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.

Did I say it was okay?
I said it has got worse, not that things were or are 'okay'. It is much worse now. I hope that's clear now.

‘Badge of the moron’? What??

it’s not headlines about ambulance queues that’s the problem. The media now takes it upon itself to make headlines out of social media posts. pick a polarised view, preferably about alleged racism, brexit, trans activism etc, find a self proclaimed ‘expert’ to pontificate their opinions, blame it all on the unconscious bias of the pig ignorant general public and there you have your story.

and by the way you can paint whatever picture you need by cherry picking stats and coming up with angles. Most stories today are not balanced, well researched objective articles at all they are opinion pieces dressed up as news.

take all the ‘cost of living crisis’ stories on the bbc: the format is always find a single parent in a deprived area and run a 10 minute case study on how they are struggling to cope.

but we have NO idea about the context. How much do they spend on their phone bill, how do they manage their money? I’m sure cases are genuine but a balanced report would provide real figures to back up the story as evidence.

how about just once the bbc runs a story on how people are spending way too much on crap food and that lack of basic cooking skills is contributing to poor health. Or asking if it’s really necessary or if we should expect to be able to heat a whole house all winter when you don’t have a job.

the mental drain of being pummelled with this constant brainwashing is what is eroding the national spirit.

that doesn’t happen in Russia or China where their brains are being washed in a completely other way through government propaganda. And where they believe (or feel forced to say) they are ‘fortunate’.

I have sympathy with this. We saw with the pandemic how powerful the media can be with headlines. I don’t think they want to let that go.

Two things I heard that go with this view - one person saying we had a particularly brutal news cycle and another psychologist saying we’d be better off checking the news once a week.

A lot of what we see is meant to provoke a reaction, and usually fear or negativity.

You can be informed without this spike, a statistics programme is a good example. It counteracts the type of headline emotional hit

@Mezmer

But the whole point about media (and social media) is you need to develop some literacy and resilience around it.

People always bang on about how stories aren't "balanced"... no of course they aren't. They never have been and that isn't their function (the BBC excepted as part of its charter).

The way the media functions in a democracy is to provide a diverse clutch of views which provide early warning signals when things are not right and straws in the wind about how people feel about stuff that's important. They are not there simply to doggedly chronicle events like a stenographer. Their job is in part to engage people to think about what they want from their governments and to be canaries in the coalmines for when things aren't working. That means they print a lot of hyberbolic shit, for sure, and sometimes make things up. But what they do, even at their worst, is tap into real debates and narratives which are happening in a country.

I find it hilarious that you bring Russia and China into this debate and yes I know you're nuancing it enough to recognise that this is propaganda....

that doesn’t happen in Russia or China where their brains are being washed in a completely other way through government propaganda. And where they believe (or feel forced to say) they are ‘fortunate’.

But surely you can see that in countries where people are mentally cauterised by decades of not being allowed to have strong views, they don't have the mental capacity to challenge authority? This is not a good counterpoint to the UK media.

Our media are far, far from perfect, in fact they are frequently loathesome. But the point about them is there is plurality and you pick what you need from the outlets you find. I'd far rather have them free to roam and spew out their opinions, then make my own mind up than be forced to toe the propaganda line of some government entity claiming to be "balanced" (as I'm sure Russia Today claims it is).

The phrase "media scaremongering" is illiterate and is invariably applied by people who don't like having to think about anything unpleasant and want to remain in a bubble of comfort. As is borne out by a lot of the posts on this thread from people going "I'm alright in my naice market town, me".

I haven’t specifically said I’m for or against a free press. I’m just saying ‘it is what it is’ and that continual scrutiny and negative haranguing plays a big part in driving the public mood.

I don’t disagree that a free press is preferable to not having a free press. but the issue is that people do not have the will nor the mental capacity to filter what they consume or source check. They take what they read as gospel. They jump on bandwagons. They look to the wrong type of people for guidance. ‘Fashionable thought’ takes over from logical and rational thought. The result is that we are being kept in a constant state of dissatisfaction and angst.

its no coincidence that the demise of the UK has accelerated in the past 12 years or so. As this is when social media took hold. So now we dine out constantly on gossip masquerading as news. And news outlets have to create click bait to compete, churning out poorly researched sensationalism with a negative undertones. Because slagging stuff off and knocking people off pedestals is what gets the clicks.

you sound like you have a great grasp on the role the media plays in the UK and that you take what you need to know and the rest with a pinch of salt. Sadly not many people are like you.

we must always acknowledge that the UK has an exceptional press and this is both a blessing and a curse to Britain. But like you say, what is the alternative? China.

There is an alternative, other than China. It’s just not utilising the skills of those paid to provoke etc to full extent.

It’s very hard to pull back from where we are which is why imo people need to chat to their dc about the media rather than react to it too much. The next generation will need even better tools

Any registering at all that because you are financially well and have had no Gp issues, that may not be the case for all.

'poverty stricken' Goodness, lucky you.

Or you could just shut up. The trope is tiresome. Your subsequent reasoning serves to help in no way. You enjoy putting the boot into those desperate to leave. Go eat more cake.

But ‘people’ can’t chat to their dcs about it because many of them don’t realise there’s a problem. The evidence is on this thread.

people REALLY believe the tories are to blame for macro forces caused by war and a global pandemic
that Matt Hancock murdered their gran by purposefully withholding Ppe
that 50 million people voted for brexit because of a slogan on a bus
That 50 million people who voted for brexit are fascist scum

that the uk can seriously afford to absorb endless migration
that ALL white British people harbour post colonial racist views without knowing it
that left wingers are ‘kind’
that conservatives are ‘mean’
and that this means the majority of British people are mean because they voted conservative

and that toxic old britain must be held totally to account for all of the ills of the world, ignoring all of the massive contributions it has made to progress, science, justice and equality because none of that matters no just the bad stuff. And British white guys are totally to blame.

such is the crap that people actually believe and is evident all over social media

it’s little wonder op is looking on from afar with trepidation as we all flog ourselves senseless.

There’s quite a lot of hyperbole in your characterisation of what’s happening. I don't think anyone believes that 50 million people voted for Brexit for instance.

Did you think about going when Brexit was on the cards? Seems a shame to have waited until it wasn’t possible

So someone asks for suggestions and the best you've got is "do you have a time machine?".

Brexiters have no shame.

You people are laughable. I didn’t vote for Brexit and the poster answered better than your pointless post.

God people are irritating.

Fresh water will be like oil in a few years time.

Sadly even in one of the rainiest countries in Europe our Government haven't managed to build enough reservoirs to store it. 🤦🏻‍♀️ It's so incompetent you couldn't make it up.

Or done anything much to harness wind power here, or hydro power from all of our coastlines. Total insanity.

Pp would like to retire

To France. Not Portugal. They olanned to reture to France and speak fluent French per the posts. How does suggesting a visa to Portugal help with that?!

@Mezmer

There are certainly people who believe all these tropes you've just listed and many of them lack critical thinking skills. I know a lot of them.

But there are also people who believe the exact counterfactual to these from the opposite side of the political spectrum, ie that all is rosy in the UK and that immigrants are all to blame and that if Britain wasn't brilliant refugees wouldn't be arriving here in boats and that only problem with Brexit was that it wasn't a "harder" Brexit etc.

We all need to be far better educated to "read" media and understand it for sure. Far better critical thinking is needed and much better political education.

All that said, I do think that its measurably the case that public services are in a far poorer state today than they were 20 years ago in many parts of the country.

There's another thread on here in which a woman was told she was facing a five-hour wait for an ambulance for a very sick baby. This sort of situation would have been unthinkable in the early noughties.

There is a palpable sense that for many people in the UK, services aren't being delivered effectively, whether that's public or private services, that there isn't enough money to fund healthcare or education.

I am in an extremely privileged position in that I am comfortably off and have my health so I'm not in the eye of this storm. But I still feel extremely vulnerable and unprotected by my government and public services.

I feel that I have to pay for absolutely everything conceivable, from healthcare to education, in order to be in with a chance of getting through life undamaged. My daughter's experience at a state school during COVID was so woefully awful and so damaging to her education that I decided to go private as I just couldn't rely on the state sector providing the basics. This is not the fault of the teachers, who did an admirable job under awful circumstances. But the provision was appalling. Similarly I have no expectation at all that the NHS will meet even the most basic of mine and my family's health needs at the moment. It's just not available to anyone other than those who can pay for it.

Obviously I am extremely privileged to be in a position to afford to pay for this and I'm conscious of how this could make me sound. But it also makes me very angry because it didn't used to the case that you were totally thrown to the four winds and left to fend for yourself (and pay for everything) at every step of the way. There was a basic level of state provision of all these services which wasn't always excellent but at minimum was adequate. This just isn't the case today.

So to answer the OP's question, if you have money you can still have a tolerable quality of life in the UK. If you don't, you just can't.

As it turned out, someone pointed out to the poster that Portugal had visas for people in her situation. It appeared to be news to her. Hardly secret info on a little known country - so she hadn't tried very hard to leave or to research how to.

I'll continue to call out people's tiresome BS when I see it. You don't get to tell me what to do from whatever moral high ground you think you occupy.

One thing that I feel has got worse is the divisiveness. This thread started innocently enough but has turned into a grumpy argument about relative expectations and probable causes. This seems to be common since the referendum but applies in a lot of other contexts too - Covid particularly

This sums the country up quite nicely.

The EU is a wondrous place to live. 27 countries all pulling together and looking out for each other. They look after each other and don't fall out but find solutions. They dont blame immigrants for all their ills unlike the UK which is inward looking and longs to be an empire again.
How I wish we could rejoin the EU. Even if it cost us billions as some people claim (which I refute) it was worth every penny and we got so much in return for the contribution we made.

People could then move to the EU and live there with no time restriction and make a new life for themselves where the health service is so much better and the quality of life. It makes such a difference to mental health to be in a happy place.

It's very bad. I'm self employed but quite a good income. I'm struggling to afford the basics where before things were easier. Some foods are double the cost they used to be. Energy, petrol and clothing are expensive.

NHS is truly fucked from the sound of it due to underfunding.

Are the other options apart from the UK?

I’d like this for you too. If unhappy people left it’d be good all round.

There’d be few left on mn of course in UK but I reckon irl it wouldn’t be very different where I am

@MarshaBradyo

Wouldn't a better answer be to listen to the ways in which people are unhappy and attempt to make it a happier place generally? I think there are quite a few of us who contribute more than we take in a variety of ways who aren't thrilled with the overall direction of things.

I’m getting the sense many are unhappy about Brexit. I didn’t want it so I did what could at the time - voted remain.

I’m not going to let the result dominate my mood though. I’m still surrounded by loads of different nationalities and happiness and I think that helps.

You are over so many posts with your snide opinion. In your last sentence you simply hold up a mirror to yourself.