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?

20th in the top 10?

There's research showing that voting intention years before a General Election doesn't translate into an actual vote at the next GE. Looking at tge fracturing of the two-party system, a wildcard coalition looks the most likely outcome for 2029.

It's an uncomfortable place to be but longer term over maybe five or ten years they should be able to cover their derriere.
Weather it will match inflation is another consideration but at least on paper it will look the same amount of money if they need to sell.
My first job when I was 18 was working in a building society legal department dealing with repossessions in 1989.
I had the unenviable task of receiving and calling people that were behind with their mortgage payments because they couldn't afford them at that time.
It was soul breaking, especially at 18. Then in 2007, my ex partner and I got a seven-time joint mortgage from Northern rock.
35k each income approximately. I would do 30 hours a week of over time to bring it up.
Mortgage was 387k.
Took 11 years to sell that house at a figure that was comparable to RPI or CPI, with only one of us working due to five years of maternity leave having had three children.
Eyes wide open now.
It's much better to learn from other people's mistakes than to absorb them oneself.

Don't. Places (like the area where I live) that seemed pretty hopeless in the 70s, 80s and 90s are now thriving — buzzing even. I took two young Londoners to Mumbles last weekend. We walked along the new promenade, spent silly money at a bijou seafood shack for popcorn cockles, had a pizza and ice cream at a locally-owned business, then strolled back again for a beer on a shady terrace to enjoy people-watching. I thought they might find it all rather provincial but they were astonished at how busy and smart and happy it was. Loads of ordinary people out having a good time. Local secondary schools get a surprisingly high proportion of students into Oxbridge/ Russell Group universities. None of that would have been true 40 years ago.

There are people who seem determined only to see what's wrong with the UK. I think they are probably paid by the Dubai Development Corporation to try and persuade more people to move to Dubai. The UK has stunning scenery and countryside and amazing history and cultural activities. It's a decent place to live if you care about more than just being able to make a shedload of money and pay minimal tax.

I think anyone who moves to somewhere like Dubai in order not to pay tax should have to pay an absolute fortune if they later decide to come back and live in the UK.

Well for years the government has intervened in the market to inflate and maintain prices. It wouldn’t have to decide on a new value, simply stop those interventions. In a free market prices would never have got so high. I mean, apparently. So I’m told by those who understand it 😂

Honestly this stuff from Labour voters is counterproductive.

Living standards were far lower in the 1970s but no one felt hard done by. Many of our parents had grown up with out door toilets and a tin bath once a week with the water shared by the whole family. In comparison to that they felt lucky.

My memories were that oil was so expensive heating the house was not really possible. The boiler went on for one hour when my Dad got home from work. We wore layers, had hot water bottles, and were generally more hardy. It wasn't considered to be deprivation, no health visitor got concerned about room temperatures, ice inside the windows was perfectly normal and we didn't have huge mould problems because we didn't have the hot water for daily showers and we opened the windows every day. We had one bath a week and shared the water. Kids first, so my parents had tepid soapy water and never once complained. Basin washes morning and evening.

Strikes were a thing, so many strikes. Power cuts. Queuing for petrol, queuing with a bucket at standpipes for water, mending clothes, darning socks, everything was handed down from one child to the next and new clothes came from jumble sales.

We never ate out, ever. Meals were basic and cooked from scratch. Holidays were in the UK.

Basically my parents had very little money so every penny was carefully counted. They were a civil servant and a teacher. However on their salaries we could afford a 4 bed house with a garden in a nice area, even if they couldn't afford to heat it. That wouldn't be possible now.

People were grateful if they had a job and tried really hard to keep it.

I'm a business owner, anyone who has currently has a job needs to develop a 1970s fear of unemployment and do their very best to keep it. The shit is about to hit the fan big time employment wise. It is already starting with the lack of opportunities for graduates. Things are about to get an awful lot worse before they get better. As a country we are very passive. We let the government absolutely screw us over and all we do is whine about it online. I'm as guilty as anyone of this.

OP, that’s just capitalism. It’s actually just how it works. The ‘economy’ has to grow or capitalism does. Like cancer. It does this by producing a little more for a little less. That is - more profit for fewer costs (inputs, labour etc). Labour costs can only be reduced by increasing productivity (you working harder/faster) and/or reducing pay/benefits and getting rid of human workers altogether. Input costs can be reduced by trashing environmental regulations and supercharging technology. Think of a hamster on a wheel that has to run ever faster. Inevitably capitalism will reach its limit. Whether because raw materials will run out, vital environmental systems collapse or because of population decline, or a bit of everything. But there really is no alternative to capitalism., nothing any better anyway that we can get enough humans to agree on. Capitalism and its collapse is inevitable. What you are feeling is capitalism starting to rub up against the limits. Limits of human productivity in the system, limits of the environment to provide cheap, extractable raw materials and limits of technology to provide further efficiencies (overall) in the system. None of this is fun and it’s only going to get worse. Just try to enjoy what small pleasures you have. And care for your kids with all the love you possess. It is what it is.

Oh, we’ll cover his derrière. It’s those whose parents can’t that worry us.

I bought my first flat in the mid-80s. Great deal, so I thought. 4.5 times salary from my investment bank employer. Managed to offload it at much reduced price, just before rates hit 15% 😱

Whereabouts is this if you don’t mind my asking? I live in an area with comparatively high crime and I walk the streets alone without feeling concerned. I don’t at night, and I do take precautions to avoid certain places and situations, but that is because I am in a more risky area. Where most of my relatives live I would not feel the need to take those precautions. There is always risk though, always has been.

and the NHS will be using this system to diagnose humans with health problems

Why is the cost of living exploding so much? Genuine question as I have not figured out the driver.

As for Thames Water…it is WILD to me that my water usage is unchanged but due to price increases my bill has nearly doubled.

At this rate I will be forced to look for a boyfriend just to keep costs down.

I’m so sick of this trope, and it’s ALWAYS middle class people who spout it in real life.
The only bad thing about that policy was the ban on using the money mad to invest in more council housing. That was really wrong.
But the opportunity to own your own home, for people who could never get a sniff of that before, that was amazing.
Let’s not forget, single mothers ( whose children are statistically disadvantaged in nearly every way) would struggle be approved for a mortgage. With a discount and therefore not needing a deposit, suddenly there is security and the opportunity to build an asset. It’s lack of inherited assets that give the middle and uppers their head start- always.
So, as a pro woman and pro children policy it was great. A pp also made the point about council estates falling to shit and becoming sinks. The council house I lived in suffered endless leaks, floods, problems. The council couldn’t or wouldn’t fix anything properly.
It’s FAR better to have mixed estates- some owned some rented.
My ideal would be the council / gov build mixed estates on purpose. Some houses to sell directly, some that can be tenanted, sold later if the tenants want to after a certain time, then the money ploughed back into more housing.

Same. Currently in NW town with highest crime rate in the county. I have never felt unsafe walking around alone.

Recall feeling very unsafe walking around alone at night in the part of London I lived in in the mid/late 80s.

You wanna try be in the UK in the 1970's, we are in fucking paradise compared to then...We compare our lives to rich and famous and get depressed, grow up and look whats happening in any country beyond our borders.

Apologies it wasn't clear.
Things that relied on chewing of numbers.
Searching huge databases and referring to every medical document or case law or producing actuarial statistics are next in line.
Creative content in terms of video etc have already surpassed my wildest imagination. Search YouTube for video clips of Google veo3.
And the ones released in the last couple of weeks (although the grock one has not been allowed in Europe because it's so effective it threatens the jobs of millions)
What I was trying to say is that hands on jobs and caring, technical hands on, STEM basically have a bit of a buffer for our children.
You can't use a robot to do a hands-on diagnosis of a pet.
You can't use a robot to do the plumbing under the sink or rewire a main circuit board.
No one is going to want robots to work in a care home dealing with the elderly or a robot nurse.
Obviously we will make assumptions about the awareness of other people's knowledge in a certain field.
I design AI and cyber security and quantum computing solutions for some very large companies and governments so I'm aware of what they can do and how fast they are exploding.
Look up the singularity by Ray Kurtzviles..
That's when AI becomes more intelligent than everybody on the planet and it was supposed to be or predicted to be around 2030 but it looks like it may be 2027 now.
AI is already writing its code to make the next iteration a hundred times more powerful. Many of the models I have come across in a professional context have basically absorbed every document, every web page, every forum, every PDF, every image, all of YouTube and other platforms so it has the ability to gather and form solutions to almost anything. Yes the current version isn't even 60% of the way there but that is number is decreasing extremely rapidly.
Again just look for some peer reviewed professional documents about the exponential rate of increase in AI and I'm actually quite scared for my children.

Why? It’s the truth isn’t it? I’m not saying the poster is herself racist. I’m saying she’s happy to have a racist government rather than Labour. She clearly is as she’s voting Reform expressly to get Labour out. I’m not saying she actively wants a racist government, but that she considers one a better option than Labour. This is what she has said. How is it counterproductive to repeat and clarify what she has said?

If you only have a choice of 2 parties then if you want 1 of them out you only have 1 other option. Why is this so hard for people to grasp? We don't live in liberal metropolitan areas with a board range of options, each standing a chance of getting in.

You have called me rascist and extremist so I will report your comment because it's against MN rules.

No they won't. They will have access to systems far more sophisticated than those available to the public for free.

And AI is improving every day, by leaps and bounds. We're still at the dial up stage.

From a BBC news story: "An economy is defined as being in recession when the total of everything we and the government spend or export shrinks for two successive three-month periods".

That's GDP ("the total of everything"), not GDP per capita.

I'm saying the UK government are taking measures to avoid being placed into recession. I wouldn't dispute that GDP per capita is a better measure of relative economic success.

I grasp it. I’m just pointing out that you must find a racist government less abhorrent than a Labour one. You keep saying that’s what you want.

But you don’t have a choice of two parties. Tactical voting doesn’t mean that. It’s why the LibDems picked up so many seats last year because voters picked whoever was most likely to eject the Tory.

Yes you have insinuated that I am rascist and extremist by saying "that's racsist and extremism. At least own it". By saying I should own it you are suggesting that I am rascist etc.
Anyway I have reported it.

Yes this is so true, the norm for my DM’s generation at school was a strictly measured few inches of water in the bath once a week. Of course in families you used the previous person’s bathwater, as a child several of my relatives still did this and I would sometimes use a bath after someone. Sounds bad but it was totally normal.

People had a totally different attitude to waste. Growing up my DM’s family had several sheets of xmas wrap that were used every year and carefully folded to use again. She says it was so exciting that sometimes in Summer she’d be allowed to take them out and look at them just to remember Christmas.