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…???

But it was ever thus.

I'm no fan of the Conservatives, but to blame them for everything that's wrong in this country right now is absolutely ridiculous. They've only been in power for 12/13 years. It was labour for almost 20 years before that.

Yes, I absolutely will not be voting for Conservatives and I will be voting for Labour because we need a change ... and I hate the way the Conservatives treat the poor and disabled... but don't expect the country to be much better overnight. Or even in five years, or even in 10.

Whatever government is in, it's not going to make much difference. With what has happened in the last few years, companies not being prepared for Brexit, worldwide food and petrol shortages, worldwide energy price hikes, the Covid pandemic, etc etc, no other government would have been able to handle it any better.

YANBU. Feels like the infrastructure and State assets are not looked after. Then a throwaway culture on top of it. Add the weather and it feels like a grey mess. A lot of lovely things remain though.

Everywhere in France and Northern Europe is well maintained and clean? I don't think so.

France is great but a lot of it is extremely run down and pretty deprived. Gardens full of crap, loads of graffiti everywhere. Dunkirk for example is depressing.
Or if you go to Belgium, Charleroi is one of the grimiest places I have ever been to. Flanders is well maintained and wealthy but their politics would give most people on here a heart attack.

I go there all the time as husband is from there so I guess I see a bit more than driving through twice a year.

Agree with every word. All today's problems started decades ago, but the "comfortable" in their posher towns just ignored it as it didn't affect them. Now things are spreading into the more prosperous areas (mostly the South East!) and there are howls of anguish at lack of prospects/jobs, litter, state of public services, run down town centres, empty shops, etc.

It's exactly why Brexit happened and why Labour lost it's "red wall" northern towns - there are simply ever increasing numbers of people fed up with conditions around them and they vote for whoever gives them hope, however misplaced. The London/SE "elite" bear all the blame for this - they have ignored the run down parts of the country for decades, sucking all the jobs and prosperity to feed their bubble. Now they're starting to see the kind of conditions that people out in the regions have been suffering for decades and they don't like it!

Totally agree. The amount of abandoned shops in my high street is so depressing, it’s like a ghost town. Despite being a pretty and historic place it looks a total mess. Sadly there are also many rough sleepers so the decline is across all aspects of society. There is a general sense of abandonment that pervades the city and graffiti has spread to the residential streets now too.

Also, the road I live on is full of pot holes. I was overjoyed to come home to find a crew filling one a few houses up, thinking they were there to finally fix the road up. Imagine my irritation when they filled in precisely one pot hole, and fucked off! Surely they could have walked two metres and filled in the even larger pot hole that they had to drive over to access the one they did fill in?!

As usual, blame immigrants for all of your problems when they're literally the ones holding the country together.

Austerity and lower council budgets is why your area looks worse, why would that have anything to do with immigration.

Endless spending during covid and furlough and help out to eat out and all the things that plunged the country into debt is why there is no money.

Brexit and the (predictable) economic devastation that it has caused has then finished things off.

Yet, immigrants are to blame.

So much racist rhetoric from people who can't read a basic book about politics or economics on here to even try to understanding anything.

Sorry I have to say something. I have lived in the South and the North. There are some very well of people and places in both. And poor in both.
Many people in the North recognise their pit or steel history for example but see themselves as at the forefront of modern industries now. They don't relate to a version of themselves many seem to want to portray.

If people compare tourist spots to every day towns it’s not going to be similar. It’s more the towns you mention that are comparable

Also, the high street has disappeared because everyone buys things online!

Yet again, no - immigrants must be the ones to blame!

Given that immigrants can't claim benefits and are consistently shown to be net contributors, versus a large % of the population who are not, it AMAZES me that these threads always end in racism!

@ladykale

I am not going to blame immigrants for the state the country is in, indeed I don't. But it's a bit of a reach to say they're the ones holding the country together. That's as ludicrous as saying the country being a shitshow is their fault.

I certainly don't live in a 'naice' town. Absolute disgrace and many articles written about its sad decline. Manchester which is booming has sucked the place dry as well as years of under investment. Ironically our joke of a council missed the deadline to apply for the levelling up funds lottery which in itself is a bl*y joke. Rishi Sunaks constituency Richmond in north yorks being more deserving
Here are a few choice photos of the actual town centre shopping experience

I'm talking about public services and frontline services specifically, so in particular

• NHS - immigrants (or expats as many should actually be called given they are so skilled) constitute a v high % both doctors and nurses
• supermarkets
• cleaners etc
• fruit & veg pickers etc

We have emergency post Brexit because there are no fruit and veg pickers as people in the uk don't want to do it.

Don't know if you work or know anyone who works in the NHS, but ask them - if you took away all immigrants and second generation, the system WOULD crumble.

Yes - I agree Britain is in a state, but trying to say that all of France is pristine is absolutely ridiculous. Plenty of Europe also has that 'held together by sticky tape' feeling that we see here too.

Lots of people are working so many hours to try and keep afloat that they don't have time for gardening.

That is trolling or gaslighting. No it was never this bad, not until you go back to the 1920s and before. There’s actually a reason for that: this is exactly what happens when you let private financial interests run rampant and ignore the plight of real actual people. This is why most societies hold a balance of public and private interests.

And even then there was not so much foreign involvement: that was the native British ruling elite stamping down on its own working classes as well as the rest of the world. Now the rest of the world is getting in on the act too, with British collusion.

I certainly wouldn't blame the current lot for everything - yes lots of things have long roots and got back more than 13 years.

I do blame them however for:

• Utter incompetency and economic mismanagement
• Greed and corruption, being into politics for themselves, and giving away billions of public money to mates and cronies
• Deliberately, ideologically under funding all public services
• Getting the NHS and the state of the nation's health into such a mess that it was completely unprepared to cope with a pandemic and the aftermath of that
• Soaring poverty levels and rising crime
• The utter shitshow that is the current education system - particularly what they have done to secondary schools
• The searing waste of time and money on Brexit and selling the next generation down the line with it and all the absolute shit heaped upon small businesses that was utterly, utterly unnecessary
• Making lots of lovely, hard working people leave and go back to live in the rest of Europe, creating massive labour shortages
• Creating a more divided national where voicing racist views in public has become more normal
• Paying only lip service to tackling climate change
• Not doing anywhere near enough to tackle the total imbalance in the economy created by the absolute greed of energy companies
• Allowing the super rich to get massively richer and the majority of people to be much poorer

I'm sure I've forgotten a few things, but it's quite a list of achievements in a decade and a bit.

I absolutely agree OP! It's been in decline for years but it's got much worse post Brexit/Covid. So many homeless people too now. 10 years ago you were quite taken aback to see one in my town, now they're just everywhere. So many independent shops have closed, with betting, payday loan or vaping shops in their place. It's really very sad.

Whilst I agree in principle that taking ideological politics out of the NHS would be no bad thing, giving to private enterprise to sort out isn’t the answer. “Looked at pragmatically” for shareholders means “increase our profits, with growth year on year by whatever means necessary”. The needs of the public it’s meant to serve would be secondary to shareholders need to make ever-growing returns. Bonuses literally take priority over cancer wards.

We’re already seeing the outcome of this with the Water sector. Privatisation was supposed to bring in business long-term investment, so that they would fund new sewers, reservoirs, etc because - in their ideology - the market would demand it.

In reality, the market gets shafted in favour of profit with businesses only addressing problems that could have been avoided earlier because they’ll only spend the money required (and thus reduce potential profit) when they absolutely have to - which often at crisis point. And we’re seeing this exactly now with overflowing sewage because water companies have opted to provide profit over replacing a rapidly declining sewage system.

Well that’s my point exactly, just because a house is rented and ‘not yours’ it doesn’t give you an immediate right to allow the outside to deteriorate into a filthy tip.
Where has the pride in our surroundings gone, are we now a nation whose attitude is ‘it’s not mine so what do I care’. Every person who dumps litter, fly tips, chucks dog poo bags has been raised and educated. If we are failing to in-still a sense of common decency into every child to facilitate them growing up into decent human beings with a sense of conscience and moral responsibility then we are failing miserably and it won’t matter what government is in charge.

Total shit hole here and no buses to boot.

I'm in Glasgow and parts of it look like the post-apocalyptic cities in The Last of Us.

Recently there was a protest outside the council HQ because the roads are an absolute disgrace. Any report via the council app gets a standard response of "we've assessed it... low risk... blah blah", they fill the pothole with cheap shite and the second it gets cold, all the rainwater that has seeped into it freezes, expands, breaks up the tar and the crater is back three weeks later. There is a facebook group for drivers to warn each other when they've had another blown tyre or buckled alloy.

The council also installed a load of speed bumps in our street (which they had to completely re-do because they used shite materials and the first set of bumps all crumbled within three months) but never painted markings on them and didn't bother to sweep up, just left gravel strewn the length of the road. Perfect for taking out someone's windscreen one dark morning!

"Leave the car at home" says the radio advert. Okay, but if the bus actually turns up at all, it's extortionate and fucking filthy on the inside.

Not that there's anywhere to go around here now. Maybe to the tip, because bin collection has been changed from fortnightly to every three weeks. Or I could go to the main street, where every other shop is a money laundering front tanning salon or bookies.

The government is responsible for creating the backdrop to allow people to do that. To have enough leisure time to be able to maintain their surroundings, and not be so fucking tired and worn out and ill that they can barely haul their arse out of bed to work, and their lives are eating working and sleeping (barely) just so they can pay the gas bill like a good little worker bee and make a bit more profit for Shell.

If the government isn't prepared to do that, then what is the actual fucking point of them? We may as well just do our own thing and not bother with paying taxes.