Dh says the U.K is f***** and he never wants to go back

[Chippednailtoepolish]

These were his words this morning.

We live abroad in a place where a lot of people are coming to live, escaping the uk and America.
He says with everything on the news, the way it's going and what the people coming to where we are tell him, that we'd be mad to return.
Is he being realistic? I want to return to be with family desperately and have a strange feeling that I need to do it soon

Would we be mad to return at this time? If yes, then when!

Did people think the UK was fucked in the 70s - yes they absolutely did, to the point where quite a few ‘elite’ fascist-adjacent charmers planned a coup d’état, only they were too pissed on their revolutionary Pouilly Fumé to actually do anything except have extended dinners at their clubs and talk about weapons. Then of course there was the Troubles. And strikes to the point that the country’s newspaper of record wasn’t published for a full year (ok that was the 80s). And every winter weekend the country’s most trashed rolling stock was hauled out to run Football Special trains which nobody in their right mind except semi feral blokes would have bought a ticket for, and when you got off at your destination all the shops shut down, bearing in mind shops were only open 9-5 Mon to Sat with early closing anyway. And in the unlikely event of there being toilet paper anywhere in the country it was that glazed Government Property stuff that left you chafed but damp. My FIL attempted to sell a house in 1978 and it took him two years to sell at a loss.

It does help having been alive a bit longer. I’d rather live now.

I love the UK and my city is classed as a great place to live, lots of history, countryside around etc. BUT at 70 my DH and I are considering moving abroad. Our city is becoming overrun with drugged up/boozed up/and illegal beings. The streets are full of rubbish and are dirty and it no longer feels safe. We are being taxed to the hilt despite having worked and saved for 50+ years. We have had to use savings for medical treatment as the NHS waiting list is is so long my DH would have been wheelchair bound by end of the year. The government don't give a damn about the British people and it is very sad. If you are happy where you are I would say sadly the UK is no longer a really good option which we feel is very sad.

The whole world is becoming increasingly unstable. If you don’t have Spanish or Portuguese citizenship, don’t expect yourselves to be welcome there forever (and even if you do, but acquired, not born into, I wouldn’t feel so very secure). Only a fantasist thinks they can “escape” all the fallout, or that people who are effectively UK citizens, not locals, will always be welcome elsewhere, as though there is no taint from the fact of a person’s alien citizenship, so long as the citizenship comes wrapped in the Union Jack (and an inexhaustible supply of money - woe betide the person who runs out, they will soon find how welcome they really are at this point…).

The question is more where you think you will be more vulnerable when the shit hits the fan. Is the UK uniquely unprepared for the coming storm? We certainly seem to have been and continue to be phenomenally shortsighted about our food insecurity, water insecurity, energy insecurity, data insecurity, nature depletion, social divisions, failing infrastructure, appallingly low standards of housebuilding, growing corruption, inability to plan for the long term, and populism. But I look at the rest of the world and do not perceive it to be any safer for me, given the fact I was not born elsewhere, I am a UK citizen. There is a big restructuring of the world order going on and, combined with rapid climate change, you would need a time machine to escape the fallout, imvho, not just a change of geographical position.

Don’t you realise that some people have no more to give in taxes as they are barely getting by and going without and visiting food banks to survive? You might be in the position to pay more tax but some people can’t carry this burden. Also people are not massively racist, they are massively help the people here first before becoming the saviour for the rest of the world. I’m fed up with people accusing others of being racist because they want to be able to afford the basic things in life and access public services they pay for.

👏 👏

I’m an expat and wish I never moved to the UK. I have children here, when they are finished school will take their 3 passports and leave. Then I will leave too.

It is managed decline and shambolic. I am embarrassed when my family comes to visit because everything is so shabby and the quality of life is so much lower than back home.

We’re high earners, zone 2 London, kids in private school etc…doesn’t make a difference. Your husband is right.

The sea is not a border. It is - the sea. Yes, it is porous as that tends to be the nature of water. It ebbs and flows.

Well done. As said borders are meant to stop undesirable people coming in and committing horrendous crimes. The failure is there, sea or not.

China is battling with a huuuuge youth unemployment, and many 'dynamic' Asian countries struggle with massively aging population (Japan, South Korea) and economic stagnation.

It depends where you are comparing it to really.
Its a desirable place to live for people from India, Pakistan and Poland (although I think many are returning to Poland as their economy has picked up).
It isn't the first choice for many who have other options but like everywhere,
if you have plenty of money, then any country will be fine.

If I could move, I'd choose Australia or New Zealand for a good quality of life.

If you can speak other languages, then you have more options.

If you have kids OP you need to be back before their next key stage/before they hit puberty.
I was out the UK for 12 years.
It changed an awful lot in that time.
You will have reverse culture shock.
Your friends, family and acquaintances have lived without you and may not care you return.

Bad things:
No NHS dentistry
Poor access to general healthcare
Cost of groceries and petrol
Bad roads (potholes) and congestion
Lack of jobs, opportunity pending age/skillset
Extremes in weather rather than temperate
Changing political landscape, less liberal
Disruptive classes in state secondary education

Good things:
Friends and family if they care
Cultural things you missed (food,TV, tea, rain)

I know expats in Europe that will never come back here. They think it's a shithole comparatively.
I know others who still have longing/yearning for their roots.
I am also aware that some of the above negatives are now true of their countries.

I wish I had come up with a better solution myself e.g. Scotland.
The longer you leave it if you have kids though OP, the harder they'll find it to reintegrate.
Good luck. 🍀

Do you go around with hunched shoulders and a grimace? Because your posts on this thread have depicted England as some kind of poisonous wasteland.

Do you kids share your view of where they live @EvangelicalAboutButteredToast ? Genuine question but I suspect you won’t give a serious answer because you don’t want to admit that your kids are equally as depressed as you

China has a rapidly shrinking younger population, so it won’t have massive youth unemployment for long - it needs those robots it is developing to fill in the gaps…

We live in Ireland- dh has been saying similar for years, I think some people decide that other countries and ways of living are the holy grail and ignore that there’s pros and cons to both. I think your gut is your gut but op the news reports on the negative and people see different things according to where and how they live. Nobody can say any of the countries you live in is wrong or right to live in.

Do you think we'd be better returning or staying here? Where will be safer and how long do we have to decide?

Yeah mindfulness will protect our children.

The population is going to start declining soon. People are having around 1.3 children and in two decades or so many of the baby boomers will be dead, seems harsh but it's true.

Where will you go?

Yes the inequality really irks me, more and more people are quite poor, i.e. things that used to be a given have now become unaffordable, and yet people try to keep up. I was quite surprised to find out a salary of 75k as a single person puts you in the top 5% by household income (https://ifs.org.uk/tools_and_resources/where_do_you_fit_in)

We're definitely a society where the top 5-10%, especially where there's inherited wealth, live in a bubble, go to their own places, and think they are suffering the same as everyone else, whereas a lot of people are genuine struggling.

This breeds more discount stores, cheap services, cutting corners... Everything is about 'cheaper', not 'better'.

Great thread op. 400 comments in and you still haven't said where you live now.

There's a big difference Canada Vs Sudan, for example.

Attention seeking drip feeding

I used to live in a big city, rough-ish area, traffic etc. I moved to a small village in the countryside, purposefully chose a cul-de-sac for my cats' safety, to make it less likely they'd get run over. One got hit by a car and killed at the bottom of my quiet street.

What I am saying is, you can do what you can to keep safe but you can never predict what will happen. There is no way to say where you will actually be safer. Be sensible and a bit cautiousm, sure. But go where you want to be in your heart.

I don't think the country is fucked-- it has some issues but it is not done for.

Do you really think this poster can answer that?

What do your family in England think @Chippednailtoepolish about the country?

You know more about your current situation than I do, so only you can make that calculation. Of course, you also have to be on the same page as your dh if you want to do anything other than stay put, unless there ever comes a time when choice is taken away from you and you are asked to leave (at which point you would have left it too late, because you would be unlikely to get a warm welcome back home at that point, if the global situation had become that unfriendly and unstable - you would just be viewed as more unwelcome immigrants, and ones who had treacherously behaved like rats deserting a sinking ship, but whose life raft sank before the ship did). If you agree your quality of life atm is great, it would be a hard move to make, imvho. You might need to wait until you start to feel the pinch more where you are - or get your dh to think much more long term and ask him if he genuinely sees himself as more of a Spanish citizen, with loyalty to Spain, and happy to live and die there, whatever happens, should life take a turn for the worse? Or are you so incredibly wealthy that should everywhere become pretty hostile to foreigners, you would feel able to float above it all and not really care about the people around you, and therefore where you happened to have ended up?

I actually said it ages ago, no drip feeding whatsoever so you can stop with the rude comments, it doesn't make you look clever, just nasty.

I like living here. I don’t think it’s f*cked. My DW wants to live abroad but to me it feels like same shit different country. We’d have to work, we wouldn’t be earning better money, we’d spend what assets we have on relocating. But then again that’s probably because I would NEVER move to the Middle East. Not just because I’m married to a woman, even if I was married to a man. My cousin has done it and I honestly feel terrified for her, if things ever didn’t work out with her DH, she’d be stuck there and she would lose of lot of the protections in divorce that she’d have here. I honestly don’t know why anyone would go there.