British Elections are coming in as I type and, well, it's looking apocalyptic for the current leadership, the Conservatives:
So here's a quick lesson:
The conservatives have been in power exactly since I left the country - before I was even politically aware. Maybe it was a subconscious evacuation heh.
In that time, everything has basically crumbled into oblivion. While it's true you can say the same for most places at least in the Western world but certainly the majority of the world, the UK has performed pretty much the worst out of all its peers in the G7 or EU or whatever other group you want to put them in.
In the time I've been gone, we've gone from one of the wealthiest countries on the planet to having London being kind of wealthy, and the rest of the country being poorer than many Eastern European ex-soviet states.
The truth is, regardless who is in power, too much damage has been done and to undo that is nothing short of impossible. We are going to be experiencing a managed decline for at least as long as I'm alive. I simply can't see a way out short of some miraculous technological development leading to some globally dominant market we hold a monopoly over.
But with so much red tape and bullshit preventing anyone from accomplishing such things, somebody in the US will get the idea first and run with it into the trillions of dollars of profit in the first week or so.
So in all honesty, I'm quite apathetic about this election. And I'm not alone. The perception here is the left side of the image, Labour, is winning by a landslide and everybody loves the left wing party. This is far from reality. The reality is simply that most people who used to vote Conservatives, aren't voting.
The overall voter turnout in the previous election was about 67%. This year it's looking like something like 51%. Their vote share has only actually increased about 1.5% - that magically made the difference between losing before, to an absolute landslide.
The left side party is winning purely by default.
So overall excitement is very, very low. The only thing people are pumped for is the complete eradication of the Conservatives - the oldest political party in the world - zero seats everybody chants. But with such apathy, people aren't even voting hard enough against them. Although it's looking like their loss is still catastrophic, is not quite as apocalyptic as everybody hoped. They are looking, as of this moment, to get about 150 seats.
Although I care nothing about the Labour left, I do appreciate that their voters will be younger overall. The reason this is important is because of housing.
Us Millennials are the first generation in a long, long time, to become worse off, and have fewer future prospects, than their parents and ancestors. Every generation after us is looking to suffer the same fate.
The older generations have, in my opinion, been solely responsible for the downfall of the country, by voting Conservative almost exclusively with the sole aim of benefiting their own personal hoard of wealth at the expense of everybody younger.
The average old person owns a couple of homes, and refuse to, for example, move into a home more suitable for their age and size (living alone and unable to walk upstairs, for example, should move into a bungalow). They consider their homes as assets they can just sit on and become richer until they die. Meanwhile, a huge portion of the Conservative party are, coincidentally, working in real estate.
So by voting in a younger voting base under a leadership who are not hoarding mass real estate for themselves, whether or not they're commies or whatever, can only be a good thing in that they'll feel more incentivised to work on lowering housing prices.
I highly doubt they will be remotely successful but at least it's a different direction. Depressing to justify with such a weak argument lol.
The fact is, even in my situation, with both of us working, no child, high paying stable jobs, a ton of savings, zero debt, passive income in rental property and investments - we still cannot imagine being a homeowner in the UK. It's just out of our price league.
I mean, sure, we can technically buy a garbage house for as little as 5,000 GBP ($6,000), but we have at least 'average price' standards. And that's what has us priced out.
Imagine being a zoomer right now working in Starbucks. You probably didn't even picture a life in which you have a home and a pension. That's just some fantastical historical storytelling like learning how Ancient Romans used to live.
Here's the updated outcome:
The one interesting feature here is that tiny light blue party 'Reform'. They are certainly the talk of the entire election, and they are making a lot more waves than the voting numbers suggest, due to the nature of our system. Although something like 20% of the country are Reform voters, it translates to only a tiny number of seats.
But this party is only 5 years old and scrambled together a campaign only a few weeks before the actual election. So like it or not, that's pretty impressive.
Their whole schtick is pretty much the same sentiment as much of Europe and the western world at the moment - Anti-immigration. If they were ever to be in power it would certainly be a pain for me personally with a foreign wife, but I can totally see why there's such a demand for them.
Canada, France, Germany, you name it, immigration has overwhelmed. Reform aren't exactly anti-immigration in a far-right sense, they're more into having 'modest' immigration like we always had over previous decades - about 30,000 per year, rather than the last 5 years of about 1,000,000 each year. No exaggeration:
They also have another goal outside of the immigration talking point, and that is to be the new 'opposition party'. They don't expect to win this time at all, but they want to be a voice that can keep the actual winners, labour, in line. Their 'manifesto' - book of policies - is very likely nothing short of delusional fantasy, but in the context of it being just a bunch of talking points and expectations, rather than actual policy to attempt to implement, is actually quite useful.
If they were in power and attempted to put their policies into practice, I could imagine everything imploding and collapsing in disorganised chaos, but just as a talking point, there's some value in having them with a small handful of seats.
I don't like a whole number of their views, their ignorance on climate and vaccines, the fact a bunch of their members turn out to be random actual racist types, rather than just regular people being accused of racism for coughing wrong, and there's something a bit... well, I feel some distrust of their egocentric, budget-Trump leader Nigel Farage. But I do think, like every populist, he believes what he says, as he's been going on about the same issues for decades. This is something else the government absolutely needs: Conviction.
Both the firm belief conviction and the handcuffs and behind bars conviction XD
So yeah Reform certainly don't have what it takes to be a respectable leadership, but they do represent a certain sizeable chunk of the population which, regardless of how wrong you think they may be, is specifically the point of democracy.
Update:
There were rumours that in all likelihood, the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak (person on the right) would lose their seat - the first time in history that ever happened. However, the news in just now tells me he managed to keep his seat. So the conservatives certainly aren't doing as badly as everybody thought.
However, he has already conceded defeat before the majority threshold has even been called. As you can see, you need 326 seats for a majority, labour is already on 290. Not far to go.
A lot of people describe this as the 'Uni-party' - two sides of the same coin. Labour will essentially continue the same status quo, but at a slightly more accelerated rate of decline. I'm not sure. Maybe it'll be slower. But it will be a decline.
SNP is the Scottish National Party. They've had a whole plethora of their own scandalous problems. Scotland is in a terrible state with the worst drug addiction and alcohol abuse in Europe, among the top in the world. Life expectancy is lower than places like Baghdad. No surprise they've lost a bunch of seats.
As you can see there's a whole bunch of other parties representing, for example, Wales, Northern Ireland, Greens like anywhere else, and more.
You can see the winning seats are quite diverse around the country:
There is a lot of talk about completely changing our political system from 'First past the post', where basically only two parties can ever win, to 'Proportional representation'.
Without going into it too much, this would be more in line with some European countries like the Netherlands, and it does come with problems. Representing the voters proportionally means that those minor parties get a much larger voice. This is nice in theory, but in practice it means the idea of a coalition is practically guaranteed every time. No single party will be in power, having to gain a majority by joining forces with one or more other party.
This means people with opposing views working together against the greater enemy can't get anything done because they have to keep conceding issues to each other. It still might be preferable to our current system, but if we can wipe out the conservatives this election, and then wipe out Labour in the next one, we could have something nice and fresh in 5 years instead.
Ok I'm just gonna wait like 10 more minutes until the majority hits and leave it at that...
Oh, that didn't take long!
It's really quite a sad day. It might have a few hours of 'victory' for most people in the country. A feeling that democracy still works, we managed to vote out the bad guys. But come on. Nothing is going to change. Nothing can change. There's so many barriers, laws and legislation that it would take an army of vikings pillaging and burning down every town to the ground for a complete reset if we were ever to hope for an upward trajectory.
This election, in short, means very little to nothing. At best, it's just a conversation starter.
I find the subject of immigration interesting. Juxtapose this with the issue of the elderly increasingly being a burden on the young. The elderly are collecting pensions, using services, and the young have to pay. Though the elderly paid into those systems when they worked, lifespans have increased and they have more than use up their contributions. What to do? The birthrate in the UK and other developed countries is below replacement rate. The only answer is to bring in new workers, young workers, people who can support the system. Or, we can chuck the old out as some traditional cultures are said to have done. But then, we forget, the young will one day be old (if they are lucky) and maybe they don't want to end up like that.
New blood--immigration--is the answer. Maybe we can use intelligent policy to police immigration. Your wife, for example, is educated. She is highly employable. She has resources. She would be a plus. Controlling immigration--not limiting it--is the answer. Unless xenophobia is the true motivation behind resistance to immigration. The UK, the US, Japan, etc. can choose to remain insular, close the world out. Or these countries can employ intelligent immigration policies that are a benefit to the economy.
This is the magic trick that nobody seems to know how to accomplish. I've been watching the whole anti-immigration debates over the election period for a while and I haven't heard any xenophobia relating to it to be honest, other than the media's dishonest spin.
In the case of Nigel Farage, for example, the most anti-immigrant party leader, he repeatedly says that we should judge people on the content of their character, that we should treat people equally, that we should be blind to skin colour. If that's as xenophobic as we get then... I don't think we have much of a problem there!
But yes right now, the immigration is completely uncontrolled chaos. 1 million per year is just unfathomable I could talk about for hours, but I also just don't think we should be sniping all the much needed talent from other countries to keep for ourselves just to prop up our population numbers. Brain drain is a devastating illness in a country and we're contributing to that problem.
The bigger solution, to me, is to make living in the country more conducive to rearing children. This is the same problem everywhere. South Korea being the worst. Why? Because it's too expensive to raise kids. They've poured billions of dollars into desperately convincing people to have more kids but until it's affordable, it ain't gonna happen.
I think we're all learning to become corporate vassal states where everyone is raised to believe that acquiring wealth is everything, at the expense or normal human behaviour like raising a family.
Now, a successfully managed decline of a population is actually a valid outcome. If our population falls at a much slower rate so there's no shock to the economic system, it could actually be the best outcome (since we can't just grow infinitely, either). Just... easier said than done
I'm not accusing anyone of xenophobia--don't know enough about internal British politics to do that. In the U.S. it is a factor (which is odd, considering we are a country made up of immigrants--except for Native Americans). And I'm not an economist, nor am I a demographer. I just know that a declining birth rate, below the replacement rate, is generally not considered a good outcome--without immigration. Besides less workers to do work in an increasingly grey population, there are less people paying taxes to support the services the government provides across the board. More cynically, there are less people to fight in armies (terrible thought). I just looked up the statistics on Ancient Rome. It seems before its decline, the empire suffered a decline in birth rate to the extent that the emperor tried to offer rewards to women to have children.
As for persuading people to have children: It's more than making child-rearing affordable. In a culture where people are confident their children will survive childhood, there is little incentive to have more than one or two children. Children aren't merely expensive--they're inconvenient. The replacement birth rate in the U. S. is 2.1. Most people I know don't want to have more than two children. I certainly didn't. I would say it is not unusual to have one child households. Having children is especially inconvenient to the woman. What if her relationship fails? Inevitably, the woman suffers a decline in economic security...this insecurity lasts into old age.
Maybe a decline in population (native population) is good, as you say. I don't see it, but then, as I said, I'm not an economist or a demographer.
All of that aside--it seems you are happy, @mobbs, happily married. I'm very happy for you :)
Well, not native or otherwise, just an overall decline is good, if slow and steady enough. The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries on the planet. The entire landscape got ravaged for wood to the point that forests are practically extinct, and wildlife is on apocalyptic decline due to agriculture and real estate. Growing the human population indefinitely at a rate of a million/year (a new city per year requires being built, then) can't possibly be a good thing... It must be appreciated that for countries like ours and say the Netherlands, there is almost no land whatsoever that isn't either farmland or housing.
The USA, with almost infinite land and resources, is a very different animal than Europe (and really, the rest of the world), and generally I can see how immigration to the USA can, uniquely, be a net benefit. You guys can literally double your population and the landscape will hardly flinch.
For the UK, we've seen an unprecedented decline in quality of life in every single aspect while immigration has skyrocketed. It may not be the entire cause, but it's certainly not the solution, and we're only adding problems to a country that is 15x as densely populated as the US, and 50% more than Japan.
For comparison, it would be like getting the population density of New Jersey, and applying that across the whole of the USA. Picture that!
Of course! We make our own happiness =D But I do have a love for my homeland despite the mess it's in, and I'm concerned for it...
😇☀️
Damn bro, you've really thought deeply about the impact of political shifts and the challenges facing the UK. It's pretty frustrating when elections feel more like a reshuffling than real change.
I've been planning on going back there for years, so I guess it's on my mind a lot to know what I'm supposed to be returning to...
I think there's some optimism to be had, if nothing else than a change of colour from blue to red haha. But yeah... not much.
Well I hope it all goes well for you good friend
Speaking of conversation starters...
Oh no! There's nothing worse than a subconscious evacuation! 🛌😴💩😂
Haha, when you gotta go, you gotta go XD
Hello mobbs!
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