What's the reality? In London and outside?
I suspect the "formal economy" is hurting in a number of places, just not the energy sector.
0: https://www.bigissue.com/news/social-justice/we-asked-expert...
Sounds just like the roaring twenties.
Food here is, empirically, still unbelievably cheap. I can buy a 500g bag of spaghetti for 28p, lentil and beans are cheap, bread is relatively cheap, chicken is so cheap that you wonder how safe it is...still...but the problem is that in the UK, if anything doesn't benefit you immediately then people will complain.
RM...they had a monopoly, their workers are almost always threatening industrial action, like they aren't "hanging by a thread"...they have a licence to print money, workers just won't turn up to work because they feel aggrieved.
NHS...funding is through the roof, the biggest individual component of the budget with a deficit of 5% and tax % of GDP at all-time highs...workers on strike, "they get paid more in Australia" (true of almost every job in the UK because Australia also has significantly higher CoL).
Crime? Again, we have an underclass of people who commit all the crime, repeat offenders often walk free over and over, shoplifting isn't investigated, robberies aren't investigated...and people wonder why it is attractive to commit crime?
Poverty hasn't increased, unemployment has dropped like a stone over the past ten years, all this time we have people like you: the economy is in FREE FALL, poverty is going to rise soon...it hasn't happened, the issue we have is that people are constantly feeling aggrieved. This seems to be a disease of the West too, you see the same thing in the US where there are real economic issues but there is very little discussion of them...all it is just single-dimensional, "things have never been so bad" grievance-building.
But no, nothing has really changed. Life carries on unsurprisingly. The UK has issues, food prices aren't one (in fact, food prices are far too low still), problems that do exist remain unaddressed, problems that don't exist absorb all of the attention.
* Energy prices are higher, and this has had a knock-on effect, but I see it more on childcare (e.g. nursery) than food.
* There have been shortages of some foods - specifically there were shortages of tomatoes and peppers for a week or two a month or two ago, but not recently... and there are shortages of eggs, which I understand from my cousins, who are egg farmers, is primarily due to bird flu (most eggs in the UK are from British hens).
* Regarding NHS, we've not needed to use hospitals recently, but access to GPs has been same as usual.
* I've not seen an increase in crime.
* I hear that poverty is rising, but don't have direct experience.
* The Royal Mail is almost certainly dying, but I think it's been on its way out for years.
Like I say, this is just personal experience - I appreciate that I'm quite lucky at having an OK-paying job, so could well be insulated from problems that others face.
Anecdotally at least:
- Brexit is a pretty notable economic negative, purely in the sense that it's added a lot of drag to EU trade and made it harder for workers to access the UK market. Nobody likes loads of red tape. It's hard to separate this from the many other influences from COVID through to Ukraine.
- There has been a pretty clear spike in the cost of living, which has a direct impact on things like poverty. Notably the housing market was very disrupted by the policies of the previous prime minister; again, it's hard to separate this from anything else but anecdotally a very large number of people noticed that they suddenly had to find hundreds of pounds of extra money every month due to housing end energy costs.
- The NHS is not in a great state, no. Several years of underinvestment and the pandemic came home to roost, and combined with the pandemic and rather a lot burnout it is not sounding great from anyone who works there.
- The economy isn't in "free fall" but does have several things dragging at it – including supply-chain difficulties, inflation, worker shortages, and other challenges. It's hard out there.
- Most noticeable and in-your-face thing for someone like me—in the fortunate position of being on the breadline—is an obvious deterioration in services and availability. Lots of strikes in various industries, quality of everything suffering, difficulties getting basic goods sometimes. It can feel pretty oppressive, though of course nothing compared to how some people must be struggling to get by at all.
32, tech worker, just bought a house in a village in the south... Yes my vegetables are a bit more expensive week to week, maybe i need to go to another store to buy one or two specific things but generally life is fine.
Still getting pay rises, still getting bonuses. Generally life is more comfortable for me than its ever been.
Someone set fire to a bin last week, does that count as an increase in crime?
If the logistics work, delivering letters only if there's a first class letter to be delivered, if there's a standard letter that's been waiting more than 2-3 days, or if Royal Mail feel like it (e.g. delivering to this road for someone else's first class letter) might save a lot of money.
Food bank use is clearly rising.
Royal Mail international shipping was down for at least a week due to ransomware: https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/23/royal-mail-restores-global... ; they are in general badly managed, but few delivery companies are ever loved.
Crime is not necessarily exploding, but confidence in the police is rather low. A Metropolitan police officer was jailed for 71 counts of sexual assault earlier this year, having done quite a lot to raise the crime rate all by himself.
We are not yet back to early 80s tent cities.
So things are getting noticeably worse but I wouldn't use words like collapse just yet.
Has only gotten worse, it seems.
I can't walk down the street any more without saying hi to people, the chippy guy who goes on Sunday runs, the coffee shop owner who lets me know when they're trying a new roaster, the elderly women walking their dogs at lunchtime. It's almost like my old hometown.