Have we, in the UK, become selfish, lawless and irresponsible?

[Commencethe]

This Bank Holiday seems to have descended into chaos and honestly I am starting to wonder what is happening to people generally.

This weekend alone there have been reports, tragically, of teenagers drowning in rivers and reservoirs, emergency services unable to reach one incident because of illegal parking, beauty spots gridlocked with abandoned cars, beaches overwhelmed with people drinking and taking drugs to excess, fights, weapons, rubbish left everywhere, police being called because a pair of teenagers were apparently having sex openly in a park, and racist outrage because a tourist attraction acknowledged Eid and invited people to celebrate it.

What strikes me is that this feels much wider than just young people behaving badly. Adults blocking roads and verges because they cannot be bothered to park properly. Families leaving litter behind. People ignoring safety warnings around open water. Whole communities unwilling to challenge awful behaviour because someone else should deal with it.

And every time there is discussion afterwards, the blame immediately goes to lack of education, the police, the council, schools, anyone except the individuals involved, their parents, or society more broadly.

I also wonder whether increasingly populist politics and public discourse have plays a role. Constant anger, division and disrespect towards other people, experts, authority and even basic rules seems to have filtered into everyday behaviour. More entitlement, less responsibility, less thought for anyone else.

At what point did personal responsibility disappear? When did we stop caring about our impact on other people or lose any sense of community?

It all feels increasingly selfish, lawless and entitled. Less consideration, less accountability, less self discipline.

Have standards genuinely collapsed or am I overreacting and being unreasonable?

And you think I am creating a drama over nothing? ( I’m guessing that’s what you mean, because the comment you made is not clear)

Families with children lost on the beach, RNLI unable to launch a rescue boat to search the sea because cars were blocking their exit, people abusive to the RNLI volunteers….

And that is just a bit of drama to you?

Normal people don't go to these places. Home garden barbecue, paddling pools, second homes, woodland walks, your local village beach, there are all kids of ways to have a nice time rather go to bloody Brighton, Bournemouth etc

Hot weather and a popular tourist spot is the worse, it always attracts criminals

It’s strange that you don’t understand .

being a drama llama is extrapolating one incident into the country going to the dogs.

i mean, obviously.

OP, society as a whole in the west is immoral.....but not the whole society.
Are there troublemakers grown locally and inported or self importing on boats - sure yes.
Is the UK gone to a very bad shape - NO. It is still the best place

spot on...once we went to Selsey, sess pit....a traveller tried to steal things from our booth, which was open....I was literally on the side of the car changing a 2 years old from shorts into dry shorts ...my husband challenged the man and he almost got into a fight

Or you could sit down, ponder a little bit what to do with your time and money and live the quiet life - the world including the UK have nature wide enough for everyone

true though
it is bread and circus

I wish I could like this a thousand times. This is a huge part of the problem; no one is being held accountable for their actions, there's always an excuse.

Nobody knows what happened this weekend so I will avoid talking about anything specific.

However, if it can be proven that a parent has knowledge of a child specifically putting themselves at risk and the parents did nothing to stop it, then there should be consequences for the parents.

No child should be playing in water alone without an adult or lifeguard watching. Ofcourse secondary children ahould go off and meet friends, go to town, cinema, go swimming at the leisure centre etc. If parents are aware they are playing in a river i.e. haven’t gone secretly there, an adult should always be there. If you made that law, it might have prevented some of the deaths over the weekend.

Fair enough but does that justify being horrible to each other? It's not people's fault. How about a bit of self control and respect for others? Or should we be disrespectful because we can?

"Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt."
Written in the 1st century. It's more interesting to me, that we always feel that things were better before/in the past, or that people were more respectful. There are lots of things that are idealised in the past too and that we don't do today (scrumping sounds gorgeous except it's actually breaking into people's gardens and stealing their fruit - average kids today would really know that's wrong I think).
I think each generation has its own problems driven by its own issues but also young people are always reckless biologically, because their pre frontal cortexes (which manage risk) aren't fully developed, so they don't look at what might happen properly. In my day we had so many tv adverts about not getting burnt by fireworks, not swimming in queries, not playing on train tracks - so young people obviously were still being idiots. We also had way more;
Drink driving
Driving without a seat belt
Way more drinking in general
A much laxer attitude to domestic violence
Hitting kids was the norm
Smoking around kids and babies was common
Leaving kids in the car with a panda pop whilst your dad had a pint
Playing knock a door run
Homophobia and abuse towards the disabled was the norm at school
I just think all generations are different, young people now drink a lot less which is good, they take better care of their bodies, also good but potentially they are more self involved due to social media etc.

Of course it doesn’t! But people do behave badly when they are very stressed or growing up in very stressed situations. It’s the competition for resources, as a PP said.

Some of this is straight up bad behaviour, but some- overflowing litter, appalling parking- is more about inadequate resources. If you’ve parked miles away, are hot bothered and exhausted, you might well put your rubbish by the overflowing bin instead of carrying it back to your car and taking it home.

I’m more offended by the litter people leave on an every day basis where it’s more about bad habits than lack of facilities.

Dense populations make people stressed - this is well known - and stressed people get angry. We are not competing for our lives, but we are competing for parking, for spaces in queues, spaces on the beach, we are sitting in traffic jams, and this does make people irritable and more likely to kick off.

Why do people throw rubbish out of car windows? Someone threw a Costa cup out of their window which hit my windscreen, coffee and all - I was doing 70 so not only did I jump out of my skin but was temporarily unsighted.

I can’t believe the Hampstead Heath behaviour. Those poor poor swans. And the f*ers were repeatedly told to get out but just went straight back in again the minute the authorities had moved on. That’s a major part of the problem: no shame and not bothered if they are reprimanded.

I agree completely, OP

Huge segments of society have lost all sense of shame and accountability.

You are missing the point I think. The UK is hugely overcrowded. Most of these people have come via legal routes. Some come via illegal routes. The media seems to be taking great joy riling us all up showing us the small boats arriving.

Regardless of how people came here the policies of the UK govt has meant we are now hugely overcrowded. Either because we had legal policies and people followed the law and came that way. Or they were not tough enough dealing with people who outstayed their visa or worse came over in a 'small boat' as they are called.

House prices started to go up the second half of the nineties and that coincided with our population going up via immigration. Now it wasn't just that - people were living longer, getting divorced etc. In the nineties you could get a same day GP appointment by phoning up and speaking to the receptionist. If they couldn't give you a same day appointment, it would be next day at the latest. This was just routine stuff, nothing urgent.

So I suppose my point is it doesn't matter which way people came to the UK - the fact is we now are way overcrowded and resources are stretched over too many people resulting in all kinds of problems.

(House prices also went up as people replaced pensions with BTL and that was the fault of govt, not immigrants but that's another story)

Squashed, ignored people living with noise and not enough space start to become angry and frustrated. Everyone starts to be alot more selfish because they have to fight for a share of resource rather than it be freely available. This become contagious as people behaving badly, causes others to start behaving badly as they get pissed off being the ones one trying to follow the rules.

We could start sorting it with hard policies on removing anyone who is not meant to be here (and mean it). They come over illegal, we police our beaches and don't let them land. Once they see we are not joking they will stop trying. Anyone outstaying their visa gets rounded up and deported.

Secondly we bring back strict law and order. More police, give them proper arms, build more prisons if we have to. Show people their crimes will be punished properly and they will start to behave. Make parents accountable for their kids crimes if they are under a certain age.

I agree the photo of that poor swan was absolutely heartbreaking. I think part of the problem is many adults seem to have a very juvenile idea of what is fun and do more and more stupid things for Facebook likes. They’ve destroyed an animal’s nest but to them it was just a laugh and everyone should be as chilled out as they are.
I think a lot of people are still respectful but those are the people who are lost in the crowd of shouting, swearing idiots doing reckless things for laughs. Of course, anyone who challenges anyone nowadays risks getting verbally or physically abused while everyone else immediately whips out their phones and ruins lives by pasting it all over social media.

I agree with you about law and order, but not so sure about illegal immigration as this is such a small proportion of the numbers.

Student visas are the largest group, but without them what happens to the universities? Foreign students pay such high fees that are keeping the system going.

Perhaps the discontent is that the UK is no longer a rich country, that standards are slipping because we don’t have money to spend like other countries?

@MaturingCheeseball

Tourism in the last decade has become absolutely monstrous.

But that's part of the long term plan to turn the UK into a "service" economy instead of a manufacturing economy. Tourism is a huge part of that, alongside property investment, financial services and universities. All required to bring foreign monies into the UK to offset all the money we pay to other countries for utilities, imported goods, etc.

You are right. Rich students bring money to the country so we should have polices that still allow in people who benefit us. However if their visa is only until uni finishes then they should have to reapply or whatever the law is.

I'm also not blaming people who came here according to our laws. Most of them followed the law here and have got jobs and integrated. However this was a failure of govt to let too many people come (legally) to the point we now can't cope.

Yes a tough, well funded police force allowed to tackle crime without fear of losing their job/being plastered on social media/being disciplined. At the moment they are scared to touch the little scroats and the little scroats know it. If you watch police zero on you tube you will see what I mean. Very scary. Or read the reddit uk police forum and see how many of them are trying to leave because they hate their jobs because of the way they are being treated. We already have so little frontline police.

As some with a whole arse degree in psychology and child studies it absolutely does NOT all come down to parenting. This is what they have been trying to convince you for the last few decades, cos fixing the structural issues is expensive!!

I added this image above, but will add it again for you.

The biggest problem is we hear all the bad news from everywhere now. Spend too much time online without intentionally looking for good news and you will think the world is going to hell. There is without doubt a lot of bad out there, but it's not the majority.

There has been a "moral panic" with every generation (it's an actual thing you can Google)

But as someone with kids, who works with kids, there are quite frankly loads of lovely polite kids and teenagers out there. I've had lovely teenagers volunteer to help with my kids classes for the last 14yrs. There are plenty of wonderful, caring parents out there, yet social media does nothing but sh*t on modern parents.

"Intensive parenting" is also a thing you can Google. Where society implies way more power on development and outcomes for kids than parents actually have. Of course parents have an impact, but that impact doesn't happen in a vacuum. You can have good parents who's kids turn out shitty and shitty parents whose kids turn out great.

People just need to stop obsessing over the idea that everything is crap and do whatever little thing they can to help rebuild communities.

Individualisation (you and only you are to blame for your circumstances) is a massive part of Western culture and it is a) false and b) leading to a lot of this misery.

I respect your degree but I always know from life experience (school/work) that the ‘nightmare’ kids in the class rarely have what I would call ‘normal parents’.

Lets ask those in the police on here. Do the troublemaker, knife carrying, trouble causing kids usually have a stable home with working parents, rules, routines, structure, a happy family life etc?

Trouble maker kids generally come from equally troubled families. Therefore, its the oarents failure to provide a stable home to raise children that has caused the kids to be troubled. Generally speaking.

Of course Brexit didn't help - we are poorer as a result, and will continue to get poorer than we would have been had we stayed in the EU.