer.

This was all the case even before Brexit COVID Ukraine.

Brexit and the decade of austerity were Tory policies, which have damaged the economy. They are responsible for these and the UK has performed worse than it should have because of these.

But there are global issues too. (Global birth rates rapidly declining being the biggest long term issue)

If you look at the top countries by population and total GDP in 2100 it's very different g7/ G20 from today.

The new power will be in Asia/ Africa not Europe/ USA.

G7 2100: India, China, Nigeria, Pakistan, USA, Indonesia, Ethiopia.

Well said.

The 1930s (Depression) 1940s (War) 1950s (Rebuilding after the War) were far harder in this country.

Tbh - all of you quacking on about range rovers and distribution of wealth for social care/NHS/etc probably need to nip over to scotsnet to see the folk running away from the new tax obligations imposed by the Scottish government to fund them.

Everyone wants more - until the bill arrives.

Yep even some pro Brexit politicians like Rees Mog said it would take a generation for this things to improve post Brexit.

Exactly. Outcomes for poorer people seem to be much better in countries where there are other health systems. Germany, France, Australia, Spain.

Why does everyone jump to the US as the default?

Not just UK - I am generally an optimist, honest, but I do feel like I've been lucky to live my life in a period of unprecedented relative peace, stability and prosperity, but that's now peaked. The environment's screwed and we're going to see mass displacement of people are war because more places will become uninhabitable. Inequality is at a ridiculous point with far too few people having far too much money and not caring to do anything with it for other people and so on.

I had no reason to doubt you about our current rates of covid, and don't even particularly care, but when I googled, the first data that came up said we were something like 25th highest, and Germany had five times our rate, and France had 15 times our rate.

www.statista.com/statistics/1139048/coronavirus-case-rates-in-the-past-7-days-in-europe-by-country/