Are things becoming just a little bit shit?

[Bloomsburygirl]

I was wondering if anyone else has started to notice the deteriorating standards in public services and private businesses. I went to London over the weekend, and I was shocked by the filth and litter. I moved to the UK in 2011, and I visited many times before I moved. I do not remember rubbish strewn across streets like it is now. And every place I seem to go gives off a feeling that there simply are not enough staff anymore. Restaurant toilets and public toilets are filthy, it takes an age to be served, and don't get me started on public transport (I read the recent thread on this and agree with every word). It seems to me like the consequences of Brexit/pandemic are really starting to bite, and to be honest, I miss the way it was pre-2016. AIBU, or do others feel the same? And is this the new normal? Disclaimer - I still adore the UK and would never want to live anywhere else!

I was in London for a couple of days last month and didn't notice a particular increase in litter.

In fact, to my absolute shame - I swear I normally have a collection in an empty pack as I HATE people who do this - I dropped a cigarette end on the ground which I didn't stop to pick up and was given an on the spot fine of, I think it was, £70, outside King's Cross Station.

Last month we visited over a dozen major towns and cities across the UK, and whilst I didn't notice an abundance of litter, I did remark on a severe lack of public bins - especially in and around public transport hubs. I wonder if the excuse is not having the staff to empty them?
Lots of this sort if thing - people clearly wanting to dispose of waste in that they walked over to the bins, but nowhere to put it!!

No way, mn is so depressed ; what music station do you listen to?

I do too.

I mean even our Home Secretary got in trouble for calling a part of England a shithole in parliament didn't he?

@Copernicus321

The threshold date for things starting to go seriously downhill was around 2010. This was around the time many councils started to contract out their major services such as Highways etc. It wasn’t immediately apparent but after more than 10 years the signs are everywhere. Ambulance stations closing down, fire stations shutting.

I have a "baseline" of services declining in our village around 2005, as I moved into my village office in 2003 and saw a very quick decline in services within a year or two. First we lost our bus service - it was pretty bad anyway, but stopped completely around 2005. Then the (Labour) council closed our village library - I know the year because it was the year our son started primary school - they managed to go once before it closed, so it was Autumn 2005. We also lost our village "Bobby" in 2004 as he was a regular sight for around a year after I moved in, but they moved him to the nearby "big" town and didn't replace him.

We were all pretty satisfied with it 13 or 14 years ago, funnily enough.

I can’t believe that people have swallowed the idea that migrants are to blame for all of our home grown issues! It’s so much easier to blame “others” isn’t it, rather than look at our own shoddy leadership and governance?

Murdoch and Rothermere have done a fine job in promoting this narrative and spreading discord. They are such a malign influence on our society and very few people have the power now to stand up to them: neither prime ministers or monarchs.

It’s got to the point now where democracy itself has been eroded and no one seems to care as long as the top 2% continue to cream off the profits.

It was in some ways. My mother in law and father were both "failed" by the NHS in 2008 and 2010 respectively, due to severe delays in treatment, strings of misdiagnoses, being moved around different hospitals to "reset" the waiting list times, wrong diagnoses, mistakes, and both died prematurely, once after a string of hospital acquired infections due to lack of infection control/cleaning and the other after having to wait 2 years for a cancer operation with a "deadline" of around 19 weeks. Throwing money at it can't cure it of all it's inherent problems!

Public services have had major cuts year on year since the Tories came to power. They sold this as cutting waste and saying the same services could be delivered for less money. It was a lie.
The services cut at the beginning were those that only some people noticed - youth services, Sure Start, cutting numbers of TAs. But then services that everyone notices started being cut. There are so many potholes in our roads and the pavements are in poor condition. Councils have sold many of their assets and in most cases have nothing left to sell.

I am kidding about the music !
Most things have gone downhill though
It is sad to see

@yossell I agree with much of your post. I hope that we don’t have another Tory gov but these problems will not be easy to fix.

I agree with taxing wealth as we are too skewed vs income & then there is the intergenerational issues but I don’t think it’s popular, everyone wants someone else to pay.

Becoming?!! I think they became shit already, after well over a decade of Tory destruction. Plus Brexit. Then Covid. The UK is really not a great place to live anymore.

@user1497207191 I am sorry you had that experience.
My family though have ongoing serious chronic illnesses and I know that treatment has gone down hill. The staff are brilliant, but waiting lists are very long and the criteria for treatment has increased.
25,000 hospital beds have been cut since 2010. This is an objective measure that there have been cuts without relying on anecdote. And this cut has been in spite of our population getting older with more complex health needs.

High taxes is the only way I can see it working. We have high taxes here, but you don't mind when you can see where the money is going. We live good lives but we are getting out what we are putting in.

People are ruder too, there's no politeness anymore

We were all pretty satisfied with it 13 or 14 years ago, funnily enough.

i don’t think maternity care was great then although it’s shocking now. I much prefer the French system. The NHS is so inefficient in many ways.

I am kidding about the music !

I'm not, 90s fashion & music was much better.

Everything is relative.

Anecdotal personal experiences are rarely reflective of the whole, but certainly my own personal experience of the NHS is that was indeed terrible years ago, but that does not preclude it having declined further in the years since.

Perhaps back in the 50's, 60's, 70's or even the 1980's the NHS functioned smoothly and carried out it's mission to a relative degree of "customer" satisfaction, but my interactions with it as an adult began in the late 80's/early 90's, and I have invariably found the NHS to be practically useless, incapable of resolving any of my complaints satisfactorily, and indeed, it left me with a life-long deficit of mobility and related pain and discomfort simply because it did not offer some fairly routine remedial surgery in the aftermath of an accident, nor provide any sort of physio and recovery therapy, which, chances are, would have lead to full recovery, full use, and no lingering pain or discomfort. This took place in 1993, so hardly recent.

They have never resolved, or even offered me any meaningful feedback, diagnosis, or opinion on repeated, decades long periods of poor mental health, nor are they even willing to address a simple gastro issue that I know can be resolved with a straightforward medical procedure that does not involve anaesthesia.

So certainly from my personal perspective, the NHS is, and always has been utterly useless, and again, that does not mean that it can not have declined across the 30- 35 year period I am referring to.

@jesterdourt The NHS in 2010 was judged by WHO to be the most efficient healthcare system in the world. It is not now though.

90s fashion, was it?

What music do you listen to now? any radio in particular

Whereabouts are you?

And vote for whom? Don't believe Labour will solve the problems. They created much of what we still have today.

@mantyzer I was referring to now.

@EasternStandard work plays the usual Capital/Fm/Radio 6. I listen to podcasts at home. Most of what I hear on the radio is a rehash if the 90s. Just think things were far less homogeneous although I guess some of that is social media

It’s noticeably worse. I can see why colleagues and friends similar age to me (early thirties) suffer with depression as our whole working lives things have got consistently worse and harder. The difference in lifestyle between us and people 10-20 years our senior is so stark.
The trouble is the proportion of those working and therefore paying into the system is so skewed. There are more pensioners and people signed off with sickness than ever before, obviously not their fault but still. housing is a massive issue for young people and I’m worried for when those stuck in private rent reach pension age with what will be shit pensions compared to the final salary pensions of now where they will need huge amounts of government support just to make ends meet. Life just doesn’t feel fair.

13 years of Conservative rule for you. Every man/woman for themselves, demonisation of the poor and vulnerable, complete lack of vision for the future under the guise of austerity, Brexit leading to workforce shortages, politicians out to divide rather than unite. I don’t think Covid actually factors into it- I think that’s used as a smokescreen for covering the actual reasons why this country is so broken.