Uk totally messed up - is anything good?

[tallcurvey]

The UK is an utter mess.
i can’t think of a single thing that is better than a decade ago.

when will people wake up and see brexit and the current government have ruined the country?

is their anything that’s better?

[ZebraD]

I think most people know but weirdly just accept it.

[Meadowfinch]

I think most people realise that covid has to be paid for (in every country). UK plc can't stop production for 2 years and then expect the treasury to be over-flowing. We always knew this was going to be an austere period.

Most people realise that having a war mongering idiot in Russia impacts food & gas prices (in all countries) making life more costly again.

Brexit was the result of a national vote, No matter what you or I think of the outcome, we are a democracy and I have to accept that.

We will have an election and the electorate will give their verdict on the management of the last 5 years. Gradually things will get better as we come out of the cycle.

You have to keep looking forwards and upwards. Getting stressed about it hampers my ability to cope.

[ArrestHer]

@Meadowfinch has it. It’s not just Brexit. It’s all the things mentioned in the above post. Things always ebb and flow. Right now is particularly difficult for many people, we can only see what comes next.

[tallcurvey]

@Meadowfinch

the uk didn’t get money in the markets for Covid.
the Bank of England printed more and the people own that (the bank) so we lent it to ourselves.
as the exchange rate did not change due to that because all countries did it at the same time. So in practicality all that money was free to us.

so the fact that we spent all the money does not add up as a pound is worth what people will give you for it and that didn’t change.

as we didn’t get the money on the money markets we can effectively pay it back never as the debt we owe we owe to ourselves.

[Meadowfinch]

We'll have to agree to disagree OP. I don't share your views on economic theory.

[Kosenrufugirl]

I blame BoJo. First Brexit lies. Second, he picked up Rishi as the youngest chancellor in the British history because BoJo knew he could get naive and overexcited Rishi to overspend on Covid. When everything started going wrong BoJo decided he needs a little distraction abroad. The Russians only attempted the regime change because the Americans were pushing for Ukraine to join Nato. (I wonder how the Americans would have reacted if the Russians tried to set up their bases on the Mexican territory). Biden knew he overstepped the mark and was proceeding very cautiously. However BoJo couldn't get the Churchill image out of his head. Now we are all paying for his ambitions while he is collecting millions of pounds a year giving little dinner talks

[TheNoonBell]

We (and most of western europe) are entering the later stages of managed decline.

It will get worse as the government steals more of our stuff to pay the ever increasing interest on the ever increasing debt. Currently £112bn or 9.7% of all government spending goes on interest repayments. Last year the goverment borrowed £119bn extra.

No political party is going to address the issue as any attempted fix would be deeply unpopular so they will just ignore the problem and carry on borrowing until we go bust.

[Octomama]

The U.K. is still one of the best places to live in the world, although I accept things have been better there in relatively recent times.

[Bululu]

We have the wrong incentives for the population. Time to overhaul the benefits system, invest in people and bring professionals with better payment and conditions. The NHS was a good idea after wars but times have changed. It is unsustainable with people living longer and mass immigration. Time to unite and stop thinking that the government must give us more and more. Plus, that believe or idealistic view that we have a debt with other countries and need to take huge numbers when we do not have the house in order. However, I find that the people who make the point about how broke the country are often the same ones that want more people to move here with lower skills and deny the fact that we are getting lots of criminals in the process. How much are we paying for police in the Pro- Palestine marches? Millions for police forces when our streets are full of criminals. It is not our war and we cannot really influence or stop it.

[Startingagainandagain]

I think this thread is starting to show some of the reasons why this was allowed to happen...

-Passivity. Any other country would have seen mass strikes and protest and forced a general election at this stage. Instead we have allowed criminal politicians to drag us into poverty while making themselves and their mates richer and this was done with the help of a large part of the right wing media.

-Reluctance to accept the blindingly obvious: that the combination of Brexit and a series of inept and corrupt Tory governments have almost destroyed everything in this country.

At this point to refuse to accept the impact of Brexit or to repeat the tired, old line that no other party could do better is absolute stupidity.

[Yesnosorryplease]

I've just driven to work along roads that are actually breaking up, massive holes in them, seen next to no buses, past biarded upshops, listening to the radio while they talk about fsm children growing up in households where the combined income is less than 7k, and about the desperation of people queuing in the streets to access basic dental care.

Utterly shocking.

[ArseInTheCoOpWindow]

Yep.

The queues for that new dentist surgery in Bristol said it all. One guy interviewed described it as Soviet Britain.

Britain is declining into a third world country. I’ve got a friend from China. They have bullet trains everywhere. Meanwhile we don’t even have trains anymore in the north of England. Stephenson’s Rocket here we come.

[Teentaxidriver]

I am struggling to comprehend your “we lent it to ourselves” theory. So you don’t agree that QE is inflationary? Maybe we should just keep on printing more and more money. History will tell you that it doesn’t work but hey-ho.

[Dapbag]

is their anything that’s better? Michelle Mone's property portfolio.

The Conservatives have spent the last ten years deliberately and systematically running this country into the ground, decimating public services and increasing the gap between rich and poor.

[beguilingeyes]

The didn't start with Covid and Ukraine though...it started with Cameron/Osborne and their failed Austerity policy. They deliberately cut public services to the bone for ideological reasons and don't give a toss because none of the use them. You think anyone in Government needs an NHS dentist? Or public transport?

[WishIMite]

@Startingagainandagain

I think this thread is starting to show some of the reasons why this was allowed to happen...

-Passivity. Any other country would have seen mass strikes and protest and forced a general election at this stage. Instead we have allowed criminal politicians to drag us into poverty while making themselves and their mates richer and this was done with the help of a large part of the right wing media.

-Reluctance to accept the blindingly obvious: that the combination of Brexit and a series of inept and corrupt Tory governments have almost destroyed everything in this country.

At this point to refuse to accept the impact of Brexit or to repeat the tired, old line that no other party could do better is absolute stupidity.

All of this. People don’t want to see that the Tory party has literally pilfered the country to make the rich richer. They’ve been very successful.

And people keep saying “Labour will be worse!”

We seem to have no agreement about what a government should do anymore. It used to be accepted that the role of government was to make life better for as many people as possible, particularly those who cannot help themselves. We now seem to believe that its role is to protect the rich.

Both are reasonable roles I guess - it depends what your values are. But we have accepted the latter, even though it makes most of our lives worse. It baffles me.

[Dapbag]

Can someone clever perhaps explain something to me?

Why, when the government wants to reduce inflation, do they increase interest rates rather than raising taxes?

To my (potentially dim and certainly uninformed mind) increasing tax could take the same amount of money from people's pockets, thus reducing inflation, but would put money into the public purse to pay for the services we so desperately need. Increased public services would provide employment, more people would be earning and paying more tax. Is that not better?

Am I wrong or should I be Chancellor of the Exchequer?

[FreeZor]

There has been a series of unfortunate events beyond our control (Covid, Russian war etc) however, had the country been properly managed after the financial crisis things would be nowhere near as dire as they are now. At that point in time the Government could borrow at negative interest rates over a very long period. A huge investment in infrastructure, skills, energy and food security and developing key growth sectors in technology, medicine etc should have been implemented at that point rather than austerity. This would have led to growth and rising living standards instead of a decade of stagnation so that we went into this period of turbulence since 2019 in a very weak position. Then we have a Government so utterly incapable of understanding basic economics that they thought a solution to our economic problems would be to trash our international trading relationship despite us having a huge balance of payments deficit already. It was blatantly obvious that Brexit would permanently damage the economy and make everyone poorer. While there have always been economic peaks and troughs it is unprecedented to have 15 years of zero real-terms salary growth. And with further geopolitical instability to come, natural resources dwindling and eight of the ten largest cities on Earth being in coastal areas that will be underwater in a few decades due to climate change, we've seen nothing yet in terms of mass migration. Not a situation in which it's a good idea to be reliant on importa for basics like food and energy...

The generation now in their 30s and 40s have been royally screwed with the highest childcare costs of any developed country, huge housing costs, student debt, no salary growth throughout their careers, inflation, Brexit, a terrible education system for their children, and now massive hikes in interest rates while they fund early retirement for those whose generation bled the state dry, sold off everything of value, let infrastructure crumble and created this mess, but repeatedly chant how they "have earned" the pensions and benefits that they paid nowhere near sufficient tax to fund.

Part of the problem is an extremely badly educated electorate who seem unable to understand basic economics or that the social contract includes responsibilities as well as rights. People do not demand change and are happy to tolerate this ongoing mismanagement, even actively vote for it. Refuse to look at data and assert that opinions based on fantasy are of equal value to those based on data and facts. There is truth in the saying that a country gets the Government it deserves. While this would always have been a relatively difficult period due to external events, the majority of the UK's problems were entirely foreseeable and avoidable.

I agree with @TheNoonBell that most of the west is in a state of managed decline and sadly this will only get worse with living standards continuing to fall sharply over the coming decades. Gross mismanagement in the UK has hastened the process: counterproductive domestic economic policies, absurd foreign/ trade policies, an economically damaging tax and benefits system that politicians know is damaging but refuse to change, no investment in the key areas required to improve things, plus a refusal to reform areas like healthcare and eye-watering unfunded pension liabilities that are not even included in the national accounts that are quite obviously unsustainable. It is a mathematical certainty that these things will HAVE to be changed because the country literally cannot pay them, but they'll wait until collapse until they do so, causing far more damage. And a chancellor so inept that he has arranged around 1/4 of recent Government borrowing on an index-linked basis so the one benefit of the recent high inflation (reducing the real-terms value of our debt) was not available! You really couldn't make it up. Everything designed around "optics" rather than what will actually work.

Head in the sand, ostrich syndrome and no evidence-based policy making whatsoever. A refusal to do what needs to be done even when it is staring them in the face and an electorate just as irresponsible as the politicians whose answer to everything is "somebody else should pay for it".

[Dapbag]

We now seem to believe that its role is to protect the rich.

I cannot understand the mentality of those who vote out of self interest in order to keep money for themselves and pay less tax.

Surely no amount of money elevates you to a place where you don't experience the pot holed roads, the state of A & E if you have an accident, crime caused by poverty, the sewage in the sea when you go to your second home in Cornwall etc etc. As you go about your life the effects of this whittling away of quality of life must be evident.

Do the selfish rich really not care what goes on outside their electric gates? They should shouldn't they?

[WalkingThroughTreacle]

We have the most capable and trustworthy politicians I've seen in my lifetime.

We are also a world leader in sarcasm.

[ArseInTheCoOpWindow]

@WalkingThroughTreacle

We have the most capable and trustworthy politicians I've seen in my lifetime.

We are also a world leader in sarcasm.

😂😂😂😂

Arent they great?😂

[MamaAlwaysknowsbest]

Now, forgive me, someone from an ex commnist country here. We had our version of free nhs, free all, free education, free uni, free uni accomodation with all bills for free included, cheap food, great holidays, tons of rubbish everywhere

now, imagine, this is what I see now, here. Makes me actually very happy and comfortable because life here is as easy, as it was back then in my country. As long mum and dad work of course. Now, are we on the way to 1984 ? Perhaps and may be .....I am not a conspiracy theorist but don't you understand that the government is basically dictating everything here one way or the other - just throwing my points into this wonderful mix

[MamaAlwaysknowsbest]

and again, observe, we cannot move forward without working mums and dads.

[MamaAlwaysknowsbest]

so dear working mums and dads, keep working please. Free lunch does not exist anywhere in the world.

[Dapbag]

@FreeZor I agree with much of what you say, but can't understand why you say 30 - 40 year olds fund early retirement for anyone. State pension can't be taken early. Those of us who retire early with private pensions pay tax on the money we receive at the same rate as employees.

I and many other older people have spent a lifetime voting for a better life for others. We are not all the same I promise you.