> complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government
I disagree with this sentiment, however it does show how bad "democracy" can be when voting for a complete government change results in absolutely no change whatsoever.
None of this is porn of course, but supposedly a lot of the lone wolf's are radicalised online so it creates a lot of "someone needs to do something!!!!" type attitudes (and no public gun ownership would not work like everyone says it would because the USA had that yet no one lifted a finger when they needed to recently, and now look what's happened), and sadly the older and more little-c conservative population carriers more clout in terms of policies because historically they tend to vote in greater numbers than younger groups. N.b. that 16 and 17 year olds have very recently been given the right to vote so things may change.
On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
That was 20 years ago. Not really recently.
What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
This is the issue.
The UK was also one of the first nations to ban indoor smoking and in cars with kids. I think this is very much in that vein (politically).
This is totally untrue. As long as it's selfish, unpatriotic people leaving, I couldn't care less what their skin color or sexual orientation is.
- this kind of authoritarian nonsense is just what Home Secretaries do. David Blunkett brought in RIP (then, to his very slight credit, changed his mind). Jack 'boot' Straw was famous for his I-AM-THE-LAWing. I don't think the Tories are any better.
- No, criticizing the NHS is not against the religion there. The newspapers are forever getting in digs about long waits, unpopular (but perfectly rational) decision from NICE about what drugs to pay for, and junior doctors and their apparent insistence on being paid properly.
- And with that in mind, having lived in three countries (four if you accept that the NHS in England and Scotland are different) I personally think the NHS is fucking fantastic. Someone close to me was diagnosed with a serious illness and immediately swept up in a production line of modern, effective treatment. Sure, it was somewhat impersonal, the biscuits are rubbish, and they were a widget on the production line, but they're also still alive ten years later, and we still have a house and savings.
- kudos to your sister. The UK is an ethnically diverse place, one of the least racist and divided that I've seen, but - like everywhere else - imperfect. The NHS always seemed to me to be a reflection of what things could be elsewhere with doctors, nurses and cleaners hired from all over the world. [which reminds me that while the right-wing press hates the NHS for being free, the left wing press occasionally hates the NHS for bringing in medical staff from poorer parts of the world. They just can't win]
Instead of questioning how MPs are entitled to a pay rise while your average person gets made redundant, people are questioning why people fleeing persecution should ‘be paid for with my tax money’.
Brain fatigue and mixed signals combined with destitution and desperation drastically impede the average person’s ability and desire to fact check and extrapolate. We are moving towards a society of down and out people living with no hope serving the elite and those with a bit of money behind them.
My fiancée and I have had enough and are also leaving in October. No idea where to all we know is we have a one way ticket away and will figure the rest out.
It's making me cynical, and I don't know what to do about it.
This is exactly what I'm saying. The NHS are seen as perfect by some. All criticism is digs that are wrong.
I'm pro-NHS. But this perspective that it's infallible is beyond all reality.
Visiting the Heineken website in the U.S. requires that you assert you are over the age of 21. Texas has instituted I.D. verification for pornography.
Regardless of how you feel about this law, it is not accurate to say the U.K. is unique in implementing it.
I've never met anyone who thinks that the NHS is perfect - least of all anyone who has used it or anyone who works there.
This is why I'm pleased that for the ward I visit, biscuits and snacks are provided by a charity, it is the best of both worlds.
Not only I am not bankrupt from medical care, but I also get to enjoy decent snacks and a good coffee machine.
Historically there is no formal constitution in the UK so Parliament is not limited in their power. IHMO it's the main factor why the UK is an outlier.
Many years ago now my sister turned down the chance to go to an international conference held in the Netherlands, when I asked why, she said it was because the NHS was the best in the world and had nothing to learn from other healthcare systems. I'm still stunned, and she still doesn't know anything about other healthcare systems.
Selfish? I'll take that. I'm choosing to put the future of my children ahead of those who couldn't care less about them in any respect.
Just, no.
5-eyes is the most heinous human-rights-destroying apparatus under the sun, and it wouldn't be happening if it weren't for the British desire to undermine cultures they have deemed inferior.
No need to imagine it. Read the Wikileaks. Names are named. The class division is real, and it is fomented by those who seek to profit from the subterfuge - and they DO profit, at massive scale.
Except many of them are not, they are economic migrants. And some have even realised that claiming that they're persecuted for lgbt reasons is an instant in - there was a case with a guy (with a wife and a bunch of children) that claimed to have written a pro lgbt article and now he's persecuted.
As a gay man the thought of that sickens me, economic migrants using who I am as a shortcut to entry, I have no problem at all with genuinely lgbt individuals seeking refugee status; we're still persecuted in so many places and there's not enough of us to make change happen in those places.
But the economic migrants...all they're doing is ensuring their home country never improves and that a steady stream of migrants continues into Europe. It'll never end.
That is what many people, especially those that do live in the UK don't appreciate.
From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
The U.K. is a flawed place going to hell in a hand basket that many U.K. citizens have strong opinions on but outside of us, the freedom loving nerds on the internet, this identity verification law is not a part of the conversation. “Draconian” and “authoritarian” aren’t in the vocabulary of most U.K. citizens. They’re far more concerned about immigration and the economy.
The long-standing “the U.K. has the most cctv cameras per person” meme is further evidence of this. A well-loved fact carted out by freedom-loving anti-surveillance types… that the mainstream of the U.K. could not care less about.
If you read any history about any daring military action during WW2, a lot of it was done by men thinking up of stuff in dark rooms while smoking cigars. Why is this so unbelievable now?
BTW, The UK ran the world's largest empire and until recently this was in living memory.
> What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
Hanlon's razor IMO is nonsense. It is honestly believe it was invented so people could explain away their malice.
Anyone who is relatively intelligent will work at out some point, that if they don't want to do something they can passively aggressively work against the authority while working withing the rules. My father (who builds luxury yachts and is near retirement) was telling me how he maliciously complies with various companies rules to make his superior's life more difficult, this is a way to get back at them for their poor planning.
Even if you accept that Hanlon's razor is mostly true. It cannot be applied when you are dealing with political actors. Political actors, the media and anything related are literally trying to manipulate you. In fact it is a good rule that whatever they tell you that it is, assume the opposite and that is typically true.
I am English. I was born in England, my parents are English, my Grandparents were English, My Great Grandparents were English etc. etc.
I have lived my majority of my life here. So I am English.
You obviously didn't read what I said. I understand that it is nothing special in isolation. However I am not talking about it in isolation. I was talking about the entirety of how the current laws are constructed as well as how the UK state operates.
Also just because other countries have rubbish laws, doesn't mean we should have adopted similar ones.
> From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
Many people do not like this and are actively seeking work-arounds. These aren't uber nerds like myself BTW.
> The U.K. is a flawed place going to hell in a hand basket that many U.K. citizens have strong opinions on but outside of us, the freedom loving nerds on the internet, this identity verification law is not a part of the conversation.
So you admit there is a problem. But you then pretend that this can't possibly be part of the entire picture because you say so.
Sorry it very much well is part of the problem. You stating it isn't doesn't make it so.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-prevalence-cctv-cameras-...
Oh wait, Paris, NYC, SF, Tokyo have more cameras per sq. Km. Narrative.
People are talking about these things ironically on places like twitter/X, facebook, whatsapp, discord and in person (shock horror I know). I was at a boys football match this weekend and people were talking about it there.
BTW quite hilariously twitter/X are censoring some footage from the commons as that content has to be age-gated.
I know it might shock you but people on twitter and discord are not representative of voters. Most voters do not engage with any social media.
People on the internet get so caught up in the international perspective we are exposed to that we forget what national voters actually care about.
Go look at polling about this law for a real insight, 80% of people support it: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
Often, when people criticize the NHS they have an ulterior motive, like privatisation. Consider all the political difficulties the NHS has had in the past few years. As such, negative remarks can be read or misread as dogwhistles for other views, so they're something that have to be phrased carefully and within context.
I was unclear: did you publish a book, or did your sister?
In general, for something both as key and as endangered as the NHS is, criticism isn't always useful -- support is. Problems can be recognised and addressed through support.
If social media wasn't important, politicians, mainstream news publications themselves, and other political activists wouldn't bother with it. So this is patently False.
Pretending this hasn't been a trend now for 15 years is completely asinine and shame on you for attempting to pretend the opposite is true.
> I know it might shock you but people on twitter and discord are not representative of voters. Most voters do not engage with any social media.
False. Almost everyone I know is on social media of some sort. They might not be actively engaging but they do engage regularly in some form or another. Most of them would be called lurkers, or they will check out stuff if some piques their interests.
You conveniently missed out where I said "facebook" and "in person"
> People on the internet get so caught up in the international perspective we are exposed to that we forget what national voters actually care about.
I don't care about the international perspective. I am English (I've already told you this). I care about this issue and I know plenty of other people who are British care about this issue.
> Go look at polling about this law for a real insight, 80% of people support it: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
The same YouGov polling that had almost every about Brexit issue at 71% vs 29%. Their polling isn't to be trusted.
Even if I took that at face value, that means 1/5 people don't support it. Which isn't an insignificant amount of people. So there are a decent number of people that care about it, even using your own figures. This disproves your statements about it not being cared about and only uber nerds caring about it.
You can take a principled stance, you can have strong views, you can believe in freedom, I’m with you, but it’s patently absurd to suggest that any of what you believe is representative of the people. The people, in the U.K. and beyond, simply do not have a single solitary regard for any of this. Porn bad so porn ban good. That’s the entire thought process.
Could more than 5% of the U.K. voting public even define “draconian”? or “authoritarian”?
False. Most of the people I engage with in real life are not nerds. You keep on stating things that you know nothing about as truisms. How about instead of trying to gaslight people about what is real and what isn't, you actually engage in the points being made by your interlocutor?
> Go out and talk to real people. Go and stand in the street and ask every passer by whether they feel the U.K. is “draconian” or not.
I would imagine if someone thought about it, I would get a statement something about all the cameras everywhere or how buying some with a bank transfer is difficult (if you buy something cash like a vehicle it sets off anti-fraud detection in your bank and transactions can be blocked).
They won't talk about it in terms you are familiar with. They will point to stuff like cameras, unfair charges etc and how difficult some of this makes their lives.
All of this normal people have experienced.
> You’ll be shocked to discover that almost nobody cares about anything that doesn’t directly impact their day to day life. Look at the rise of Reform, Farage’s embrace of trumpism. That’s authoritarianism, and the people love it. You’re completely out of touch with the common person if you think any of this matters.
You mentioned all of those. I didn't mention them. You are projecting onto me what your experience is. The irony here is astounding.
How so? If I have a car lot, I'll have multiple cameras for a tiny area bumping the average camera per person without meaningful results. Sounds like the worst measurement unless you are trying to push a narrative.
I'm not anti-NHS, I've no agenda to see it privatised, I just want it to be better. I tried many, many private routes first. I tried NHS England, NHS Digital, the Innovation Service, AHSNs (many sections having since been renamed/reorganised). About 20 different contact points over two or three years, most of which seemed inappropriate but I made sure if anyone told me it was someone else's responsibility I checked with them.
The problems had already been recognised through public inquiries and yet were still ongoing.
I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive. But as far as I could see, offering support was getting me nowhere.
I just had people acknowledging the issue and then shrugging their shoulders, pointing fingers at everyone else. So I wrote a book on it, spoke about the issue publicly and within months it was decided to spend tens of millions on sorting it.
You listed extremely dense cities. Of course they have more cameras per square.
This isn’t a narrative violation, it’s basic math.
Skilled immigration or the Channel crossing?
Errr, what? A lot of people complain about the NHS, whilst conceding there are issues that are difficult to address eg staff, lack of investment etc.
Very very very few people think the NHS is infallible. What are you even talking about? We all understand the NHS has many many problems, and those of us that have used the NHS understand this even more.
However, we still think it's a lot better than the private healthcare model.
Not sure what you're getting out of this weird strawman argument you're putting forward.
Please give a few examples. I'm intrigued.
Basically Labour continues taking UK into corporate fascist utopia.
That I could have multiple negative NHS experiences relating to missed cancer diagnoses of friends in that relatively short span of time is suggestive of a real problem. The institution seemed to have less of an issue with elder care (in the US, the phantom menace posed by Obamacare or any governmental involvement in healthcare was meant to be "death panels" deciding the fate of grandparents) than with avoiding at all costs detecting potential long-term problems in the young. It's a 'rational' fear in the sense, as you note, that such cases put tremendous pressure on services, but there's no world where the best health outcome is refusing to screen your working age population.
You are allowed to say there is censorship but not allowed to say what is forbidden (and you are not allowed to criticize some laws, without breaking the law). You can really go to jail or have your life ruined, or your business burned because of a TikTok video.
This censorship benefits a lot of bad people, but naming them is a crime by itself.
For example, in France, there is no insecurity in the streets. If you say the opposite and start naming examples, you will get shamed or even physically attacked by some people and be prosecuted for “spreading hate” and other crimes whereas your attackers will have zero issues.
This phenomenon is known as “juges rouges” (the red judges), somewhat similar to USSR
I don't know anyone that doesn't complain about the state of the NHS. The only time I've heard anyone defending it would be when compared to countries without national healthcare (e.g. America).
This kind of political insecurity is toxic for rational conversation. Blindly rejecting the criticisms of our political opponents is just as naive as blindly accepting their criticisms. Either way we handover control of the conversation.
That's really not my experience. In fact, almost everyone is surprised when I suggest that despite its many problems, the NHS does better for the people than most modern countries' health systems.
Yet private healthcare is a strawman, I've never argued for it.
This significantly underplays the situation here. The UK state views "anti-migrant" views as extreme: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/26/elite-police...
In the UK attending a protest against putting illegal immigrants from Afghanistan in a hotel by your kids school is likely to have you on a watch list or arrested. This might not sound that bad to our European friends, but you guys in the US might be quite surprised to hear this.
It's not just "right-wing" positions which are dealt like this either, I should note for legal reasons that I strongly disagree with the actions and views of "Palestine Action", but arrests of peaceful protestors who simply wish to voice support of them as a group (without actually being part of the group themselves) is in my mind absurd. It's one thing to make membership of the group illegal, but to also make debating that judgement illegal is highly problematic in my mind. For those interested you'll find videos of the police arresting elderly women for terror charges for simply peacefully voicing their opinions on Palestine Action. It's vile.
UK bad because online safety rules, let's ignore US states that already do this.
> Don't mind what we are doing, the UK is worse.
Not defending the UK, but they aren't the first and you dont get the same inflammatory racist language with other countries.
It’s not uniquely U.S. at all
What other countries require ID checks for services like Discord?
The U.K.’s implementation of this law is much more unique than you’re claiming.
This isn’t true at all. Age verification to use services like Discord in the U.K. is very unusual.
The U.K.’s approach to online speech and freedoms is not shared by many countries.
I don’t understand why you’re trying to reduce this to a normal outcome when it’s not normal at all
We have a history of trying banning bad stuff. Magna Carta in the 1200s against the right of kings, slavery abolition in the 1800s, now porn being pushed to kids.
I don't think child grooming or hate is particularly bad here but we tend to try to stop that kind of thing. We also had the first modern police force in 1829 and other innovations which have caught on in some other countries.
Some of the US alt right media pushes broken Britain stories because we have some muslim immigrants or something. The majority of the public support the bill https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-poll-finds-7-in-10-ad... I wonder if it's more the US is afraid of the their government that if they say they are promoting online saftey they are really going 1984 on the populace? Here people tend to assume they are in fact promoting what it says on the tin.
[1]. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg87yvq529o
Edited for typo.
Seems like the pendulum has swung back now, doesn't it? Increasing authority/rights of the government instead of a king.
No one I know who has lived in France or Germany or any developed country other than the US thinks the NHS is better than the systems in those countries.
Average UKian is, IME, surprisingly technologically unsavvy. This might be the root cause of lack of interest or protest.
If I were to guess how this whole thing came to be, it would be thus: the UK government is increasingly dysfunctional and polarised. The attention of government and opposition goes increasingly into futile, high-stakes but always drawn battles. But that means that motivated and organised groups can push through things that look benign from the outside and don't trigger the Great Polarisation. Protecting children from suicide, what's not to like? The Parliament, where this should be shredded to pieces, is too busy trying to reshuffle deckchairs.
Meanwhile this is printed on vellum, welcome to the new reality.
I think it's wonderful that you offered to do that but it simply isn't realistic. Who is going to support this software in the long term? How are you handling privacy concerns? What guarantees can you offer about server security? Who is paying for and maintaining the servers in the long term? What happens (to be blunt) if you die the day after the software is delivered?
There's so, so much wrong with the way governments provision software projects from outside parties. But there is good reason to have contracts the length of the Bible. Picking up work from individuals on a whim is courting disaster.
What private healthcare mode? WHat they have in the US? Then definitely yes. What they have on France or Germany or Japan or almost every other developed country.? Then No. What they have in Singapore? Still No.
There have been several high profile cases used as examples, like the guy who was convicted for making a video of his girlfriend’s dog pretending to do a Nazi salute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan
Doing anything considered “grossly offensive” online can result in the police knocking on your door and financial penalties. It’s a foreign concept if you’re in a country where making jokes online doesn’t constitute a risk to your freedoms and finances (which is more than just the U.S.)
Other countries are moving in the same direction. The EU has repeatedly tried to push things like on device scanning or banning encryption.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government.
Mostly a failure of democracy - we have two major parties that are hard to tell apart.
They are both cynical and scared, and have for decades believed the future of Britain is managed decline. They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
There are policies that are wildly popular. Free public healthcare is one of such policies in many countries, and perhaps for a good reason.
In real terms the budget is the largest it's ever been, it's a relic of the time when people worked and died shortly (a decade) after retiring, not when they live for 30+ years longer.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/33362401287959...
Is it though? Are other forms of government more successful while remaining respectful of privacy? Or is it more of a reaction to social or societal changes? Why would these social or societal changes be different than previous changes?
Granted I'm in tech so that's steady employment with benefits, but there you go.
> just mentioning increased immigration
One of these seems like the solution to the other.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income
Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.
I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.
Just my 2¢.
Being a free society comes with both good and bad. This type of law, whether it's good or bad, is akin to China's Great Firewall
Requiring ID verification in one country is not a small difference.
The rest of the world checks a box. People in the U.K. must submit to ID verification.
It’s so strange to see things like this claimed to be small differences.
You may not like it and I may not like it but the view of the U.K. voting public is that age verification to look at porn is reasonable and that “protecting” children justifies limiting freedoms.
My exercise for you: decide what evidence is needed to convince you that most British people are happy with this law.
That’s not correct. The Discord support explains that it’s required to change automatic content filtering or unblur any content that gets caught by the automatic filters.
Saying that illegal migrants should be sent back home can literally land you at the police station. A hotel worker was arrested for testifying to what he saw in his hotels, ie. migrants being hosted, given a phone, meals, and NHS visit once every two weeks.
As of 2022, the WHO reported on SSB (sugar-sweetened beverages):
> Currently, at least 85 countries implement some type of SBB taxation.
It feels to me like this was a rare step in the opposite direction - recognising that industry is the driving cynical force and pushing back on its over reach where it has failed. Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately to avoid the tax, with what net loss? (The class-targeting comments were a straw man)
https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2022-who-calls-on-countr...
The current global status quo is “radical” and the U.K. is the only country doing it right?
You were accusing others of being U.S. centric a few posts back, but now you’re pushing the U.K.’s unique laws as the only valid solution.
> We’ve been doing it for decades with credit cards
Age checks for credit cards are required because minors legally couldn’t be forced to pay their debts.
If companies issued credit cards to minors then the minors could spend as much as they want and the bank would have no recourse to collect.
I don’t think you understand these issues if you’re using this as a comparison. Either that or you’re not even trying to have an honest conversation.
A lot of that money has gone on stealth privatisation through inefficient outsourcing of contract staff and PFI of infrastructure.
So the actual standard of care is far lower than the funding suggests. And it has been deliberately run down so a US-style system can be implemented.
So yes, the organisation should be improved, but in the exact opposite direction to the one you're suggesting.
The UK's real problem is that it's run by an out-of-touch inbred aristocracy with vast inherited wealth, working through a political system which prioritises stealth corruption over public service.
They don't see why they should contribute anything to the welfare of the peasants. The obligation is all one way - from the peasants to the gentry.
And there's a layer of middle class professionals who have convinced themselves they're the gentry, even though they can't afford to pay their school fees, never mind maintain a huge estate.
So - private ownership good, public spending bad. More sensible countries don't have this attitude problem, and are proud their public services actually benefit the public.
>I, for one, am glad that porn is being age-restricted online. It gives young people false ideas. You'll never get a plumber to come around to your house that quickly in real life.
You said it "wasn't part of the conversation" originally. Not what the majority agreed with. You've subtly tried to change what the discussion was about. That is known as moving the goalposts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts
Then you asked me to provide evidence of something I can't possibly provide. That quite frankly bullshit.
> You may not like it and I may not like it but the view of the U.K. voting public is that age verification to look at porn is reasonable and that “protecting” children justifies limiting freedoms.
I don't doubt that the majority are OK with it. I am taking issue with the fact that you are pretending only libertarian nerds online care about this. I know that isn't true.
> My exercise for you: decide what evidence is needed to convince you that most British people are happy with this law.
Don't talk to me like a child.
I don't have you provide you with anything. You made the claim that only a few people care about this. When even your own evidence disputes. 20% of a large group of people is still a lot. That isn't "nobody cares" like you pretend is the case.
Anyway I am done with you. Go away!
It's more the protect kids from sites 'that carry pornography as well as other “harmful” material that relates to self-harm, eating disorders or suicide.'
I guess other counties are like screw the kids, I'm terrified of being IDd in case my government does bad things?
So public/NHS vs private/US system is a false dichotomy, and "free at the point of use" is a red herring.
Looking at the reactions, this whole threads does exemplifies what the OP said about the NHS being a "religion".
I don’t think my view on the law matters, I haven’t shared it. I am speaking specifically about how everyone here is talking as if people in the U.K. care about “draconian” surveillance. People in the U.K. are not people from the U.S. Age verification is not a philosophical issue for U.K. people as it is for people in the U.S. People from the U.K. are not principled free speech absolutists. Ask a person in the U.K. if porn should require age verification and they will not think nor care about the free speech or surveillance implications of voting for such a law.
And people in the U.K. are not unique. People in the U.S. are. Spend any amount of time outside of our U.S. Internet bubble and you’ll discover nobody cares about any of this.
Whether I care and whether you care is not relevant to the British voters. Not the Australian voters. Nor the Swedish voters. Or the Thai voters. Or the Japanese voters…
Costa Rica has an affordable all inclusive public health care system (Caja). But you can also pay for extra for private healthcare. Is it the same in the UK?
However the way this works out in practice is a reduction in consumer choice, one that I'm reminded of every time I walk into a shop.
> Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately
This is the problem, really. Rather than adding new "low sugar" product lines, in most instances they're modifying existing ones to replace the sugar with artificial sweeteners. The "original recipe" is often no longer available to consumers at any price.
As someone who struggles to consume enough calories to stay healthy, this sucks! (Mostly unrelated to pricing, just as a matter of practicality)
Cigarette smokers for example can still walk into just about any shop and purchase their favourite cigarettes, they just have to pay more for them - this seems fine.
Overall I'm quite on the fence about the whole thing, but on a purely emotional level it feels like an instance of government overreach.
A non insulting way to view that is that central goverments understand incentives, and in the same way there are child incentives for people starting families, having incentives for healthier eating is something a central goverment should use its taxation policy for.
More control over education standards is also a common purview of many good educational systems. Decentralisation is not necesirely better, with teh extreme being homeschooling failing every time its attempted. Centrally dictated standards was the method of the French revolution, believing that a society where everyone roughly understands the world the same way was a society that was more unified. French "equality , fraternity and legality " is a basis for modern liberal democracy almost everywhere, but they didnt get there without authoritarian imposition of their standards, with entire minority cultures getting trampled along the way.
The hyperbole and bad faith explanations of legislation is not a good representation or argument against why britain is more accepting of som legislation many feel intrusive.
A better argument is that this piece of legislation was passed late on the rule of a disastrous administration and the number of problems in day to day society largely are unaffected by it, so it got no time in the spotlight for people to complaint or know it was coming until it was days away from being implemented. Society is also largely technologically illiterate, this is pretty much the case everywhere in the planet, which means the nuances of tech legislation are lost even on the people writting and voting on it.
In canada we’re in a phase where this is just starting. Private clinics (e.g. telus health) have started to pull doctors out of the public system and put them behind subscription paywalls. We’re still paying the majority of their salary, but they can only be accessed if you pay their private overlords a monthly fee.
It makes me sick. It brings to mind that old quote from Mussolini: “The truth is evident to all who are unblinded by dogmatism, that men nowadays are tired of liberty.”
Scary times indeed.
(I don’t want to talk to you like a child, but a little lesson: mainstream news is mostly a cynical cash grab by harnessing outrage. Mainstream news loves things that outrage people. If there was any real outrage about this law, it would be harnessed by the dailymail and the Sun and Reach PLC to make money hand over fist. They would milk it so hard they would have to implement age verification.)
Take this law: it's not new, it was passed in 2023 by the previous government. The law had a two year deadline attached to it, and companies didn't introduce any restriction before the deadline. The new government has a lot on its plate, so it's hardly surprising that repealing a law that was already passed with little attention to it was not high on the list of priorities compared to things like not defaulting or unblocking planning permissions. And yet, twitter and other places are full of very loud voices describing the law as new and designed to oppress them now, even though the deadline was set two years ago.
On a more general note, we have our problems, but the UK is in a pretty good place. Sam Freedman covered some bases in his recent post [1] (crime is down, the economy is struggling but improving, etc), but I'll add some more:
* We're probably the least racist, most integrated society in the world. The leader of the opposition is a black woman and first generation immigrant [2]. When Rishi Sunak became a PM, his race wasn't brought up once in any media, including very right wing; compare and contrast with all the bullshit about Obama and his birth certificate dog whistles.
* First time in years we're reducing the backlog of asylum applications. People applying for asylum can't work because they haven't proved their status yet, so naturally they need to be looked after. All the noise you hear is caused entirely by the conservative party defunding and then outright pausing application processing. This means that people looking for asylum had to live in limbo for years, which caused multiple problems. No backlog, no problems.
* We punch WAY above our weight in arts and theatre, and the industry is flourishing. Ever noticed how overrepresented British actors are in Hollywood?
* Compared to our main ally overseas, we have a very effective parliament. The executive is kept in check even with the very large majority Labour has now, and the Lords proved their worth during Brexit, putting brakes at the worst impulses of the previous government.
* We largely preserved our core military capabilities and alliances over the decade of austerity, slowly repairing, recovering, and expanding now. We're a major partner on nuclear programs, tier-1 partner on F-35, AUCUS is happening, we do a lot in Ukraine, and we're one of the only two nuclear countries in Europe and just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with France.
* We are helping people in Hong-Kong, Ukraine, and Afghanistan with targeted immigration programs.
* We're rolling back anti-nuclear nonsense, building two large NPPs, and deployed wind generation at a massive scale.
* A bunch of important reforms are going through the parliament [3], from enhancing renters right to a YIMBY reform.
But very little of that filters into online environments. The most unhinged, xenophobic, paranoid voices get amplified, creating the impression that you cited, even though it can't be further from truth.
Britain is a beautiful country, open to the world, with a globe-spanning network of alliances and relationships, and an incredibly resilient democracy. We should do SO MUCH MORE, yes! But it doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate where we are now, too.
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/samfr.bsky.social/post/3luwmp2vpd62...
[2]: she was technically born in Britain, but she and her mother returned to Nigeria very soon after her birth
There are persistent and valid claims that the NHS is inefficient in its use of technology. It wastes lots of money, wastes clinicians' time, and sometimes fails to get accurate information to the people who need it in time to be used.
But there is a best being the enemy of the good problem here. The amount of regulation involved in supplying any kind of tech product or IT service to these public sector organisations is becoming prohibitive. Parts of the industry that have been providing these products and services into the NHS are being crippled in productivity or even literally shutting down whole supply chains because it's too onerous to comply with all the red tape. It's not just individuals but the small businesses that employ or engage them and then the medium-sized business that use the small ones.
If you're working with big consultancies with their own legal and compliance teams then sure you can write hundreds of pages of contracts and require compliance with several external standards about managing personal data and IT security and whatever else. But that regulation flows downhill to the smaller suppliers who don't have resources already available to deal with those issues and at some point it becomes overwhelming and everyone has had enough and decides to become a gardener. Now your only options for supply are big consultancies engaging big suppliers who charge big prices and provide big company levels of service and responsiveness (in the most pejorative sense of these terms).
Surely this isn't the best strategy for a system that desperately needs to be more efficient and sometimes more innovative. There is a broad spectrum between "adopt a one-off product with no support from a single well-meaning individual" and "everything requires so much red tape that only the places charging those £x000-per-day consulting rates we're always mocking are actually allowed to provide it".
Obviously there is not going to be a “nah I really want to see this tho” button, or the age check would be completely pointless.
One guy had a brain infection and was told to wait four months for an appointment. Another went in for a root canal, left without a tooth, and fainted outside the clinic. Someone else was refused an X-ray after an accident.
Meanwhile, in my tiny country, we have a dual public-private health system, and the facilities, doctors, and dentists are top notch. It really makes you wonder what's gone wrong in the UK, considering how much taxes British people pay.
Which it needs to be given the demographic changes you note. It's about 15% smaller per capita than comparable countries spend. That would suggest that we need to increase the budget if we want comparable service.
I would actually argue you've expressed dozens of opinions related to this law and very few facts. Any source on whether Swedish or Japanese voters care for example? What led you to this conclusion?
Furthermore in your last comment you first argue you are only speaking to UK sentiment ('I am speaking specifically about how everyone here is talking as if people in the U.K. care about “draconian” surveillance.') and then double down on your argument that US is the outlier.
Why do you think shops ask for proof of age when you buy cigarettes? Not because they care about cancer or want to sell less, it's because they're required to by law. Of course, teenagers can still find workarounds. They can ask an older friend to buy it for them, just like they can use a VPN to access porn.
The difference is, regulation shifts accountability. It moves the responsibility from a greedy, insensitive business owner to the kids. And at least with the kids we can guide them, and help them spend their time and money where it actually matters.
Note: I know people who love guns or porn are probably going to downvote this, but someone has to say it.
There are also plenty of rules that exist for dogmatic reasons and impose absolute requirements that don't always make much sense in context instead of stating principles that should be appropriately applied.
I understand that those administering these rules don't want to leave loopholes where people or cost-conscious suppliers will cut corners for convenience and/or to save money. There is obviously a danger of that happening if you don't write everything down in black and white.
But you have to remember that the starting point here is receptionists at medical facilities asking people to email over sensitive health information or casually discuss it on the phone when they don't even know who they're talking to and what information is appropriate to share with them. Doctors are trying to read vital patient information from scrawled handwriting on actual paper in potentially time-sensitive life-and-death situations. Expensive scanning equipment in hospitals relies on software that runs on 20-year-old versions of Windows from a supplier that shut down long ago.
In this context you probably win a lot just by having clear policies and guidelines that really are short and simple enough for rank and file staff working in a wide variety of different jobs to understand. A reasonable set of basic technical measures would be far better than much of what is in widespread use today. Trying to make everything perfect so we have fully computerised health records and integrated diagnostic and treatment systems and everything is 100% secure and privacy-protected and supported is a laudable goal that would obviously be much better for patient outcomes and also for the daily lives of everyone working in healthcare. And in 50 or 100 years maybe we'll be able to do it. But not today and not tomorrow.
To bring it to a comparable level to similarly wealthy countries would take an increase in funding of 20%-30%.
If the per capita spending is exceeding per capita taxation, increased immigration does not solve the problem. More people requires more spending.
> The UK has always been an empire in decline
I find this fatalistic attitude to be very unhelpful in determining good policy decisions. If you start with the assumption that the empire is in decline then it doesn’t seem as bad to add policies that contribute to decline, as long as you get some short-term win out of it.
Unfortunately due to the Boris Wave, we got mass, unskilled legal migration.
The channel crossings are a rounding error compared to that (but should be stopped as well).
Unfortunately the main problem is chronic underinvestment by successive governments of all political inclinations. We tend not to fix our roof in the summer because we hope the other guys will be in government by winter when everyone inside is getting wet and they'll get blamed for the consequences of our decision. We've also made some poor choices historically around selling off national assets and questions of privatisation or public ownership.
This isn't unique to the NHS and ironically among the current Labour government the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is one of the few people suggesting significant changes that actually do make sense for the long term future of our country. Unfortunately a lot of them will probably require more than 5 years to implement and that puts the results over the horizon beyond the next general election. So the price for trying to "do the right thing" might be that he won't get re-elected to see it through. This enables the cycle of short-termism and lack of consistent investment to continue even though its horrible results are increasingly clear for all to see.
I'm not entirely sure if the UK has a public-private health system. What I do know is that companies offer private health insurance, even though everyone has access to the NHS. That suggests there's a private system in place, one that probably attracts the most experienced and competent doctors and GPs?
These ca. 200 trusts operate with a great degree of operational independence, though they are public entties.
The distinction is important because they are what makes the scale manageable, and it also provides resilience.
A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.
This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.
I've lived in both the UK and the US and there are issues with healthcare in both. Maybe the model your country uses could scale up to populations the size of the UK and the US, maybe it wouldn't. Difficult to know.
Though it also leads to inconsistency and the "postcode lottery" problem where the quality of treatment a patient receives for a specific condition can be extremely variable depending on where they live.
There are times I opt for private services for speed, because I can afford to, but I could also afford private health insurance (which is cheap in the UK), and haven't felt the need to.
That said, dental is a weak spot of the NHS, with too few dentists offering NHS services, and there's a perceived quality difference in that the NHS treatments have fee caps that mean they will often not include the best aesthetic options. For dental I do tend to go private (but dental for adults is also excluded in quite a few other "universal" healthcare systems - like Norway; don't know about Spain)
Ironically, that's not a problem in China, they have a one-party authoritarian state and can plan 10, 20 years ahead without worrying about elections or political instability.
E.g. my old GP used to provide both private and NHS services (they were precluded by their NHS contracts from providing private services to people registered with them with the NHS).
Many NHS trusts also provide private services, as they are allowed to do so to improve utilisation and supplement their budgets, so in practice this is part of the reason the NHS is so cheap compared to universal systems in similarly rich countries.
Most private hospitals in the UK also e.g. rely on NHS for intensive care, and this, along with relying on the NHS for first-line care (A&E, GP's unless there's a wait, etc.) is also why private health insurance in the UK is unusually cheap, and why private hospitals in the UK are unusually cheap (if you're in the US, and planning elective treatments, it can be cheaper to fly to London and do it here, even factoring in hotels - and some Central London hospitals have hotel suites, and at least one have or had a previously Michelin starred chef because they cater - literally - to high-end international healthcare tourism).
It is a prime example of class targetting because manufacturers of more expensive drinks still put sugar in them, its the cheap drinks that have switched to sugar substitutes.
The peak of the empire was around WW1, where the victory was immediately followed by Irish home rule, and Churchill(!) putting the UK military into austerity to save money, which is how it came to be that evacuating from Dunkirk involved a lot of civilian ships, amongst other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule
WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory. Not that Westminster collectively realised the nation's weakness until the Suez Crisis and the Wind of Change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(speech)
I'm not sure the people of the UK have yet fully internalised this decline, given the things said and written during the Brexit process. Perhaps social media really did make it all worse, but it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson may or may not have taken an arrow to the eyeball.
> There are times I opt for private services for speed
I'm guessing the NHS, being public, comes with long waiting lists. So it's more about speed than quality of service? I'd assume most doctors with 20–30 years of experience are working in the private sector, right?
And, it's very much a "public-private" health system. E.g. all GP's and most dentists are private businesses, paid for by the NHS to varying degree, but also with many providing private services.
The NHS uses an extensive network of private providers, including (when sufficient funding is provided) to drive down waiting lists. I've personally had a procedure carried out at a private hospital at the NHS's expense.
The NHS has many problems, but at the root of a whole lot of them is that the NHS needs a funding increase of 20%-30% to get to similar levels of funding per capita as similarly wealthy countries.
The UK spends about as much per capita on the NHS, providing universal care, as the US does on just Medicare and Medicaid.
The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues
But social media is different. For most forms of media, TV, movies, books, radio etc. You had some degree of agency and choice over what you consumed. You couldn't set what a channel or station was playing, but you could change the channel.
You don't choose what you see on social media. You see what an algorithm thinks is most likely to keep you hooked / going.
Our brains only know what's real based on what's in front of it. You can acknowledge something is rage bait, but as you process it, you will still feel some degree of anger / discomfort. You can acknowledge that something is a cherry picked example, designed to tug the sensibilities of users, but it will still tug on your sensitivities.
And so sure enough, as you keep getting rage baited, concern trolled into algorithmic oblivion, it changes your gestalt. Your worldview shifts to one where those are data points, and it starts distorting your perception of reality.
Garbage In. Garbage Out.
Other people have said that it's like electricity consumption. No. This is very much like tobacco. I don't use social media. Even though I get paid to post to it.
Technology is advancing much faster than humans can biologically evolve and very few people seem ready to seriously tinker with the human genome to keep pace.
Perhaps "the feeds" are just the inflection point where the information overload becomes obvious and baseline humans actually need a majority baseline human experience with all of the associated problems in order to prosper?
We have daily reporting about database breaches where people were duped into uploading their picture/ID, and then it gets posted on 4chan. This is true for the latest "Tea" app this past week, but also ID verification services for big companies like TikTok and Uber. I draw a hard line: I will not upload my ID for some private business to review, because they will never delete it.
You're commenting on a story about VPN use surging in the country after the law came into effect. Clearly folks noticed.
However, sugar sweatened energy drinks are much more available.
So I share your frustration in the opposite direction.
The said. Taxation is not for the individual but the society.
Whilr I am sorry to hear that you have issue getting enough calories, that is simply a non concern for the society.
So this seems to be a good use of tax for incentivizing.
New Years Eve, my son was referred to an out-of-hours GP service within an hour of a phone consultation.
But while the shortest wait I've had for a video consultation for myself (via the NHS) was literally 10 minutes, the longest was two weeks.
If you have an emergency, you will be triaged and given a faster appointment if you use the right channels (111 - the non-emergency alterantive to 999/911, or urgent care walkin centres, or A&E as the last resort), but of course many things that are not an emergency will seem intolerable to wait for, and then it absolutely sucks if you can't afford to pay your way to be seen faster.
This is a political/cost issue - the NHS is bargain basement in terms of amount spent per patient compared to many other countries.
A large proportion of doctors in the private sector also works for the NHS, so quality of clinical experience has never been a concern to me.
E.g. when my ex looked for a doctor when she considered having a c-section done private, the top expert she could find was an NHS consultant that worked privately on the side. This is the widespread, and often the private clinics are operated by NHS trusts, as a means to supplement their budgets, and/or the operating rooms etc. are rented from NHS trusts.
If anything, my only negative experiene with lack of experience here has been with private providers (the only nurse that has ever struggled to draw blood from me in my entire life failed to get any blood from me after 3 agonisingly slow attempts where she rooted around in my arm for a vein. Every NHS nurse that has drawn blood from me or my son have been so fast at drawing blood you hardly notice before they're done even when they're filling multiple containers)
But if you want to be pampered, then private providers will be nicer. They're also nicer if you e.g. want more time - GP's are expected to allocate an average of something like 7 minutes per appointment for the NHS patients, for example, and how flexible they will be varies, while with a private GP you can pay for however long appointments you want.
I only have to look as far as my own wallet to see the effects. I'm being taxed to the eyeballs while there is a glass ceiling preventing me taking any more pay home without a major jump which just isn't coming due to stupid tax rules keeping the working class from bumping into the middle class.
I see mine and my family's living standards drop only to be told by the news that I'm a likely target for more tax hikes, and there's just no room to tax me more while my bills have also gone up significantly, and something will have to give. If it gets to the point where I can't pay my bills despite being a "high earner" I'll have to start considering whether I leave with my family, and where to.
I'm not exactly the milky bar kid, but I imagine beyond my friends and family, I imagine the consensus would be very much the same, yet there goes two "successful" professionals and the children we were raising probably to be high earning professionals too.
I don't do social media, but I do keep on top of the news from all outlets, I try to look beyond the biases and form an opinion on a combination of sources.
When it comes to pedos in specific, the UK got absolutely shaken by the scandals of the last few years - Jimmy Savile, Epstein being involved right into the Royal Family, just to state the obvious ones.
As for terrorism, the problem dates back a bit deeper, the UK has had the IRA conflict for decades, and to this day the conflict isn't resolved, the only thing that did happen was the IRA got formally disbanded in 2005.
The incident you mentioned is yet another piece of fallout from Rochdale, but if you look closely the offences mentioned are from 20 years ago. I don't think that should be used to talk about the present. There is a lot more safeguarding these days.
The main negative factor is the press, responsible for both "opinion management", doomerism, and sensationalist demands to Do Something in a way that doesn't help. The Online Safety Act and Brexit are both victories for the Daily Mail that are losses for the rest of the public.
> because if you're employed there is additionnal and mandatory healthcare
Yes, if you are employed in the private sector there is now mandatory additional private health insurance to cover what public healthcare does not.
Healthcare isn't free at the point of use in any case. Things may be automatically paid/reimbursed as the case may be. Private sector is much more involved than in the UK, too, starting from GPs who are all private practices.
The point is that it's not because you have to pay at point of use or because things are more private that you end up like in the US. This is an FUD argument against change.
But it's better to have management failings contained to individual trusts, that are monitored, than to have these failing affect the system as a whole. Not least because it does allow patients going elsewhere as a last resorts.
Emotional phrases aside, what is your total NI + income tax deduction percentage, and what percentage do you think you should be paying?
You'll probably find how few places let you in as economic migrants.
And that’s without putting things like dating apps, advertisements and privacy violations in the mix.
The state doesn’t regulate these things to protect people, it does so to manage risk to itself. Porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, etc., are tolerated so long as they are contained, taxable, and politically useful.
Regulating porn is this system likely trying to move the needle on declining birth rates. You can look to a host of pro-natalist efforts in China as the likely inspiration.
And without a doubt, overreach by governments will continue.
So what they get out of it is at least to some extent that it is expected many places as a means to getting job offers from private providers.
20 years ago it was mostly Poles whose only quality was that they were willing to work for less than native UK citizens in jobs that said UK citizens supposedly did not want to do (which is doublespeak for businesses not wanting to pay a decent wage). This kind of immigration was one of the reasons Brexit happened.
Your take about French censorship is equally ridiculous. I would gather that 90% of French press would not survive a month in the US before being pressured/defunded or worse. What happened to Charlie Hebdo would have happened in the US, by "patriots" instead of islamists.
And let's not even start about the separation of church and state...
So these are not some dusty forgotten thing from history books that people might read about, it was stuff they saw on TV and is back in the news whenever a round-number anniversary comes up etc.
The point I was trying to make is that quite shocking bad things happened semi-recently, and more shocking bad things continue to happen. It appears in the news over and over and over about people being radicalised online.
I get why people think this is a good idea - you need to prove age to buy knives and cigarettes etc, so they think "why not" for porn and other "adult" things online.
Didn't there used to be a explainingthejoke user on here? Whatever happened to them?
Without money society is just doomed.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.
In addition, I'd say most of this thread is a bunch of people debating what issues there are with the NHS (I don't see anyone claiming there aren't any) with some people for it, and some against it.
A fair few people believe that it is the duty of the state to care for individuals, and that one right that people have is free access to healthcare.
If someone expresses that viewpoint I don't think it's fair to say that they're being religious or dogmatic about it, just like it wouldn't be fair for people to argue that your view (which I assume is for a more privatised healthcare system) is religious or dogmatic, it's a simple disagreement.
It was more the later additions to the EU a few years later that were actually problematic and got people's backs up.
It didn't help that we were allowed to restrict immigration from those countries but didn't as the government needed mass immigration to disguise the fact there was no growth.
They're well known an documented, but I'm sure you know that already.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?locat... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?end=2...
However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.
I imagine medicaid funding is directly tied to the enrollment count so they are very aggressive about getting people on it. Granted it was trash insurance and most specialists wouldn't take it, but it covered basic care fully.
It is funny you say these are well known and documented, yet provide no links or sources.
That is not how marginal tax rates work. Each income band is taxed at the rate for that band. It’s why it’s called “marginal” - because the rate change happens at the margin between brackets.
You are taxed 0% on your first £12571. You are taxed 20% on your next £37669, or, £7359.80 on £50270 of income. If you then earned one more pound, or £50271, you would owe £0.40 (40%) on that one additional pound only, for a total of £7361.20. There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.
On the part from 0 to 1000, no taxes
1001 to 10000, ten percent
10001 to 20000, twenty percent
20000 to 30000, thirty percent
30001 and more, forty percent
So if you were earning 29000 and get a raise to 31000 those 29000 are still taxed as they used to and the extra 2000 are split among the two bands around 30k.
Edit: Ah, there's a baseline personal deduction (12.5k) that disappears between 100-125k, meaning, for that narrow band, every dollar earned in that range has a higher effective tax rate due to that deduction slowly disappearing. It's still progressive, so you don't suddenly start paying 60% tax on everything.
https://www.brewin.co.uk/insights/earn-over-100k-beware-the-...
Absolutely. It's not the only problem, but it is a serious and deep problem.
Anecdotally, the loaded people I know are all still here and largely back up polling data that the rich tend to favour higher taxes on themselves.
there are several
there's one at around 50k (where child benefit is removed) and another at 100k (where childcare vouchers are removed)
Here’s an explanation of the figures:
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/money/article/high-i...
Tracking would feel helpful and useful, if not for constant oppressive reminders that "Bad Thing could happen any second, be vigilant!".
While at the same time, it was vastly more unsafe than Eastern Europe.. and cities themselves were vastly dirtier.
Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.
To be honest and to give some context - they have been under threat of terrorism(due to The Troubles first - the name itself seems to reinforce this view, seems innocent..) roughly since end of WW2. well WW2 was a factor too.
To add a bit more context: this wasn't my first nor last trip to UK, and each time i visit it the worse it feels in every aspect: Cleanliness of cities, safety, and oppressiveness.
Empires take a very long time to die, but when they finally do, it is never pretty.
Historical example are abundant.
I feel like this is 100% true of the US as well, the only difference is there are multiple factions (the blue EAs, the blue EAccs, the red pro-Trump, the red anti-Trump, the red EAccs, ...) scared and cynical of different things.
Could you elaborate? From over here the Netherlands seems almost a paradise of modern society.
I can't speak for OP but I can report on what I'm seeing... I know a lot of British, Canadian, and Australian expats that have moved to California in the past 5-15 years.
Why? Healthcare is probably everyone's first concern, but expats tend to be well educated successful people who can afford excellent healthcare... I'm an expat from a different country and seeing the top end of the healthcare facilities in the States is a luxury experience compared to national healthcare where I'm from. I wish everyone here had access to that, but at least poor people in California do have access to state healthcare.
Politics is a shit show, and has gotten worse recently of course, but that's true in a lot of places now and everyone I know came in before the most recent decline. I know a couple of families who have gone back to their countries, but all of them went back because they wanted to be close to family again, but none of them left because they didn't like it here.
Across everyone I know, the main appeals for coming to California seem to be weather and lower taxes than their home country. Cost of living is similar to many of the big cities in the countries I mentioned above. I'm not suggesting America is a better place, that's a different calculation for everyone, just reporting on what I'm seeing.
The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.
Bureaucracy kills any kind of infrastructure project (see HS2), so don't expect any improvements any time soon.
We do have some nice cities: Manchester, York, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge. (I've probably missed a few from this list). London feels pretty far from 30 years ago - and not in a good way.
The UK government has announced a new "squad" who will check social media for anti-migrant sentiment. Even if you are not "anti-migration" (whatever that means), I think we can agree that opposing migration is still a valid opinion to hold in a democratic society.
There is also a lack of a respected teaching class. With the changes to universities and schools, there is no longer any respect for those with an education and able to teach.
I am Eastern European, and there is no way in hell I will ever use a service that requires me to verify my age through a photo of my ID.
Speaking personally, the biggest issue isn't the waiting, but the chaos and uncertainty. Every part of the NHS is in a constant state of crisis management. I don't terribly mind that I usually have to wait about two weeks to see my GP (family doctor), but I do object to the fact that I'll invariably be seen by a locum (temporary) doctor who doesn't know how the local systems work and won't be there if I need a follow-up appointment. I could live with waiting lists if they were always 14 weeks, but it's incredibly disruptive to not know if it might be 14 or 40 weeks, to not know if your long-awaited appointment will be cancelled with no notice due to staff shortages or industrial action. I've almost got used to the fact that the corridors of my local hospital are permanently full of "temporary" overflow beds, primarily occupied by frail elderly people, often in considerable distress, sometimes obviously neglected.
I'm fairly high-agency and I feel that the system is hostile and difficult to navigate; I have no doubt that many patients who are less able to advocate for themselves suffer preventable deaths because they fell through the cracks.
Have they though about joining some sort of economic union, maybe one with like minded countries that share the same continent?
> Obviously there is not going to be a “nah I really want to see this tho” button, or the age check would be completely pointless.
That is exactly how "ignoring" an user on Discord works. Their messages are still there and you have to click on it to have it uncollapsed, so that is kind of ironic of you to say, lmao. So yeah, there actually is a "nah I really want to see this tho" button.
Section 127(1) makes it an offence to:
"Send by means of a public electronic communications network a message that is a -
(a) grossly offensive,
(b) indecent, obscene, or menacing, or
(c) false, known to be false, for causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety."
Section 127(2) adds that: "A person is also guilty of an offence if they cause a message or other matter to be sent that is similarly offensive or menancing.
You can be caged on a whim.
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates https://www.gov.uk/tax-free-childcare
For other readers who don't want to go through that:
Say you earn £99,999 and get a pay rise to £100,000 and have two pre-school aged children, you lose £4000 (£2000 per child) per year, so you now earn less.
Now for the next ~£25,140 you earn you'll pay an effective tax rate of 60%, so from £99,999 you first have to hit ~£110,000 to break even, then it's ~60% tax up to £125,140, then beyond that it's 45%.
- George Orwell, 1984
The truth is I don't know the exact numbers but it's not relevant to my point, as I've tried to point out elsewhere.
EDIT: it's interesting that anyone genuinely asking and trying to understand is getting downvoted as opposed to anyone who just disagrees with me.
The facial recognition technology for that already exists. And the UK has a sufficiently dense CCTV coverage.
The EU might be better on digital privacy right now, however the emotional winds of the political mob change often and many people in EU government feel differently. The EU is also an aging population of technologically illiterate and immigrant-afraid retirees. I wouldn’t expect much different coming from them in the future.
As a percentage of GDP, UK healthcare spending is well above the EU and OECD averages. We spend a greater share of our national income on healthcare than Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Finland or Norway.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...
For what it is worth, it has to do with Discord ToS (per / by country).
In some countries you must be over 13 to use Discord, other countries 14, but if you are below, you MUST verify yourself to be able to access your Discord account after you set it to below 13. This verification process is done through sending Discord an e-mail requesting them to restore your account, with a video of yourself holding your ID card as an attachment.
The list per country can be found on Discord's website.
What I am talking about is separate from the server settings (require phone verification and/or age verification).
The one that is also working on a digital age verification system?
The one that created an AI regulation that stopped all innovation, and a data protection innovation who's single result is billions of people having to spend 3 seconds before visiting every website clicking a button that doesn't actually do anything (in 80% of cases)?
Yeah, great.
Also, if you’re paying a decent amount in to your pension your effective salary is lowered and won’t hit that child benefit threshold until your salary exceeds £60k or more, and you still get to keep all of that money.
Most of the OP's assessment that I quoted is about the UKs failing economics
I wish this were the case so badly... it seems to be more the opposite with many companies doing RTO now.
Just weeks ago a couple of pop bands got hauled in front of judges or had police investigations aimed at them for voicing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. (Ok, so they used incediary language, but they’re 20-somethings at festivals and the Gaza situation is abhorrent).
Fairly recently, an activist group which uses tactics reminiscent of the anti-nuclear-proliferation movement and animal rights movements of the 70s-90s got proscribed a terrorist organisation. At present, the law around this and recent implementations of its enforcement are such that I can’t tell if I’ll be arrested for writing this paragraph. I’ve tried to stick to the facts, but interpretation can get you locked up.
The real kicker is the 99,999->100,000 trap where you lose all tax free childcare care allowance, £2000 per year per child, it's assessed quarterly, and if you exceed it by a single penny, not only do you lose it, they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.
Isn't the cost of living crisis and rising wealth inequalities a problem that many western countries face?
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/long-reads...
I struggle with the child tax credits. If I'm childless and move from 99,999 to 100,000 it doesn't change my situation at all. I don't think we can view that in the same light - it's a tax credit benefit, but it's not just a matter of earnings. The goal is to support lower income families, so the line has to be drawn somewhere, and whether it's gradual or not someone is still going to complain about it going away.
No dark rooms, armchairs or cigars are needed. Did you guys even read Wikileaks?
There are so many charitable and earnest ways to make the point you're getting at, why reach for such intellectually low hanging fruit?
Is this the same comment where they said good riddance to the entire country?
We do suffer from many political parties not willing to cause short term pain to improve long term outcomes. There are a few urgent issues going on in politics at the moment. Stuff where a decision needs to be made now and action should be taken. But the political parties do not want to make those decisions because they would inflict short term pain to some voters but would also improve the long term quality of life and economics of the Netherlands.
The worst part is that those issues have been known for a long time, but decisions were postponed over and over again because politicians didn't want to make the decision. Making the issues worse and more urgent over time.
At the same time populism is clearly on the rise in the Netherlands. A famous thing happening in a debate before the previous elections was a populist saying "But this woman cannot wait for the costs to be decreased, she needs it now." about decreasing a specific part of healthcare costs for citizens. Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/17/reform-income-tax-end-th...
If you go from £99,999 to £100,000 and have pre-school aged children, you lose £2000 in tax-free childcare per child. If you have 2 children, that extra penny cost you £4000, 3 children, £6000, you take home less, fact.
Combined with the 60% marginal rate, you now have to get to £110,000 just earn the same you did at £99,999 and then there's the side point that a couple can earn £99,999 each, or £198,999.98 and still benefit from it while any single parent who hits £100,000 loses it completely, so a single parent high earner loses out vs a couple. I'm not a single parent but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.
EDIT: and that person who hit £100,000 has the extra burden of having to file a tax return from now on simply because they hit an arbitrary number, and despite being on PAYE, though perhaps some people love doing tax returns, so not necessarily a negative point.
I really prefer that sort of earnest, thoughtful comment compared to short-form little quips.
This guy was prosecuted in the US for posting a meme on Twitter [0].
I imagine this can happen in almost every country. What ones do you think it can't happen in?
[0] https://www.courthousenews.com/on-trial-for-memes-man-asks-s...
Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.
We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
It’s also not entirely up to the UK, the EU has to be convinced about the seriousness of such a decision and how it would benefit them.
Having it go away is less of a problem than having it go away all at once. If it was phased out over a range of incomes such that every marginal dollar of gross is still a marginal increase in net, that'd solve the problem mentioned in this thread. Key property of a tax system: the function from gross income to net income should always be monotonically increasing.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52410-nine-years-afte...
I don't know where you're getting this information, but it's in stark contrast to all of the statistics I've ever seen on the matter.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51484-how-do-britons-...
Even Nigel Farage has called it a disaster.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-...
Nobody is expected not to use it if they earn below the point it is taken away, it's just an arbitrary tax on parents who earn 100,000, while at the same time a few other paper cuts are piled on.
I know Americans always do tax returns, sounds like a pita for you guys, and I believe until recently you had no choice but to use some sort of service and couldn't DIY it?
Here if you're PAYE (salaries), it's dealt with on your behalf, the tax is deducted before you're paid and you don't have to deal with it, unless you're self employed. It's not necessarily a huge issue, but it's a time cost and that has to have a price, and if you get it wrong, HMRC are notoriously hard and will demand full payment immediately, if you're lucky and they accept your "excuse" (their word), they might let you split it over 3 months.
At this point it's best to make sure you have £10,000+ in savings aside just in case.
I've not had to do a tax return yet, but I've frequently seen tax bills in the tens of thousands from family and friends because their accountant got it wrong, and holds no liability.
I don't think it's as big an issue for me people have taken from my original wording, that's fine, poor choice of words on my part perhaps, but it has certainly been blown out of proportion including some minor jabs at me and (incorrectly) at my political leanings etc. Despite this really all having nothing to do with politics or news and quite clearly as I pointed out at it's direct effect on my family finances.
As the saying goes here in England, "I'm sorry I mentioned it".
Social media is a forum for people to complain about the problems they face, if you don’t like that the solution is not to censor the messenger but to fix the problems.
As someone who grew up in the UK I can tell you that the elitist mindset of the UK is a huge part of their problem: only the elite are capable sophisticated right-think, all others are wrong-thinking simpletons and must be silenced for their own safety. The BBC is a huge part of the problem as it is inevitably pro-government but trades off a strong image of neutrality, to the extent that it regularly misleads the public and they lap it up.
Even without the price difference I have a hard time imagining how such an outcome would be necessary, maybe you can clarify?
Reminds me the latter three dune novels. Frank Herbert had this idea he was exploring about how the inevitable end-state of society is this sort of stalemate between opposing bureaucratic factions which have become optimized towards preventing their own destruction to the point that they aren't capable of doing anything other than prolonging their own existence.
It reminds me of the Republicans and the democrats in America which have become utterly unresponsive towards their own voterbases because they have already rigged the political system to prevent any viable competitors from displacing them but in general it seems like the whole of western civilization has reached this point over the last 50 years or so, because just about any country which is referred to as 'western' has a set of very obvious problems on the horizon with very obvious solutions being stalled by a ruling class which is concerned with maintaining its own existence at all costs even if it has to bring down the entire nation with it.
There have been a number of public scandals regarding immigrant crimes, along with subsequent anti-immigrant riots started via social media and people being sent to jail for internet posts. Social media seems to be more of accelerant for social unrest than than the cause. For me (an outsider) observing the situation, it seems to be mainly caused by immigration.
So this might or might not be in line with official guidance but I was exactly in this situation and I expected to earn around £99k last tax year then I was given an unexpected £4k bonus in my march salary, and I wasn't told about it until it was in my account already so it was too late to put it into pension. I asked HMRC about it and they said as long as I was being truthful at every quarterly questionnaire where they ask if you expect to make over £100k and I told them the situation changed as soon as I became aware of it I don't have to pay anything back for the free childcare hours. I asked my accountant and she said since I have it in writing it should be fine(but HMRC can always change their mind so who the hell knows).
Compare that to the insane situation of the benefit for carers where people are being asked to repay benefits going back years if they went over the threshold by a single pound - I imagine HMRC is being incentivieed to go after benefit takers more than other areas like childcare hours, for various more or less political reasons.
In my high school drivers ed there was a kid who looked like he was in his 20's with a full thick beard, stocky muscular build, deep voice. I thought he got left back a bunch but turns out he was my age - 16. So "obviously not a kid" doesn't really work and potentially puts people at risk.
I left for greener pastures a long time ago and subsequently all of my friends and anyone I knew of any talent has also left, it feels weird visiting a place I once called home and not being able to see friends.
What’s less clear is the claim that pornography is inherently harmful to children’s development or wellbeing, the research is mixed at best. And the justification that age-gating websites and apps is purely about safety remains deeply unconvincing.
So then either this effort is misguided, a hollow gesture for optics, or a small piece of a broader agenda that hasn’t been made explicit. It just seems to me that this is creating a lot of chaos for a hollow gesture.
So politicians LIED?! Color me shocked.
This isn't about protecting people.
People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far?
Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors.
To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.
That's quite different from a private practice (like a solicitor here) that you pay directly and/or that seeks payment from health insurance.
For example, if you pollute 99 ppm, then you're good. If you pollute 100 ppm, you're bad.
Are you sure you replied to the right comment? Where have they claimed that?
I take it you lost your allowance for the rest of the year due to the bonus?
Luckily for me the childcare tax people contacted me about it the first time it could have become an issue because I received a bonus at the start of a tax year, so I adjusted my pension contributions for the rest of the year lowering my take home. By this point though I'd already been taxed that marginal 60% thanks to the bonus being paid to me, like yourself without being notified.
e.g. corporate lobbying clearly exists and operates, and may be nefarious, but is broadly directed towards the corporate entity's gain, rather than dividing and conquering the masses.
> taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
This would end very poorly because what the U.K. sorely needs is investment (to create new productive capacity). For example, Americans invested huge sums in North Sea oil and created an entire industry (before we destroyed it). Conversely, if you force people to keep wealth in the country then you just make things more expensive: they will bid up the price of property and the like. Nothing is added to the UK’s real economy by increasing the number of pounds flowing around in it - it’s only helpful if it’s invested. So what you actually want is tax breaks for foreign investment, but with some kind of ownership cap.
Obviously very different if you're self employed or have income mostly from investments or properties, but the you have an accountant to do it for you.
IMHO, there's nothing authoritarian about either editors or social media. It only becomes authoritarian when they intentionally align with a central political authority.
I don't support censorship. But increasing the accuracy of the information most people are getting is a difficult problem to solve.
Here's some Farage quotes, so you can see that there is no contradiction between the comment you were replying to (him saying it was a disaster is compatible with all this) and him still being a leaver:
“I don’t think that for a moment,” Mr Farage replied when he was asked if the UK would have been better off staying in the EU, the world’s largest single market area. “But what I do think is we haven’t actually benefitted from Brexit economically, what we could have done.”
“I mean, what Brexit’s proved, I’m afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were,” he added. “We’ve mismanaged this totally, and if you look at simple things…such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country.
“Arguably, now we’re back in control, we’re regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members. Brexit has failed.”
But the UK has always to some extent enjoyed a fantasy of being an island under siege from mainland Europe and it something the nationalist press like to drum up.
As for its increasing poverty, the UK went all-in on neoliberalism since the ‘80s, and especially in on austerity since 2008. Entry-level wages barely grew for over 10 years. Blame the EU for that, get Brexit, more expensive goods and damage to the financial sector the country relied on. Then Covid…
News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly
There's been enough in the way of tax breaks and "derisking". A huge part of the problem with our public finances is being on the hook for some very ill-advised "investments".
The money going out exceeds the money going in, because that's what an investment is. An opportunity to make money.
This is a very dangerous measure of how worryingly authoritarian or not a particular place is becoming. People's perceptions are notoriously subject to all kinds of blindness and unknowns. The perceptions of most average Germans living in the first years of the Nazi state were also of minimal concern for authoritarianism, and little more than a series of modest blimps on the radar, and where did that take them?
This is not to compare the underlying savagery of something like the Nazi state with the soft bureaucratic smarminess of the modern UK, but the underlying risks of any creeping authoritarianism are the same: a steady normalization of deviance.
For me, it'll be the UAE. Instinctively, some people will probably attack that choice, which is fine. I've lived in the Middle East previously, it's not perfect to say the least and I have some personal history with that, but I understand the choice I'm making. One thing people won't like is the headline tax rate, but I probably won't come out ahead there initially as cost of living is quite high - it'll cost me about USD 70k just to put three kids in school. Accommodation is also quite expensive, private healthcare also needs paying for, but at least you get what you pay for then.
Where the tax situation is appealing though is that then I'll be incentivised to earn more beyond those high living costs, where I just don't feel I am in the UK. Sun and swimming works for me too. Job adverts there are absolutely rammed with literally thousands of applicants and I'm hearing from recruiters that a lot of people from the UK and wider Europe are trying to head in the same direction. I'll be working for myself though.
I likely won't see out my days there. I'd imagine we'll retire to somewhere on the Med, my wife would prefer NZ but I don't think that works for me. The US is perhaps desirable, but it seems quite hard for a Brit to get into unless they happen to have a job with a company there. We'll have to see.
Conspiracies are a very common part of business law, people just do not accept that it can happen in the political realm.
This. The UK was a band of feudal kingdoms that somehow managed to create an overseas empire. The empire is now gone, and the feudal kingdom is struggling to transform itself into a modern nation.
One nice perk though is that [private, corporate] jobs offer cushy health insurance as part of the deal as standard really so you can go and see one of the many private doctors in their offices at your choice and leisure.
Good questions, but the quickest way I can answer them all is to say that my company had delivered software for national security purposes to central government departments. This really was nothing.
It certainly wasn't my preferred option. The offer was mostly a tool to ensure that cost of development could not be used as a reason to reject.
We could imagine fixing the problem by making the childcare voucher phase out between 80k and 100k, and at 100.2k you'd get exactly the same amount as you get under the current system.
In this hypothetical would you still say taxed to the eyeballs? If so, what would your justification be?
Yeah they were: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/operation-stovewood-seven-me...
You're pointing to another rape case(ironic there's so many of them) but the other one was the OG that exposed the British government being involved in the cover up of migrant crimes to not seem racist, where the British citizens talking about the Muslim rape gangs were the ones being persecuted instead of the gangs themselves.
You can't make this shit up. It was a betrayal of the British people of epic proportions, whose trust in their leader was lost forever, because if they're willing to sweep that under the rug to protect their image, what else have they been covering up. Then the post office workers comes up.
It's not just emergent disconnection, there are many documented cases ([1][2][3] etc) of nation states trying to sow division and fear. The impression that you got is a good example of them succeeding.
[1]: https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/dozens-of-pro-indy-accounts-...
[2]: https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/new-whitepaper-telling-c...
It certainly wasn't even my preferred option, I'd have been much happier if they said they had a team that could run with it.
What the UK desperately needs is actual shareholder capital actually being invested into British companies, so that they can create new wealth. They are welcome to take a share of the wealth they create! Everybody wins!
Implying that the recently -convicted gang who spent several years hosting "rape nights" targeting minors in Glasgow I've linked to was somehow less depraved than people of Pakistani descent doing the same thing in Rochdale years earlier because they weren't members of an ethnic minority does kind of underline my point.
This seems to be me to be a weird framing. It's a tax benefit for parents that's taken away when you hit £100k. When you hit £100k you don't face an arbitrary tax, instead you're now playing by the same rules everyone else is. You're in parity with your child-less coworker. Not disadvantaged, just no longer advantaged.
Those cameras know exactly who you are, and the tracking device your carry around in your pocket serves as a secondary confirmation.
Checking IDs would be a superfluous and costly tertiary method of confirmation.
okay what are you implying tho?
Even China with extreme capital controls and pervasive surveillance can't stop money leaving the country. Unless the UK was willing to go fully authoritarian and ban its citizens from spending money overseas, and ban crypto (and build all the internet firewall/DPI infrastructure that doing so would require), it wouldn't stand a chance. And attempting to do so would destroy the value of the pound, because nobody with any options would want to hold a currency that could only be spent in the UK.
The same thing is true in Sweden. People vote for the party that blames the immigrants and then goes on to rule with the liberal conservative part. They all know that during the time they claim is the downfall of Sweden, we have more than one third of state tax income and had the worst privatisation of schools worldwide, . Yet the problems with schools and healthcare is immigration.
Demagogues are what they are.
Just a note to you or anyone else reading this, USD 70k is on the high side; average yearly schooling cost in Dubai is around 40k for 3 kids. And the accommodation cost depends heavily on location; it's more than 50% cheaper if willing to live at least half an hour's drive from the city centre.
This is the case if you do anything that opposes the governments desired narrative. For example, by saying something “far right”. Multiple years in jail for a tweet.
But I agree, what you’re describing is I think best called anarcho-tyranny: not some (disturbed) utopian inspired police state, but a police state of gritty hypocrisy.
I don't know where this is coming from; statistically speaking, homeschooled children do better on pretty much every educational outcome. Because the absolute number one factor determining student outcomes is the ratio of students to teachers; the fewer students per teacher, the better.
The rape rate has almost quadrupled in the last two decades: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-off...
Detectives will be drawn from forces across the country to take part in a new investigations unit that will flag up early signs of potential civil unrest.
The division, assembled by the Home Office, will aim to “maximise social media intelligence” gathering after police forces were criticised over their response to last year’s riots.
...
“This team will provide a national capability to monitor social media intelligence and advise on its use to inform local operational decision-making.
“This will be a dedicated function at a national level for exploiting internet intelligence to help local forces manage public safety threats and risks.
What I see is every national asset, every successful company, and increasingly land and housing sold to (typically overseas) capital, with the proceeds sucked offshore.
Whether it's new housing in London, ARM, the water, the electricity, most products and most supermarkets: the beneficial owner is outside the country, being largely taxed outside the country, and spending their money outside the country.
We're discussing this in the context of a deeply dysfunctional Britain. If the "wealth creation" route were in any way effective, we'd be in a very different place right now. There's been concensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up. It's clearly not working for most of us. Everyone but a select few in this country is living on the edge.
I personally see a major component of our malaise as the rentierism practiced by largely foreign interests throughout our economy. Alternative explanations are welcome, but it's hard to see how we'd be worse off without the vampire squid up each and every orifice.
An Atheist who burnt a Quran in Yookay and got stabbed by a muslim as a result (proving his point?) got a 325£ fine for "religiously motivated public disorder” whatever that means.
Peter Tatchell got arested by the police for holding a sign with "STOP Israel genocide! STOP Hamas executions! Odai Al-Rubai, aged 22, executed by Hamas! RIP!" because of "breach of peace" whatever that means.
During the recent riots in Yookay, a man was jailed for 20 months for "shooting at a dog", and "using racist slur". While it's sure distasteful, it's no different than Putin's technique of protest repression.
I could go on with Germany, where sharing benign memes about politicians lead you to get swatted and your house searched, the Yookay with its "non crime hate incidents" that require no proof, France and its extensive hate speech laws that prevent asking to boycott another state, Finland where burning the Bible is ok, but not the Quran, and so on.
Holding the door open for fake asylum seekers costing billions while his fellow countrymen are laid off, and pointing the finger at MPs taking a few million between them.
With a progressive tax band, the burden is different, you're aware of it ahead of time and you set your living standards accordingly, you won't see a big sudden drop and can adjust accordingly. You can't suddenly sell your home or find a much higher paying job in the same space of time a small pay increase took you over the cliff.
For my generation, a professional that's having a family has probably focused on their career to get there, having there kids once they break some income threshold at a certain age, let's say it's 80k to fit with your numbers. You bought your home somewhere where those higher salaries are, paid a premium, higher SDLT on a small new build flat, you upsize when you have kids, buy a(n) (old) house, now overpriced due to property price jumps in the last few years, another chunk of SDLT, bills much higher, then you hit 100k as your costs have gone up significantly, that might be manageable, but you've just lost 2k per child to the tax credit trap, then the next 10k breaks even, after that you're taxed at 60% while your salary can't/won't be able to increase enough to offset that additional tax burden and your living standards have materially dropped because you got a pay rise.
I suppose the nuance I'm trying to convey is one of timing compounded by cliffs in the tax system that wouldn't become the sudden problem they are if the tax system wasn't set up the way it is.
One could argue that you could have known this, but I don't believe anyone would be seriously aware of the pitfalls until they have kids or hit a salary where you're going to be hit with a big step in tax burden.
Sure it won't affect everyone the same, but if you happen to meet those specific criteria with that specific timing, it can certainly feel like being "taxed to the eyeballs" even if that isn't the best way to put it. I'm far from the only person in that position, it's just the natural progression for some.
I hope that explains my position a bit better. I wasn't trying to say "I pay too much tax as a percentage of my income", in fact I DON'T think that, but I and others I've spoken to in this situation believe it's a tax-based ceiling on our progression and is a tax-based contribution to the growing wealth devide pushing anyone down that attempts to break into the middle class, which as a whole just makes the rich richer and the poor poorer; no I'm not putting myself in those brackets before someone jumps on me, but pushing the middle down makes the rich richer and the poor poorer (sorry slight tangent at the end there).
Now despite your previous admission, you are here telling me that you did answer it and I just didn't like the answer. The question has revealed more about you and your motives than we could have ever imagined.
Contrary to your statement, the UK is a center of education, innovation, and still a major player in finance. The current malaise infects the West and is much more than “brexit” or “colonial hangovers”.
Over here under communist times it was definitely a police state - there were no ID checks, crime was rampant, but everyone could be observed at any moment and be arrested/dissappeared as needed.
UK evokes identical feeling now as a tourist.
The government has been clear they want you to work harder and earn more, they also want you to have children and raise future tax payers, if you do have children either your career and earnings take a hit or you need to put them in childcare, in that case I think all child care should be tax free, they're only in there so you can work and earn and pay tax. It's typical that your wages should increase with experience but you can't un-have children, perhaps you didn't even know you'd hit that threshold when you had them, or more likey that such a threshold even exists.
If we don't think of it like that, but simply that you're no longer advantaged as you put it, the issue is that it's sudden and affects unevenly, two parents can earn £99,999.99 EACH and still receive it, but a single parent or one person in a couple earns that extra penny they're now £2000/child worse off and still have to put their children in childcare.
Of course there's an option to have or not to have children, but I'd argue that the global consensus in countries with ageing populations, like the UK, is that the government want you to work more, and for longer and have more children, so it should be fair to say that from the government perspective, having children is the expected norm.
On average as a tourist, the Netherlands is straight up just a better version of Germany. However a friend of mine recently moved. She’s from India, moved to Germany and then fell in love with a Durch man she ultimately married. In the process of moving she of course also switched into the Dutch health care system and that I think is legit worse than the German one but I don’t know how much that might be a symptom of a greater issue in the Netherlands.
The difference is essentially that the Dutch health care system tries to be profitable which is nice but then results in procedures not being covered by health insurance that a German doctor would find essential. Specifically preventative care and child birth related stuff where very problematic for her.
But otherwise I think the Netherlands takes a very practical approach to society. Is it annoying for cars to navigate Dutch cities? Yes but also it’s the only country where you can basically always take a bicycle anywhere and be safe. Is 100km/h on the highway annoying? Yes but it’s also the most relaxing drive in heavy traffic I can imagine. I think in a quite literal sense, i think the Dutch are less conservative than we are. The way things were done matters less which results in people seeing the benefits of change much more. Like everything car related. Youd start a riot in germany just doing parking like the Dutch do.
That's not where I would say the line between working class and middle class should be drawn.
Your comment was mostly on point until you decided to put straight presenting white guys as the victims
The grass is always greener I suppose.
Yes, after paying approximately $70,000 per year in premiums, I still have to pay a couple thousand dollars for routine, non-emergency, common healthcare procedures.
Technology wise, I think we have the greatest healthcare system in the world. Finance wise, it feels like the worst parts of Cyberpunk 2077.
I’m no longer eligible to have an opinion UK or local conversations. “how would you know”, “the city’s changed a lot since you left”, “why are people who chose to leave so interested in X”, statements specific to ex-pats.
For those from outside the UK, ex-pat (expatriate) as a singular term is almost always derogatory regardless of context or publisher.
Because if they knew about the welfare policy before they started typing, they would've actually mentioned it then - it's a specific problem, with several obvious solutions (i.e. don't means test at all or taper off more gently) unrelated to the concept of tax brackets (and potentially not related to the actual bracket index values themselves.
There's a strong focus on streamlining and reducing "unnecessary" care (including a lot of preventative care that is accessible in other countries) but without doing that now the whole system will not be affordable in 20 - 30 years.
Is that the optimal approach? I'm not sure, taking a patient wishes into account and doing (some) preventative care does probably have a positive ROI. Having said that I can see both sides of the coin but as a younger person I'm glad they're taken future demands into account.
And you wouldn't be receiving it at all if you didn't have children.
Like I would choose to not means test such a policy were in charge, but it's also got nothing to do with marginal tax rates - it's why liberals like me generally oppose means tested welfare policies (because it costs more to deliver and tends to deliver less).
So sure, that's probably blackmail and subversion (via kompromat on prominent politicians or business people) in favour of that country's interests, but again that's insolated and self-interested (i.e. in the interests of the particlar country in question). But it's not centralised 'divide and conquer the proletariat' in favour of the (ultra-)bourgeois, which was my original point.
I'm not saying that such things don't exist; I'm just arguing they're not as centralised and targeted at creating divides and unrest amongst the people as the original post suggests, as usually that's not a tactic that results in a beneficial outcome for the group involved. Epstein's putative handlers weren't going "nah, forget infiltrating the mil-tech sector in your country; what we're really interested in is a few headlines about immigration in the UK".
The most telling stats is that the percentage of homeschooling parents increases, specially in religious communities but the test takers in homeschooled scenarios almost always come from higher educated urban families.
There is a large case of selectin bias, in a public school every kid takes an SAT test. For homeschooled kids, the kid of two doctors who was homeschooled and aces tests for breakfast he takes teh SAT and smokes any underfunded public school near him (although he probably scores average or below prep schools that cost arguably less than his homeschooling, with additional socialisation benefits etc). Meanwhile the hyper religious family wanting their daughter to marry at 16 is not letting that barely literate girl take her SATs.
The two groups in favour of home schooling are hyper capitalistists who think the disruption of public schooling + their advantage will make their kid unstopable, and the niche fringe believes, usually religious who are scared of interacting with mainstream institutions for fear of disrupting their reality. Both are problematic, anti social and harmful groups and their over representation in goverment and media is largely a sympton of the inability of liberal institutions to fight against illiberal threats.
If you don't like it you must be foreign; I'm not, I was born and raised in England to British parents. Nowhere did I say I was even planning to leave, I merely suggested that if things got worse I might have to consider it, and I was jumped on for that.
Things ARE getting worse, but I'm not at that point yet, maybe we'll have a miraculous turn around and our public services will improve and our economy will grow, I'm not even asking for it to be sunny for 3 months of the year, but if they don't, am I just supposed to sit here on a sinking ship with my children next to me?
And let's be real, it's not even about me at this point, it's about what is and what will be for my children, I've worked hard to give them a better life than I had as a kid, and I'll be damned if I don't do it.
What?
> Large parts if London are just forests
What?
Your second point is a hallucination on your part. Nobody is saying it's bad because they're minorities. We're saying it's especially bad because the government was implicated - they very people charged with keeping children safe sacrificed them for political reasons, by the thousands, for years, and still are. That, combined with the scale of crimes by the Pakistani and other rapists and the acceptance these crimes received in their community, form a different type of crime - a massive crime committed by authorities and a whole community over years. That's what's so especially horrifying.
Owning a home, having significant savings, holidays abroad at least once a year, sending your children to private school, etc are probably some things I'd consider markers of being in the lower middle class.
On that basis, homes are becoming harder to own, savings are being eaten up by higher cost of living, the pound is weakening and taxes are making it untenable to send your children to private school.
Maybe my idea of what being middle class is is wrong, but it can't be far off, and that's exactly the group of people who aren't going to go much further beyond that to whatever comes at the next stage, I don't know what living standards look like for people above that; multiple properties, significant portfolios, not working for a living?
If my perspective if off, I'm willing to hear it.
You also don't have childcare costs once they go to school, so the loss of that outgoing makes up for the loss of the tax credit.
I'm also liberal, and I think that everyone should be given the child tax credit, if the government wants you to work, and earn, and have children (it does), the tax credit is an effective way to help everyone work harder and earn more.
The issue I've been trying to describe, is that after you've already had children, and you then hit 100k, you lose it entirely, making you 2k per child worse off, so let's say you get to 100k, and you already have two children in childcare, you lose 4k, then you get a pay rise to 110k, with the loss of the 4k and at the same time you also hit a marginal tax rate of 60%, you now earn exactly the same as you did at 100k.
If you got a with-inflation pay rise every year from 100k onward, you'd be earning less for almost all of that time until those children go to school.
Lowering the higher band threshold to 100k from 125k and not tapering the personal allowance would actually leave you better off.
EDIT: Typo in my numbers (100k > 110k).
There are many academic studies, across many countries, that confirm the better results. Your evidence is?
> Meanwhile the hyper religious family wanting their daughter to marry at 16 is not letting that barely literate girl take her SATs.
Not really a thing in the UK, or most places. It might have some truth in the US but sounds like a biased view
On the contrary I credit home education with getting my older daughter into a male dominated career (she designed power electronics for EVs).
> The two groups in favour of home schooling are hyper capitalistists who think the disruption of public schooling
Not really a thing in the UK either. Home educators tend to be social liberals and politically left wing
In fact of the many home educators I have come across very few fit your description.
> with additional socialisation benefits
Because meeting the same people of the same age from the same area in the same place every day for many years is a great way to develop social skills and make a variety of friends.
> although he probably scores average or below prep schools
I went to one of the best schools in Britain academically and my kids got a better academic education (as well as in other ways) than I did.
It's one of the reasons the UK has one of the highest concentrations of CCTV cameras in the world. Public tolerance for this took hold the IRA years and cemented post-9/11 and 7/7. The narrative of ever-present threat made "if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear" sound reasonable to a large portion of the population.
The press, especially the Mail, Sun, and Express, also thrives on outrage. They set the tone for national conversation, whipping up fear and anger that politicians then "respond" to with legislation. The broad assumption is that people can’t be trusted with unfiltered access to information or autonomy, especially online. You also saw it in lockdown, where Britain had to endure one the harshest COVID lockdowns among Western democracies.
Home educated kids often teach themselves so the student teacher ratio is infinity so terrible!
Both my kids taught themselves some subjects (had tutors for other, had me for some, so lots of one to one too). They did just as well in the subjects they taught themselves (8 and 9 in GCSE Latin, which as they did not have a tutor and I am terrible at languages is very much self taught).
knowing HMRC it's because they can't figure out how to work it out
at least without giving infosys/fujitsu a couple of hundred million quid
So do you think that after you get a couple miles away from something, you're no longer fleeing it when you keep going? An argument like this doesn't make you sound very credible.
> These men claim they are children.
What percent of the migrants are you talking about here?
No it is not. I've asked other politicos I know and they didn't know what you were talking about. I ended up asking the perplexity. Which disagrees with your definition and says that social media and in person is also important.
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/the-conversation-when-refer...
You cannot judge public sentiment accurately from mainstream media or polling. Mainstream media typically act as stenographers for either the state, their corporate masters or both. Polling has a multitude of issues that are well known.
> I’ve showed surveying that backs that up. The absence of any mainstream articles about this should be evidence enough it isn’t part of the conversation. Maybe that’ll change in future, but at least for now, nobody cares. Maybe you’re right and there’s a conspiracy amongst the mainstream to suppress the real views of the people, we will see.
I've told you why I don't believe them to be convincing. "The conversation" isn't happening on mainstream media. It is happening on social media, in person, on YouTube etc.
You re-iterating the same tired old talking points and showing me a YouGov poll (which are known to be BS) and saying you are right isn't evidence.
BTW. A lot of these polls aren't there to find out what the public actually thinks. They are there to manufacturer consent by making it look like it is supported by the majority.
> I don’t want to talk to you like a child, but a little lesson: mainstream news is mostly a cynical cash grab by harnessing outrage. Mainstream news loves things that outrage people.
You are literally still talking down to me in a condescending manner. Do you think I don't know that msm doesn't engage outrage?
BTW, you are presenting this like this is a revelation. When in fact it is a trite observation about how the media operates.
There are actually much more interesting ones if you look at how sometimes the exact same headlines are pushed by newspapers that are supposed to be opposing one another.
Earlier on in my career, I used to integrate news feeds for news sites (sports news, but still news). Most of the news you see is literally bought from several source providers and copy-righter/editors (or AI now) literally rewrite the article in the style of the site. That is why many news sites literally just repeat the same thing and then put their own spin on it based on their audience.
God forbid we start talking about subjects like how the media manufacturers consent, how the British State (MI6) has engaged in psyops against it own citizens.
I really suggest you spend some time reading some books about these subjects because you are way out of your depth.
> If there was any real outrage about this law, it would be harnessed by the dailymail and the Sun and Reach PLC to make money hand over fist. They would milk it so hard they would have to implement age verification.
Firstly, everyone who has two brain cells to rub together know that these are rags.
Secondly. Your argument is that if there was real outrage about this law it would be covered by outrage mongers. Why would they need to create outrage if there was already real outrage? Doesn't make any sense.
Thirdly. There has been coverage by MSM. I was visiting my parents house at the weekend, and as I walked into the living room, ITV news had two so-called experts talking about the issue. So somehow I stumbled on the mainstream coverage by accident (I don't ever watch TV these days), but you can't find it! Strange that.
Unfortunately, this opinion gets framed as "hate speech" in many countries, with legal consequences. How convenient to criminalize opinions of opponents !
Capital controls. By the time they are applied it's always too little, too late, and they only ever apply to the plebs -- the wealthy always have ways to move money out (and back in, later -much later-, if it becomes necessary or advantageous). Always too little too late because -I suspect- capital controls don't really work -- not against the wealthy.
I don't understand how you don't see this as textbook conspiracy or centralised?
Assume good faith.
Cost of living and wealth inequalities aren't key concerns for me personally. It's more quality of life for my family, safety and economic opportunity.
All those studies are either paid for by home schooling groups, or report the same fundamental issue in terms of data collection I have mentioned. Also the ones that break down results by socio economic background all highlight that anywhere from lower middle class to lower class homeschooling results always fall under public education.
> Not really a thing in the UK, or most places. It might have some truth in the US but sounds like a biased view
The UK has had a recent surge in homeschooling, in part because of Covid, also in part because of systemic underfunding of schools. But the religious exception was the most credited answer (some marked it under the philosophical reason) for homeschooling up to 2018. It is also underreported for women in some minority communities like travellers, orthodox jews, and some more extreme versions of islam. those girls are "homeschooled", wanna guess how they would do in their GCSE's?
> On the contrary I credit home education with getting my older daughter into a male dominated career (she designed power electronics for EVs).
This kinda highlights my original assumption of people defending it being because they personally believe in it, but credit to your daughter aside, she probably would go and kick ass regardless of the educational establishment or framework. And while you can't run a double blind study, I am not sure why you would think her being in a regular school she would be denied the chance to go into such a prestigious career?
> Not really a thing in the UK either. Home educators tend to be social liberals and politically left wing
> In fact of the many home educators I have come across very few fit your description.
it is important to point out that the biggest movement for homeschooling is evangelical americans, the same group that managed to get the department of education destroyed under Trump. Their propaganda, think tanks and TV news anchors distribute, enable and control the conversation borderline globally. The UK in comparison has a relatively small home schooling population (despite its recent uptick).
Also home schooling groups tend to be self contained, if you are socially liberal and go find other home schooling parents, you will find your neighbours and people who visit the same in person or online resurces (libraries, websites, forums etc). If you were a hyper religious person who did not believe your daughter should learn to read, you would report that most of the homeschooling parents you have met believe the exact same things you do. It is, by design, not an ideology that promotes everyone being under the same umbrella.
> Because meeting the same people of the same age from the same area in the same place every day for many years is a great way to develop social skills and make a variety of friends.
Almost every study tends to think so, yes. Support networks are important for humans, having people who face the same challenges (puberty, a math test on friday) and that are reliably reachable (same schedule, same place) means kids can learn things like trust, collaboration, loyalty etc organically.
This skills are not impossible to develop elsewhere, in the same way you can learn math elsewhere. But those benefits are not non existant.
> I went to one of the best schools in Britain academically and my kids got a better academic education
Yes, and your grandkids, if you ever have them, will get a better education that your kids regardless of where they study. Because education improves, resources improve, attention to kids increased over the last generation. You and I probably run around all afternoon with our parents not caring were we were, our teachers had not refreshed their knowledge since they got their degrees. Nowadays with things like the internet, Pluto stops being a planet mid school year and the kids get that info asap. Instead of a priest slapping kids like when I was a kid, there is a comprehensive "Religions of the world" curriculum were kids suddenly know tons of greek mythology, buddhisim, islam and plenty of christianity from early sects, to modern catholic, protestant and orthodox divisions. None of that was taught when I was a kid, so of course kids are better off now, as they should be. But that would happen regardless of where your kids learn I think.
The drawbacks of homeschooling for the whole of society I think are too large for any individual benefit. The lowest dregs denying their kids food or basic knowledge, conspiracy theorists denying reality to their children, abusive parents being unchecked, religious fundamentalists not allowing their kids to interact with whats beyond their control... disrupting all that and having kids be together, the same, and learning about different people and following the same curriculum I think is valuable.
I have a very similar career to your daughter, and my first interactin with kids being homeschooled was in an international math olympiad. Some of the kids I met had real hung ups about socialising, and I promise you they would have been just as good as calculus if they had gone to any normal school and just did a lil extra in the afternoon like I did. Growing up and doing some research on think tanks and who was funding what, the people promoting homeschooling had some pretty awful ideas about society and where everyone should fit in it. So while I would never judge any individual parent, there are plenty of good reasons to do it, I am keenly aware that most of the material coming out in support is not always coming from good faith sources.
Sorry to say, gizajob, you would make a terrible dictator.
The irony of you replying like this to a comment that replied to an American is stark, as unlike in the US, in the UK the care you get if you opt to go without private care is very viable, and private insurance costs far less than in the US.
If anyone should be upset over paying twice, it should be Americans.
> There's been consensus among pretty much every party in my lifetime around supporting "growth", "investment", number go up.
Yes most U.K. governments have talked about fine talk but other than Thatcher, failed to actually deliver on securing enough investment. It’s not that the investments are bad, it’s that they have been decreasing for 25 years:
https://www.economicsobservatory.com/boosting-productivity-w...
It’s funny that you mention ARM because it was created under Thatcher back when the U.K. was willing to start businesses. Yes it should never have been sold.
The only successful professional white men I know and have known for the last 10 years are self employed...and even that is under attack. If you want a permanent job as a white man in the UK, your hope of career progress is minimal at best. You will only be promoted if there is no other option.
There is so much home grown talent in the UK going to waste in the name of modern ideology.
Its creating a kind of apathy towards work for a lot of people. Especially those now reaching their 40s. There are loads and loads of professionals with 20 years under their belts that have seen nothing but stagnant wages and slow / non-existant career progression.
The sad thing is, all of this hard line "white and male is stale" rubbish hasn't changed the balance in terms of wealth distribution...you can still he financially successful as a white man in the UK, just not through permanent work and definitely not working for British businesses.
Ive seen it first hand, I spent ages pitching a business idea and prototype to raise some funding. Not a sausage. As soon as I had a couple of black ladies involved (great lovely women, but far from the top of their game) money fell put of the sky. They didn't even have to deliver high quality pitches.
What is equally as sad is these two ladies don't want to be given hand outs based on their race. They struggle to work out whether what they're trying to do actually has value or whether they're just being given money because they're black and female. It messes with their heads as well.
I appreciate the proximity of the two sentences made it unclear, but the general population isn't what I'm critical of in this case. I briefly had an Iranian project manager, that nation is almost as high as you can get on the theocracy scale (IIRC it would be beaten by Afghanistan), but he absolutely was not and had tattoos of video game characters.
Also, I should say that the use of "theocracy" in the modern sense is somewhat looser than the historical, and therefore ask if we're actually disagreeing? Certainly I don't mean in the sense of the deification of the Pharaohs.
Re the rest:
Given my focus is the rulers and not the people, I think the Lords Spiritual remain relevant (the attempt to replace the HoL with an elected one being promised by the HoC in 1911, still waiting).
Likewise that the head of state is also the head of the national church and there being a religious requirement for being crowned monarch, and that there is no desire to reform away the monarchy as an institution, likewise the Establishment nature of the CoE, making this the only non-meta conversation I've ever had where I can legitimately use the longest (recognised, non-systematic) word in the English language by saying that the UK political system is one of antidisestablishmentarianism.
I don't think I'd count the coins, even though this is about the ruling classes who are much more likely than anyone else to speak Latin and thus recognise the abbreviation printed on them. "FID DEF" has an ironic history, but so does the much easier to read "In God We Trust" and I'm not (yet) going to describe the USA in this way.
Aside from all of that, there's also the requirement of schools that:
All maintained schools must provide religious education and daily collective worship for all registered pupils and promote their spiritual, moral and cultural development.
Collective worship in county schools and equivalent grant-maintained schools must be wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character, though not distinctive of any particular Christian denomination.
I suspect it's nowhere near the 95th percentile of earned wealth.
You're literally doing what you're accusing me of "hallucinating" yourself, bracketing a group of crimes by the ethnicity of the perpetrators, and ignoring white British people doing exactly the same thing and also getting away with it for years, and pinning the blame on the crimes committed by ethnic minorities specifically on the "entire community"; Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush, and according to the person I was replying to even the perpetrators aren't as depraved. Police and social services (not generally considered part of "the government") failed to put a stop to grooming gangs for a wide variety of reasons; yes, in the case of Rochdale specifically where there were a number of warnings that shouldn't have been ignored that made it warrant a public enquiry and elevated news coverage. Needless to say social media coverage driven by agendas tended to skip the more robustly established findings that police repeatedly didn't take victim reports seriously out of assumptions about the behaviour of working class girls staying out late at night and often failed in fulfilling basic child protection protocols in favour of the "politicians covered it up and still are" angle. Back in reality, we've had a lot of convictions, multiple public inquires and people from all political parties talk more about them than most other sex crimes put together (even including Jimmy Savile)
In any case, the wider discussion was whether the UK's current ailments and political schisms are "mainly caused by immigration", and its quite hard to logically connect even the immigration-driven controversies like Brexit, "caps on migrant numbers" and fixation on small boat crossings to crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis, mostly in the early 2000s.
All of the currently-rich nations had a multi-generational baby boom*, long enough for their systems to assume and become dependent on that population growth.
* babies being the most extreme example of "influx of illiterate people, totally dependent on government handouts", though people only objected to them in the UK when I was a kid when it was single mothers producing them
Families started to have fewer kids, but the systems still presumed and needed more people to avoid stagnation. Japan chose stagnation instead of welcoming as many immigrants as it needed, and "the lost decade" became a plural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades
> Healthcare and insurance, literally everything is pricing the middle class out of existence.
I assume from this that you're American? That's basically just America that has this problem. Healthcare and health insurance is fine in most other developed (and developing) nations, even e.g. here in Germany in those few years where it took on around a million asylum seekers.
IMO, many of the UK politicians themselves don't realise how out of touch they are, both with the people and with the systematic reality of the world in which they exist. (Thinking back to David Davis on Brexit, saying they had a good idea what Czechoslovakia wanted from negotiations, despite it having ceased to exist in 1992).
Plus really shit media that loves negative clickbait and low effort outrage stoking.
If the income of everybody above the 80th percentile dropped to be equal to the 81st percentile, the 80th percentile income wouldn't change the ones above would just be very closely bunched.
(Last time I checked the opposite was true and they got more spread out)
You come across as out of touch and entitled. You live in the future - enjoy it!
Both have collapsing demographics, collapsing social welfare systems (turns out forced government pension payments thrown into low yielding bonds for people in their 20-30s who should be 100% equities is a bad idea), non-competitive taxation policy, and decades of underinvestment in risk assets that have starved their business community of capital needed to innovate or grow.
That said, I agree that is pretty stupid.
The only connection to marginal tax rates is that the pay bands line up though?
This is the best 1 sentence explanation of how it feels like to live in the UK. Every institution feels more catered towards preventing it's end than to a goal.
With no intention of downplaying the particular scandal that you're referencing, I don't think this is correct. Victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church are also usually estimated to range in the thousands, particularly e.g. in Germany
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse...
The school results are worse. Even here the claim is that it is the immigrants' fault. The privatisation of the school system in sweden has led to increased segregation of the school system. Private schools can be found in areas where they get "easy students". Yet they fail to deliver any better results than public schools. Which is amazingly dumb. The state pays private schools (they are open for anyone and have no tuition fees). The schools can then let less money go to tuition and more to the share holders/owners, while being able to claim that they are just as good as schools with all the tough students. By all measurements they should be much better. It is such an enormous failure.
And who do we blame? Immigrants.
And social mobility is going downwards. Not nearly as low in the US, but I want to think that we at least still believe in the value of hard work.
Have you ever been to mainland China? I've lived in both places and honestly, day-to-day life in major Chinese cities often feels more "free" in practical ways - safer, cleaner, more technologically convenient.
What is freedom really? In Shanghai or Shenzhen, I can walk out at 3am to get noodles or take the metro without a second thought. In LA or SF, I'm constantly aware of my surroundings, checking who's behind me, avoiding certain areas. The surveillance cameras in China never made me feel as watched as the constant threat assessment you do in many Western cities.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying China doesn't have serious issues with political freedoms and surveillance. It absolutely does. But the lived experience is way more nuanced than "oppressive dystopia."
I used to have similar assumptions before actually spending time there. Western media coverage (cough propaganda cough) tends to focus exclusively on the authoritarian aspects while ignoring that for many people, daily life feels safe, convenient, and yes - "free" in ways that matter to them.
Instead of imagining what China might be like based on western news coverage, why not visit and see for yourself?
Extremely unpopular opinion on HN, I'm sure. But I have a compulsion to challenge stereotypes when the reality is so much more complex.
>Somehow the Glaswegian associates and neighbours of the "Beastie House" aren't tarred with the same brush
Because this is an isolated incident, not something happening at a mass scale in that community.
You are helping mass rape continue by trying to minimize it; you are part of the problem here, right here, right now. Your kinds of thoughts and words are the support that those ongoing mass gang rape of children requires to continue. Hope you're proud of yourself; at least nobody can call you racist.
>crimes committed by gangs of mostly second generation British Pakistanis
It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.
Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.
The income numbers are already there and if I want to check it's easy: my employer gives me a form with the same numbers in the same numbered boxes. I just need to specify how much income I had from bank interest.
The tax witholding system usually works as well - the main exception being straight after starting work for the first time or changing jobs, when you can have a temporary code. In these cases I just called HMRC and told them what was going on. The employer gives my pay numbers to HMRC and HMRC give my employer a tax code that determines how much to withhold each month.
Although at police level, it came out yesterday that multiple officers in Rotherham were under investigation for sexually exploiting the victims themselves. Which would sound a much more likely reason why victims were ignored until they became part of wider investigations than some high-level conspiracy to empower taxi drivers to rape. I'm quite comfortable in being able to declare this is a major scandal without having to wait for the ethnicity of the police officers to be identified to decide whether it was an isolated incident or the fault of the entire community.
Only one of us is implying that some gang rape perpetrators and groomers are less of a big deal than others; it isn't me. Whether that is your intention or not, it certainly isn't helping victims get the support they needed or crimes get solved.
> It's hard to connect immigration to crimes by committed by ethnic immigrant gangs? Dear lord.
I mean, yeah, it's super hard to connect immigration routes that British Pakistanis and their ancestors didn't use at any point to crimes some of them committed.
> Look up the stats on sex crime convictions per capita by immigrant origin in various European countries.
We've got stats for sex crimes per capita for the actual UK, for convictions and for reports and for those targeting minors specifically. They certainly don't support your argument that white Britons' sex crimes against kids are "isolated incidents". Statistically, they're actually slightly overrepresented on a per capita basis, and that's after decades of large investigations into specific crimes committed in specific communities.
Edit: there is no need to be jumping to stark conclusions which only add to the division being spread throughout the world.
If you disagree that’s fine but it’s quite telling that your response isn’t well thought out or based on any logical argument
But it’s not obvious that the standard of living associated with being better off would ever have been near the 90th, let alone 90th percentile of salaries?
Not convinced that sending children to private school would ever have been seen as a ‘lower middle class’ expectation.
But I’m also not convinced that the markers you describe are not available to someone at the 75th percentile of income, say, let alone to people at the 95th percentile. Now the luxuriousness of those markers may not be at the level marketed in glossy brochures etc but isn’t that an issue with unrealistic expectations?
Germany's gotten more freedom online since the EU DSA forced them to abandon their idiotic strict liability law for online activities [2]. You can't criticize Israel, but you never could - that's not a new thing.
[1] basically "Can we have mass surveillance now, pretty please?" "No and fuck off" "Please please please please please?" "No" "How about now?"
[2] they would trace the activity as far as they could, and whoever they couldn't trace further beyond was automatically fully liable for that activity. Public wifi was effectively illegal, because you'd suffer the full consequences for anything anyone did with the connection, until a few years ago when they carved out an exception, but it still remained generally illegal to share a connection in other circumstances until the DSA.
This country has so many (excuse my rudeness) lamearses, and they seem to revel in pulling everybody down to their level. Whenever they feel challenged by somebody else having genuine hobbies and interests (beyond consumption of food, drink, substances, and media), being fit and healthy, or being educated, they get threatened and start trying to pull that person down. I've seen it all my life.
However when you do find interesting and talented people here, they shine through. It's just needles and haystacks.