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…???

Also it took a long time to sort out the mess the previous Tory lot left.

@Novembermummy88

I really didn't want to agree with this because I actually get fed up of UK bashing on here, but I have absolutely no choice.

I live in a really, really nice rural county, And I love the area ... it's surrounded by fields, canal, river, woodlands, etc, and my village is looked after and kept beautiful by the people from the village, and the farmers... The little market town some 3 or 4 miles away from me is kept quite nice too...

However, just 3 or so miles out of the little market town, there's miles and miles of rubbish on the side of the A road ... and potholes for as far as the eye can see. Literally miles of potholes and rubbish on the other side of the little market town... Almost as far as the next (medium sized) town some 15 miles on from there.

And three or four small and medium sized towns within 20 miles of me were actually teaming with about 70 to 100 shops. They now have at 25% to 35% shut down, and boarded up. And virtually a third of the remaining shops are fucking charity shops! Lockdown fucked up some, but some others moved to the massive Shopping Centre in a city some 12-20 miles away from them.

Half the time, several towns stink like a wheelie bin that needs emptying, you never see road sweepers, and very rarely see litterpickers. And yeah, just generally a shit show. I feel so sad because I love my country, but yes it's looking a mess. It's like everyone has given up. What happened to the Keep Britain Tidy campaign? Remember that???

ALSO, people can bog off blaming teenagers and children for the rubbish. I see more grown adults chucking shit out of the car window, and tipping all their crap into a layby and whizzing off in the car, than I do teenagers/children dropping rubbish!

Also ridiculous - and rude - to blame immigration for the country going downhill! Fuck me.

I agree with you 100%, OP - your description fits this part of the East Midlands.

There is a section of the A5 near us where there are so many deep potholes now that driving that stretch is like playing an old-fashioned arcade video game, and it is now just about impossible to complete the course without hitting several obstacles. The road gets visibly worse on a daily basis.

It looks like there are no plans to repair it in the near future, either - I saw yesterday that they have just erected proper road signs (not the temporary, free-standing sort) indicating an 'uneven' surface. Talk about an understatement. I can only guess that they don't have any signs that show the real state of it, which is absolutely full of ruddy great craters.

As for our country lanes, which used to be perfectly wide enough for two-way traffic, even with large farm vehicles, they will soon all be single track only, as the sides have been crumbling away for years and are not been repaired, so these roads are gradually getting narrower and narrower and the grass verges wider and wider. And, like in your area, road markings, especially central markings, have disappeared, making it even harder to judge how safely you can pass an oncoming vehicle.

This, plus everything else you described, is thirteen years of Tory government for you!

It wasn’t great when Brown lost either after 08 crash

Pesky citizen of the world here! Even worse, I’m of dirty East European extraction and have come via the Antipodes! Hate to break it to some
posters but the UK looked pretty shitty more than two decades ago too. Housing has always been cramped. Space has long been at a premium. Netflix and binge watching A Place in The Sun has just dislodged the goggles a bit and people - especially those not in the top 5% of earners - now see that other parts of the world can afford them a better quality of life ON PAPER than here. So why did I stay? Because I have had fascinating jobs in interesting places. Because I have a decent house in an expensive city. Because I have investments here that I wouldn’t have had in my cleaner but duller home country. Because my children are settled in good schools that I’m paying for. Because I can fly for 2 hours and end up surrounded by fascinating symbols of history and immerse myself in other cultures. I have made the most of the opportunities this (admittedly untidy) country has given me despite having zero family and connections here.

Why do housing estates look shit? Because many Brits like pastiches of Georgian homes which look rank when they’re not to scale. If Poundbury - an architectural crime scene - is the best of the lot, we are in trouble.

Places like Australia are also filled with houses on tiny plots. But people are more open minded about modern architecture so they look decent.

People Down Under don’t litter. It’s socially unacceptable to do so. Not so here. I see many tweens and teens and younger folk wantonly flinging empty drink bottles onto the ground. (Perhaps they are foreign born who knows but they’re usually speaking in local accents). We actually shouldn’t need street cleaners.

But yes, it’s immigrants like me, who do litter picking as the council won’t, whose households have never claimed from the state - not even child benefit when it was open to all - and contribute six figures a year in tax who are to blame. Sigh.

If it is the blue collar migrants you’re seeking to blame, think again. Why do you think people cannot afford to do necessary maintenance on their homes? Because labour is expensive because there is a massive shortage! Why? It begins with B and ends with T.

If you voted for Brexit because you didn’t like dirty East Europeans (who are mentioned in the same breath as people from the ‘third world’ though developing countries is the proper term), slow hand clap. Our ageing population means we have a demographic timebomb and we need migrants here to work so our arses can be wiped in old age (bring on the robots too I say) or you need to
lie back and think of England.

We also need governments who are not short-termist in their thinking and who believe in investing in infrastructure.
No party will do this. It’s just not the British way.

All the main parties though are watching what you’re saying about immigrants and seizing it. Much easier to blame outsiders/newcomers/minorities for this country’s ills than to look in the mirror.

Nowhere near as bad as this though.

We're in a period of managed decline, it's pretty easy to see - just look at any government department or local council's spending plans for the next decade.

It's what people voted for in 2016 though, you can't put up trading barriers with your biggest market and expect things to be the same without that extra 100+ billion a year coming into the country.

Horrendous state of affairs as it has immediately followed the failed austerity project from 2010 which again people voted for.

I don't know why people are surprised.

When I was young in the 50s/60s the population of U.K. was 50 million now it’s nearly 70 million -that’s a huge increase. Nearly half as much again. Compared to Germany which has gone from 72 to 84 million in the same time.

But that apparently has had no effect on housing, the economy etc

I think that any government of any political hue is actually doomed because there are too many other factors that come into play. However good you make state schools, there will always be children whose family backgrounds are too chaotic for school to make much difference.

The NHS is a money pit: you could give every penny earned by every single person in the country to the NHS and it would just swallow it up and nobody would see any change.

In a way, what is needed is for party politics to be taken out of health and education. If they could both be looked at pragmatically, rather than through an ideological lens, it might be possible to make some improvements. They would have to be very radical in the case of the NHS in particular: the NHS isn't fit for purpose as the needs of the population are now so different, but the mawkish sentiment attached to "our NHS" makes it impossible for anyone with any kind of power to do anything to improve healthcare.

On a more local level, we would probably all benefit from party politics being taken out, too. I live in a beautiful, well-tended place that's a safe Tory seat - but a lot of that is nothing to do with the Tory MP and everything to do with most of the people who live here caring about their environment, doing their bit to keep it nice, using outdoor spaces for their intended purposes (i.e. as children's playgrounds, not as drug/drinking zones), and bringing their children up to see why they in turn need to keep things nice for everyone else.

Sorry - rambling, but I'm stuck at home with a rotten cold!

It was pretty bad. Recession hit soon after too we had falling house prices and job losses in our sector which meant redundancies across the board

On Googling - How did the 2008 recession affect the UK?
It led to the deepest UK recession since World War II, with rises in unemployment, debt and home repossessions. Young people experienced particularly high levels of job losses and unemployment.

Luckily people have moved on and forgotten most of it

I think flytipping has increased due to the costs being charged by recycling centres to take waste. And being very picky about what they will accept.

Potholes are literally due to the amount of traffic and lorries and HGV's really rip up tarmac more than most.

Councils need to be very careful where they spend their money. And who they give it to. I am not sure they always are.

To just also say, being poor does not equate to not having a communal awareness in keeping things clean and tidy around you and respecting your world. It really is offensive to imply that it does. Personal responsibility does not disappear if you have no money. It was something I learnt from home and schools.

Some of it though is people being lazy. Where I live theres backstreets full of rubbish. People just expect the binmen to clean it up. Even though it's they're own fault for putting bin bags out overnight or not putting they're rubbish in a binbag. Children no longer play out in backstreets and there's the fly tipping as well.

But that apparently has had no effect on housing, the economy etc

It has a massive effect on the economy - growing it hugely at creating more jobs.

If we don't have enough services and affordable houses that is the fault of the government, not immigrants or a growing population. They think it will all trickle down and the market will provide. It doesn't.

Is it just the south east that looks like this? Did I just read that?

Parts of the midlands and north have looked like what you describe since the 1980s. That was when Britain’s serious decline began, when thousands of people had their livelihoods taken from them and many turned to crime.

Then we had the 90s and bloody Blair who did a good turn in propaganda but created more inequality. He and his followers simply put out rubbish about how we were all middle class now, and pretended the working and underclasses did not exist.

We could have been having sensible conversations years ago about how people should live in a post industrial age, indeed many of us were having those conversations in academia and personally: Blair and his middle class followers preferred to engage in disaster capitalism, ripping out the wealth of lower classes to create a new hereditary system.

The U.K. is now close to collapse.

Agree.

Vote Labour in 2024/5.

Do you not get irony/sarcasm?

Sorry to hear you don't understand basic economics.

I do agree about the state of the roads but I also think every single person has to take on some responsibility.
So many people don’t take a pride in their own surroundings any more, they don’t bother keeping their own gardens tidy, they drop litter, that alone infuriates me, it’s so selfish to drop litter, who do they think is going to pick it up? There’s a very large portion of the population who are lazy and slovenly. They chuck out their rubbish in a lay-bys, chuck their dog poo bags into trees, because they can’t be bothered to take it home, or to a local tip, it’s plain filthy!
I would never let my kids drop a drop a sweet wrapper, if parents don’t educate their children with the basic principles of human decency then there is no hope.
Shopkeepers are as bad, filthy windows, filthy shopfronts, no one even thinks of using a broom and bucket of hot soapy water.
Stop blaming the government and blame the filthy race that so many have become in this country

A bit dramatic to call it a human rights issue. At any rate, it's not always done by people doing community service orders. There are state/city road crews that do it as well, blocking off the area they are in with a truck with flashing lights, cones closing the lane etc, like a road works crew. They aren't right on the road either, it's off to the side in the grass/edge of the woods. It's fairly safe, no more dangerous than walking along the road like many people do.

"The NHS is a money pit: you could give every penny earned by every single person in the country to the NHS and it would just swallow it up and nobody would see any change."

Well that's just bullshit. Do you have a King's Fund or WHO report to evidence that, or are you just shooting the breeze?

Do you really think you can convince people that they should desire an expensive insurance based healthcare policy that will literally mean the wealthy flourish while the poor become sick and physically impoverished? Good luck with that.

I think you're the one who's been whooshed here @PurpleButterflyWings , try reading it again.

It’s partly people buying more stuff (although that could be improving) so more crap to deal with, also packaging and take away/ delivered food -packaging again.

So many people don’t take a pride in their own surroundings any more, they don’t bother keeping their own gardens tidy,

For so many millions, it isn’t their surroundings. Every inch of Britain is owned, much of it by foreign interests, the rest by private landlords. Our work isn’t benefitting us. Trust has gone.

So we should be miles ahead of Germany economically.

Which post do you think I am on about??? I think YOU are the one who has been 'whooshed...'