Uk is in big trouble - what do you think will happen?

[hippysun]

Thames water on brink of collapse. All those CEOs getting fat bonuses. Water shortages and rising bills.

the cost of living is off the chart. Every bill has gone up. Pop in to Tesco for toothpaste, butter and chicken and it costs an insane amount for just a few items.

the government are crap and taxing the hell out of us.

my salary is stuck. I feel constantly poor now. 10 years ago when I earned significantly less, I felt ok money wise. Chatted today to a colleague about science graduate son who is stuck doing a minimum wage job as there are no jobs here. I’ve noticed this myself in my town. The council have a few, other companies outsourced to India years ago, the pharma company moved out years ago and the land will soon be a new housing estate.

the nhs is a total mess.

housing costs make me want to weep! No chance of moving. Feel bad for my kids. They just keep building expensive houses here all packed into poorly designed estates. Tiny gardens. But no infrastructure. The promised schools get cancelled and drs surgeries and hospitals are rammed with patients. My mortgage of course is up.

in my industry… everyone is obsessed with AI and I’m sad to say it has taken some jobs already. There is a huge push towards AI.

there seems to be underlying tension here re migrants. People getting increasingly annoyed.

this country feels like a right mess. Making rich people richer and poor people even poorer. The middle earners are getting squeezed. I hate it.

i don’t remember it being this bad ever before.

why is it so terrible? And what do you think will happen?

Another issue is that the young have been systematically disadvantaged for decades. This is a real problem for any country. It is now resulting in a major homelessness problem, a declining population, lots of young people with terrible mental health, lots of young people (and others) getting signed off work long term and not paying tax or contributing economically. Many intelligent, hardworking young people are leaving or planning to leave the UK. We already have a major demographic problem and this is inevitably going to worsen because of these factors.

Actually I think you’d find we would. It’s fairy money for those of us who bought a long time ago and have no intention of moving. The people who would really be hit hard if the bottom fell out of the property market are relatively recent buyers with huge mortgages.

Yes, people who have such a rosy eyed view of the 1970s don't realise just how much lower the standard of living was then.

Foreign holidays once every 5 years if you were very lucky. One TV - maybe black & white - per home with only a few channels. One landline phone, with international calls extortionate. You might go out to eat for birthday and anniversaries, certainly not every weekend. And much less choice of food, both in restaurants and in supermarkets. Pizza would have been seen as the height of exoticism. Wearing hand me downs from siblings or even cousins was quite normal even for the middle classes.

You could say that the basics of life were more affordable then, and probably that's true. But I very much doubt anyone here would want to go back to the 1970s. And that's not even going into the prevailing racism, sexism and so many other -isms which would horrify us today.

The sensible ones will drop their prices in order to sell.

I think the rot started when thatcher decided to sell off council housing.

This has actually made me laugh. I assume it’s satire.

How do you suggest collapsing house prices.

sorry mr jones I know you have a mortgage of 500k on the property you bought ten years ago for 800k but it government have now decided it’s worth 200k. I know it’s in the catchment of a outstanding school and have prefect transport links to London but Thems the rules!
Ok then. I won’t sell it! I will rent it out and people will pay what I ask

And obviously if the market drops overall the house you’re downsizing to would also be cheaper.

I heard yesterday that the IMF bailout of the UK in 1976 used up 10% of the reserves of the IMF. If they were to do it now, a bailout would use up 50% of the IMF’s reserves. If this is true, it is clear that the UK economy is in a truly dreadful state, and this government seems to do the opposite of what would help at every opportunity (not saying that the last one was much better though). I don’t think the UK has anyone to lead it at present who is capable or willing to tackle its problems.

I am fascinated by the rise and fall of empires and agree that this is what we are now seeing in the west especially in America. Like you I try to focus on the little things rather than get too embroiled in the horror show that is unfolding on the world stage. I spend time with a friend and her delightful toddler but I do find myself wondering what sort of country this will be by the time her little one reaches adulthood.

Same story for years, nothing new here apart from house prices.

Unemployment was 25% in 1931. Yes 2025 is a bad year from what most of us know in our lifetime but times have been historically worse.

Year Unemployment Rate (%)
1932 25%
1984 12.0%
1993 10.6%
2011 8.0%
2021 5.0%
2021 4.7%

And utiliites, water being a prime example of this, what an utter literal shit show that turned out to be

We still get the library van! Thankfully retired boomer - we have been very very lucky but have worked very very hard through the 70s and 80s and 14% mortgages! So glad we are tucked away in the far far SW seems we are immune from most of the shit going on everywhere in the world and a day on the beach or a walk in the countryside costs nowt.

Exactly this.

Just to add to this.
The proliferation of applications on phones and tablets has dramatically reduced the attention span (I had a casual 40 minute chat with psychiatrist outside a hotel in Plymouth once, in the last 10 years). Lovely gentlemen from India.
I asked what he was doing in Plymouth.
He said he specialised in addiction and was brought in by a games app developer to make the games more addictive to keep the dopamine hits so that anyone playing would get addicted.
This kind of physiological manipulation can result in hugely decreased attention spans as the brain is developing.
Add to that the isolation and social interaction compromise that came from covid lockdowns as well as the constant fear mill and now Doom scrolling, the brains aren't the same as it was for the people of my kind of age which is mid 50s.
Even an addition pertinence of AI replacing the first three years of new graduates into the big four and accountancy firms and many other companies it looks like time for apprentices in plumbing, electrical, gas, engineering, seem to be the safest options to avoid the looming wolf of AI.
I lectured at my old grammar School in 2018 about the upcoming possibilities of AI and spoke with multiple groups of sixth formers to determine what Fields they were going to move into.
Veterinarians, tick.
Civil engineers, tick.
People that were thinking of going into accountancy and even those who were going into law or medicine I advise them to brush up how to use it as a tool because it can never replace the humanitarian side or maybe it will one day but I was relieved to hear most of those particular cohort were buffered against the impacts of things like AI.
Both GPT and grock have released versions in the last week that surpass PhD level knowledge with fully referenced documentation as to where the knowledge came from enabling verification.
I've got three boys aged 16 and under and I've been working in IT since 1983, and have kept a very close eye on it.
Times they are a changing.

Same. My MIL is Irish and we are applying for residency and passports for our girls to give them options when they are older, DH too. They will all leave me in the sinking ship which is UK plc 😂

Agree. We’re just coming to the end of an agonisingly slow process to sell our family home in England. We’ve already bought our flat, quickly and efficiently, in Scotland (that’s a whole other thread 🤣). We’re going nowhere now unless it’s in a box. Cash buyers, it’s our home, price fluctuations will have no effect on us whatsoever.
Our youngest is just taking on his first mortgage. If the market slumps, that’s him in negative equity.

Yep. We're living in what future historians will regard as 'end of empire' times. Britain and Europe is increasingly a backwater.

For once I'm sometimes happy to be in my 50s. I wouldn't want to be young growing up with AI taking so many jobs. And no, I don't agree with those who blightly say 'new jobs will be created' to replace the massive number which will be lost to AI.

In 2015, ten years ago, 50.1% of the electorate voted for parties (Conservative, UKIP or DUP) which expressed a desire to cut net immigration. In ten years since, net immigration has increased.

What's actually happening is that we have an ageing population and most immigrants are relatively young and come to work. If the UK decreases net immigration then the working population will get smaller due to more older workers leaving the workforce than young people joining it. This will cause GDP (a measure of total economic activity) to also decrease, placing the country officially into recession, which will make it harder to borrow the money that the government needs to plug the gap between the money collected via taxation and the money spent on services.

If you don't understand that story, it seems as though successive democractically elected governments have wilfully ignored the majority opinion and it's one of the things making people angry, fed by Twitter and the 24-hour news cycle.

My dad probably earned equivalent of about that or less in the 70s. We had a nice sized house but absolutely none of what a lot of people take for granted now. We never ate out. Not even a drink. Never had holidays apart from one week in a caravan once. Clothes were 2nd hand mostly and very few of them. Food very basic and few treats. Heating rarely on. Few toys. Ancient furniture. Ancient decor.

My dad is in his 80s now and complains how hard it is to treat his grandchildren and great grandchildren as they already have so much.

Life is much better now in many ways. Harder in some. I wouldn’t want to go back to the 70s though. My gran lived in an absolute hovel with an outside loo. These days there would be outrage at some of the housing conditions people had in the 70s.

It's GDP per capita that is important and Britain is now 20th in the top 10.
I studied economics.
Can provide figures if you want to be picky.

AI is not conscious entity, it is constructed of context scraped from the internet, content which is produced originally by humans.
Now that each Google search throws up an AI summary there are fewer incentives for any of us to go to individual websites and add our own content. Those websites will dwindle and AI will be left with nothing new to feed upon.

That's what's so worrying. Anyone who can't see the problem with massively cutting taxes while also massively increasing spending - which TBF appears to be a large chunk of the British population - shouldn't be allowed to vote. Or near sharp objects.

Veterinarians, tick.
Civil engineers, tick.
Sorry what do you mean by this?

People have no idea. I agree that things are bad now and given the advantages we now have they should be better, but no doubt that for most of human history life is struggle. Even in recent history things were basic.

My family as an example, and they were doing well by comparison…the house my mum grew up in had no central heating, of course there was mould and in the mornings in winter you had to break the ice on water by your bed before you could take a sip. Nobody went on holiday. Holidays abroad were not even a thing. Most people never in their life left the country. Food was sourced locally, no supermarkets, and it was scarce. When my mum and my auntie left school, which was weekly boarding, food had been so poor there that they were both more than a stone underweight.

Many of the women in their village were lifelong spinsters since the men they were to marry had been brutally mown down in one of the world wars. Their uncles included two with war injuries and one who was killed, a beautiful man in his 20s with everything ahead of him.

When my grandfather had a stroke in the 70s, it was probably avoidable because no one monitored blood pressure or gave meds for it then. Yes the doctor came to the house, but only to say just do your best for him and leave him to die at home. He was unable to speak or even I think swallow but not even taken to hospital, family had to just do their best for a few days till he died. Horrendous trauma, and absolutely the norm for medical treatment then.

Due to the collapse of farming post war they had lost the farm and were left in a perilous financial situation as many were.

People do not realise that medical services and treatment were so basic, that almost no school they would have considered now using existed in many places, that heating and indoor bathrooms, televisions, phones….all these things were exceptional or new in living memory.

Not even touched on racism, homophobia, religious bigotry and the rest.

I mean, sorry to go on. Just to clarify I do agree things are inexcusably bad now too 😂