We live in a developed first world nation
I agree with all you say (except you are not old, and you haven't even seen the middle let alone the end of your personal road yet, okay) but I pulled this bit out because this is the used needle between the bus seats of UK Life Now for me.
The problem is, I think that this is essentially no longer true, and I think we are living through the fairly horrible period whereby the generation roughly equivalent to the millenials are going to be the ones watching that realignment happen.
This is generally the point where fellow kiwis get very angry at me and yell something about demoralisation, or similar. I do not engage in whatever that is supposed to mean. Perhaps I just don't express my thoughts very well. What I mean is, often there is much talk among us of Something Needs To Be Done and Something Will Be Done. And... I don't think Something Is Going To Be Done.
There is a phrase that comes up a lot in writing about the last century of the UK's history, and it's "managed decline". The loss of the Empire. The loss of the biggest Navy. ("You English think you are so great because you have BOATS" is the best bit of Napoleon.) The loss of the eminent world position that saw Britain sit at Yalta. The loss of our skilled manufacturing industries, the loss of our unskilled manufacturing and mining. The transition to a post-industrial services economy as per the Thatcher reforms. (You can argue about whether or not she was right that "there is no alternative". But the economic reforms that got us where we are are substantially the work of her administrations, regardless of how you feel about them.). The loss of an ethnically homogenous society in significant areas of the UK. The gradual... enshittification of many of the 'institutions' of UK life.
It's a managed decline because it's happened slowly. But to sum up what I mean, I believe it is still happening. I think there was an assumption around the early 2000s that it was done, that the UK had realigned its place in the world and we were now where we were going to settle. I do not think that any more. I think, to borrow a phrase from in rooms, we have not yet hit our personal rock bottom. I think things are going to get worse, economically and I am sure socially, but I don't think they were get worse, Something Happens, and then they get better. I think it is more like boiling a frog. I think things are going to get shittier, nothing will happen, and eventually the UK will find its new level.
And I don't believe that level is going to be Banger Fire Top 10 Nation In The World Booyakasha. I said this about the Slovenia thing in the news last week, I think at this point the UK public are still surprised to hear living standards for your average punter in Slovenia are better than here. I don't think in 10, 15 years any cunt will be surprised by that. I think we are continuing to drift down as other countries start to move ahead.
In my lifetime, Germany was reunified, the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union ceased to exist, and the EU was born as the new power bloc of our continent whilst China became a superpower. Now, regardless of how anyone may personally feel about those developments, they have rewritten the world in which we live in fundamental ways.
I think we are, right now, in the UK, living through a shift just as big. It's just a shift that is from 'things are not great' to 'things are pretty crap tbh'. I think our children will enter their adulthood in country fundamentally different in nature, in economic forecast, in international power, from the one we (certainly I, who graduated in the comparatively halcyon days of Blair) entered into adulthood in. I think their prospects will look drastically different from ours. I think probably even different - and yeah I mean worse - than the ones the kids now are trying to get to grips with.
I don't think Something Will Be Done about this. I see and hear much talk, honest talk, about the Need To Act in some way and I see and hear a lot of very cogent analysis of what the problems are.
What I do not see, honestly, genuinely, not speaking as the voice of doom but my honest reflection, is any sign anywhere that Something Will Be Done. I see a frog, boiling. I see a sort of surrender to fate on the part of the majority of the populace. Was the Brexit vote an act of mass defiance, yes, pretty much. What did it accomplish, well, I don't think anyone who voted to Leave did so expecting and wanting the issue of legal and illegal migration to massively worsen, to look even more insoluble, and the economic headwinds the UK faces to get even stronger. The "real Brexit has never been tried" argument is not relevant here, regardless of how interesting it is. The public perception is that the Brexit vote was their demand for Something To Be Done and what has followed it is Everything Got Worse.
And yet. And yet. Do you see, hand on heart, no copium about Farage, but honest bet-your-life-on it, any signs, anywhere, in the public mood, in civil society, that anything is going to happen. I expect at least one person to say "the public will vote for Reform and they will engage in sweeping civil and economic reform and everything will greatly improve". Respectfully, they already voted for Brexit, they already had a swing at voting for Reform, and the sum total of what has been delivered is, well, fuck all. As Austen wrote "Nothing is to be expected from that direction". Do I see any rival populist (I struggle for a more accurate term so let's use that one) movement or party coming to rival them. No, I do not, quite honestly.
I think things are changing around us, very quickly, and they are changing in a way that if not permanent (nothing is) is definitely going to set the social and economic tone of this country for the next 40 or even 50 years. I think we are disoriented by the speed and apparent uncontrolled nature of that change. What really worries me though is that our way of life where you got a degree and a nice enough job in an office that could buy you half a house with a partner, is going to look as fucking quaint to our kids and grandkids as my old uncles' tales of their time working in the shipyards sued to sound to me as a kid.
That's what worries me. The very real feeling that our grandparents and parents lived through the change of deindustrialisation, and we are currently living through the change of... wherever the fuck it is the UK is going now. A second world country. Faded grandeur. Austria in the 1950s and 60s, but fucking worse.
Do you get where I'm coming from
