good question

most people want to jump and scream “brexit!” and yes, brexit isn’t helpful, but it’s a symptom of bigger problems.

the most recent problem is that, the UK embarked on the “government austerity program” since 2010. this means that, the government slashed spending on most government provided services, ostensibly to pay off the UK national debt. in practice, this meant sharply reducing spending on social security, cancelling school building projects and restorations, sharply reducing police and prison spending, reducing funding to local governments, and increasing national sales tax (VAT).

end result? take a look at this graph, showing the number of hunger charity/food bank users increase over time. note that it was basically nobody at the start of the austerity program, and now it’s several cities worth of people.

it’s almost as if, when you cut government services that people rely on… that… people start suffering?

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if you pull on the thread of history, there are reasons why austerity was done, and there were reasons that those reasons were done, and so on. i’m happy to talk about it at length but i’m also trying to catch and prevent myself from “longposting”.

the short answer is that, successive UK governments over 50 years have sold everything in the proverbial house to pawnbrokers and vultures, to prop up an unsustainable drug addiction (winning general elections). the result is now there is nothing left to sell, they maxed out all the credit cards, and now the debt collectors are coming.

there’s a nice line from this article that sums up my opinion on the issue:

…in today’s UK economy, whose underlying stagnation has been masked only by the release of excess liquidity on an oceanic scale, some deficit spending may be good – necessary, even.

“release of excess liquidity” is an understatement here. we sold everything to the highest bidder, and now we’re fucked.

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here’s some hot topic examples of some things that are fucked, for further reading:

the police are now in “murders only” mode, only 4% of crime is actually being prosecuted because they just don’t have the resources to investigate anything anymore. even if you do the investigation yourself, and give the evidence over, they just shrug.

most sewage is now dumped directly into rivers and oceans, because we sold off the water utilities and now they have no real oversight. remember, the police are in murders-only mode? who’s going to prosecute them? nobody, lol

a lot of schools and other buildings are at threat of literal collapse, because we cheaped out on the material to build them. each successive government wanted to win an election, so none of them thought to mention it to us.

the queue for healthcare is so long, that 120,000 people in the queue for surgeries and treatment are… just dying, because they don’t get seen in time. (granted, some of these are oldies who were going to die anyway, but the figure has doubled in 5 years.)

lastly, here’s some further watching on how tax works over here, it’s pretty messed up