[monk_e_boy]

Other than london and a couple of other cities, most of the country was already ranked as most deprived in Europe.

Throw in Brexit, cost of living and most normal people are fucked.

I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened. NHS is struggling. Pay rises are around 0% for most people I know. Food inflation is around 16%. Foodbanks are struggling to feed families.

Companies are making record profits, these are distributed as dividends to shareholders (the rich) who then go on to buy more shares or other assets (e.g. houses)

Where I live most houses are Air B&B for a lot of the year, this has destroyed most villages by the coast. House prices have doubled or more. So a lot of those families have moved into towns, forced to rent rather than buy. Tons of money that used to go into mortgages (investments) is now funnelled to rich people who own the housing stock.

There's a lot of crazy stuff going on. The UK has a shrinking middle class. The middle class used to drive the economy. The rich poor divide is breaking the country.

A better TAX system would fix most of the problems. But our government is not interested.

[zpeti]

I think you are right on the symptoms, and some of the causes, but let me add some from the other side, as I think left and right both make good points and you have to be intellectually honest if you want to move forward.

There are some multinationals who escape taxation, but even if that were perfectly addressed it wouldn't solve the UK's issues. Tax receipts are already close to 40% of GDP, these are record highs, frankly there are few countries where going over 40% is both possible or sustainable. (The US is at 25% for reference).

House prices are high because for 15 years mortgages were basically at 0% interest. This didn't actually make housing more affordable through cheap mortgages, if just inflated house prices. The endless schemes to help young people buy property just makes this worse, as the schemes are just built into the price.

Lastly, and this is usually hard to hear for people of your persuasion, you just can't add 500k-1m NET people to a country and expect housing to be just as available, and the health service to not be under massive strain. It's a physical impossibility. YES, I know many immigrants work in the NHS. That is not a valid rebuke to the problem. 1m net immigrants last year is 1m more people who need health services. The NHS has received massively more funding since covid and just can't cope. I'm not against migration, but the sheer numbers need to be talked about. You can't keep a sustainable country at these levels.

Finally, the UK has relied on financial and advisory services for decades as the core of its economy. This seems to be working less and less, tech is taking over. the 80-90s were about finance, since then it's been about tech. Slowly the country is falling behind.

This is a chronic issue in almost all of europe, but at least there there is high end manufacturing, and eastern europe has tonnes of catching up to do which grows the economy.

[ttlsa]

Regarding your point about migration,

> * Net migration was unusually high in 2022, as several factors came together at the same time, including the war in Ukraine"[1]. *

Even so, the net migration numbers were nowhere close to 1 million. From the same source as above,

> * With this caveat in mind, estimates from the Office of National Statistics suggest that total net migration was 504,000 in the year ending June 2022. *

You suggested that the UK adds 500k-1m migrants every year, but the actual number seems to be pretty much at the bottom of that range. The number of students coming to the UK has also increased significantly (it does contribute to increase in net migration stats).

The ONS still predicts (with a considerable amount of uncertainty I'll admit) that the net migration numbers will fall significantly in the next 5 or so years.

1. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/lo...

[rcarr]

> eastern europe has tonnes of catching up to do which grows the economy.

Most of Eastern Europe is expected to overtake the UK in terms of living standards in the middle of this decade. Parts of it already has.

[Symbiote]

I found the same link as the other reply, and I notice the UK's net migration is broadly in line with other wealthier European countries and the USA.

You absolutely can have this level of migration, but you need to build the infrastructure to support it (homes, schools, hospitals etc).

Relevant statistics on number of dwellings are here [1], and they seem to fit the population increase, but I don't have time to find similar statistics on school places, hospitals etc.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

[KaiserPro]

I'm not sure why this pose was downvoted, apart from mentioning brexit.

I used to live in the countryside, the 90s had a background of rapid improvements in schools and hospitals. 2000s full of out of town megashops killing the high street. 2010s public service cuts. 2020 stuff just not working.

The scale of the housing price problem is difficult to behold.

https://www.plumplot.co.uk/Norfolk-house-prices.html has the house prices

https://www.adzuna.co.uk/jobs/salaries/norfolk is the average wage. The average house price is 10x the average wage. but thats not evenly distributed. if you live up in the northern part, the average house price is 100x times wage.

The UK was already extraordinarily unequal in the 2000s, however inflation, benefit "adjustment" and general failure in policy.

[dukeyukey]

> if you live up in the northern part, the average house price is 100x times wage

I really, really, _really_ doubt that's the case. That'd need salaries to be <£10k and house prices of >£1 million.

[el_oni]

House prices are awful, and with the current mortgage rates it makes it even harder. Last July when we first started looking at what sort of deposit we would need and how much mortgage payments would be it looked like we would be spending an additional £400 a month (which is fine, I wouldn't have to save for a house after all). But since the catastrophic economic policies of our shortest term prime minisiter we would be paying an extra £1000 a month over our current rent.

The house 2 doors down was last sold for £80k about 20 years ago. The house over the road that has just gone up for sale is asking for £300k. I'm lucky that my salary is over the median, but a 3-bed semi detached is like 10x the median salary (£26k). The same sort of property that my parents generation bought for 5x the median salary back in the 90s.

[monk_e_boy]

And who is hoovering up those expensive houses? Not the middle class.

Rich folk are investing in housing and renting it out. It's crazy.

[blitzar]

> £80k about 20 years ago - asking for £300k.

7% a year assuming they spent £0 (hint: they didnt)

[OscarTheGrinch]

UK was already creaking at the seems in the 2000's. I left in 2011 and have spent the last 5 years crawling up a sewer pipe of regulations trying to get my post brexit immigration sorted.

Brexit was just a fantasy of better days to come that was actually pretext for a right wing power grab. And what do right wingers ultimately want? A world of red in tooth and claw capitalism with themselves as the permanent winners, right up until they are hit with one of life's unexpected curve balls then they come crying to the state to save them.

Fuck the tories.

[Applejinx]

Harsh but fair. It's not significantly different in the US.

You know, it's not different in ANY of the empires, past or present. Look at Russia and it's just a couple decades of further decline, but the same thing.

If hackers and nerd idealists are worth anything, it's for trying to solve all this against a background of constant push-back. I sometimes wonder if the most important thing I could possibly do is try to depict this larger picture in such a way that people got it.

[rcarr]

> UK was already creaking at the seems in the 2000's. I left in 2011 and have spent the last 5 years crawling up a sewer pipe of regulations trying to get my post brexit immigration sorted.

As someone planning to leave and never come back, can you give me a brief overview of some of the shit I might not know about that I'm going to have to deal with?

[bluehoot]

stop being misled. tories, labour, it doesn't matter. two sides, same coin. government needs to end. international banking cartel needs to end. the synagogue of satan needs to end. evil needs to end.

[tpmx]

"Pay rises are around 0% for most people I know."

Some data:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwor...

Growth in employees' average total pay (including bonuses) was 5.8% and growth in regular pay (excluding bonuses) was 6.7% in January to March 2023.

(That appears to be on an annual basis.)

[monk_e_boy]

I don't know those people. I think averages that include London and other cities don't represent most of the country. Average salary for where I live is £10,000 less than the UK average (I just looked it up)

[whywhywhywhy]

> I'm a lecturer (5 yrs) and I'm struggling to pay my bills. We've been out on strike and nothing happened

Why would not working result in higher pay? Especially in a field where the product is increasingly seen as a luxury that costs as much as a downpayment for a house and ultimately not a essential requirement for employment.

[gameman144]

Striking provides a forcing function to reveal the actual value to the employer of your labor.

In certain fields (e.g. medicine, academics) there are huge centers that represent the majority of jobs for a region. Specialized workers here find it harder to job hop, as there are fewer opportunities.

Striking provides another means to better pay. Say you value my work at $40/hr, but are currently paying my at $20/hr. In domains where employees don't have much recourse to just go find another employer, strikes provide a good mechanism to call the bluff of an employer. If they really only value your work at $20/hr, they'll not be willing to pay any more. If they do value it more highly, striking makes it so they have to choose between making concessions or losing work they value.

[hammyhavoc]

A lot of people get student loans. A lot of people never end up making enough to even begin repaying their student loans if they've taken a degree that's not in demand, or they never end up paying it back before it is just eventually written off. The student loans aren't like a normal loan. Yes, it may be to the sum of what you could put towards a downpayment on a house, but it isn't the same as that's something someone would have to repay, regardless of how much they were making.

As a lot of people can access further education, they take the opportunity even if it isn't necessary for employment. Most students work whilst studying, even with a student loan, because the loan almost certainly doesn't cover their rent, food, transport and textbooks for example. Most young people you see working in hospitality are probably in university studying.

What's the alternative to make ends meet for students? OnlyFans?