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?

I listened to a podcast the other day and the Times economics editor was saying that in Britain, we have a particularly doom-laden view of our country. She was saying that France, arguably, has as many problems if not worse (greater debt to GDP ratio) but the French aren't nearly as gloomy as we are.

Toothless regulators and kleptocratic private ownership is probably nearer the mark.

Some organisations such as utilities are not well suited to private ownership unless a very close watch is kept on them, because there is always the issue of getting the balance of short term profit generation vs. long term investment. Private businesses tend to be quite good at the short term profit but much less good at the long term investment.

There is also the issue of whether you want fundamental services to be exposed to the same risks as say a clothing shop. If a clothing shop goes down I can't buy my pants there. But I can get them somewhere else. If a water company fails I am screwed so the government has to backstop it.

Its another example of the same philosophy that the banks had. Too big to fail - we know the government won't let it fail because it will ruin the financial system, so we will take appalling risks knowing that the government will always backstop us.

But i expect your grandparents lived in a very modest house that probably needed work doing, holidayed in the Uk in a caravan or maybe a cabin, never ate out or went to the theatre or to Christmas extravaganas, bought all their food ingredients from a greengrocers and spent hours turning it into meals, only had one car and very limited monthly discretional spending (phones, subscriptions, gyms etc). The money they didn't spend on non-discretional living costs (bills and food) they saved as there wasn't really anything else to do with it!

I don't think any place is going to be able to continue to thrive without real productivity. I don't think an economy can survive on mainly services unless it is an isolated economy.

But the exodus of manufacturing of all kinds has happened throughout the West and Europe because of globalism. That's a worldwide economic phenomena, not one that national governments can easily control.

And right at the moment, to me it looks like the only people trying to change that are certain kinds of conservatives. (Whether or not they can be successful is a differernt story.) The left seems to believe that opposing globalism (ie, opposing movement of labour or trying to protect domestic industry, or worrying about the massive dominance of China in manufacturing and all the mechanisms that support a manufacturing industry) is racist.

I am actually not sure where countries go. It's not just the UK though. It's bad everywhere. I always notice that when people say they are "getting out" and do so, they are not going to places with systems like the UK with a lot of social protections and support. Many go to the Middle East, Caribbean, or other places with less supportive states.

In the 80s, when the mining, manufacturing industries etc were destroyed, a lot of people were deliberately shoved onto invalidity benefit to keep the unemployment figures down.

But these things were something where progression would alter the problems, medical science and manufacturing inventions. The issue now is that many problems won't be reversed. For example AI is here to stay and is going to alter society for the worse. Prices aren't going to drop. They never do. They either just plateau for a while, or they go up. Immigrant unrest won't change. We can't ask people already granted permission to remain, to now leave. So our country is pretty much going.to stay over populated, and Labour aren't going to do anything to stem further immigration. So we're all pretty screwed.

it's been like this for years

Old enough to remember the 70s with its blackouts, 3 day weeks and unburied bodies. Also the eighties with it's famous UB40 one in ten mantra. Job centres queuing up the street and everybody on strike all the time. Goes in cycles I guess but our government is crap.

Tbh, I am not convinced all of the doom mongering on SM is coming from actual UK residents.

Industries started to decline in the 70s though.

There are a lot more luxuries that people spend on now. THe thing is in the past, we mostly didn't miss these because we'd never had them, so they weren't shit in that sense. They were just the way things were. People did not have a million options to eat out, and mostly they didn't. No door dash either. There is in the end a significant amount of money tied up in that stuff.

I also think we are heading for a serious problem. In the last financial crisis of 2008 interest rates were reduced to "emergency" levels that lasted for over a decade and people started to see the emergency rate as normal and loaded up on cheap debt accordingly. In addition to the emergency rates absolutely huge volumes of money were printed under the "Quantitative Easing" banner. So the problems were masked but not solved.
Now that the interest base rate has been forced to normalise and the QE has stopped we have a massive problem. Its a bit scary if you think about it too hard. Inflation also still way to strong.
I predict interest rates will have to go up again to over 5% within a couple of years.

Have a week off the news and social media. You will instantly feel better and and it will be of no detriment to your life.

There have been constant different crisis throughout history but just now we get to follow the microanalysis of every event at our fingertips

i don’t understand how my parents (one worked in a shop part time, one was in building industry, both low earning) could afford a beautiful large house in south east.

my gran and grandad (SAHM, and hairdresser) afforded a house in Surrey that in todays money is worth over 600k

today, people in those jobs could not go to a bank and request enough cash to buy a 4 bed house in Surrey.

things are really tough. It feels different this time

I have no idea how the country will sort itself out. I had a conversation with someone yesterday about the last time things felt 'good or ok' for me and that was in about 2014 2015. Since then things have felt a bit expensive and a bit unstable. I've worried about money pretty much every month in ten years!

The powerful will continue to divide and rule, get the population to turn on each other and blame one another for the problems in society instead of looking where the root of the problem is.

There'll be more and more people living in poverty, skipping meals and using credit cards until they get cut off and put on plans.

More people won't be able to afford holidays or fancy phones. The general standard of living for many people will continue to drop. We'll see the return of the annual day trip to Cleethorpes, fewer people will have cars and every other shop will no longer be a Starbucks.

As people struggle more and more they'll become more and more resentful and angry.

We'll see increases in petty theft and aggression, more fighting and in the end we'll see some rioting for a while.

Then, little by little, we'll see people get used to it. They'll start to accept they can't afford things they used to have and the next generation and the one after that won't know any different so they'll just live their lives and probably be quite happy. Can't miss what you never had.

Politicians, and the very rich will carry on as normal, probably a bit happier as things return to how has historically served them best. A poor population focused entirely on feeding themselves and getting through each day is less of a threat. Employees scared of losing their jobs when that means hunger are employees that will accept poor treatment and conditions. The system will ensure it doesn't get bad enough that we'll have a revolution though. We'll keep getting pats on the heads and chucked some half chewed bones now and again.

We may even see a return to the times when disabled people were kept in institutions.
The impoverished too, who knows? Never rule anything out.

People keep comparing things to recent times but what we need to do is take a longer look. Look at the Victorian era. Hell, look at the last 500 years. Or more. A mostly comfortable population is the anomaly here. The blip.

There won't be a massive change. There won't be a rebellion or revolution. People will ultimately continue to take it up the arse and just take out their frustrations on whichever group of society is being blamed at any given time for the inequalities that exist as a result of the rich and powerful running the show and not giving an inch.

TL/DR Most of us are fucked but the world will keep on turning and people will just get used to it as people have always done.

I certainly understand your worries, and I share some of them from time to time. For me, the best antidote is to go into my nearest city, a typical northern multi-cultural English Settlement. In the course of my wanderings, I usually talk to a few people, some native Brits, some immigrants and, almost without fail, I feel better. All of the things you have said are true but, somehow, the good bits of life persist. I accept I'm what's considered ridiculously fortunate - early retirement and mortgage free - but, like everyone else, I've had my ups and downs over the last thirty-odd years and I worry about my grown-up children.

As a dinnerlady said to me once when I was about 8, seemingly apropos of nothing, "Life's hard. Funny how we still seem to enjoy it."

Immigrant unrest? Don't you mean stupid racists being incited by the likes of Farage and anonymous shit stirrers from who knows where on SM?

What do you mean? ETA = Edited To Add. It's a common usage. Or did you mean something else.

To be fair though, the French have better weather, wine and cheese and a sexy language. We have terrible weather, ugly buildings, shit food and no room.

I'm sure I have read this exact same thread before.

The job thing is a huge worry too. I live in a town in south east. The council have a few jobs, my place has redundancies. The high street is dead. There are a few jobs but zero hours or low hour contracts plus self pay tills have taken lots of jobs. You can now longer go and easily get a Saturday job as a teen.

everyone is making cuts it seems. Private sector jobs etc.

im not sure stopping reading news will help as this is stuff I’m seeing with my own family and in my own town.

@GasPanic "The 70s really were shit."

Yes, they were. I was a child in the 70s. All clothes came from jumble sales or hand-me-downs. We had neither central heating not double glazing. We relied on home grown veg, knitted our own sweaters, walked everywhere.

Food was pretty awful. TV was 3 channels, cars were poor quality. Child protection didn't exist, or if it did, they spent a lot of time looking the other way. Racism and sexism were rife. Health care was basic. The UK was still unable to install a dedicated phone line in each house, party lines were common.

I'm in no rush to see that sort of poverty again. And we won't.

It feels different this time

If you weren’t born until the 80s how do you know? I was a young adult in the 70s, it felt pretty much the same.

Yes i agree. Too many old, miserable, defeatist people. Happy to moan but somehow unable vote for the difficult steps that need to be taken to solve problems. And always taking ridiculously simplistic positions on hugely complex issues. All our problems are completely solvable if basic rate of income tax was 25% like it was in the 80s and 90s.