To feel our quality of life in the UK gets lower every year?

[Playingvideogames]

Off the back of another thread where I mentioned my childhood homes being bought by my parents for under 300k in the late 90s/early 2000s, and are now all selling for 700k+.

I feel like our quality of life just dwindles every year. Everything becomes more expensive. Housing is low quality, small and extortionate. The weather is awful 70% of the time. Everything feels so overcrowded with fewer green spaces and natural beauty as more housing estates go up. The roads are awful, choked with traffic and potholed. Constant roadworks here yet nothing ever seems to get solved. Customer service is a bit rubbish, nothing really works as intended. More and more rules about what you can and can’t do. People just seem stifled and stressed.

I’m sure people will rush along to say how wonderful the NHS is and similar, but I sometimes feel really envious of people living in places where (although not perfect) they have something reliable to enjoy - great weather, a nice big house, just more space and less overcrowding.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable but I wonder if you do!

according to Chat GPT - for speed.

The government’s official figures only count tax avoidance schemes they already know about and can measure. They do not include most big-company profit shifting, complex international tax planning, or avoidance that is legal but reduces UK tax bills.

Yes, it has. Unfortunately, 52% of the public voted for a lower quality of life in 2016 and, in doing so, also chose to make their kids and grandkids poorer too.

We voted to free ourselves from the shackles of Brussels and to take control of our borders and our laws. It's mutually beneficial for the UK and the EU to have free trade in goods and services.

This is an anecdote but a friend managed to set up and run a successful business after Brexit because EU regs in his industry were overly strict.

Congratulations on not understanding how non-tariff barriers work. For goods and services.

This is why voting on Brexit was folly. Even 10 years on you folks still don't have a clue.

I despair, I really do.

Brexit has on average added £200 to average family food bills. GDP per person 6-8% lower by 2025, so household income down £2000/year. Energy and everyday prices up. Fewer jobs and lower wages hit family earners, especially for parents working in service sector. Economy £140bn smaller, less for NHS/schools, plus approximately 1500-2000 extra deaths per year due to the staffing impact on the NHS.

All these statistics are available online if you look for them. And all of this was anticipated / warned about before you decided to vote for it.

You contributed to making a monumentally stupid decision that's going to leave your children poorer, sicker, and with fewer opportunities.

We had all the trade deals with the EEC since 1973 though. No one had any objection to that. In fact the first referendum was held a couple of years later in which the uk vioted to remain in it

Making us part of the EU and making it more political was sneaked in without asking the british public

I completely agree that it is mutually beneficial to have free trade with the EU. However Brexit put a stop to that.

With free trade comes freedom of movement for workers. If you don't have that then companies will relocate to whichever EU country has the lowest wages & taxes, so if you want to keep UK jobs then freedom of movement is a good thing.

Absolutely we can have free trade again and this is on offer but it will mean accepting freedom of movement which currently both Labour and the Tories and most definitely Reform are against. That said if Labour continues to weaken the economy then maybe freedom of movement will be much easier to accept as no one in the EU would want to move to a basket case economy anyway.

Again, it would have been in mutual interest to have had these removed as well.

Even so gave us freedom to make our own free trade deals elsewhere and not be constrained to the EU.

Some of these posts are hilarious, You either have a choice of the U.K of a war-torn country, nothing else in between 😂

Despair all you want. All these studies you post are based on flawed studies and forecasts.

My children and my family are doing very well thankfully. Doing exciting things in their careers. Husband works across the middle east which is growing and thriving. Honestly it's a lot better than Europe. And so glad we have the legal ability to close and tighten our borders. Nl

Congratulations on your economic illiteracy.

Really. And people wonder why the UK is gettong poorer.

Your pub logic doesn't work in the real world.

You can have free trade of goods and services without freedom of movement of people. Why should anyone have an innate right to move to another country, when another would need to apply for a visa?

Also I did speak about Brexit and why he still agreed with it. He's so grateful because Brexit allowed a business he set up to operate in a less strict regulatory environment. He is grateful as his business thrived due to not having to follow the overly strict EU rules.

If Amazon left, people would buy all their stuff from other retailers and lots of new retailers would open up etc. People wouldn't suddenly stop buying and selling stuff.

Please do feel free to share links to rigorous economic and social evidence from reliable sources that shows that Brexit has been a success.

You won't find any.

I know 😂 it’s either live in the UK, or get shot/stabbed/arrested for being female or die in a hurricane/tornado/avalanche

Another thing to consider when people argue that billionaires like Jeff Bezos or companies like Amazon are being treated unfairly on tax is that these businesses have benefited hugely from first to market advantages.

Save your tears for the Billionaires. It’s supposed to be a two-way street but at the moment it gives companies like Amazon an unfair advantage, letting them use the system and resources for their benefit (profit) while workers and consumers are left picking up the tab.

The problem is cognitive dissonance prevents people who voted for brexit from being able to admit it was a mistake. Thankfully as the years go by there are more and more young people who didn't get to take part in the vote (as well as those of us who did and voted remain) - and they have no qualms at all about recognising it was a massive balls up.

^ This, you've explained what I think perfectly

Yes we had it before. Look up the EEC

@Jideom well that’s nice for him- interesting to know what he’s in that has such strict laws it was unviable before - ?? it totally killed some aspects of our business and many many others as well as encouraging plenty of business relocations to elsewhere- as an example many of the biggest companies in our industry are now headquartered, employing people and paying tax in Eire or the Netherlands.

It’s always people who look to the Middle East, US or places like Singapore that are always very Brexity without actually thinking why it is that these places can be independently wealthy .Middle East is mainly about oil , Dubai style tourism , property or many dodgy business type things I’ve come across - not somewhere I personally like much having been , US is its own version of the EU so has enough of a market on its own doorstep both for export and investment by big corporations and Singapore is all about finance and its position , some Brits would like it, many would hate it as it’s quite authoritarian .

the UK has none of these aspects without changing the whole culture massively- the country does not have the size to attract like the US does, doesn’t have huge amounts of resources that can’t be got from elsewhere and unlike Singapore doesn’t have a population that has had strong education from birth and an expectation of conformity - you can only work with what you have within budgets you have and the country has far more in common both socially and fiscally with many EU country’s than in these other places -

if people want to go to tax free places where itsall about cash and paying for any services at all - totally fine then do so, but it’s ironic they have effectively blocked those of us who would like to be able to move and live and work within the EU from doing so in the majority of cases -

That’s not true though.
People buy on Amazon because it’s incredibly easy to. Stuff they wouldn’t bother with unless.
Getting next day delivery on pretty much everything under the sun is unbelievable.
The high street has 10th of the range ( if you can even get to a high street) and less convenient and online elsewhere takes hours of scrolling and high postage.

The middle east 🤣🤣🤣

Yeah how is it for women there, fancy swapping our laws for theirs

Think about this for a minute. With only free trade and without freedom of movement then if I have a factory producing widgets and my average staff salary is £35k then why wouldn't I just relocate to say Hungary and pay an average salary of say £25k and then be able to import the goods tariff free?

By having freedom of movement I can employ the Hungarian workers or UK workers in the UK on say £30k. Eventually salaries will rise in Hungary or I will run out of Hungarians willing to move so salaries stabilise, but at least I haven't lost the entire factory to China.

It is true though.

There is a lot less next day on Amazon these days. Many retailers do next day delivery or click and collect.

It still doesn't alter the fact that UK tax payers and workers are picking up the tab.