To be fed up of the constant bashing of the UK?

[Drind]

I am currently away for Christmas with extended family and family friends in a very nice part of southern Europe.

It is lovely here, but I’m thoroughly fed up with the endless comparison to the UK. We all come from a smallish town in the midlands and if we see something nice here it is immediately ‘yes that’s lovely. Not like the shit hole we live in’. We see a palace and it’s ’you wouldn't see that in our town centre, would you?’ Well clearly fucking not because we live in a old fishing town not in the middle of London.

Then we’ll go to a nice restaurant and it’s ’no point in opening a Michelin restaurant where we live, it’s too deprived’. Or walking back to the hotel it’s ’at home you’d be watching chavs vomiting in the streets, not like these lovely clean streets’.

It is so wearing. I defend the UK and I’m told they’re joking and not to take it so seriously but it is endless.

Various mentions of the ‘lower class’ people at home too. It is driving me mad. Why are people so obsessed with doing the UK down? I know it has got its problems, but it is not that different from other European countries which also have their prosperous and struggling areas.

Not sure it matters but these are left leaning people too, not people desperate to criticise the country as a way of voicing political criticism.

But if you were in Monaco and usually lived in Middlesbrough would you lament how pathetic and shit home was because you’d never see the Grand Prix at the local leisure centre?

Maybe. I do think the decline has been pretty precipitous over the past ten years, much more so than at any point in my lifetime. There’s still a lot to love about the UK and it will always be my home; but its so diminished.

But I agree with you that sneering at your own home country is self destructive and pointless.

Yes! It is as if they think all other countries are Disney where there is no poverty or unemployment, political unrest and unpopular decisions, or bars catering for the lower end of the price scale (where they themselves drink whilst at home), or littering or fly-tipping. They really seem to think these things are purely found in Britain and all other countries are spotlessly clean and full of rich people and excellent healthcare etc.

My husband is Danish. It's only from Brits that we get questions about why we live in the UK when Denmark is obviously so superior. Often from people who've done no more than visit copenhagen for a long weekend. There's bits we like about Denmark but it's not utopia, on balance we prefer the UK.

Yep I see TikTok’s form all over Europe- Ireland, Germany, France, Spain - all with the same whinging about being invaded by migrants etc

I’m currently in a Northern European city similar to my large UK town, and I always do think how much more pleasant it is. Good public transport, excellent bike and walking infrastructure, very well provisioned underground parking keeping vast numbers of cars off city centre streets. Though then also there is part of me that does have to remind myself that I’m on holiday, and can do things at much more convenient times, and on my own schedule.

My town in the UK has loads of lovely sounding cafes to visit for example, but they are only open when I’m at work. No chance am I walking to a coffee shop or bakery every morning for fresh patisserie when having to then compete with the school run/rush hour shit fight to get off my own drive. On holiday I can mooch for a late breakfast at half 9. Doesn’t have quite the same attraction at 7am on insufficient sleep. I do wonder if living and working in Europe would maybe close the gap in terms of what is nice.

(No offence to anyone who lives in any of these places) It is very different to be in a well to do Cotswolds village than it is to be in the centre of Bradford, and whilst somewhere like Utrecht/Antwerp/Lille etc on holiday probably feels more like a Cotswolds village despite being more (on a scale/infrastructure requirement/amount of built up concrete level) like Bradford. Is it just pace of life?

It’s where you go too. If I was a holidaymaker who stayed in a certain part of my town I’d leave thinking it was a gorgeous place. But holidaymakers wouldn’t be sitting in traffic or visiting the run down high street etc. We go to the nicest, tourist parts of an area on our holidays.

I live in Switzerland and its does make the UK look like a complete sh**hole. Lived in Wales for 20 years, spent a few years in Bristol/Bath then 10 years in London, now 6 years in Switzerland. I have seen the rapid decline in the UK and its hard not to compare and yes I do visit London/Wales 2/3 times a month for work/family. But if you haven't lived somewhere better then you don't know any different. I find it so frustrating when people defend the UK/NHS etc when they don't know any different because they haven't lived anywhere else. If I'd never left I'd probably be exactly the same.
But here is my experience -

• I earn 2.5 times more vs when I lived in London
• I pay less tax
• Better pension
• Better social care - there is contingency for when things go wrong. You pay equivalent of national insurance & accident/sickness insurance. As long as you have been working for 2 years or more, if you lose your job for any reason you can claim unemployment benefit up to 80% of your salary capped at 10k per month for 2 years. There's no stigma to it either. If you're sick, your insurance ensures you can afford to live whilst you get better.
• you pay mandatory health insurance but the service you receive is incredible. Longest wait I've had in A&E has been 1.5 hours.
• for the tax you do pay you reap the benefits of how it is spent

-everything works - public transport, infrastructure, education - its progressive and it feels like everything is constantly being improved

• culturally Swiss come across as conformist and conservative, rule abiding - i don't see litter or littering, or antisocial behaviour - it is not how they behave.
• it's safe- i have never felt unsafe at any time of day where I live
• I don't see any crime
• public education is very good - small class sizes too avg 16 kids per class

-its clean
-healthcare is amazing and I have had consultants horrified by the care that I have received from the NHS. I have had an undiagnosed long term autoimmune disease picked up here that was not discovered by the NHS. I dont wait for any referral and even have had some appointments on the same day as being given the referral. My son had a 4 month wait for an ASD test and since his diagnosis he has had a child psychologist who we see once a fortnight and an occupational therapist we see once a week.
I could go on but I won't.

Conversely when I come to London/Wales now there are inevitably things I miss - pubs, Sunday lunch, newspaper, the friendly faces in Wales, sense of humour, familiarity. But that's about it. Often I feel embarrassed and hororfed about the state of the UK -
I've had relatives call an ambulance after a stroke and been told its a 12 hour wait, my 75yo mum post cancer surgery had to got to a&e with an infection and was left in a chair for 36 hours........I cannot fathom how anyone can defend the NHS because this is not normal and should not be considered acceptable. It takes me less time to fly from Switzerland to London, than it does to go from Gatwick to central London because the trains are always delayed. Nothing works. It's filthy. Every time I take my son to the local park in Wales he asks me why the playground is broken, why there is rubbish everywhere because he's not used to seeing it. There is 0 level of customer service in the UK........how has it become normal for sales assistants and customer service reps to effing and blinding to customers.....my experience. It's as if people don't care, there's no pride in the country they live or the job that they do and it's a very sad state of affairs.

@LupinLou I don’t personally prefer the uk day to day having lived in Copenhagen , but there are certainly bits about both I prefer - and jets face it , this really depends where you live in the UK or in Denmark - we certainly went through plenty of rural deadly dull and not scenically interesting bits of Denmark that i wouldn’t choose in a month of Sundays - just as there are big swathes off UK I feel same about - if it came down to living in the posher leafier bits of London or Copenhagen - it would be a much closer choice for me.

Am fairly sure we were told Brexit would result in lower living standards. Loss of money. Loss of prestige on the international stage. How long ago was that again?

Tell them you think they’ve been reading too much Daily Mail or watching too much GB News.

They don’t though. They’d actively judge people who did.

How can “most of the UK” be “dirty”???

Less than 10% of it is built on!

Yeah but show them up as the thicker lower classes and that will shock them back into their senses

use their snobbery against them

This 💯

I see both sides of this- I live in a very nice suburb semi rural that is quiet but my nearest city and other suburbs are some of the most deprived in the UK - this is also where I work. Things have got worse in the past 5 years - housing and access to healthcare/dental.

Maybe the people are constantly using humour to explain the comparative differences to sort of inversely make themselves feel better about where they live? To try and make sense somehow of such differences. It also sounds like they point out the bleeding obvious rather than silently acknowledge it and move above it to another topic - it does sound wearing

Why is asking two perfectly reasonable questions is trying to be a dick?

I was wrong about the midlands and didn't think of the Lincolnshire coast, but if you're going to say things like Switzerland is southern Europe then you have to expect questions. No need to be so rude.

There are issues in every country, some are just the same as the UK. What is evident is the quality of life and the environment in many parts of Europe is different from the UK. The gap seems to be widening more and more as the cost of living here has spiralled, even those with higher incomes are being squeezed. What I notice most is the quality and availability of good food. We now have supermarkets with cabinets full of expensive processed foods, no fresh produce counters and a society that is time poor and unhealthy. I see that we are becoming more like the USA in this sense where only the wealthy can afford to cook and eat well and it makes me so angry.

You were troll hunting and accusing me of lying, as you well know.

I think life in the UK is a pretty hard grind for a lot of people, for all sorts of reasons. Here are a few:
Almost totally dysfunctional NHS
Education system underfunded and teacher shortages
Housing, too much reliance on private rentals, high rents make it impossible to save, ridiculously high prices of houses almost everywhere relative to salaries
Lack of jobs and lowish salaries for many young people. Apprenticeship system is partly dysfunctional
Shambolic and expensive public transport, lack of EV infrastructure
I am not surprised at people sneering at the UK, it is well deserved
Even as a lifelong Labour voter I despair of our government's apparent inability to improve just about anything

Some European countries, Switzerland and Scandinavia included, are much more expensive than the UK.

By your own admission you were lying about where you are.

@DrindI agree but in general what we get and what’s available to the average person here is lower quality. I go to Spain, France and Italy and there are markets full of fresh produce. The equivalent where I live here is only available from a twice a month farmer’s market at very high prices certainly not for the average weekly family shop. It is just hard to live and eat well in this country on an average income.

The economy has not been getting more efficient for decades now, in fact worse - so there is just no money for the things we need.

It isn't great here - and the differences are getting visible.

Britain is genuinely in a hole - Andrew Sissons and John Springfield have written a brilliant essay on this, and what we need to do to climb out: Getting Britain out of the hole – A plan for the UK economy

This isn’t true across those countries though, I imagine? I’m just back from Normandy which outside of small traditional (tourist) towns is industrial, empty and full of lidls.

i spent the summer in Portugal in what turned out to be the least characterful beach resort with awful food in the restaurants and shops that resembled a uk 24 hour “food and wine” store.

we like to have this image but how much of it is relevant now? Globalisation has hit all of Europe, and whilst many towns have certainly retained their charm and character, just as many never had any.