What do you think the U.K. will be like in 15-20 years?

[GoodnightAdeline]

Pondering this on the train this morning.

My personal view is Labour will win the election this year, and will be able to keep the country treading water for a little while, but we will continue to get poorer as a nation and the decline will continue. I think there will be an exodus of skilled and younger people and we will slide into second world country status, leaving a tiny workforce struggling to support an enormous number of dependants. Perhaps it will right itself eventually, but not before 2060 or so.

Am I being too pessimistic?

Oh come on

I thought this was the elephant in the room
Not 15-20 years though but later

I am an immigrant. I don't think I will stay once DH and I retire, which will be in the next five years. I am already flying back home for medical treatment. I will be very sad to leave, though.
DC might go elsewhere too, I don't know.

I'd like to see someone with political vision voted in. A big move towards green new jobs, 4 day week as the norm with time for people to pursue leisure, hobbies & passion projects, regeneration of wild habitats, retrofitting houses to be passive houses with inbuilt solar panel tiles on the roof for community energy or green roofs, increase in off shore wind and small football pitch sized nuclear plants, plastic packaging outlawed, vertical farms in cities. A move to walkable towns and cities with separate connected and safe cycling paths, good public transport everywhere, not just London. The population will be aging so opportunities for the elderly to be involved in community projects like gardens, rewilding, recycling, teaching skills like sewing that will benefit everyone.

Unbearably overcrowded. Its overcrowded now, so god knows what it will be like in the future. My local woods have been hacked down to make way for a new housing estate, and a second giant housing estate is being built at the other end of the village. The traffic is already hellish. So bad, in fact, that I hardly go out. Frankly, I sometimes feel like I’m suffocating.

I know someone will say “actually the birth rate is falling,” but they overlook two things:

1. People are living longer. And they may soon be living a LOT longer. The first generation of age-slowing drugs are on the horizon, and some people think the lifespan could soon rise to 120 or even 150. In other words, people won’t be dying to make room for the next generation.

2. The birth rate may be dropping in Europe, but in Africa it is still booming and the African population is going to double. If climate change gets worse, that huge young population will head to Europe.

It’ll be even more fucked than it is now-and that’s saying something

I saw a map that predicted the Thames would have flooded by 2050 - most of Pimlico, Westminster etc all underwater.

Hard to believe. They'd shore it up first. Though I think it's interesting that so much money is now invested in East London around Stratford which is predicted to stay dry.

I heard your second point from a friend who worked for a multinational. they said it would get uninhabitably hot in Africa and the Middle east so there will be mass migration to Europe.

But I thought life span in Uk was back on the slide again because the NHS is so underfunded. My parents - from the generation of war child boomers - both had operations on medical issues in their seventies that would have killed them off a generation earlier. That meant they lived to late eighties and suffered dementia. I think there will be a shift in funding away from keeping people alive if their bodies start to pack up in their seventies, towards funding the health of younger people. But it won't be presented like that.

Blasphemy laws, a massive decline in living standards, possible civil war in most of Europe or war with Russia, overcrowded expensive housing, fewer taxpayers and much higher taxes for those in work (if there is any work left to be done by humans), appropriation of normal peoples savings and anyone with any kind of assets will either be taxed into oblivion or have it taken from them for the "benefit of society", rich getting massively richer, more powerful and even more dictatorial, civil rights and enlightenment values massively rolled back, cultural decline, no more middle class, mass movements of people but people who want to leave stopped from taking any wealth out with them. Basically hell on earth.

Mass immigration has already been and will continue to be the ruin of this country. No one considered the infrastructure behind an open border policy and we're still welcoming in thousands by the day and giving them housing/money/medical care/education.

It's as if no one in Government actually has a brain cell between them. I personally think the system of MP's should be scrapped and parliament run by community members and business people.

You are not wrong OP. The terminal decline with continue and UK will be an irrelevant middle income country within the next 20 years.

Those who have a made it a mission to live off the ever shrinking number of net contributors and taxpayers and those who demand freebies are in for a big shock.

15 years time? A new offence of paedophobia will be created.

Not much change then. That’s pretty much what it s now.

Yes, fully agree with that. You simply can't continue with an ever reducing proportion of people actually working and contributing.

It will be an offence to be afraid of babies and children? Or did you mean an offence to paedophile-phobic?

It will be grim, and there won't be any teachers prepared to teach the unruly and rude pupils.

The latter. We will get to a point where it will be an expression of hatred to condemn paedophiles. They won’t call it child abuse of course - it will be “inter-generational love” or something. Very worried about the MAP movement.

At the rate of global warming currently reaching tipping point, there may not be UK as we know it.
AI would make a lot of jobs and people obsolete, the fair few who are currently in line to test and produce AI will get insanely rich, middle class will disappear.

Run down, over populated with a fair few ignorant uneducated, feral, scary people, drug addicts etc and lots of conflict over race, religion and resources. Glad I won't be here to see it.

I agree with @karriecreamer
Also, I don't think I would have children if I had my time again, as the future IMHO is so bleak with world events that we cannot control dominating our lives to an alarming extent.

I recently helped out at DC’s school and met a lot of teenagers. Of course I already thought my own teens are amazing but talking to a load more of them made me optimistic for the future. We are not in the UK but I’m sure there’s similar kids over there.

Wow I hope there's only one term of socialist government. Otherwise will be like living in a Terminator film.

Well, this is a cheery thread! I have decided not to worry about the paedophiles. Plenty of other stuff to worry about!

It wasn’t last time. It’ll be like living in a Dickens novel if we have the Tories much longer.