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…???

The UK is horrible IMO (lived here a long time but not from here originally). Depressing weather, ugly buildings, and yes huge amounts of litter, dereliction etc. I’m in one of the most affluent areas of the country and it’s a dump, the high street is half closed, I can’t imagine what it’s like elsewhere.

Regarding the NHS: roughly one in six NHS workers are immigrants. This matches up with roughly one in six of the overall UK population being immigrants. In other words, immigrants are proportionally employed in the NHS, rather than disproportionally propping it up, as is often claimed.

As to fruit/vegetable picking: it isn’t that people in the UK “don’t want to do it”. They simply don’t want to do it for practically slave wages. Food producers have grown used to being able to fly in large numbers of migrant pickers, house them on-site in disgusting and inhumane conditions, pay them the minimum legally allowed, and then deducting a large chunk of payment for “board” (unheated, overcrowded caravans and shacks). The pickers end up being paid far less than minimum wage to do back-breaking work and live in squalor. The only people willing to do this are those who come from extremely impoverished countries and have no other economic opportunities available to them. They are basically modern day slaves.

Why is it bad for the system described above to “crumble”? Why should food producing businesses be allowed to exploit the desperate so they can line their own pockets? Why shouldn’t pickers be given fair wages - wages enough for UK citizens to actually be able to live on? Why shouldn’t innovation into picking-machines be incentivised by turning off the tap of almost-slave labour?

Source for NHS 1 in 6 stat: commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7783/

Source for population 1 in 6 stat: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/internationalmigration/bulletins/internationalmigrationenglandandwales/census2021

I agree. I was nodding along with the OP until I saw this. Yes, it’s clearly all the fault of immigrants.

When you see rubbish like this, you realise why this country is in the state it’s in because many people will always kick downwards rather than blame who’s really responsible. To be honest I couldn’t care less now if OPs car was damaged by a pot hole ‘caused by immigrants’.

This winter, pot holes everywhere in my semi rural village, no grit on main roads whatsoever, flooding. It’s a disgrace.

I remember the 70s very well, I left home in 1975. I've never felt as well off as I did in the 70s.

Despite being in very junior jobs, my friends and I easily found cheap flats to share. We could afford to pay rent, all our bills, run cars, pay commuting costs, and still go to the pub most nights and have 2 holidays a year. I bought all my shoes in Russell and Bromley and most of my work clothes from Jaeger. Jobs were easy to come by, you could hand in your notice and get another job before the month was out.

I only had to wait 3 months to see a gynae consultant, and 2 months for surgery. From referral to tonsillectomy 5 years earlier was 4 months. NHS dentistry was readily available.

There were train strikes, but I got the bus to the tube station and the tube to work, my journey was only about 20 minutes longer. Some of the London parks were used as car parks, so people could drive in. The bin men strike only lasted a month or so, and the only time I saw vast piles of rubbish sacks was when watching the news. The power cuts arising from the miners' strike were planned and you could plan accordingly, far fewer people had central heating so most were able to stay warm during them. We played board games or bridge by candlelight to entertain ourselves, or visited friends who were in adjacent areas which were unaffected on the day in question. And energy companies were nationalised, so the government controlled energy prices and prevented massive increases in bills.

At the end of the decade, things changed dramatically. Unemployment almost trebled over a few years. It got much harder to find places to rent and rents shot up, so I bought a house in the early 80s, only to be hit by rising interest rates which kept me skint for a decade.

@MarshaBradyo might have been the biggest defeat since 1930 mainly due to Corbo and dilly dallying around a second referendum. No one is denying that. But to suggest huge swathes of the red wall wholly endorsed the same tory policies that destroyed whole communities is ridiculous. And that's the dilemma the
Conservatives are in now - bringing together the economically left wing values of the red wall and the slash taxes, small state obsessed current crew who mainly reside in the wealthy bits of the south. You can crow as much as you like, well done you, doesn't make you right.

As much as I dislike the tories and would love to blame them for everything, I think the issue we face as a society today are just the legacy of having two "me, me, me" generations in power back to back. You can't have 50+ years of focusing on profit and self above all else and not have widespread problems at the end.

Even now the biggest barriers to reducing and tackling societal inequalities come from those two generations. Once they're out of the positions of power/influence or at leasr outnumbered, things will improve.

I’m not wrong about the results as much as they irritate you 🤷‍♂️

Not my issue if facts do that. If you voted for Corbyn and you’re sore well sad times but it doesn’t change the outcome.

And Brexit won due to concerns over immigration. It seems even Labour are too nervous to let those voters go…

Again, she didn’t say it’s all the fault of immigrants. She described the behavior of some immigrants where she lives.
I see exactly the same behavior where I live. Hardly anyone thinks all the problems discussed on this thread are down to immigrants, of course they‘re not. It’s doesn’t change the fact that some groups behave in the way the OP describes though.

Perfectly put - I would say succinct but it's a long (non-exhaustive) list

There's no point moaning about town centres being empty if you shop online. We are all responsible for that. How many of us use Amazon because it's easy and convenient?

Poundbury - an architectural crime scene -

Pmsl at this! Brilliant description.

Poundbury is weird and slightly creepy. It makes me feel like I'm in some weird parallel universe.

My best friend lives in Paris and hates it now. They have a hard core Socialist mayor who has ruined it. Businesses are leaving France to go to other countries - Belgium being one, as it has lower taxes.
Anyone who thinks the problems we have here are lack of government spending is living in another world. The government spends a fortune.
We have no money. We borrowed crazy crazy sums to shut the economy down, and now the bill is due. If you wanted a lockdown (most on here did) you are partly to blame.

UK is grotty in certain places yes and some of the roads are covered in pot holes. But other countries aren't some kind of Utopia. We were going to buy property in Spain once but I have never visited a town with so much dog shit on the pavements. Drove from UK to Spain in the summer all the way down through France. Shocking numbers of homeless people lying on the streets, graffiti and shit everywhere. No where is perfect.

Same here, Scotland. Is dismal.
Cycle of poverty I think, people just don't seem to care or take any pride in their own area/environment.

I've never understood it, to see neighbours littering or fly tipping - I think YOU live here! This is YOUR street!!

No one takes their bins in, they blow down and lose their lids. One neighbour didn't use bin bags (??) and would put her loose rubbish in her bin without a lid. Bloody, used sanitary pads blown all over my garden, her children's dirty nappies covering our car park. For some reason she bins her knickers too and they were just strewn everywhere. She'd walk past them, daily. I can't fathom.

Really gets me down, I love doing my garden and trying to make the place look pretty - but often feel what's the fucking point when there's all that surrounding it, plus the frequent dumped mattress or telly. Demoralising.

That's not even getting started on the high streets becoming ghost towns of empty units, pot holes etc as mentioned in OP.

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.

Labour were in power for 13 years: 1997-2010. In the same amount of time, this bunch of Tories have managed to undo everything that Labour achieved, and then some. Things are even worse now than when the Tories lost in '97, by quite some distance.

That was a really excellent series. I might have to watch it again.

@MarshaBradyo I'm not sore at all. Shit happens.
Nice to see you suggesting the Red wall voted to leave the EU purely due to immigration racism.
In my experience it was more nuanced (backed up by the literature). A hatred of Osborne and Cameron and their austerity politics. A kick in the teeth of the metropolitan elites who steadfastly ignored the rest of the country. Did you ever listen to Farage ? Listen to the podcasts by John Harris 'Anywhere but Westminster' pretty eye opening and tell a narrative different from yours from people in those places.
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2021/jun/25/anywhere-but-westminster-10-years-in-10-minutes-video

Any case that amazing election victory is in tatters. Promises came to nothing.
Labour might not be much better but certainly cannot be any worse.

I grew up in Croydon, and when I look at pictures of it now, I scarcely recognise it. Nearly all my friends have moved away, most of them to predomininantly rural counties, a few to the commuter belt along the Surrey/Sussex border, a couple to France and Ireland, and one to Scotland, but so far north they may actually have moved the furthest.

I remember watching the riots on tv. You could see the flat I lived in when I first left home, above a shop on London Road. It was really sobering to see.

I recognised this as Bolton instantly from the lap dancing place 😅

Our council could do with a lesson in housekeeping. While services that most people need and use are being reduced they have found the money to buy a fucking castle and basically awarded themselves PP to build on an area of outstanding natural beauty whilst landing us in debt fighting all the groups that opposed it. This has run into millions
The roads are a bloody disgrace with pot holes , (movable) barriers still in situ on the motorway causing havoc
They should stop running councils as a business

The Paris economy is booming, with loads of startups, but I suppose people do wee under the bridges which is probably because the Mayor is a socialist.

'We have no money' is nonsense. We have tax receipts - and borrowing. In effect the government has endless money. Of course it spends more than in previous years - that's how inflation works - but it doesn't spend enough. It hasn't invested in anything worthwhile, which is why growth has flatlined for the last 10 years. We're insulated in the UK from seeing how low our standard of living is, and how poor our salaries are compared to salaries in, for example, the USA. Our sense of exceptionalism means a lot of people are in denial about that. And the Conservatives and their tame right wing press tell us we're all doing well because we're not as bad as insert struggling economy here. The truth is even Russia's economy is doing better than ours, and they're spending a fortune on a war of their own making and are under sanctions. There's only one reason for this: our government is SH*T.

Same.
And I think with the cost of living hitting middle earners worst, things will only decline further, no matter if it’s under a Tory or Labour govt. as it will be only the benefit classes who get to live in accommodation large enough to make reproduction viable. Sloppy morals is one aspect - no pride in their surroundings or who they multiply with. It’s a grim future ahead with a tiny elite lording over a miserable underclass.
Middle earners who can’t afford to have children will simply die off, as will their morals.

@Strawberrypicnic 😂

Nice to see you suggesting the Red wall voted to leave the EU purely due to immigration racism.

Yes immigration was a top priority, research shows it. I just googled and first chart had top reason - I wanted the UK to regain control over EU immigration.

I wanted to teach British politicians a lesson - was last. Although Remainers ranked it higher when asked why they thought Brexit voters voted as they did. So your post fits with that remain view.

It’s also why Labour are trying to hold onto those votes by ruling out SM and CU and reusing Brexit line (funny thing to do but hey)

I don’t call people racist for voting Brexit btw I leave that to the sneering left (not saying you but see it often on here)