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?

Good article on poverty today:

Why poverty in the UK now is worse than 50 years ago and its grip is tightening every day
https://archive.ph/QEyTw

A future Reform government is now a certainty.

People are done with the main parties. There is absolutely nothing they can say anymore to fool people into believing that they can delivery anything.

Exactly.

I agree but I also resent the constant attacks on boomers/ gen x that occurs on a daily basis.So many gen x and boomers are not well off.It's the older boomers that did well on the whole.So division and nastiness is always around which also makes the UK a crap place to beNot saying other places are perfect either.I constantly see on mumsnet judgemental comments on all manner of situations and people.Marx said that when the machines come the populace will turn on ieach other.
If one has not followed the life script or couldnt for whatever reason nasty comments abound and the get a job brigade when jobs are becoming very very difficult to get in a fast changing world.There are unpleasant right wing comments from people but also a refusal from the left to acknowledge that the white working class are often s...t on and that the pressures of increased immigration do obviously affect them more.Gaza is appalling but I also hate the anti-semitism.,
Then the attitude of younger women towards older women and men is appalling and ageism is a big thing with older people expected to defer to the young even if their lives have been hard.The young seem unable to cope with certain life events because in the tech age they expect instant solutiuons and goods and also their true needs are not being met.

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In order for things to change if its not too late, bringing up children needs to truly be a village effort and the family structure loosened at least a bit.It should be important that ones kids are happy not that they are successful in today's terms.Its impossible for everyone to prosper in society as it is even if they have a so called work ethic.People need to share, to get their cars off the road even electric ones, to fight for public transport, make many services free and promote a basic income.It meansa complete change of mindset away from destination weddings, gender reveals and family bickering about what happened when my best friend ghosted me etc.Mumsnet needs to get political in addition to all the other advice, it needs to promote community for all.But sadly we have to have our holidays, our xmas excesses and the hideousness of modern ife, constant apparent connection but less real connection
We are heading twoards disaster if we just want the world to carry on as it did.It can't. And being kind and getting therapy isnt going to help unless the world changes.well i can dream.I wont be back on again as i feel very much excluded from the sort of women on this.take carebut dont think tech and Ai will necessarily save the day.Of course they can be very very useful but there has to be human input.If I hear one more person say'oh i'm a luddite' Ill hit the roof.Read about the luddites.

On the answer to the op I think we’ll limp on as people get more dissatisfied with Labour.

And then your alarm clock will wake you up.

This is true I think in many ways but the big difference this time is in housing cost and availability. I cannot think of a time when housing costs were such a huge proportion of income, real wages are lower than in the 70s. After a century or so of people being able to afford a home we are returning to victorian and earlier eras of normal people not being able to house themselves. Not enough people are working and NHS and pretty much most public services are a complete mess. Historic housing stocks need renovation and no one has the money or manpower to do it. Soon the people with no houses or pension are going to try to retire. I genuinely don't know where that will bring us to. The UK is my no means unique in this housing issue but it is the biggest one we have. House prices will not crash with supply as it is. Rich people are doing well with relatively high interest returns. Labour tax raids on farms for some and the cost of employing people for everyone have been very damaging, they seem clueless about the tax they can raise from a struggling country.

Meta (which is akin to Chat GPT's younger, slightly more dense sibling)

They are all bullshit machines (see thebullshitmachines.com for an explanation of how they work), but compared to Meta AI and Google's search "enhanced", both ChatGPT and Grok are towering intellectual colossi, Wittgenstein and Russell to the others' Donald Trump and Andrea Jenkyns.

Presumably an abbreviation of “Edited To Add”

Nothing to do with Basque terrorists.

I have no answers as to what will happen but I feel the whole country has become entitled, we throw money away on ridiculous things. Policing is a shambles - I heard on the radio yesterday they were sending out some undercover female officers disguised as runners in our local area to basically penalise men that cat called or stared at them as it was harassment. Yet the same police force can’t come out to burglaries or anything remotely worthwhile as they are under funded. The whole country has actually gone wild.

No it isn't.

70% of the electorate don't support Reform. There will be a tactical voting campaign in 2029 to keep Reform out. That is assuming it is even a viable party by then. Which it may well not be.

Yeah, sure.

@hippysun Yes. I didn't go on a plane until I was 18.

My dm used to send us out scrumping for apples and picking blackberries. Picking hazel nuts in autumn. We ate them with eggs, which cut the meat we needed that week.

It was my job to climb our pear tree. My job to wrap each fruit in newspaper and store it in the garage. My job to check every few days and remove any that were rotten. The same with carrots and onions. We used to buy potatoes from a farm in a 55lb sack because it was cheaper.

Furniture was secondhand. We resoled shoes and passed them down. My school blazer was third hand, and passed on to a neighbour when I grew out of it. I darned socks and tights

I started work as a cleaner at the weekends when I was 13, and was paid £2.44 for four hours work. I felt very rich. 😁

Life has moved on, thankfully.

Well, I have saved your post to revisit in 2029 🙂

I’m quite optimistic about AI. It will no doubt need some regulation, but I reckon we’ll get better decisions because of it and as a tool to improve information-based work it will pull standards and efficiency up. People will be doing different or adapted jobs, but will still be working.

It is a bit shit at the moment. But it will improve. And along with super-computing we could be looking at a wonderful longer-term world.

All of this is true....however the 70s also didnt have the aggressive consumer culture we have today....our grandparents didnt spend hundreds of pounds on mobile phones, nail and hair extensions, botox and fillers, takeaways, brand label clothing, overseas holidays etc. Our consumer focus has intensified and there has been a massive swift in the choices people make in their spending. Im not saying this is the only factpr, only that social factors have changed and societal norms have as well. We're not comparing apples with apples here

I couldn’t agree more. Tactical voting decimated the Tories last year, there’s no reason why it couldn’t work again. The electorate is far more savvy than people think. For every voter for whom the prospect of a Reform government is a wet dream there are two for whom it’s a nightmare.

Papers today - not good news - record 8 MILLION people on Universal Credit now and also
IHT in budget next month will restrict free amount you can give to your children in life time - presumably before tax!

How do we make the country better/how do we all start to feel better?

1.Get off Twitter/X/GB News as much as you can. Remember these are all designed to convince you things are terrible and make us hate each other. It's naive to think you're immune from this.

2.Go out and visit all the wonderful museums and heritage sites we have in this country. Remind yourself this is British culture - don't listen to all the rubbish that it's banned or whatever.

3.Accept that things are complex and there are always trade-offs. There is no easy way to distinguish who "deserves" help and who doesn't, no easy way to deal with an ageing population and the climate crisis. Stop assuming that politicians are all stupid or incompetent because they can't make everything perfect. Choose the party that best aligns with your overall view on how things could be improved but accept that most other parties aren't evil (unless they're Nazis).

4.Rejoin the Single Market and Customs Union

5.Build some houses , especially Council houses.

This is not a goady thread. I’m genuinely seeing stuff with my own eyes and I’m worried. Back in the 90s, you could go to uni for free… do some random degree and walk into a decent job.

now… it costs loads, jobs market is tough so no job guarantee

I work in science and my god that has gone down hill. Where are all the graduate science jobs in the uk? It’s very different.

the only thing people keep saying is millennials like me will inherit well but I expect the government will tax the hell out of that too.

the evidence is out there… the cost of living is out of control. Wages rises vs house prices tells us all we need to know.

I feel like all these little things are chipping away at my happiness. I mean I do enjoy my family and friends but in the back of my mind money worries and fears For my kids etc are always there

There are just one or two problems with this:

The most obvious how would you collapse house prices, some sort of government edict???

And then assuming the sort of dramatic reduction you are proposing:

Houses cost a lot to build and the builder has to pay his workers, if you tell them they have to sell at a loss or even make no profit they will stop building. Their workers will be out of a job and the housing shortage would get worse. Or if it's not quite that a catastrophic they will reduce the number of workers, reduce wages and build sub-standard houses with cheap poor materials.

How do you force people to sell houses, let alone at much less than they paid for them? The market would totally stagnate and no one would be getting on the property market.

How do you get landlords to lower rents, when often they are hardly making money already, many landlords have already sold up. if they were forced to reduce rents the quality of the properties would have to go down as they wouldn't be able to afford maintenance. Or they would be converting everything into HMOs where they can charge per person, this is already happening as letting houses is getting uneconomic for many good landlords.

A lot of things are better. I remember my non negotiable Saturday and holiday job from age 13 onwards (school issued work permits for this). The constant 'touching' sexual comments, of us young girls. How we tried very hard not to let anyone be left alone with certain men. How our adults knew, and laughed. It was just standard. The 80s were very hard for working class aspiring kids, except one thing. University was funded.

I hope with all my heart I live to see Brexit reversed, COL and housing become possible for young people without huge parental support.
They will have to raise taxes. And the rich won't take the hit- they are too well equipped with ways out.
It's a mess, but I don't think a hopeless mess. I will be glad when the last food bank has closed, but would welcome more 'sharing' banks to cut down on food waste. Water, rail transport for a beginning need to be back in public ownership.
We have no leadership. Starmer is well out of his depth, I think.

I started my first l job in 1972, management trainee with Sainsburys. From the start, we were plagued by strikes. First at the bacon supplier, so my first job was learning to bone and joint a side of bacon. Inflation started to hit, and we got a pay rise every month, but this was immediately eaten up by price rises. The nationalised train network was unreliable and expensive. The roads in London were filthy, people smoked everywhere, so getting on a bus was walking into a smoke filled cancer wagon. Restaurants were v expensive, pub food was pickled eggs and crisps, new rules on landlords led to a shortage of rental properties, and high rents. We found a 3 bed flat, but needed 7 people to live in it to afford the rent. Shortages of sugar, paper products, oil and salt. Bomb threats a regular occupancy, fortunately most were hoaxs, but still caused loads of disruption. Surplus money was in short supply and pubs were expensive, so we would make half a pint of piss poor beer last as long as we could. Despite all this, we were young and had a great time. We need the situation with Russia and Israel to sort themselves out, and perhaps that stability will lead to growth. At the moment our national debt is increasing by over £5,000 per second so the gov need to get to grips with the economy, unfortunately, I can't see this gov doing that, so God knows where we will end up.

People will be tactically voting to keep Labour out!

Dissatisfaction % with government is 68% Vs satisfaction of 13% . Those are the figures released today

It’s cyclical as others have said. My parents found it hard in the early 1970s to save to buy a house with all the other costs and hard to find somewhere to rent whilst saving. My Dad remembers the interest rate being, say 10% at breakfast and up to 15% by lunchtime. He said that was a bit stressful. My parents dodged the property crash and negative equity of the late 1980s and early 1990s.
I remember the early 1990s and things weren’t great. Everything was expensive, the NHS was crap, high unemployment, some schools were really awful. My parents were well paid but felt hard up due to everything going up constantly.
I don’t think there’s much the government can really do as the foundations of our current problems were laid many years ago