To think it’s shocking how bad Britain has fallen apart compared to other European counties

[TheColourofspring]

I am in Spain at the moment in one of the big cities. It’s clean, modern, well maintained. Transport is cheap, food is cheap, healthcare seems to work pretty well (from talking to local). Parks are noticeably well maintained- even saw park keepers! Clean & tidy.

Pensions higher, if you lose your job you get a portion of your salary in unemployment benefits while you look for another and there are no penalties. Based on the premise that if you have paid in, you will get looked after if you are in need.

I am not saying it’s perfect- no country is but it was the same when I was in France last summer.

In Britain, everything is underfunded and close to the edge. Schools, the NHS, local authorities are all at breaking point. My local parks look shabby & there is very little maintenance. Roads have pot holes. Yesterday I read an article about pharmacies being the latest at ‘crisis’ point with major drug shortages (thanks to brexit). Queues at borders, people can’t heat or eat properly, food banks, housing is ridiculous for many people.

I think it’s just so noticeable when you go to other places just how run down Britain is.

Finding it shocking and a bit depressing - like I said, all countries have their issues but I think Britain really has been pillaged by the tories & Brexit really is a disaster.

I understand Brexit has changed who comes to the UK. And I agree that as a country we should be aiming for a cleaner country and cheaper transport. Surely all countries should be looking at what they're not getting right and try to improve it. As you say Poland tends to have cheaper wages. So it follows that the transport will be cheaper. I went to Barbados a few years back and got on a bus that cost 50p. Sounds very cheap. Until you compare to that what people actually earn there.
I just get annoyed by people saying the UK is a dreadful place and one of the worst in Europe/ the whole world. When most people have only seen a week or two from a tourists eyes. ALL countries have failings. I'm sure there are countries that do things much better then the UK and are better places to live. But plenty are not. And going by how clean a place is or how cheap the buses are isn't an indication of how good it is to live there.

Also in UK it's the people who live here who cause the mess to a certain extent such as fly tipping or not bothering to recycle or chucking litter on the streets

Not clearing up after their dog etc

The UK's problem isn't unemployment... its UNDERemployment and the resultant low productivity.
The reason we have underemployment is thanks to all the 16 hours per week brigade choosing to have kids they couldn't otherwise afford and then choosing to work minimal part time hours in order to receive optimum "in work" benefits.

Does anyone remember the fag end of John Major's government?

It feels the same. Dirty streets, shuttered shops, public services run into the ground.

I do!
Then we had a Labour government and things improved no end.

I remember it well. I was living in Southern Africa at the time and weekly phone calls home always included a lengthy, colourful report from dad of the latest shameful Tory shitstorm.

Those first few years of New Labour were a breath of fresh air.

Absolutely this.

I know that lots of people hate being told this, but in work benefits are actually a subsidy for big employers, who can get away with offering 16 hours a week instead of 18 or 24, which would require them to stump up pension contributions and sickness benefits.

Yes, it’s really a benefit to businesses and is a sticking plaster over a fundamentally weak economy.

It really is shocking. Thanks Tories first for years of austerity (note that US got out of the Great Depression by increasing public projects spending and not the other way around. They could have stopped with austerity couple of years after 2008!)
and then Brexit
it is very depressing and not much hope in sight

I can't think of a single foreign place I've been to where I didn't manage to find dirty parts of the city. Plus very smelly (Barcelona).

I was in Kensington today and was surprised how grubby it looked it’s incredibly wealthy

I agree with pp feels like mid 90’s the tail end of another long Tory stint of running the country

The thing that astonishes me, everyone knows the country and public services go to shit whenever we have a Tory government, and yet people vote for them in droves. I can only think it's the brainwashing from the rightwing press. Their screaming headlines of hate, go in, despite what we might think, none of us are immune to this stuff. Every time we go into a shop we see these pro Tory messages from the headlines.

What seems to have happened is that the Tories have perfected the ability to say they stand for one thing (Law and Order, low taxes, economic responsibility, tough on immigration) and do the exact opposite, but they repeat the mantra and it sticks.

On thread after thread on here people pop up with tired tropes about Labour "spending all the money" (Tory borrowing is consistently higher) etc.

It's genius, but very frustrating.

The burden of taxation, both in cash values and as a proportion of GDP, rose over the course of the Thatcher years - yet she is cast by revisionist historians as a tax cutter because she shifted the burden from the rich to the poor.

@TheColourofspring.. You mentioned protesting in dibbys post and didn't mention the unemployment rate for young people, 31% and general unemployment at 12%.
We are around 3%.

That means a huge % of Spanish young people can't get work.

That not good at all op.

@Kendodd yes and no.
I remember very well the horrific state our hospital was in under labour.

@HRTQueen

I went to see Buckingham Palace for the first time I decades into February.

I was gobsmacked.

Grotty paint peeling on the railings, grime on brick work, some delapipdated.

Overall it just looked so incredibly plain, no flowers or trees in pots. Zilch.
It looked unloved and deserted, however I can't imagine labour doing anything about bucks house.

@LabradorsByTheSea I agree. I voted for Tone.

They were a breath of fresh air, and oasis in no 10!.

Tony brought a momentum and energy to the role and it really looked like some good stuff would happen.

Then quite quickly things became about dismantling legal aid and support. Fox hunting dominated whilst elderly follow wherever suffering in silence dreadful old people's homes and so on.
Gorrden brownies soley save that period with his tax credits scheme and his attempt to drum financial sense into us with giving each.it's child 250 and 500.

I have really enjoyed this conversation, as I worry a lot about the state of the country currently. I don’t mind the anecdotal examples, all quite interesting. I am a European married to a Brit. There’s no denying that things were better when i came to live here in the 90’s. In fact compared to my home country, the UK was doing incredible at that time, we all just used to just quit jobs without anything lined up as we’d always find something else, the crazy consumerism, people buying new outfits every time they went out (so every week-end!), people going to New-York for the week-end. I certainly had never seen anything like it.
In the mean time places like France, Italy, Spain had crazy levels of unemployments, low pay, I certainly felt like I had the better end of the stick here. Maybe that’s why the difference is so felt, we have had a good run. Maybe after doing well for quite a long time we were due a recession.
The situation with health care is not good in most places at the moment. In France it’s been going on for quite a while apparently, i just did a quick search and found forum posts from over 10 years ago that were already discussing the problem. This French article actually says that France and the UK are in a similar situation. Hospital and healtcare crisis in Europe .Also a quick google search tells me that in France you pay about 15% of your salary towards the healthcare system and companies pay 29%. Then the individuals additionally have to pay for private insurance (called mutuelle) for about 500-1000 per year, if not they incur about 30% of the price of the treatment. So maybe the system is not in quite as bad a shape but it’s because people are funding it much more heavily, as long as people are ok doing the same here we could probably improve things, slowly. Also, the pension system in France in my view is not sustainable as still linked to final salary, at least here people are very much encouraged to provide privately as much as they can.
Some French friends have moved back to France from the UK recently and really struggled to find a doctor to register with. When i tell my Spanish friends how cheap Spain is they don’t think so, not in comparison with the salaries. In terms of cleanliness, I think it’s similar, big cities tend to be dirtier than smaller ones but i have to say that my husband who always used to bitch about Europe in terms of dog shit on pavements has started saying that actually it is now worse here.
My Italian friends, especially in the south have been saying that public health pretty much doesn’t exist anymore, in comparison I had availability at the dentist within a week last time i made an appointment (which i know doesn’t reflect the situation but anecdotally…)
At the end of the day there’s no point comparing the UK to the rest of Europe. Maybe it’s best to just acknowledge that we don’t think it is good enough here at the moment. To acknowledge that some of it starts in the home (don’t leave dog shit behind, don’t litter, teach your children to do the same, involve them politically and socially). And maybe we need to start shouting louder, on the street, not on mumsnet. Serious politicians might actually prefer that to a disengaged population.

This French article actually says that France and the UK are in a similar situation. Hospital and healtcare crisis in Europe.Also a quick google search tells me that in France you pay about 15% of your salary towards the healthcare system and companies pay 29%. Then the individuals additionally have to pay for private insurance (called mutuelle) for about 500-1000 per year, if not they incur about 30% of the price of the treatment.

I'm not sure I'd say France and UK are in very similar situations, but there are parallel problems in some areas - there are certainly Generaliste (GP) shortages in some areas (usually inner city or the very rural) and yes the system in general is under stress.

For info/context with regard to the finances you quoted above, yep you pay more upfront than the UK, e.g. fee for visiting the doc, a charge made for any visit to A&E that doesn't result in an admission, OTOH a lot of those charges for treatment are capped at quite a low level.

Also perhaps worth being aware when trying to make comparisons that very many chronic and/or long lasting conditions (and it's a long list that includes stuff like cancer) the State covers 100% of the cost, so your mutuelle doesn't always take a hit.

Is there low productivity? The data suggests productivity has risen by 126% since the 1970s, yet over the same period, wages have only increased by around 90%, a 36% decoupling between productivity and wage growth.

Seems to the bigger issues is that workers aren't the one's benefiting from their extra productivity.

I have impression that UK "productivity" used to be highest in world, now it has slipped to something like 12th. All the people moaning about "low productivity" are moaning about decline & 12th place (out of 50 high income countries & another 130 countries in the world).

Yes I picked up that impression on my recent stay in the UK. A general air of depression punctuated by Dementors on the telly raving about immigrants or scroungers.

Back then it was Deadwood and Michael Howard . Now it's Cruella and Leanderthal. But , as I recall , it didn't do the Tories much good back then.

Coincidentally following the demonization and demise of union membership.

What people don't realise is that we have not hit rock bottom yet.

The UK has a massive dependency problem (ratio of workers to retired and unemployed/disabled/sick)

The last 5 years have turbo-charged that dependency problem due to demographics and larger rate of sickness.

To put it bluntly, the run down problems that people are seeing in the UK vs Europe is caused by a lack of investment going back to 2010.

You might not notice a 5% reduction of healthcare, education, and LA spending in real terms over one year.

But when its 5% compounded over 13 years:

(1 - (0.95)^13) = 49%

That means we invested 51% less than we should have done over the last 13 years.

This is HUGE. If investment was supposed to be £1T, we only invested £500bn. That £500bn reduction caused the infrastructure to start to deteriorate and fall apart.

And we are now headed into a recession over 2024 as the BOE rate rises hit the UK and reduce disposable income and economic activity.

When that happens, capital investment in the UKs infrastructure will be sacrificed again.

The UK has dug itself a massive hole and it will take at least two decades to dig the country out of it.

If you want a good example of the poor levels of capital investment look no further than the water sector.

Do you know by what year we 'might' get better water quality with current 'above average' rate of capital investment?

And the 'target' for the control of sewage release into our rivers and beaches is the 2050s.

You honestly cannot make it up.

The country is literally covered in sewage and poo, full of potholes, massive amount of food banks, productivity flatlining, serious economic stagflation and people still pretend nothing is wrong.

At a certain point, pitchforks will need to come out into the streets as the apathy is just astonishing.