This is quite darkly hilarious tbh. And consistent with my experience of Blackpool.
I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself to a fish-and-chip shop, feeling like a silly city boy in a greasy gritty concrete town. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember walking, late evening, lonely, on a bridge over the railtrack. The entire place felt deserted, metallic and concrete.
I went back to my room and ate the oily chips on my bed. After the first day with an old crusty – but perfectly lovely driving instructor – and a rather large heavy-haulage driver who was renewing a license, we went out for some drinks. Beers. Lots of beer. And they took me to a gay club – of which there are oddly many in Blackpool – because they thought it'd be a laugh. It was actually a massive spectacle for me. It was the first time I saw older men kissing, right there, by the entrance on a old tawdry sofa. I was still on a journey of coming out, so it felt oddly enlightening or validating or something. It was an old-england gay club – the type you hear about in the era of stonewall.
The entire town was like a time capsule to a poorer apocalyptic britain. Betting shops, cheap nail salons, boarded up derelict buildings everywhere! Even the beach was deserted. It reflected the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK. It felt like a shadow of its former self, but somehow, there was a old english magic to it that I can still feel. My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me, but I remember it fondly.
So yeh I think I understand this SLS thing. In places like Blackpool – forgotten remnants - you can feel the depression in the paving stones – the grey withering vitality – swallowing you whole.
> the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK
I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous.
Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London?
It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make good places to buy property. Surely, on the whole, they have more natural beauty than inland areas.
Beautifully put, an answer approaching literature. I have the same feelings about Blackpool.
Coastal towns really are monuments to another time. The houses are beautiful, too - a two bedroom flat in one of the old guesthouses on the sea front with bay windows is a steal in most towns, if you can cope with the town itself.
Scarborough is another one. It was clearly so much more full of life than it is now, but its status as an elder resort is part of its charm. The poverty, so much not.
Your description of Blackpool is both eloquent and absolutely spot on!
I suggested to my friend that we go there for his stag do; and even for the debauchery of a stag do it felt a bit too grim! To the point that I felt guilty for suggesting it.
My parents used to take me for our "exotic foreign holiday" in Blackpool each year (I was from Scotland).
I actually have many happy memories from the time. There was the Doctor Who Exhibition we went to once - nothing even remotely like that anywhere near my home town. Then there was the Blackpool Tower. My parents used to complain about how expensive it was to get in, and I think we only went there once, but on that one trip me and my dad went to see a laser light show set to music (so futuristic!) and also went to a stall that used a video camera hooked up to one of those new fangled computer things that could print out an ASCII art picture of your face (such mind bogglingly advanced technology!) Also the arcades. Again they cost money so it was rare we'd go in, but there was once I was given money to try a grabbing claw machine, and won a pack of sweets. My parents thought I was good at them, and so gave me money to try and win something for my sister, which was a huge boost to my confidence (finally something I was better than my sister at!) Unfortunately I didn't manage to win anything for my sister. It was only decades later that I found out that those machines aren't skill based - there's a dial inside where the operator can control the "payout rate", i.e. the percentage of times the claw goes limp vs stays rigid. (Another childhood illusion shattered.)
Anyway, maybe that was before it got too grim, or maybe I didn't notice because I was so young, or maybe I just thought that was what England was like:-)
One awful thing I remember though was just how filthy the beaches were. The coast was lined with sewerage outlets, so where-ever you swam there would be all sorts of things floating by. Once I picked up what I thought was a funny shaped balloon and started filling it with water and playing with it. I went to show my mum how I could make the balloon bigger by squeezing it, but she just looked horrified and bashed it out of my hand. I had no idea why, but didn't ask, and just kept quiet. I did however wonder what it could have been that was so bad, but the best my innocent young mind could think of was that perhaps it was some form of artificial breast for breast feeding, given it was skin coloured and had a teat at the end. It wasn't until many years later that I realised what it almost certainly was.
Please tell me that writing is a substantial part of your daily work! Or at least that you're prolific outside of your professional commitments? This was written so well..a real delight to read.
Poverty is extremely harsh on people. And when I was much younger (<15), like many adults now think, I used to think that poverty is the lack of power of buying expensive things. But as I have grown up, I realized that poverty is extremely harsh.
For example, relevant to the submission, is healthcare. Healthcare in India is theoretically free in government hospitals. But in most places the state of these hospitals is horrific, and getting treatment is very hard due to corruption.
But the bigger issue is opportunity cost. People who live based on daily earnings, cannot afford to go to hospitals abandoning their work as they cannot ensure next day's food. So, unless it happens to be someone young, people don't seek treatment at all. And visiting a proper doctor and buying meds take away ~10 days' income. Really unaffordable for poor people.
So, even people in their forties and fifties decide to wait it out, and easily curable ailments get chronic and beyond cure. Women fare worse than men.
Real victims are old people, and nobody bothers to spend money and weeks of their time to get them to treatment. They wither, and die without treatment. I have seen at least a dozen people die like this.
I think, the cause of SLS is opportunity cost. People often die, and more often suffer for decades from easily curable diseases because they cannot really afford either the time or money to get treatment.
I also know at least a dozen people who have something chronic, but get no treatment at all because they cannot afford it.
The UK has typically had the highest levels of income inequality in Europe.
A previous Prime Minister had been quoted 'A pound spent in Croydon is far more of value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde', Croydon being in London and Strathclyde being an administrative area in West Scotland that ceased to exist in 1975. The quote was from 2012.
WFH has allowed me to continue working from rural Scotland, to be honest I thought COVID would radically transform society's thinking and our requirement to be in high GDP areas for certain lines of work. Doesn't seem to have had quite the impact it was supposed to.
That's how infrastructure projects are prioritised in the UK. Return on the pound. The south east returns something like 10x the investment versus the north of England.
Just look at HS2 - everything north and north east of Birmingham has effectively been cancelled, leaving yet another "national" infrastructure project serving only London.
This Government, or the previous one, or the previous one, ad nauseam, continually fail to invest in the north, and north east. In fact the last major national infrastructure in those regions would be the building of the motorways. (edit) And just look at the North East, Sedgefield had Labour PM Tony Blair, Hartlepool had MP and cabinet member Peter Mandelson, and yet the investment there during that 15 year period was negligible. It's a London-based Government thing, not a political thing.
If you're not "close" to London, you're going to be poor by comparison.
Bringing Newcastle closer to Leeds by faster road and rail, and hence York, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and the Potteries, would hugely increase economic productivity in the North of England.
I too hope that WFH will redistribute the wealth around the UK.
I hate the fact that we have an idiotic adversarial political system. Which ever party is in power is invariably hamstrung by the opposition voting the other way just 'because', is pathetically childish. The best time to build infrastructure was yesterday.
Although Croydon is a London borough, it's quite far outside of central London, to the point that it doesn't really feel part of London. It's also quite a deprived area. So that quote is weird on a number of levels!
I'd say my hometown in middle America is significantly affected by Shit Life Syndrome.
Thanks to my career in tech I broke out of that and moved away, but I've definitely had my seasons back at home where I get sucked into the Shit Life Syndrome around me.
I had some post-Covid health issues and spent a month back in my hometown to recover. But after a month I couldn't stand to be around so many struggling people while I was struggling myself.
So I went back to my cosmopolitan life and surrounded myself with people who are doing well.
I still have my health issues, but surrounding myself with people who are doing well has been much more tolerable for me than sitting stuck in Shit Life Syndrome in my hometown.
I don't know what the solution is for places that have SLS, but for individual people, the best advice I can give is, to the best of your ability, surround yourself with people who are doing well.
I hope there comes a day when the rich and influential look for the next money-making venture in which to invest in, see only a sea of machine-generated uncertainty on the stock market, and decide "actually, the most profitable thing I can do to protect my wealth is to invest it in the public"
I hope there comes a day when using the money hoarded by the rich and influential to invest in the public, does not depend on the rich and influential choosing to do so out of a desire for maximal profits, or even benevolence.
That’s basically every rich lefty. “I’m rich” -> “I gotta vote for small government and low taxes” is not an obvious step to me at all. I’d much rather live in a town with happy people, low crime and high income equality than in a gated community full of rich people with guards and fences to keep the bums out.
Maybe find a way to inspire in the rich the kind of philanthropy practiced by Andrew Carnegie. He wrote his views in, The Gospel of Wealth - not having read it, but having long heard Carnegie's name as an example of wealth turned to good, I'm planning to give it a read.
Unfortunately with a political system wholly owned by the wealthy (US), I fear that there may be more truth than I want in my father's admonition that things will never get better in this country until we have another revolution. I've been around a bit and so much of today seems to be a rinse and repeat of the issues I experienced when I was young - not the world I wanted to see for my daughter. Hopefully the next generation has a stronger backbone - mine and the couple after seem to have surrendered our dreams to greed and consumerism.
The uncertainty of the stock market doesn't really matter. The M3 in the UK went up around 25% over the last 3 years. So the major concern when choosing where to invest is whether the assets are optimally positioned to benefit from the growth in the money supply. Physical reality is still a concern of course.
Although arguably rich and influential are investing in the public; the UK government spending makes up about half the GDP and the wealthy are paying what I gather is a 40% income tax.
There's an interesting dog-that-didn't-bark: the word "meth" does not appear. The drug is still not common in the UK[1]. Blackpool has precisely the demographic makeup where, if it were in America, it would be flooded with meth dealers and addicts, and become magnitudes worse than it already is.
I dread the day that drug finally makes landfall here. It will sweep through our urban underclass like the Black Death.
Nor fentanyl. Probably because while heroin is a thing, it tends to stay in its rather particular niche.
I'm not a believer in gateway drugs generally, but the prescription opioid hell that exists in the US never really took off here. A problem yes, but not a society-wrecking scale. Mostly because doctors are much less free-and-easy with prescribing the stuff, and can't easily be bribed by drugco's to do so as they were in the US.
> Blackpool exports healthy skilled people and imports the unskilled, the unemployed and the unwell. As people overlooked by the modern economy wash up in a place that has also been left behind, the result is a quietly unfolding health crisis.
I used to date someone from a small city in Northeast United States, and when I visited and met her friends and extended social network, this was the impression I got. The ambitious and privileged ones aspired to leave and never look back, while others remained to make the best of their city while taking care of aging loved ones. Half of the people I met had some awful family story (alcoholic and/or abusive parents, drug-addicted siblings, father in prison, etc.) Job prospects were dire. Monuments to that were abandoned and sometimes burned down factories that lined some of the streets in parts of the city. It's all very sad.
Even without poverty in the picture you still have the problem of the medical system failing pretty badly with the complex cases. Everything is geared towards short appointments, that simply doesn't give the doc enough time to see a complex picture. Unless you can afford to go outside the system to docs who actually have the time you're not likely to get good answers.
I’ve always wondered if a brute force approach to this is to money bomb these areas and let people get large amounts of funds to leave the area and go somewhere where they are slightly more likely to have positive interactions.
Brit Boomer. I grew up in a single parent family near the bottom of the heap in England. What kept us going and saved me from early death or a life of crime or drug dependency was the welfare state. The NHS, free school meals and host of other measures meant that there was a safety net in place, even so much was done by charities like the NSPCC. Later there were grants, with tuition fees paid, to go to higher education. For me, seeing how the other 50% or so lived was truly eye opening.
Post Thatcher, the safety nets have been allowed to fall into disrepair if not discarded entirely. Modern Britain is not a place to grow up poor in.
The journalist Sarah O'Connor, linked to in the Wikipedia article for her "Left behind: can anyone save the towns the economy forgot?" article in the Financial Times, is also known for this:
A while ago I was dealing with a lot of shit in my life and I wasn't coping well, so I engaged the mental healthcare system. I tried telehealth therapy and was told 'your needs are beyond what telehealth can handle, good luck'. The number of times I've been told 'good luck' by a mental healthcare provider as they're dismissing me makes me feel sick.
Psychiatrists were no better, they only want to talk about medication. There's no time for discussion of anything else.
Group therapy was a joke, no matter how much I failed at being a responsible adult I was told that I'm doing my best. Well, if doing my best means not being able to hold a job or support myself, then it's not good enough. In the animal world, individuals that are too depressed to support (feed) themselves die. Things aren't much different for a person living in the USA.
I engaged the mental healthcare system because I started failing at life and wanted help succeeding again, but instead of making me a person able to succeed I was told to reframe my failures as successes. Maybe that works if you have wealthy family to fall back on, but for the rest of us being able to earn a living doing productive work is vital to wellbeing. Telling a poor person that it's ok not to work because of their mental condition just traps them in a shitty life forever and they will never be able to be happy regardless of how many prozac they take.
The fix is as simple as looking at Maslow's pyramid. Make it so no one is worried about having a warm bed or enough to eat. Give opportunities for meaningful work that earns money and contributes positively to the world. Make it easy to become part of a social hierarchy and positively interact with other people. But all that isn't feasible, so let's give people pills to fix 'shit life syndrome' while leaving them with a shit life and no hope of improving it.
FWIW Blackpool looks like a heck of a lot of seaside places in the UK. Whatever problems are described in this article are problems all the way around the coast.
Visit a seaside town here and it often feels like you're back in the early 90s. There's a certain style that hasn't been updated. Arcades, chip shops, betting shops. Ok the betting shops look modern.
A lot of high streets in nice towns are even starting to look like they're made entirely of charity shops and betting shops, and starbucks/costa.
More of this coming, and much more broadly. And it'll have consequences outside just economics and public health. Demagogues, riots, drawbridges being pulled up around the world. People need a reason to live, you can't just take that away from them and expect that everything will be fine.
> But they [doctors] believe the causes are a tangled mix of economic, social and emotional problems that they — with 10- to 15-minute slots per patient — feel powerless to fix.
Would more time by doctors solve this problem? I expect not. People suffering from SLS need case workers, and training, and mental health workers, and something. But they probably don’t need doctors performing this task. It’s a hard problem to solve.
There’s an expression “they need Jesus” that I think fits, but not in a religious sense. People need help, but it’s a wicked problem because they really need a social support network. I’m not sure what the secular version of church is, but I think people need it to break out of a downward spiral by not having friends and family to help make good decisions and support when needed.
[+] [-] padolsey|2 years ago|reply
I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself to a fish-and-chip shop, feeling like a silly city boy in a greasy gritty concrete town. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember walking, late evening, lonely, on a bridge over the railtrack. The entire place felt deserted, metallic and concrete.
I went back to my room and ate the oily chips on my bed. After the first day with an old crusty – but perfectly lovely driving instructor – and a rather large heavy-haulage driver who was renewing a license, we went out for some drinks. Beers. Lots of beer. And they took me to a gay club – of which there are oddly many in Blackpool – because they thought it'd be a laugh. It was actually a massive spectacle for me. It was the first time I saw older men kissing, right there, by the entrance on a old tawdry sofa. I was still on a journey of coming out, so it felt oddly enlightening or validating or something. It was an old-england gay club – the type you hear about in the era of stonewall.
The entire town was like a time capsule to a poorer apocalyptic britain. Betting shops, cheap nail salons, boarded up derelict buildings everywhere! Even the beach was deserted. It reflected the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK. It felt like a shadow of its former self, but somehow, there was a old english magic to it that I can still feel. My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me, but I remember it fondly.
So yeh I think I understand this SLS thing. In places like Blackpool – forgotten remnants - you can feel the depression in the paving stones – the grey withering vitality – swallowing you whole.
[+] [-] placesalt|2 years ago|reply
> the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK
I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous.
Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London?
It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make good places to buy property. Surely, on the whole, they have more natural beauty than inland areas.
[+] [-] hkt|2 years ago|reply
Coastal towns really are monuments to another time. The houses are beautiful, too - a two bedroom flat in one of the old guesthouses on the sea front with bay windows is a steal in most towns, if you can cope with the town itself.
Scarborough is another one. It was clearly so much more full of life than it is now, but its status as an elder resort is part of its charm. The poverty, so much not.
[+] [-] louthy|2 years ago|reply
I suggested to my friend that we go there for his stag do; and even for the debauchery of a stag do it felt a bit too grim! To the point that I felt guilty for suggesting it.
[+] [-] m-i-l|2 years ago|reply
My parents used to take me for our "exotic foreign holiday" in Blackpool each year (I was from Scotland).
I actually have many happy memories from the time. There was the Doctor Who Exhibition we went to once - nothing even remotely like that anywhere near my home town. Then there was the Blackpool Tower. My parents used to complain about how expensive it was to get in, and I think we only went there once, but on that one trip me and my dad went to see a laser light show set to music (so futuristic!) and also went to a stall that used a video camera hooked up to one of those new fangled computer things that could print out an ASCII art picture of your face (such mind bogglingly advanced technology!) Also the arcades. Again they cost money so it was rare we'd go in, but there was once I was given money to try a grabbing claw machine, and won a pack of sweets. My parents thought I was good at them, and so gave me money to try and win something for my sister, which was a huge boost to my confidence (finally something I was better than my sister at!) Unfortunately I didn't manage to win anything for my sister. It was only decades later that I found out that those machines aren't skill based - there's a dial inside where the operator can control the "payout rate", i.e. the percentage of times the claw goes limp vs stays rigid. (Another childhood illusion shattered.)
Anyway, maybe that was before it got too grim, or maybe I didn't notice because I was so young, or maybe I just thought that was what England was like:-)
One awful thing I remember though was just how filthy the beaches were. The coast was lined with sewerage outlets, so where-ever you swam there would be all sorts of things floating by. Once I picked up what I thought was a funny shaped balloon and started filling it with water and playing with it. I went to show my mum how I could make the balloon bigger by squeezing it, but she just looked horrified and bashed it out of my hand. I had no idea why, but didn't ask, and just kept quiet. I did however wonder what it could have been that was so bad, but the best my innocent young mind could think of was that perhaps it was some form of artificial breast for breast feeding, given it was skin coloured and had a teat at the end. It wasn't until many years later that I realised what it almost certainly was.
[+] [-] xwowsersx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|2 years ago|reply
That they forgot to close down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0LeL9BUPtA
[+] [-] acdanger|2 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarfolk
[+] [-] GordonS|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Uptrenda|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KnobbleMcKnees|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/u2vu5x/i_thi...
[+] [-] stevoski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzamo_norton|2 years ago|reply
Nicotine is odourless.
[+] [-] fjni|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ransackdev|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] throaway_12345|2 years ago|reply
Poverty is extremely harsh on people. And when I was much younger (<15), like many adults now think, I used to think that poverty is the lack of power of buying expensive things. But as I have grown up, I realized that poverty is extremely harsh.
For example, relevant to the submission, is healthcare. Healthcare in India is theoretically free in government hospitals. But in most places the state of these hospitals is horrific, and getting treatment is very hard due to corruption.
But the bigger issue is opportunity cost. People who live based on daily earnings, cannot afford to go to hospitals abandoning their work as they cannot ensure next day's food. So, unless it happens to be someone young, people don't seek treatment at all. And visiting a proper doctor and buying meds take away ~10 days' income. Really unaffordable for poor people.
So, even people in their forties and fifties decide to wait it out, and easily curable ailments get chronic and beyond cure. Women fare worse than men.
Real victims are old people, and nobody bothers to spend money and weeks of their time to get them to treatment. They wither, and die without treatment. I have seen at least a dozen people die like this.
I think, the cause of SLS is opportunity cost. People often die, and more often suffer for decades from easily curable diseases because they cannot really afford either the time or money to get treatment.
I also know at least a dozen people who have something chronic, but get no treatment at all because they cannot afford it.
[+] [-] ricardo81|2 years ago|reply
A previous Prime Minister had been quoted 'A pound spent in Croydon is far more of value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde', Croydon being in London and Strathclyde being an administrative area in West Scotland that ceased to exist in 1975. The quote was from 2012.
WFH has allowed me to continue working from rural Scotland, to be honest I thought COVID would radically transform society's thinking and our requirement to be in high GDP areas for certain lines of work. Doesn't seem to have had quite the impact it was supposed to.
[+] [-] DrBazza|2 years ago|reply
Just look at HS2 - everything north and north east of Birmingham has effectively been cancelled, leaving yet another "national" infrastructure project serving only London.
This Government, or the previous one, or the previous one, ad nauseam, continually fail to invest in the north, and north east. In fact the last major national infrastructure in those regions would be the building of the motorways. (edit) And just look at the North East, Sedgefield had Labour PM Tony Blair, Hartlepool had MP and cabinet member Peter Mandelson, and yet the investment there during that 15 year period was negligible. It's a London-based Government thing, not a political thing.
If you're not "close" to London, you're going to be poor by comparison.
Bringing Newcastle closer to Leeds by faster road and rail, and hence York, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and the Potteries, would hugely increase economic productivity in the North of England.
I too hope that WFH will redistribute the wealth around the UK.
I hate the fact that we have an idiotic adversarial political system. Which ever party is in power is invariably hamstrung by the opposition voting the other way just 'because', is pathetically childish. The best time to build infrastructure was yesterday.
[+] [-] louthy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZephyrBlu|2 years ago|reply
1) Why did you think that?
2) Why do you assume that people are only in "high GDP areas" for work?
Personally I moved from rural New Zealand to London and I work 100% remotely.
[+] [-] yosito|2 years ago|reply
Thanks to my career in tech I broke out of that and moved away, but I've definitely had my seasons back at home where I get sucked into the Shit Life Syndrome around me.
I had some post-Covid health issues and spent a month back in my hometown to recover. But after a month I couldn't stand to be around so many struggling people while I was struggling myself.
So I went back to my cosmopolitan life and surrounded myself with people who are doing well.
I still have my health issues, but surrounding myself with people who are doing well has been much more tolerable for me than sitting stuck in Shit Life Syndrome in my hometown.
I don't know what the solution is for places that have SLS, but for individual people, the best advice I can give is, to the best of your ability, surround yourself with people who are doing well.
[+] [-] tetris11|2 years ago|reply
One day maybe.
[+] [-] Karellen|2 years ago|reply
I hope there comes a day when using the money hoarded by the rich and influential to invest in the public, does not depend on the rich and influential choosing to do so out of a desire for maximal profits, or even benevolence.
One day maybe.
[+] [-] lookboil|2 years ago|reply
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36
I won't hold my breath, but it's a nice thought.
[+] [-] skrebbel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevmo|2 years ago|reply
"Power concedes nothing without a demand." - Frederick Douglas https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-fred...
"the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land." - Moses Finley
[+] [-] alaxsxaq|2 years ago|reply
Unfortunately with a political system wholly owned by the wealthy (US), I fear that there may be more truth than I want in my father's admonition that things will never get better in this country until we have another revolution. I've been around a bit and so much of today seems to be a rinse and repeat of the issues I experienced when I was young - not the world I wanted to see for my daughter. Hopefully the next generation has a stronger backbone - mine and the couple after seem to have surrendered our dreams to greed and consumerism.
[+] [-] roenxi|2 years ago|reply
Although arguably rich and influential are investing in the public; the UK government spending makes up about half the GDP and the wealthy are paying what I gather is a 40% income tax.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] deadletters|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulddraper|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _dain_|2 years ago|reply
https://www.ft.com/blackpool
There's an interesting dog-that-didn't-bark: the word "meth" does not appear. The drug is still not common in the UK[1]. Blackpool has precisely the demographic makeup where, if it were in America, it would be flooded with meth dealers and addicts, and become magnitudes worse than it already is.
I dread the day that drug finally makes landfall here. It will sweep through our urban underclass like the Black Death.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdd8/uk-british-dont-use-m...
[+] [-] Earw0rm|2 years ago|reply
I'm not a believer in gateway drugs generally, but the prescription opioid hell that exists in the US never really took off here. A problem yes, but not a society-wrecking scale. Mostly because doctors are much less free-and-easy with prescribing the stuff, and can't easily be bribed by drugco's to do so as they were in the US.
[+] [-] Obscurity4340|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toastercat|2 years ago|reply
I used to date someone from a small city in Northeast United States, and when I visited and met her friends and extended social network, this was the impression I got. The ambitious and privileged ones aspired to leave and never look back, while others remained to make the best of their city while taking care of aging loved ones. Half of the people I met had some awful family story (alcoholic and/or abusive parents, drug-addicted siblings, father in prison, etc.) Job prospects were dire. Monuments to that were abandoned and sometimes burned down factories that lined some of the streets in parts of the city. It's all very sad.
[+] [-] wooptoo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LorenPechtel|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helveticar|2 years ago|reply
Post Thatcher, the safety nets have been allowed to fall into disrepair if not discarded entirely. Modern Britain is not a place to grow up poor in.
[+] [-] dazc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HL33tibCe7|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the-dude|2 years ago|reply
edit: looked it up, it is 2002 actually.
[+] [-] Obscurity4340|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|2 years ago|reply
https://abc11.com/sarah-oconnor-connor-terminator-killer-rob...
[+] [-] xnxjsjagzuxk|2 years ago|reply
A while ago I was dealing with a lot of shit in my life and I wasn't coping well, so I engaged the mental healthcare system. I tried telehealth therapy and was told 'your needs are beyond what telehealth can handle, good luck'. The number of times I've been told 'good luck' by a mental healthcare provider as they're dismissing me makes me feel sick.
Psychiatrists were no better, they only want to talk about medication. There's no time for discussion of anything else.
Group therapy was a joke, no matter how much I failed at being a responsible adult I was told that I'm doing my best. Well, if doing my best means not being able to hold a job or support myself, then it's not good enough. In the animal world, individuals that are too depressed to support (feed) themselves die. Things aren't much different for a person living in the USA.
I engaged the mental healthcare system because I started failing at life and wanted help succeeding again, but instead of making me a person able to succeed I was told to reframe my failures as successes. Maybe that works if you have wealthy family to fall back on, but for the rest of us being able to earn a living doing productive work is vital to wellbeing. Telling a poor person that it's ok not to work because of their mental condition just traps them in a shitty life forever and they will never be able to be happy regardless of how many prozac they take.
The fix is as simple as looking at Maslow's pyramid. Make it so no one is worried about having a warm bed or enough to eat. Give opportunities for meaningful work that earns money and contributes positively to the world. Make it easy to become part of a social hierarchy and positively interact with other people. But all that isn't feasible, so let's give people pills to fix 'shit life syndrome' while leaving them with a shit life and no hope of improving it.
[+] [-] lordnacho|2 years ago|reply
Seems like it's not paywalled.
FWIW Blackpool looks like a heck of a lot of seaside places in the UK. Whatever problems are described in this article are problems all the way around the coast.
Visit a seaside town here and it often feels like you're back in the early 90s. There's a certain style that hasn't been updated. Arcades, chip shops, betting shops. Ok the betting shops look modern.
A lot of high streets in nice towns are even starting to look like they're made entirely of charity shops and betting shops, and starbucks/costa.
[+] [-] tycho-newman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] karaterobot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|2 years ago|reply
Would more time by doctors solve this problem? I expect not. People suffering from SLS need case workers, and training, and mental health workers, and something. But they probably don’t need doctors performing this task. It’s a hard problem to solve.
There’s an expression “they need Jesus” that I think fits, but not in a religious sense. People need help, but it’s a wicked problem because they really need a social support network. I’m not sure what the secular version of church is, but I think people need it to break out of a downward spiral by not having friends and family to help make good decisions and support when needed.