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!

State of the roads here in West Mids you could mine for diamonds in the pot holes on my local roads.
Train service is dire DD at college and her trains are always late/cancelled/no seats.
DD 12 referred to orthopaedic consultant for a serious issue it's a 5 month wait.
Shops that used to be well staffed like Primark that have 10 tills with only 3 teenage staff, same in Superdrug, Next.
Big Sainsburys has gone from a few self checkouts to only 3 human staff and expect us to do self checkout with massive trolley.
Class sizes creeping into the mid 30's and shit old school falling apart.
My only positive is that as a small town I can usually get at GP appointment or a Nurse appointment.
Oh yes also I need a wisdom tooth out and the dentist said waiting list is over a year plus.
Tories.

I have one word for you: tories.

13 years of rich inept wankers raping and pillaging the country finally catching up with us.

@ilovebagpuss same here in North Essex Went over a pothole yesterday and so bad the Christmas CD in the CD player jumped Yet there are always road works.

To be honest, the filth and letter is linked to poor education of people who just haven’t been taught to actually throw their stuff in a bin. The amount of people I see who throw their rubbish on the ground, blatantly, is unbelievable. When I was growing up I was always taught not to litter, but like a lot of things, undisciplined kids are now turning into self entitled, couldn’t care less adults. Products of the last couple of decades of lazy parenting. And don’t get me started on public toilets. Why do people think it’s ok to wipe their arses and chuck their used toilet paper on the cubical floor, or crap on the seats, not flush the toilet. People who do this - do they live in hovels, or just save this sort of behaviour for shared spaces with the public?

Britain was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, and had an empire.

Now we have no coal or minerals left, and the heavy industry at the heart of our erstwhile prosperity is no more.

Equality for women has resulted in their labour being monetarised for the benefit of the wealthy, as it now requires both partners to work in order to live. (Back when I were a lass in the 1960s we were promised 20 hour working weeks!)

We have an aging population, and expectations of receiving a very high standard of health care.

Somehow, we need to find a way of sharing what we do have,

Bloody hell, which part of London have you been going to? I've lived here for 40 years and don't recognise that. If you stick to tourist hotspots there will always be idiots.

Bent tories. 290m spent on Rwanda. The majority of that money will be in the Swiss bank accounts of Rwandan politicians and in offshore shell companies, that will be in years to come, linked to tory donors.

Too many people at top set the financial agenda, and strangely they set it to help themselves.

They're not illegal immigrants. Don't believe everything you read in the Daily Mail. Almost all of them are perfectly legal. Hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents are entitled to come here, many Ukrainians have come, also a lot of international students.
Also, since we told the Europeans that they weren't welcome any more, more people are coming from elsewhere in the world.
While the Tories are banging on about small boats the vast majority of immigrants come by other means.

I've yet to see even one drunk ambulance in London, so that's a bit of a shock to hear it's apparently full of them.

Yeah OP, it's practically unforgivable on MN not to be planning to emigrate, didn't you get the memo?

its the government!
I know many seem to get queasy about politics but politics is everywhere and everyone’s problem. Campaign to get these greedy and corrupt bunch out and you’ll see the change

Everyone feels this. The war in Ukraine has taken vast sums of money from UK and other countries.
We had a poor summer, and everyone is depressed. We have to try to find joy in the small things, a child's laughter, a robin, music etc

😆😆😆😆

It's because the English love their Tories too much, too many bootlickers.

They've wrecked and ransacked everything in the last 13 years.

Yes although depends what part of London. City is spotless because the the council gives a shit.

A lot of the problems with private business are due to not being able to recruit staff and when they do they’re just not good enough.

The broken welfare system coupled with years of wage depression by shareholders means work does not pay.

It’s also tough to get decent staff because education was neglected for so long. My DM is a team leader in a business that recruits a lot of young people (travel) and she is shocked by a growing lack of I’m sorry to say, intelligence, social skills and personal care skills. Never before have they had to speak to staff about personal hygiene, washing and ironing uniform on a regular enough basis but it is quite commonplace now.

You are more right than you can imagine. I am a youth justice worker and see not just how bad mainstream public services are but how much worse they are for our most vulnerable and traumatised children. We have many children unable to get an education (which under UN convention is every child's basic right), some needing to be in care because their parents can't care for them or their homes are so abusive but social care don't have the money to pay for care (despite safety being every child's basic right) and children waiting up to three years to have their cases heard in court which means they have it hanging over them and are less likely to be able to focus with education etc and which means victims don't get closure and sometimes have to be revictimised if they have to give evidence all that time later. Police barely investigate most offences because they have nooney either. The UK scored 179 out of 184 countries in the kids rights index league table of how well each country is doing on UN convention of childrens rights. Oh and the Young Offenders institutes have such bad staff shortages that children are locked up 23 hours per day often without any education, and yet we expect them to suddenly be able to live pro social productive lives on release. Nothing for children to do anymore, no youth clubs, no safe places for them... Honestly it's worse than you imagine

I'd pay more in council tax if there was a guarantee that my local council would spend the council tax on important things I.e. adult social care, public protection, street cleaning, rubbish collection etc but they cant guarantee that because the council tax will be spent on their dodgy backhander deals with their tory pals. (I live in an area where the councillors were reprimanded by the government for their shady dealings - THAT says something doesn't it!!)

I'd pay more in income tax if there was a guarantee that the money would be used where it is really needed and not being used on some twatty idea to fly people to bloody Rwanda or shoring up a Tory MP's wheeze with a dodgy mate (PPE debacle).

I moved to London 1995. I think it became the Greatest City in the World in the 00s. Brit-pop and all that. It was frankly an amazing time to be young, single and in London. It was expensive but even on a rubbish salary you could still afford to rent a room in Zone 2-3, get a tube pass and buy a few drinks in a club.

I think London peaked in 2012 - Jub-o-lympic year. What a year that was!!!! During the Olympics they suspended all the flaming building and road works in Central London and it was just bliss. London worked like I've never seen before or since. Maybe all the soldiers having to be drafted in last minute to do the job of GS4 was a sign of things to come though. Papering over the cracks so to speak.

10+ years later and we are definitely in decline. Is it the mayor? Is it the government? Is it too much immigration? Is it the stupidly expensive house prices? I don't know, but as they say 'the past is a different country' and London is not the vibrant place it once was, and I'm not sure it will be again in my lifetime.
Outside of London I don't know. Councils in some areas going bankrupt while places like the North Cotswolds are becoming a Soho-house/Bamford gated community. Certainly there seems to be a widening gap between those who have and these who don't and it's becoming a lot easier to fall down the ladder than it is to step up a rung or two. So yeah, guess I agree that things are a getting a bit shit. :-)

In a democracy you need a robust and free press to hold the powerful to account. In the UK the main media outlets are in bed with the Tories, most of the papers support them and even the BBC gets stuffed with Tories at the top and they're cowered into not holding them to account. Then you get outlets like GB News and the Murdoch media who will only complain if the Tories aren't right wing enough.

Without a strong press, corruption is easy in plain sight. The likes of the Daily Mail would never allow a Labour government to get away with what the Tories do. Look at the amount of front pages devoted to Starmer's curry. Everything is wrong about the way our society is structured.

@beguilingeyes "Also, since we told the Europeans that they weren't welcome any more..."

Is that true though? I understood EU citizens could apply for settled status, and 6million did.

I suppose what leaving the EU did was take away the unfair advantage that potential immigrants had over those coming from the rest of the world.

Why do people think it’s ok to wipe their arses and chuck their used toilet paper on the cubical floor, or crap on the seats, not flush the toilet. People who do this - do they live in hovels, or just save this sort of behaviour for shared spaces with the public?
At my workplace, which is large and has lots of different people visiting, they put signs up in all the cubicles with diagrams showing you not to stand on the toilet seat, not to poo on the floor, throw paper on the floor etc etc. I asked one of the cleaners and she said they have people doing this nowadays and then she told me some gross stuff which made me regret asking.

I haven't seen any poo or used toilet paper on the floor but someone has started covering the toilet seat with paper (obviously to sit on or maybe stand on) but they leave the paper there when they've done their business!! Why, I mean why would you do that for the next person to find?

It's always the same toilet block, middle toilet, on the ground floor - obviously their special place and in the women's block. I took a picture of it last time I saw it to show DH. There's some weird buggers about.

Not just a little bit, and not just since 2016, though it became more noticeable when visiting workers started to feel unwelcome. The government have been running the economy down since they got in, and a large put of that is massive cuts in central funding to local government, meaning that local councils don't have the money to run services properly.

Oppadoppadoo, and owning snd running a car costs nothing?

They were officially told that they could, and then it was made as difficult as possible, and done with the usual efficiency for which the Home Office is so well known.
In the mean time, the racists emboldened by Brexit doubled down on the hate and telling everyone with slightly darker skin or the hint of an accent to f**k off back home, sure that the government supported them. The public services depending on them, and the farms with nobody close enough that could afford to work for what the farmers could afford to pay have been haemorrhaging staff ever since - remember the reports of food rotting in the fields? I remember them in Lincolnshire, especially in the local press.
And now the Tories are planning to stop the ones still willing to work here from being able to get visas, and just save them for people earning at least 50% over the average wage.

I understood EU citizens could apply for settled status, and 6million did.

Did you stop to think before you typed that ?