To think a lot of the Uk looks like a state

[Novembermummy88]

Not sure if I am being dramatic or if years of austerity are really starting to show…? Lately I’ve really started to notice how filthy, run down and falling apart everywhere looks! I live in a town in the south east on the borders of the M25. Every where there are gapping pot holes (can hardly avoid the volume there are now and genuinely concerned I will lose a wheel at some point!), broken lamp posts, the volume of litter / filth on the roads seems very high and can’t remember the last time I saw a road sweeper, and things like pathways are a state, road markings worn out, SO many closed/dilapidated shops….the town just looks awful as do many of the nearby towns! Is it just the South East looking like this? Aibu?! Or have I watched too much Selling Sunsets and setting my expectations too high…???

Selective memory @Catspyjamas17.

It is very simple. If everyone picked litter, people would actually think twice about dropping it.

This is how people think. When a place is messy with litter, people think "urgh what a mess" and add to it.

Basic sheep mentality.

My area is lovely. This is because there are enough people who care and pick it up. You don't need to join a group. Just buy some grabbers for £3 and off you go. Take your kids with you.

Feel better.

I have been saying this for a couple of years whenever we drive anywhere - the amount of litter on the sides of the roads is disgusting. It's like driving through landfill. Didn't the Highways Agency used to tidy up occasionally? I'm assuming that it's something that has been cut because of "austerity" but we need it back because it's vile.

I had my children in the late 1990s and noughties. The hospital was an absolute fucking disgrace. Short staffed and absolutely filthy. I was left without water for hours on end (having had a tube down my throat). My mum had to come with bottles of water, food, and clean sheets. We were told to take cleaning stuff in our hospital bag because we'd need to clean the bathroom before using it.

Hospital waiting lists were similar to now.

My DC went through the independent school system from age 4 because the local schools were crap.

Things might have been better for some people then, but that was certainly not my experience.

I live near Glasgow and I have never seen it so run down looking pot holed roads, empty shops and a useless council .
Recently they allowed developers to build a huge block of student accommodation across the street from an empty run down tower block right in the city centre, instead of getting the developers to demolish it and use that site instead which involved digging out tons of soil for the foundations of a brand new build. Now the students can gaze out the windows at a derelict block!
Just doesn’t make sense and theses companies are making a fortune from building student accommodation.
It would have solved the problem of what to do with an old building lying empty, but that would require Glasgow council to actually think, which under SNP rule seems hopeless.

Absolutely, so true. Its created lots of now, deeply ingrained problems which will takes ages and loads of effort repair. For what? To bail out the financial sector and blame the general population for the problems they created. Cameron and Osborne, pair of careless, ignorant toff wankers.

Bailing out the financial sector / banks was Brown though

I have seen two road sweepers this week and last week litter picking on the motorway. (The other side was covered in rubbish though, but that's due to lazy people chucking stuff out)

Our town is full of building works putting up new homes and offices. We have a new park.

The council are really good at sorting fly tipping.

There’s litter everywhere we turn near me, apart from a small area that’s regularly picked by a volunteer group. I drive down the A1 the other day and it’s absolutely disgusting. People seem to have a view that because they pay taxes someone else should pick up after them.

So many empty shop units.

Not fit for purpose initiatives like smart motorways trying to improve infrastructure on the cheap at the expense of safety.

Public services starved of funding and regularly cut. We have a beautiful sure start centre near us that’s empty because it’s not funded anymore.

I agree OP, it’s shit. It I didn’t have family I’d emigrate.

Pot holes are better than they were. We have had a lot of maintenance in the last few years. (My road is cobbled underneath the tarmac which helps I think? )

Austerity was ideology not economic necessity. There’s a special corner of hell with Cameron’s name on it. Between austerity and Brexit, his government was catastrophic.

I'm surprised it's taken so long for many to notice it.

I did about 7/8 years ago, I started to think parts of the UK looked like my husband's Eastern European country where I'd spent a lot of time- beautiful, but falling apart. Now that's us.

To the person above, it isn't about a bit of litter picking. I pick up the litter outside my house. It's about all kinds of services that have been cut- street cleaning for starters, then leaves are blowing about and congregating in gutters in the road and moss starts to grow, it's about pot holes that widen and get deeper and then wreck cars, it's about grass verges not being tended or nicely cultivated with wildflowers, it's about getting rid of all the parks staff so your local park looks scruffy, untended and becomes a place for drug dealing rather somewhere families and kids like to enjoy, it's about stepping over needles. It's horrible, and you cannot have a high level of street and public environment without public money being poured in. No amount of individual litter pickers can do that (and it's positively dangerous to pick up where there might be needles or other unsavoury things, it's not about the odd crisp packet).

That's great, and we have the same in our village. It doesn't help the pot-holed roads, broken pavements, lack of good healthcare and education, missed bin collections, missing bus service, and silted up drains that are flooding out the roads and pavements though, does it? Community spirit and effort only goes so far.

Yes I can never understand why he doesn’t get slated more for his total incompetence but he was like Teflon, and skipped off to his shepherds hut with never a look back at the car crash left behind him!

Where we liver the local authority are building literally thousands of new houses on what used to be wilderness. Ponds, trees, wasteland. It's fucking hideous to drive through and when I look at all the 'blind' roads they have started and realise there will be roads there and more houses, I just want to run away, but it's pretty much like it everywhere.

Neither of my parents are from this country (but my mother's parents originally are). They both say when they came over that they were surprised at how run-down and poor everything looked. I don't know any different but I have noticed a huge increase in litter, shabbiness in buildings and public spaces, and insanely badly maintained roads over the last five years.

My town looks like an absolute dump too - yet the council tax is among the highest in the UK. We've got a Conservative council - who couldn't care less about the town - and a Conservative government, and that's the problem.

Where did she say it’s all down to immigrants?
She was talking about specific behavior she‘d noticed.
I‘m an immigrant myself and I find that fear to ever criticize anything immigrants do strange and unhelpful.
That behavior OP describes in her post, I‘ve seen plenty of it in the town where I live too. Why shouldn’t people be able to talk about it?
It‘s naive to think immigrants are a large homogeneous group, all hardworking and decent, and in need of protection from the „bigoted“ locals.
We‘re are all individuals. Some of us are keen to integrate, others aren’t. Do you really think immigrants never criticize other immigrants‘ behavior? Especially if that behavior reflects badly on all of us?

The most reason, similar length of Labour government was in the 2000s under Blair and Brown. I seem to recall the country being in a bit of a better state then.

*most recent

I live in north west london and some areas which are really affluent, house prices over a million, the high street looks very poor, closed shops, only eating places opening, I think it’s the after effect of shutting down the country for so long due to covid, brexit, cost of living. I agree the roads have potholes everywhere. I don’t think immigration is to blame, I think the government want the pubic to blame immigrants so they are not accountable for their failings. They want people to turn on eachother.

Things started looking up when Thatcher came to power? Hahahahahahaha
There’s always someone whose a joker

Yep totally agree.

Sobering to consider that so much can turn on a single moment - just one remark on one day in 2010 (Gordon Brown accurately describing a bigoted woman as a bigoted woman) was enough to lose the election and condemn us to this.

It made a lot of rich people much richer. That's always been the Conservatives' end game. When they talk about boosting the economy and growth (not that they've succeeded in doing that) they mean at the expense of ordinary people, who will be forced to accept crap wages and living standards so that big business can rake in the profits. Brexit was part of the same thing. None of what they do is for the benefit of the ordinary people, which is why they talk about 'trickle down' economics, by which they mean they're making rich people richer and that should trickle down to the rest of us. But it doesn't. None of their ideology works for the vast majority of people in the UK.

I'm sorry you had that experience but things were better for nearly everyone then. There are statistics on hospital waiting times to back this up.