It's a mixture of reasons really. I've watched lots of current affairs documentaries about the decline of the UK.
We used to be wealthy (not for a long time) and so people got very entitled and unrealistic.
We have governments who don't care about making the right decisions for the country only the ones that will keep them in their job.
Everyone is too scared to say what they really think or as you can see from this thread you get called a nazi/bigot/etc. We are supposed to be delighted to fund people who don't want to work and we are not allowed to say boo to them either.
Vast numbers of the public are absolutely raging about the current state of affairs though why is why reform got a huge number of votes recently so change is coming.
The working public who are sick of funding the scroungers are taking steps to pay as little tax as possible. In part because of the cliff edge drops when you earn above a certain level but also because people object to paying tax to get no benefits from them.
People used to be embarrassed to be a burden on society and would be on benefits only as a last resort. There was a pride in looking after your family and building your nest. Now we have people on youtube coaching others how to milk the system. Of course once one person sees that others are living an easy life on benefits it snowballs. Nobody wants to be the mug working and paying tax if nobody else is.
We seem to have vast numbers of children with something wrong with them. Now it is hard to know if there really is something wrong with them all (in which case we need to investigate why and sort it) or if families are just milking the system which appears to be very easy to do.
In short the UK is living in the past, resting on it's laurels and about to have a rude awakening in the next few years. If we get a hardline govt we might (might) be able to turn thing around but there will be no space for people who are a burden. We must create growth and cut costs and live within our means. Even so it will take years to return to financial viability and that's if we can do it at all.
80 years ago the UK had no welfare system and no NHS but if you suggest such a thing might be what we need to survive you will get called all sorts of insults. I don't know if people are too frightened to face up to reality or if they really are that ignorant of what is going on.
My hope is reform will actually do what they say. If not I honestly think we tinker on till the IMF take over and slash all these benefits anyway. I mean the UK is currently financially unviable and thankfully more and more people seem to be becoming aware of it and are demanding solutions.
God help us if we get a more left wing government although I suppose that will speed up the decline and make it go boom quicker.
Plus if we look at the worldwide picture we have vast overvaluation of stocks at the moment due to the AI boom. Massive amounts of spending on capex which so far has not shown enough returns to pay it back. If that does not come to fruition we are all going to be seriously f*cked. I totally understand why the USA is sick of supporting us. On top of that we have the shadow banking industry now (bank who lend to vunerable companies) and if the AI bubble does not pan out there is going to be lots of defaulting. The whole economy reminds me so much of 2007 just before the subprime crisis in the USA came to light and big financial institutions starting going bust.
The UK is in a far worse financial situation than we were in 2007. Not to mention our public services are all on their knees whereas back then they were all quite well funded.