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?

Whose polls should we trust?

It's definitely a mixed socio+economic bag and sadly for me I don't live in boujie West Yorks - but my point is that while it's absolutely hard as hell for some, the majority of people (and I work in education so see a decent cross section) seem to be cracking on ok. Is the UK perfect? No. Are people struggling? Some of them yes. Do I wish that we had more doctors and better services and people felt the pinch less? Of course. But most are doing ok. I'm not loaded btw - I earn under the UK average wage and I am lucky enough to live somewhere where house prices aren't crazy - I appreciate this and that not everyone has it so. But I always find it interesting to read these "the UK is totally buggered" threads and wanted to provide a counter response.

So she worked hard all her life for her share of living expenses?

Poor woman.

Only the ones which say Labour is doing well seemingly........which is precisely 0 at the moment. So bit of a dilemma there 🤔

Yes it is certainly postcode specific but Labour have well and truly shafted my family on numerous fronts, resulting in redundancy for DH at a time when all papers are reporting high unemployment levels.

A lot of young people (my daughter and partner included) still get hand me downs when they get a home of their own. A lot of their furniture is from charity shops too as they cannot afford new. Nor can they afford to even save up for new as the rent and bills are so high. Clothes are usually secondhand too.

Me too. You need to be practical, but you also need to be able to problem solve because you never quite know what you are going to encounter in someone's home.

I do think it's important to model optimism and resilence to my DC. I only air my worries on MN. Not in real life.

Agree 100%. There is a lot of dark money being pumped into social media to upset the balance of power.
It was very obvious before Brexit and took off again shortly after July 2024.

Even Reddit has been infiltrated.

Reddit didn't need infiltration, it's been a cesspit for a very long time.

Not enough pro Labour posters?

When I was at Uni I worked on a care home. The trouble is largely how some jobs are seen as beneath people. We need to alter how we view the importance and status of jobs and not just link it to the amount they pay

Don’t be ridiculous She was a business partner not some poorly paid employee.

Ah yes didn’t she say There is no such thing as society?
That’s where we’ve give wrong!

I don't think today is as bad as the Seventies. You mention public services - there were scheduled power cuts because of the miners' strikes affecting coal! And we had the three-day week. Those two things alone are far worse than anything we have now.

I think young people just have a more positive energy. If you go to a place where there is a greater proportion of young people, it just feels so much better.

Old people have a way of interpreting things in a negative way. It's a hormonal problem largely I think.
(I am old myself BTW..so here I am ...moaning about old people)

I mean thinking that way is a mistake if you want to stay in power.

You can dismiss concerns and claim that all the disquiet with Labour is currently some sort of arch plot by the illuminati.

That doesn't turn out well though if the dissatisfaction expressed actually turns out to be real.

I left home in the 70s (1975, to be precise).

It was really easy to find affordable accommodation to rent, the first flat I rented with my BF was about 30% of one salary, and we had pretty average salaries. We both had the sort of public sector jobs that you could stay in for decades, if you wanted to. Seeing the GP was a doddle, I only had to wait a few weeks when I needed a minor operation, public transport was fantastic apart from when there were rail strikes and fares were pretty cheap. Energy supply and water were nationalised and the government prevented massive price rises.

We lived in London, so it was always easy to change jobs, although unemployment was rising in the more industrial areas of the country. Income tax was 35%, but no-one earning less than around £3k had to pay it because the personal allowance was higher, relatively speaking, than it is now.

Interest rates were a good deal higher than now, but as you could buy a house in London for just a bit more than 2x an average salary and get a 100% mortgage, that really wasn't a big deal.

I've never felt as well off as I did then. I bought most of my shoes in Russell and Bromley and dresses from Ozzie Clark, there's no way I could do that now. We'd be in the pub most nights, eat out at least once a week and have 2 or 3 holidays a year.

It's interesting to hear perspectives from older people like my dad who was born into post-war London - money was tight, rationing etc. However, he is firmly of the belief that things are worse now (I don't know the extent to which being younger during the tough post-war years meant he was more optimistic back then).

I think the dreadful state of the NHS affects older people like him more. Also, crime / antisocial behavior and not feeling as safe is another big factor. He can certainly see that some things have improved but mostly due to technology / medicine improvements.

There is no doubt that for various reasons, the UK has changed dramatically in just one lifetime.

I found my diary from 1979. We had the equivalent of about 6 weeks off school through caretakers strikes, snow, broken heating. But mainly caretakers. That would never happen now.

Coming back to the AI stuff, I do think it’s a significant worry for the future, and I’ve been worried about it for many years now. I do think we will have to pivot hugely in terms of employment and how society is set up generally (I do wonder if a universal basic income is where we are eventually headed), and I’m worried that the pace of AI progress seems to be rampant with no controls on it (I know it sounds far fetched but I actually DO worry about the robots taking over the world lol). I feel like if we can make sure that doesn’t happen when the AIs are literally hugely more intelligent than any human that has ever lived and might start seeing us humans as a problem to be solved etc, then we will probably find a way round everything else like any technological innovation in history but the upheaval is bound to be difficult and painful for many.

I could be wrong but I genuinely actually think my job as a doctor is reasonably safe for some time yet, compared to many other jobs. Yes, the role is likely to evolve yet further from what I did as a doctor when I first started out compared to now (it’s a long time since I made up the IV antibiotics physically myself!) and may involve AI to some degree, but I don’t think doctors are that easily replaced. People still want and need a human connection, especially when they are unwell, there is a therapeutic aspect to that.

Also I don’t think AI is easily going to evolve to pick up on certain things like a human being does, there is absolutely a certain amount of art, psychological understanding, and lateral thinking to medicine as well as a science. For example, I know that when a South Asian woman points to the top of her head complaining of headache, it’s usually stress related, but culturally she will never say she is stressed or depressed, or when she says “I have a swallow problem” it’s not actually anything to do with swallowing and they’re complaining about something being swollen. AI won’t have the context that another patient is a raging hypochondriac and will always say any symptom is 10/10 severity and say something has been going on for months when it’s actually been a week and a half. AI won’t know like I do that another patient’s son’s best friend just tragically died in childhood from a brain tumour and that’s really why they’re suddenly worried sick about their headaches. AI won’t have the human rapport and trust built up in order for another patient to be able to be persuaded to go to A and E when they absolutely need to, even though it’s the last thing they want to be doing right now, and won’t know the best way to persuade that particular individual of this. AI won’t know that this patient is a farmer and would never normally darken our doors so something must be terribly wrong even if they play it down.

I hope I’m right about this though lol.

So many of the problems Britain faces are global. In other words, we're not alone. We only ever see places like Italy or Australia as visitors, and visiting a country is very different to living there. If you moved abroad you'd soon be confronted by similar problems to those you face here.

Take climate change, for example. Apparently, Europe is the fastest warming continent in the world, and it is going to be the southern European nations that suffer most. Places like Spain, Italy and Greece may be uninhabitable in summers to come. We were moaning about the heatwaves in Essex this year, but in parts of Spain it was nudging 110 degrees!

Mass migration is another issue all countries face. Africa has the highest birth rate in the world, and the African population is going to double. African immigration is putting huge pressure on southern Europe. Or take inequality. Again, it's a problem everywhere. Brazil, the USA, Argentina and Turkey all have greater inequality than the UK. We are about average. Violence, crime and anti-social behaviour are also universal.

In fact, in some ways we're lucky. Corruption, for example, is a much bigger issue in some countries than it is here. My plumber is from Malta (lovely man) and often complains about this. He says the EU will send millions to build a bridge in his home town, but that when he returns home the bridge still hasn't been built and the money has vanished into various back pockets. The UK is far from perfect on women's issues, but I'd say it's better than most places. I'd rather be a woman in the UK than almost anywhere other than scandinavia, Holland and maybe Canada (I was shocked by the sexism in Australia, for example).

don't forget the power cuts.

There's no denying times were much harder years ago but that was then. Even if a family of 12 all used a tin bath of water to wash, then cleaned their clothes in it then used the water to make soup for the month times have changed. There's no denying there are now people who were doing ok that are now living pay check to pay check, just working to keep a roof over their head, no spare money for a little luxury or fun it feels depressing. No there's not much that people can do but have a little moan about it because it is what it is and you just have to plod on but it still feels shitty.

At this point all I can do is pray for the US to liberate us from this authoritarian dictatorship lead by Bum Harmer and the awful traitor Prince Charles. They are even going to restrict access to Wikipedia for Christ sake. They need to be stopped.