AIBU to think we are edging worryingly close to anarchy?

[Noras]

Am I unreasonable to believe that we are 2 or 3 steps away from anarchy?

Just that really. We see endless footage of quite aggressive and in the open. Shop lifting. People seem to have no shame eg driving over parkland or chucking rubbish out of car windows. Kids ran amok in Cornwall. People decide to live in caravans anywhere and just poo in parkland. Fly tipping is rife.
People freely wal: around the streets under the influence of drugs. People go to upmarket gyms with ankle tags and no sense of shame. People are more abusive and rude.

I have a flat I rent out in London, it was an accidental thing but I’ve never had chance to sell it with one thing or another. I charge an astronomical rent on it for what it is and I come out £100 up after tax this year. Yes these policies have hurt me as a landlord if that was the intention, but they’ve definitely hurt renters a lot more.

We might be living in a time when technology and medical science are constantly improving but it comes at a price.

Our population is too large. People are living longer and immigration is a huge problem. We don't have enough housing but we also can't just keep building more indefinitely because then you have to build more roads, hospitals, schools, doctors etc. which all has an effect on wildlife.

When I was a child in the 60s/70s and my parents took us out in the car the windscreen would be covered in insects, that just doesn't happen now. I hardly see any butterflies now and small birds seem to be on the decline.

AI is gradually taking over, how many jobs will be lost through that. I do think the next 100 years is going to be a challenging time for humans as climate change, wars etc have an effect.

I visit the UK every 6 months or so, originally from Scotland. I’m sorry to say that from what I see it’s just grim and getting grimmer every time. My parents and my sister are firmly middle class, living in rural areas and they are mostly doing fine in their bubbles. It’s definitely possible to still live a nice life there - until they have to interact with the NHS or get a dentist rdv.

But go into the local towns and it’s a completely different story. Even the formerly ‘naice’ towns are getting grimmer by the year : émpty shops, really rough / poor / sick looking people wandering around and an absence of professional looking people. I went into Boots and realised that the head pharmacist was the only man I’d seen wearing a suit in the whole morning, this in a busy town centre. Everyone else was shuffling around in trackies and Primarks finest. And everything looks so run down and dirty.

And shoplifting - even during brief visits it’s obvious. Young men just walking straight out with a big box of beer on their shoulders, ignoring the security. Ditto gangs of young girls.

I can say the opposite about 2 local council estates near me, they were basically no-go places in the late 90s/00s/early 10s, I recently went to both places for different reasons and the houses/streets looked so much better. I actually can't think of a single estate in my town/surrounding towns that is worse now than it was back then.

Look it’s obvious things are bad when you walk into shops and see basic food provisions with yellow security stickers on, plastic security hats over the top or in hard plastic cases. My kids were confused at first but now my teenager just exclaims ‘oh look cheese is now in a plastic case, that’s because people just nick stuff ’. ‘Yes my twenty first century darling, that’s indeed because people just steal stuff now’. Halcyon days.

You probably should sell in that case.

So your town was perfect until Starmer took over? What exactly has changed in your town because of Starmers policies? Previous government let in the most immigrants,

• 2023 (peak): ~900,000+ (record high)
• 2024: ~431,000 (fall begins)
• 2025: ~204,000 (back near pre-Brexit levels)

I struggled to get a carer in recently and guess who is doing the job? An immigrant, a really lovely young fella too.

Guess what - the country is broke- constantly spending more than comes in . The rising non working population and huge rise in numbers of pensioners compared to workers is a huge huge problem and not an easy one to solve.

Reform are showing on councils that when they have to solve the real problems it’s a bit more difficult than just blaming immigrants for everything

To avoid anarchy, there needs to be another election and soon. I’m not saying there wasn’t issues before Labour, but they have dangerously fanned the flames with their rhetoric, migration policies, attempts at autocratic wrong think identity based taxation & benefits policies. I have never known everyone so angry and simply disillusioned in my whole life.

Back to talking about Reform! Why?

I really need to know why the assumption is Reform every, single, time. It’s got to be a social media algorithm that you’re stuck in. There are more than two political parties, or at least there were when I last looked.

The country is now ridiculously overcrowded. I absolutely loved London in the 1980's, it now just seems dirty, full of litter and grime. There are rows and rows of tents, whereas back then there was the odd homeless person, not the masses that you see now. I hate the impact that mass building will have on wildlife, it is all just so sad.

Exactly. How does being poor equate to going out wearing pyjamas, not cleaning up your dog's mess, keeping dangerous, intimidating dogs, letting your kids run feral, kids and parents being rude and abusive to teachers?

If anything, older generations of working class people were more careful of their conduct because they were aware of being deemed inferior in society.

Leaving less housing stock for those who need to rent - like me. These reforms are not going to help renters af all.

It feels like ‘anything goes’ now. Since society stopped shaming people for behaviour that was considered inappropriate, it’s really hard to know where the line between acceptable and unacceptable less any more.

A lot of people were formerly on the wrong side of the right / wrong line - gay people, disabled people, single mothers, etc. So we’ve moved the line. Where does it stop ? And I don’t just mean what’s legal or not legal - I mean what’s socially and culturally acceptable, and what isn’t. Where are the lines?

Shame / pride (two sides of the same coin) and not wanting to be ashamed kept them scrubbing steps and wearing the cleanest clothes they could despite their poverty. But now, we aren’t allowed to judge or to shame people.

Carrots and sticks worked on people as well as donkeys. But we’ve now done away with the sticks and called that progress.

Given my personal experience over the last 4 years, I’d rather only landlords that wanted to do it long term were left. I’d prefer my house to be bought up by a company to rent out than have a private landlord given the choice.

I understand why some landlords think these reforms will harm them but for good landlords and good tenants, they won’t. If they’re worried they can’t evict people without reason, that’s a red flag to me 🤷🏻‍♀️

We have a vicious underclass in this country that lives on benefit fraud, drug dealing and petty crime. Unfortunately, instead of discouraging them from having kids, our benefit system encourages them. Such people live outside the norms of civilised society. They do what they want when they want. If they want to drive around the neighbourhood in a noisy car that wakes everyone up, they will do so. The police can do nothing with them either, and they know that.

Secondly, we have open borders in all but name. When immigration happens on a small scale, and you are highly selective, it really can benefit a country. When it happens on a massive scale, however, and the people you let in are unskilled, uneducated or, in many cases, criminal, you’ve got a problem.

The left now dominate academia, the arts, the publishing industry, and much of the media, and they control the way we see the world. In their eyes, the real villains are the middle-class Daily Mail readers. To the left, criminals, benefit cheats, and illegal immigrants are heroes. They are ‘fightin da system’. It’s not until you live around leftists that you realise how destructive and hate-filled they really are. Many of them celebrate law and disorder. They want anarchy because they know it upsets and hurts the NIMBY Brexit-voters and Mail-readers. Also, they hope social collapse will spark a revolution.

Never have I read something less accurate.

ok that’s a lie but its definitely up there.

I have noticed my ChatGPT is awfully left wing. I keep telling it to be centric politically but it loves telling me to read the Guardian and source information from the BBC 🤣. When I told it those were not unbiased places to source info, it immediately went right wing on me and told me to read the Daily Mail and the Independent. I again explained those were also not neutral news sources and it then told me I wanted the seemingly impossible.

I think we need to assume AI is being programmed to be left wing propaganda machines as a starting point, due to the political leanings of the programmers.

Negativity breeds negativity.

When people read and view constant news reports which are so desperately disparaging of the uk, they start to believe this is so and act accordingly.

Much like if you constantly tell a toddler they are naughty rather than providing positives, they believe the narrative.

There is so much that is good in this country but we are all guilty of forgetting this.

I would agree with you if it wasn’t for the fact that we can see what’s happening with our own eyes when we are out and about.

Do you think if we put our heads in the sand and ignore what happened in Clapham, Beckenham, Birmingham, Leeds and Manchester over the last two weeks that it will just go away? Or is it because we’ve been doing this already that things are this bad.

Tbh this resonated with me! I was at a veh posh spa the other week. Some oaf strode out of the hot tub with an ankle tag on. Men in spas is bad enough at the best of times imo, never mind if they’re crims and rougher than a badger’s arse!

That said, we’ve been to a theme park recently and I was girding my loins for rude folk, but they were all delightful. Even folk on the Tube are generally very friendly and chatty ime. (Unless I’ve become the mad old bag who strikes up conversations with anyone…)

Social media has a lot to answer for. No-one was doomscrolling 20 years ago. We spend our lives glued to these catastrophising headlines.

Yeah, there are nutters waging wars and, literally in their own words, threatening to destroy civilisation, but on the mean streets of the UK, its really not that bad.

The UK homicide rate is the lowest it has been since the 70s.

Kids have always had run ins with the police at raves. Nothing new there.

Fewer people are drinking alcohol and using drugs.

Cost of living is through the roof so stands to reason that supermarkets are being rinsed by shoplifters.

We're a way off anarchy though. The country seems like a much better place when you get out to see it for yourself rather than through the screen of a phone.

Society has changed for the worse in decades. Lawless behaviour, lack of prison space, heavy social media presence.
A lot of people lost the pride, respect and decency that most people used to care about.

Could be the racist death threats he gets