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?

Forgot to link to poster I was replying to!

Tell me the towns that are no go areas and I will provide evidence.

Caveat being that I will need to run it by MNHQ first as they may see it as a TAAT or as singling out posters. Both of which could earn me a suspension.

People like this? Please expand.

3 more years of it to get a lot lot worse..

Labour

Been the case for years now but let me guess - Starmer's fault?

It will. Every day's a school day.

You think Labour is going to be in power for the next couple of decades or so? Which is the timescale pp was talking about.

Am I the only one who believes that OP is a clever Reform stirrer?

Rise of the far right is the scariest thing i think, racism and xenophobic sentiment is being normalised, it genuinely scares me

I think they are going to do an awful lot of damage, that won’t be easily rectified.

They're a Reform stirrer but not clever.

When my mother was a very young nurse, she and her friends rented because there was no room in the nurses residence. They all shared not only rooms, but beds - they switched off depending on who was on night or day shifts.

I really think younger people now have no sense of how differernt the consumer culture was as well.

In a way, I think that element really should be scaled back, it would be better for people, the environment, and everything. Holidays in domestic spots, simpler beauty routines, fewer (far fewer!) cars, keeping clothes longer and repairing, making our own food instead of eating out, collcting local food and having a garden, and young people having kids jobs. Even some of the household luxuries people expect now like a/c - they are costly, environmentally destructive, and in many cases facilitate unhealthy lifestyles.

Rolling back some of those things wouldn't solve the issue, but I don't think it's something to be afraid of. There is nothing wrong with having only a few, or no, airplane trips in a lifetime.

Wow this has exploded! I’m not reform by the way. I voted Tory at the last election and I’m undecided for the next. If I had to vote today, I’d really struggle to pick.

Careful now. They’ll report you because they don’t like what you’re saying.

Anyway. Clever: Reform? 🤣 No.

Sure.

As opposed to Johnson and Truss? Ha! 🤣

So you agree it will get better in the fifth? Good-oh.
(Seriously, if you’re going to interject on forums discussing UK politics, read the briefing properly first.)

Well, they were useless I agree. In fact, I did think that things couldn’t get any worse.

And then we got Labour. And now I realise.

What?!!

Four decades of prosperity - we have had 15 years or more of credit crunch-austerity-cost of living crisis!

Well done, you.

This is the issue, as soon as someone brings up the fact that a huge proportion of people are not working, someone comes and says that of course these people can't work.

Other countries are much more strict about who can get benefits, including the socialist utopia Nordic countries.

The only way to offer good services, and support properly the people that truely need it, can work, is if society has a strong moral compulsion for people to work and contribute and do their part. ANd that requires a social consensus that not doing so is bad and that people who don't work when they could are looked at negatively.

It seems like a lot of progressive people in the UK and some other countries can't abide this approach, and want strong social benefits as well as being completely non-judgmental about anyone who says they can't.

That just can't work.

Why would you say that?

A lot of people feel that way. It's the main thing driving the desire for these newer parties, on the right or left.

To get people back to work takes investment. We have millions on waiting lists for surgery, physiotherapy and dire mental health services. Young people are claiming benefits for mental health issues and older people for physical health.

People need help before crisis hits, therefore treatment should be more holistic. Increasing deprivation means we have an obesity crisis. Doctors are now seeing children who are both obese and suffering from malnutrition. Early intervention is crucial.

Some are. But many are just choosing not to work - or work less than they could -because they'd rather not and because our tax and benefit system actually incentivises them not to.

In Norway for example, they have a concept that what you get back from the state depends on what you've put in. If you are working then lose your job, you can get unemployment benefit of up to 62% of your previous income for up to 2 years - providing a true safety net for everyone.

They do also provide subsistence level help - the equivalent of our working age benefits - but read this to see how differently they talk about it with emphasis on how it should be temporary. Completely different to the UK, with our expectation and frankly encouragement of generational worklessness https://www.nav.no/okonomisk-sosialhjelp/en

State pension in Norway and many other EU countries also depends on how much you've contributed in tax over your lifetime. How on earth is it fair that everyone in the UK gets the same state pension/pension credit whether they've contributed £hundreds of thousands in tax over their lives or whether all they've done is take? And our direction of travel is to means-test even that?!

It is a cultural difference, regarding a sense of responsibility. But it's not just intrinsic - although that's real - it's that those values are part of the fabric of their tax and benefit system. In sensible countries, that's set up to encourage people to work and contribute and then support contributors properly when their life circumstances - either unemployment or having children - temporarily require it. It's fundamentally different to the value system of our Welfare state which makes a virtue of redistribution for it's own sake.

UK progressives have a compulsion to just give away other people's money without thought or judgement. They think that makes them good people. They're wrong. Our society is much worse for everyone as a result of that childish compulsion.