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?

As PPs have already pointed out, that kind of AI application is very basic compared to what is being used and developed for other uses right now.
However, the issue of a shrinking data set (and it's content so much as access, that is the issue) is an actual problem for advanced models too. I'm working on Agentic AI for a specific area of banking and we know we will have to address some sort of intervention for the inevitable point at which the data set is no longer sufficiently large enough.

Who were the polls set by though?

Sorry this is so long: I kept thinking of new things to add.

I've just reread the OP's comments about how her parents and grandparents could afford to own their own homes in the 1920s and 1960s and bemoaning the fact her high street's dead. Basically, it seems to be 'Why can't we be like some idealised version how things used to be at some unspecified time in the past?'

There was no ideal time, OP. Your grandparents might have been able to afford a house in Surrey but when they were growing up there was no NHS and no welfare state as we know it now. No employment protection. And no central heating and possibly no indoor bathroom in their home, either. It wasn't until 1948 that state pensions, NHS etc all started. Their lives probably felt very precarious to them.

Fast forward to the 1950s, and the UK was still hard up after the war. The 60s were grey and chilly but there were a lot of unskilled jobs available for people who'd left school at 14 and ended up spending their lives in factories, and the post-war building boom meant that housing was more widely available. The 70s were all power cuts, strikes, political chaos and bailouts from the IMF. Even as a teen I can remember reading the news about yet another general election being called and thinking it sounded scary. We had the three day week: rubbish wasn't collected, bodies weren't buried. It wasn't all deelybobbers and David Cassidy. I graduated in 1981 into a recession and lived in one room in a share house with a single shared bathroom for the next four years. The recessions and inflation just kept coming. The Miner's Strike was dreadful.

The period you think of as a golden era was probably the mid 90s through to 2008, when the financial crisis hit. A period when the economic cycle was on the up and there was relative peace and prosperity. Things did seem better for a lot of people, until it turned out to have been an illusion. In the US they had massive overselling of mortgages to people who couldn't afford them: over here there was some of that also but tax/ mortgage relief for BTL landlords meant that lots of houses were bought up by wealthy people intent on renting them out for high rents to people who couldn't afford to get on the property ladder. Property prices went through the roof. Basically, that policy allowed people with property to make a load of money out of people who couldn't afford to buy property.

What we've got now is the fallout from that, plus a tech revolution that is changing everything in our lives, plus capitalism on steroids, plus the rise of China and the east as manufacturing giants, plus global warming, plus mass migration. We're living in a vastly different and fast-changing world from the golden period you're nostalgic for, OP. There's no going back and no way of predicting how things are likely to be like in the future. This has always been true.

Oh, and the reason the high streets are empty is that people like you (and to some extent me) decided it was easier and cheaper to use Amazon than use your high street shops.

Let’s hope they stay in power! But they need to somehow turn the economy around to keep people onside and stop trying to compete with Farage and the Tories about who is tougher on immigration etc. People were extremely relaxed about immigration in the 1990s because economically times were good.

You Gov

Very good, thoughtful post. 👏

Equality for women and gay people is definitely a lot better now than in the 1970s!
Life expectancy is higher, crime is lower, heathcare is better (yes it really is - you wouldn't have had any routine ultrasounds in pregnancy in the 70s), building standards are higher, home ownership is higher, benefits are more widely available, more people have access to cars & international travel - honestly modern Britain is not that bad.

In fact this Lib Dem has Reform leading in all polls

https://www.markpack.org.uk/155623/voting-intention-opinion-poll-scorecard/

Enough said.

Decent salaries, terms and working conditions would be a start.

It’s all about materialism on this thread. I grew up in the sixties and seventies and I had a very happy childhood. The end of the seventies were particularly great. All this talk about oppression of women doesn’t chime because most of the women I knew were formidable farmers wives who ruled their domain.

Not in the workplace they weren’t,

I don’t share your hope tbf I’d love to see the back of Starmer and Reeves. I think some of their decisions will come back to bite, if not already doing so.

Are there any polls that say what you’d like them to?

Well the farm was their workplace

Probably not.

Completely agree. As an ex advisor, even 10 years ago I had graduates with firsts in varying degrees and they frequently took low paid non degree work just to get a foot in the door.

Just because you personally didn’t see anything untoward doesn’t mean it didn’t happen though.

I’m not a fan of Reform personally. And as for stitching clothes that has generally been outsourced to other cheaper countries at this point. Ditto we don’t actually have that many factories left in the U.K.

Fruit picking is tricky as it’s seasonal work with low wages linked to efficiency, so people who haven’t done it before (and have the kind of attitude you describe!) will struggle to make enough to live on. It suits immigrants who are happy to come here and make hugely more than they could ever hope to make for an equivalent job in their home country and living on site sharing basic accommodation with multiple other workers as part of their effective wages, while sending money home where it will have more earning power. You also have to be young and fit. But I agree we should be aiming to increase British workers wherever possible.

I think hotel cleaners here often are British to be fair? Less so hospitality workers in general as we don’t have an economy built on tourism like many other countries. Caring roles are another one. We do have British carers of course but we need a lot of carers, and it’s physically and mentally hard work and long antisocial hours/shifts for minimum wage. I have a friend who did a community caring role for a while, she really had a heart for caring but it was almost impossible to do the job properly in the time given which she found upsetting and stressful, and she didn’t get reimbursed what she actually spent for petrol either. I think if carers pay was better we would no longer have need for immigrants to fill these roles. It’s the same story for many of the labour gaps including nurses.

We are also now seen to be importing so many doctors (and their relatives) in a way I’ve never seen before, which is mad when zero effort is spent on retaining current staff and lots of British born doctors are emigrating or retiring early because the job is now so stressful (I am a doctor so I know!). At least they’ve made some effort with recruitment but it will take a while to pay off and won’t sort the problem if they don’t start focussing a bit more on retention.

I actually think part of the issue with NEETs as you describe is because it’s become more socially “normal” to live at home with your parents as a young adult in recent years, due to high housing costs (of course if you’re lucky enough to have parents who can afford it). It’s an unhelpful development in many ways, because it’s just temporarily masking some of the real problems with the economy rather than solving them, and it means people who have to actually shoulder all the costs of living including housing are trying to compete for jobs with people whose parents pay for housing, bills and food and they’re only working for “fun money” really. Which means they are far more willing to settle for unrealistic wages.

I think we need to equalise income a tiny bit more by taxing the wealthy, but they won’t do it, bizarrely. They have just refused to implement a 2% wealth tax for income over £10 million. They may as well be Tories.

YouGov tends to poll Reform lower than others.

I agree they’ve made some bad decisions, but they’ve also been governing in a hugely tough environment and I don’t see any better alternatives yet personally. I was extremely relieved to see the back of Boris, Truss, Sunak myself. Who are you hoping will win the next election?

Well I was thinking that too but I did read an article a while back in the Guardian explaining that the risk is the wealthy (who basically are now citizens of everywhere), will simply take themselves and/or their businesses elsewhere as a result and it’s apparently very realistic that we would then end up with less tax money overall than we have now. I agree it would still be a fairer way to do things and might work out well longer term, but they simply aren’t in a good enough economic situation to be able to take themselves risk of having even less money coming in right now.

Were they actually paid for all the work they did? Or paid adequately for all the hours they put in? Or do you think that that's materialism and women don't need to be rewarded for their labour?

My partner's mother was a farmer's wife who worked flat out from 18-60, first on her father's farm and then on her husband's. She was expected to be able to do everything he did as well as raising the children and providing a cooked lunch for any farm workers. She was a strong character, but she was never paid a penny for any of it because women's work wasn't considered work — just what women did. She was ecstatic when she turned 60 and got a state pension because it was the first time in her married life that she had her own money. And my FIL wasn't a tyrant, it was just how farming families did things.

And my second link to a page run by a Lib Dem who compares pills? I suppose you don't accept any of those either 🤣? Which polls DO you accept?