To think our towns and cities are just so run down lately, and our standard of living has decreased significantly?

[blahhhhg]

I don't know if I'm just feeling a bit down and bitter lately but I just feel like lately our country seems to have gotten very run down. I went out into town today and couldn't help but notice how grotty and rundown everything looks. Litter everywhere, security guards everywhere - in nearly every clothing shop there is security on the door now, security wandering up and down the high street. It makes you feel really unsafe but they must be there for a reason now? Shops are dirty; filthy floors and used Starbucks cups just left off the shelf for some poor worker to clean up. Clothes for sale that are covered in makeup stains. I just found it really depressing. It's just not one town either, I've noticed it nearly everywhere I've been. I'm in my late 20s so it's not like I've had decades of life experience to draw from and I have a rose-tinted view of yesteryear, but it seems that in the last 5ish years things have really declined.

Agree
but if we couldn’t buy online as before then ……. we’d spend our money in town like we used to.

Yes. Where I live is the exact same, I’m sure it’s the case in city centres everywhere. It really gets me down.

You're right, so Truss enacted her Thatcherite economic policy, but instead of paying for it by selling off nationalised companies,it required heavy borrowing. The IMF were so concerned, they issued a warning.
We're still paying for that catastrophe.

Cuts to public services
Council tax , despite going up has to be priorised for social care and mandatory services (litter / parks isn’t mandatory it seems )

There’s a lot of belief in Labour, well on here. As rubbish piles up. I guess we’ll see.

Truss further wrecked the economy trying to push through all tax cuts and trying to be Thatcher.

No. Labour are even worse.

The costs to build & the time it takes are staggering;

"the planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as muchh_ as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.’"

@Livingbytheocean how do you think labour can undo it?!

I live in Bradford. It’s a shithole. But it didn’t used to be. We have people who have moved from their own countries because their own countries were shitholes, but then just transferred that shit to here. It’s people that make places. It’s scruffy here with dirty streets, and the people are feral. I actually stood in Greggs last weekend whilst someone walked in and brazenly stood with a bin liner and started putting sandwiches from the shelves into the liner. The two ladies serving behind the counter just stood and watched. The guy just then brazenly walked out. I feel sick that this is what our country has become.

As @mistressofthedarkside said people just buy cheap shit from Shein, Temu, Amazon etc. Often so they can needlessly redecorate their homes and themselves every season. Then they complain about the demise of the high street.

Pre New Labour, they might have renationalised our stolen sold off industries and amenities, got some of our infrastructure back and working.
OK, it might have been in that lackadaisical and lacklustre way nationalised organisations seemed to have but at least they wouldn't have been run down and asset stripped.

Agree with litter everywhere. Our local retail park is absolutely shocking.

You have clearly forgotten how utterly shit our state owned services were… or too young!!!

The decay and degradation is very real, especially in the city centres. Manchester may have a glossy skyline filled with skyscrapers and amazing buildings but at street level it’s an absolutely embarrassing disgrace and the council whom have been in charge for years seem to be doing very little to alleviate the situation.

Filthy streets, litter everywhere, alcoholics and addicts in doorways everywhere you look, hoards of Deliveroo riders swarming pavements, wild rough people ranting and causing mayhem. It’s truly abysmal, there’s hardly any police presence so the streets feel very ropey in the daytime never mind evenings. It really does seem grimy and frankly not what you would expect from somewhere with such a lofty ambition for being the pinnacle of UK growth and development.

Neither! (Giggle)
But they staggered along in their crap way, and weren't owned by foreign conglomerates.

I think people are only now realising just how fucked England is.

I think many still don't get it, they think it's a blip and we can recover but we have never had the demographic issue.

Which demographic issue do you mean?

Ditto. A group of schoolgirls shoplifting in the local Lidl. The Security guard detained then and when the police arrive the 5 accused him of trying to sexual assault them and touch them inappropriately. He now wears a camera as part of his uniform. I heard it from one of the cashiers.

Apparently school kids entering the store in groups straight after school and shoplifting cakes & food is a very regular occurrence. Something they feel powerless to do much about.

Absolutely were. I recall how people were shouting out for change back then, because state owned services were so badly run.

Exactly 👏👏👏

@PandoraSox the shift in it. On the one hand it's great but the financial implications are huge.

I have lived in the same market town for 48 years and, yes, it has really gone downhill. It feels dirtier, noisier and nastier. It also feels dangerously overcrowded. It’s basically a market town with the population of a small city crammed into it. You can see the effects everywhere. The new build housing estates are disgusting - horrible rabbit hutch houses squeezed on top of one another. You also see it in the traffic. The narrow old roads and country lanes weren’t built for this volume (and don’t get me started on the screeching car engines and modified exhausts that bang and explode).

I hesitate to blame immigration. I work with people from Poland, Hungary, Norway and India, all of whom I like and respect. However, the left talk as if immigration is always, automatically, a good thing. It isn’t. Immigration can be positive, negative or neutral. It depends who you let in (and how many). I often drive across town at around 11am on a weekday. Everywhere I go there seem to be gangs of young men wandering aimlessly around. When I pass them, they are always speaking in a foreign language, and they clearly don’t work. One of the problems with this so-called ‘refugee’ crisis is that vast majority seem to be young men.

I feel like there’s opposites with this. On some threads Temu and Shein are bad. The way to interrupt that is price increases. Which are very bad if you look at tariff threads.

I agree. But still plenty of people falling over themselves to say “it’s all shit but just to be clear I’m not talking about immigration”. It’s a huge factor and people are still burying their heads in the sand.