HACKER Q&A
📣 Victerius

Is the United Kingdom undergoing collapse?


The headlines on the /r/unitedkingdom subreddit are really bad.

"Anger as train firm boss awarded £1m share bonus amid strikes and railway chaos"

"'No 10 have completely checked out. It’s really bad': Inside Boris Johnson’s zombie Government"

"Cost of living: More pets being abandoned, dogs home says"

"Over-50s turn to house-shares to beat rising rents"

"Price cap seen to breach £6,000 for first time in grim new forecast"

"‘We are being abandoned’: when the energy bill goes up by £100,000 a day"

"Libraries and museums to be ‘warm havens’ for people struggling with energy bills"

"Price of a pint of of beer in London surging towards £14 [in 2025] as inflation rises, according to analysis"

"Fuel poverty: better-off urged to donate £400 energy grant to those who need it | Fuel poverty"

"London’s broken housing will destroy the economy – and the Conservative Party"


  👤 daneyh Accepted Answer ✓
I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The pound buys a pence's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; yutes are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell: "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"


👤 berenza
I guess you want something more than online news and commentary to assess the economic state of [country], so as an attempt at a useful answer i'll provide this.

go here https://tradingeconomics.com/calendar and click "dates".

then click last week or last month, scroll through the various economic indicators and see the ones with the british flag, and go from there. if you're new to econometrics you will probably need to dig in a little but it is worthwhile if you are interested in the state of the economy.

if you are seriously wondering if the UK is collapsing, you are probably spending too much time in comment sections and crowd-curated news sites and should do less of that


👤 richliss
It's not undergoing collapse but it is going to be no longer comparable to the likes of France and to a lesser degree, Germany from now on.

The UK is now comparable to Italy and Spain - regional historic class-based wealth group at the top screws over massive part of the economy to maintain/grow it's much smaller percentage.

After a lost decade already, the Conservative Party are on the verge of annihilation - I know people who work for investment banks and earn serious money and they will not vote Conservative until there's a completely new generation of middle-class Conservative MP's in charge. They see the bucaneer spirit of the old Conservatives as dead in the water replaced by corruption that wouldn't be out of place in places they used to sneer at (Argentina and Brazil being the most commonly cited examples).

£14 a pint will be the straw that breaks the camel's back - lots of old boozers won't be able stay open as people drink at home.


👤 slater
imho it's just an extreme version of "right-wing government fucks it up for the common folk while enriching the upper class, left-wing government has to come in and fix it all again, badly, because they'll be opposed at every step of the way by the right wing in opposition"

Brexit was a horrific mistake, one that will take decades to fix (up to and including the UK re-joining). In the meantime, the folks at the top stop just short of telling the poors to eat cake.


👤 arkitaip
Sounds pretty typical for any country specific subreddit.