Are things in the UK really that bad?

[namechange10022002]

I’ve been living overseas for about seven years and I am lucky to have a very safe, easy, comfortable life here but for various reasons I really want to move back home to England. However I keep hearing about how bad the situation is over there, with the cost of living crisis, housing, energy bills, health service, etc. For example I was watching Triggernometry and the hosts were saying the next few years are going to be extremely difficult for everyone there. I was just wondering, is it really as bad as they say? If you never watched or read the news or looked at social media, would you notice the difference in your quality of life? What is the general feeling on the ground, so to speak?

I guess I just want to know if it would be a mistake to move back there.

I would love to live in Canada! 90k is a lot for some places, not a lot for others. It would depend very much on house/ size of mortgage/ area. It's not a huge amount for London. It won't get you private schools or healthcare or really amazing long haul holidays.

This.

It is, on so many fronts.

e.g. Most expensive/ difficult country to have children.

I live in a predominantly working class Northern city. I dont know anyone experiencing the hardship that posters are on Mumsnet. I'm a SAHM as are many of my friends so we are single income households. All have our heating on, still doing the weekly shop, days out with the kids, we are overpaying substantially on our mortgage and have a european holiday booked for the summer. None of us have two cars. We have a credit card that we clear in full each month. Who knows what lies ahead but things where I am aren't as bad as on mumsnet. I've needed 3x GP appointments in December, one for each child, seen same day. I had to cancel two hospital appointments in December because I had norovirus and they were rebooked straight away for early Feb. The people I know who are struggling (a couple of relatives) have always struggled and aren't more so now. All their children have the latest iPhone etc so they certainly could cut back if they wanted to but have never lived any other way. This is only my personal experience.

Do you think other countries are not also on strike? (Spoiler... they are!).

Exactly this.

It’s not great right now is it. I’ve not tried to get a GP appointment myself but had no problems getting them on the same day for dc.

My North American friends including in Canada tell me things aren’t great over there either and they’ve got covid, increase in kids getting sick along with drug shortages so it’s clearly not just Brexit causing this like most people on mumsnet think it’s a global problem.

I think in places like Germany, the average is much higher..I looked up average incomes in Germany and it's around the equivalent of £41k which is london/SE style salaries. And most parts of Germany have lower property prices.

I would not mind buying a 'soviet style' apartment if it was in a decent area but honestly even the ex council flats in my area are £350k. And even in a cheaper area they would still be £300k. So it wasn't a big deal spending a bit more to buy something a bit prettier with stained glass windows and a bay window. But the trouble is that there is no cheaper alternative really for lower earners.

Yes and yes. As well as Australia, most of Europe and the USA. Plus Russia and China.

which countries are YOU comparing it to that makes UK seem so shit?

I think though that if the OP has family and friends in the UK she's not insulated from vicarious worry about the state of things any more than she would be if she lived here with private medical care etc. She's asking whether things are going to feel miserable and difficult for her on a personal level if she moves here. I think that's a pretty hard question to answer. Obviously if her family and friends and sense of home are here that's a big pull. Same reason many of us don't leave

We are fortunate and live in a comfortable middle class bubble but even so in everyday life I notice a basic feeling that nothing works properly which is scary and depressing. Cost of living crisis is very evident - food so expensive and trying not to put the heating on and we are comfortably off compared to most.

Difficulty getting medical appointments and treatment. My relatives have had to pay privately twice for urgent life-saving surgery (thousands of pounds) as no prospect of treatment in time on the NHS (waiting list of several months even to get on the waiting list for cancer surgery). Our own GP asked if I could afford to take DD privately after she referred her to a specialist and the referral got refused by the consultant. Whenever I take the kids anywhere by car it crosses my mind that if we were in an accident we might not get help and it scares me. My dad died last year and in some ways I’m glad as it would have been a nightmare trying to get his complex needs met now (it was pretty bad then - to the point that we struggled to get a doctor to come out to certify his death as they were so overstretched).

Public services are falling apart. We get post once every few weeks (not related to the strikes - has been like that for a year now), trains are so unreliable (even not duringstrikes) that we don’t make plans the way we used to. Bus services cut back so public transport doesn’t really function, roads are full of potholes that never get fixed. Town centre is full of boarded up shops and restaurants that can’t operate properly due to lack of staff.

We are stuck here but if I was settled elsewhere there is no way I’d return.

A lot of Russian citizens seem to think their Country is great and everything is good and that the UK is a joke. Which goes to show you how useful comparisons are.

Whatabouttery. Do you think Countries that strike frequently like France have decimated their health service

(Spoiler... they haven't!)

You posted this chart (unknown provenance, you didn’t name a source, so I’ve no idea if it’s accurate but presume you believe it to be) on another thread, which indicates that average house prices are higher than Germany than in the UK. So if the average German wage of €41k is equivalent with London, how can it also be true that housing is more affordable in Germany?

But you can’t compare “most parts of Germany” - or most parts of any country - with
London, which is where the poster with an income of £110k lives. Housing affordability, particularly for young people, is a huge issue in virtually every European capital city. Likewise, “most parts of the UK” are more affordable than London and most other European capitals.

yes i once watched a documentary about Russia where a guy who worked on an oil rig said someone like him had a car, owned an apartment in the city as well as a dacha in the countryside, a stay at home wife and a son and daughter. What more can a man ask for, and Putin is great etc etc

You could interview an urban dweller in China and he would probably say something to that effect as well. And compared to what his grandparents and parents have, it would seem like heaven. Even with the covid restrictions.

As I said on another thread ' I'm 24 and I was looking to buy back just before Lizz Truss announced all of the increases. My Agreement in principle went from 3.3% and 4.2x to 8.6% and 3x which makes it impossible to buy in my east midlands area even on my wage of over £35,000. I did view and consider putting an offer on one then everything went to utter sh*t. I'm praying things get somewhat better, I've been slowly saving and I'm now 50/50 about whether once I finish my part time masters I stay in the UK or move abroad which will impact whether I should buy or not. If the mortgage offers dropped by at least 2 percent and I could buy at at least 3.5x my wage I would consider it, I'm in limbo at the minute living with family as I don't want to commit to a rental and be stuck for a year renting when it could change but I also don't want to impede on family for too long or just move to another house share. I have friends that live both in florida and in aus that have said I would earn substantially more abroad and just wait another year or two and move but I'm unsure.' but on top of that health is diabolical, my sister was in a serious accident and coma and left with life debilitating injuries, when we visited her one afternoon we noticed she had saturated a pad heavily and not a single health care professional checked we were actually family or came over to help after our requests, we ended up changing her ourselves. My dad has been trying to change jobs for 18 months now and every interview he has they treat him as if he is too old and don't bother giving him a proper interview, he is 46, the UK is awful and I am ashamed to live here, I'm not even British biologically- just born here. I'm part Irish part Arabic.

I am the poster with the combined income of 110k. didn't say my age in that post but I am 30 and my DH is 32 (so probably still count as young!)

The stats also support that Germans on average have more disposable income than people in the UK:

www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jul/13/average-uk-household-8800-a-year-worse-off-than-those-in-france-or-germany

Where is this ??

Kind of the point I was making: that it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

what we tend to do in Britain is believe we are above every other country. That somehow we should preside over the rest of the world in terms of what we should be doing and deserve.

It’s arrogant but totally opposite to Russia and China where people are brainwashed with propaganda to believe they have it good and they are lucky.

our press and media brainwashes us into believing our governments are crap and that we all deserve to much better and that we are being let down.

No other country in the world has a press like the uk does. It’s poison.

one poster up thread blamed all the ‘gullible brexit voters’ for ruining Britain. Like everyone is gullible but her. Yes of course. Couldn’t possibly be that she’s been reading too much guardian and spending too much time on Twitter. No. It has to be that what she has washed her brain with is far more worthy and ‘truthful’.

i think living in Britain is shit. It’s always been shit. The weathers crap and its too overcrowded. the nhs needs reforming and public services need a shake up. But I’m not dim enough to think that’s there’s some paradise somewhere that has it all. And it’s not money that the uk needs it needs leadership on all fronts.

but nobody will do anything for fear of doing a ‘truss’ and igniting a Twitter war. The end result is that we have mediocrity in government meaning nothing ever gets solved or shaken up.

that’s down to the social justice warriors and small but vocal minorities. At least brexit voters were up for changing the status quo.

Oh i love the weather.

The Russian and the Chinese person may not be wrong. After all what you have as your basis of comparison is your past experiences and the past experiences of your parents. Perhaps for the Russian and the Chinese, its not the propaganda but its just that genuinely life was terrible in the past, so they treasure that small amount of economic security they now enjoy (and the property they now own) and are willing to overlook their rulers' foolish experiments with imperialism.

From what I can see, many British people seem to have rose tinted views of the past. I am an immigrant so I can't really tell if life was better in the past and the UK has truly gone downhill (i came here in 2011 but I do feel everyone was much more optimistic when I first arrived). My DH grew up here and his life is definitely better now, his mum was a bohemian raising 4 kids so life was always very tough. Mumsnetters seem to recall a past where very ordinary people could buy houses in nice parts of London which does not correspond with DH's mum's experience- she had to raise 3 kids in a 1 bed flat before she could afford to upsize in London and money was always very tight. we both bought our flats at the same age and we both had to live at home before buying so nothing has changed on that front. Also she needed family help to upsize.

We live in Europe and I get so homesick sometimes but I just don't feel like I can come home. Things are comparatively ok here (Germany) and the kids are getting a good education. I can see a doctor whenever I want and although food prices have rocketed it still seems manageable. That said we are on a good income.

I miss the UK and Britons very much. I was hoping it wouldn't be that bad. This thread has made me so sad.

I used to get so, so homesick living abroad. I really love the UK. We came home in 2010. I do now, though, wonder if we would have come home if we’d been able to foresee Brexit and the terrible damage done by the Tories. It’s not the country it was twelve years ago.

I don't know about other EU countries, but pensioners can definitely live in Spain on a non-lucrative visa if they have an income of around £24k.

Services just don’t work properly or efficiently. Calling a bank, returning a parcel, making an appointment, arranging a trade, taking an item back to a shop; it’s all made harder by rubbish systems and generally people who are paid too little to care (and I don’t blame them!).

Things are too expensive and the cost of housing keeps us trapped in jobs. As a nation we eat poorly, don’t exercise enough and we accept poor standards to avoid making a fuss.

If we could afford to leave, we would.

I've been in France for 27 years. Services have declined here a bit over that time particularly the health service post covid. But I've always been able to get a same day gp appointment despite living rurally. And no hospital appointments were canceled due to covid.

Kids had school all the way through covid apart from the first lock down.

Gas has gone up but capped at 15% for 2023. Our electric bill has actually gone down. New nuclear plants are planned to meet future demand.

Animal feed for the farm has gone up a lot.

Legal services still functioning at normal speed.

Police service doesn't feel like it's declined.

We can live comfortably on our salaries. Foreign holidays cost more due to flights costing a lot more.

Food banks exist but no one with a job needs access.

The number of homeless doesn't seem to have increased in our closest big town.

I'm always shocked by the state of the Uk roads and the litter along them.

The British press seems to delight in painting Macron/the French as devils but my experience is in stark contrast.