Why Britain is now a Third World country

BRITAIN is a rich and civilised country with many trains, a rule of law, benefits for the needy and much public transport.

Unfortunately, none of it actually works any more. Not the weather. Not the Government. Not even our useless national football teams. And it gets worse.

read it all here -http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/columnists/clarkson/article1655505.ece

When i was a kid, i heard about Great Britain.
It is obvious why the Great has been dropped.
Is it really Britain or a United Kingdom anymore?
It seems to me that it is England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Then within England, is there any unity?
I feel that most have been too busy keeping up with the Jones's whilst the Patels, Yongs, Zambas and the likes have supassed the lot of us.
I am not racist and i say good luck to them and Jeremy is so right.
This hasn't just become the case either, Great Britain lost it's way sometime after the sixties, early seventies.
No time to expand upon my feelings at the mo, but i will contribute more another time.

Good grief. I don't like Clarkson and I utterly despise The Sun, so the two together are hardly a winning combination.

And when I spoke to the girl in the shop about how she copes with rising fuel bills, she explained that to keep her moped topped up, she’s now working 14 hours a day, 28 days a month. For £600 a year.

Is Jeremy really saying that's a good thing??? I certainly wouldn't do those hours for that money. Why should anyone?

Do these wonderful, efficient, go-getting countries have free healthcare, education for all and a comprehensive benefits system? No.

Great Britain... still pretty Great, actually. I know where I'd rather live!

I think a lot of it's back to front. I hate to say this, cos it might make me out to be some kind of moron, but about 3 years ago, when through no fault of my own (dont worry, thats another story!) I became homeless, I found myself in a situation where I could get zero assistance - but was told that if I was a druggie, just come out of prison, or got preggers, I would be fine. In fact, the people at the council tried to convince me to get knocked up to get help! It's so, so stupid

Oh, and when you think how our bills are rising all the time, you might be forgiven for thinking NMW is a great thing, as it means we wont go short......well I think it sucks, because so many people get turned down from jobs because they are over 21 and the pay has to be higher. I know the age discrimination act came in, but it makes no difference, I have tried and failed TWICE to bring this act into force, but nothing has ever come of it, despite overwhelming evidence.

My industry (which I trained in, nothing to do with the 2 cases mentioned above, which were both shop work) has pretty much gone down the toilet, and I can't help but think how my life would differ if I were to be less willing to support myself. As a childless, working adult, I feel like part of a forgotton planet. I'm not saying I should have an easy life by any means, but I cannot help but have bad feelings towards a government that allows other, less well-meaning people, a life of riley.

This could be a great debate, but the facts are plain to see.
What has happened to our coal industry???
Who owns our steel industry???
Where does our fish come from???
How did all our textile industries come to an end???
What car do you drive???
When did you vote about going into Iraq???
How much control does Great Britain have in regard to its future gas, oil and energy needs???
How is it that we have homeless people???
What is causing the elderly to die from living in cold houses???
How is it that we still have soup kitchens in use???
Is this country still Great???

I guess that in many other countries many of the above questions have favourable answers, perhaps moreso than for us.

I wouldn't say that i am a Clarkson fan, and i don't buy any paper, because they are all full of junk and indirectly linked to the hounding of famous and infamous innocent people who have commited no crime.
I will never join that pack of wolves, certainly not after the Diana incident, not that i did prior to that event either.

I wonder if you could keep a moped topped up here with £600 fuel for a year??? About two and a half gallons per week.
It certainly wouldn't cover the M.O.T., roadtax and insurance.
How would that girl eat and survive here???
Or how is it that it cost so much more here???

This country has no free health system, no free education system and the benefit system is not financed by the Lord. Everything we receive from this country is paid for by us, through taxation.
Question is, do we get good value???
Who pays in most and who takes out most???

If i could live for free, then i would work for free. If i need £1,000 to survive, then i would work for £1,000.
Should we all expect to earn £20,000??? £50,000??? £1,000,000???

I have visited 27 different countries and i'm very sorry to say that i do not see anything great about the U.K.
I am looking at moving away, like so many have already done.
I found New Zealand to be the best so far.

this is a debate i need to keep out of

What needs do you have???
You started this ball rolling???

Go on, don't be a Chicken, add your views. I love to expand my own understanding and feelings towards any given topic by listening to others. Of course, listening doesn't mean i have to agree nor does it mean i am dismissive of those views.

It is like Sodabubble wrote above, surely there is something wrong about a country that lets hard working and well educated people be homeless. I spent four months living on Skegness beach when i was sixteen and i wasn't the only one.

Oh, please don't combom! By all means close or delete it if it gets nasty but I'm 100% sure everyone above is capable of polite discussion and we want to hear what you think too. Gwan, gwan, gwan...

I shall be back later to beat pyart with a wet kipper

Oh, threats of violence already???
A good ole' beating with a Great British (maybe Arbroath) kipper.
Are they still from our Great British fleet???

Lol pyart!

Of course this country isn't perfect - examples given above prove that conclusively. BUT... although the Antipodes, Canada and parts of Europe might be fairly judged to be better overall, the fact remains that most countries aren't.

Yes, ok, our services are paid for by taxes but they're free at the point of need. If any of us here breaks a leg tomorrow, we don't have to worry that we'll have to sign away all our worldy goods before being taken to hospital. Heck, there are plenty of places that don't even *have* a hospital. Likewise, we can all be confident that our children will recieve full time education to a minimum of 16 years, regardless of our financial status or our child's ability.

As for who pays in most and who takes out most (disregarding the govts cut for arms, sops to big buisness and a snifter in the Commons bar) is it not fair that those who earn more help to look after those less fortunate? I know when I was working and earning well, I had no qualms at all about paying tax to aid lone parents, the elderly and young people trying to get a start in life.

I think the coal/steel etc point will lead me onto a Thatcher rant, which may not be helpful here but it's worth bearing in mind that because we have yo-yo system of government, a lot of our politics revolve around 'fixing' what the last lot did, rather than truly progressing forward.

oki u asked 4 it although this will be misinterpreted, its hard to get my feelings into words

i sort of see and agree with a few of everyones points, but disagree with everyone too, including clarkson, who i like on TV, but dislike as a person

in the last few years, the uk has degenerated further, everything from house prices, to replacing sexism and racism with "fattism" and "benefitism" (if your lost here, try watching weekday morning tv). imho patriotism can breed nationalism and with the rise of skinheads from the "soul scene" to racism, we dont need any more catalysts, and lets not speak of the BNP.

i dont see how any current problem can be fixed, the credit crunch is global, and so far through cooking the books we have kept out of it, but now it is going to hit us had and fast, this will fuel the nationalists who are against immigration and nomatter what they say will work towards "sending them home" if they get power. but if we all trace our bloodlines back for enough we will probably find we are all immigrants, a few generations ago my family came from belgium as refugees in WW1.

imho to date the only person to enter parliment with genuine intentions was guido fawkes, but even if he achieved his outcome, nothing would have changed for the better and you can always tell when a politician is lying, his lips move!

gordon brown isnt even interested in working for the masses, hes just doing what he likes as he knows he cant win an election, and there is nothing we can do, and even when there is (an election) the ONLY vote that will get rid of labour is conservative, the rest cant win!

is the uk scr**ed? it always has been, remember when blair came to power with all the good ideas and did none of them? itll always be like that for us

i think pierre-joseph proudhon said it best with "Whoever puts their hand upon me to govern me is an usurper and a tyrant. I declare them my enemy."

I think people are fed up with empty promises, it seems that leaders are only interested in looking after their own and/or massaging their own egos

Of course, it's not possible to please everyone all of the time, but unless we start to see REAL changes, I predict that voting turnouts will continue to decrease.

I think what people have to weigh up is the benefits of the UK against the faults.

This country is much better r.e. healthcare and services than most other countries and yes we do pay for it in your national insurance, however if we need that £50k heart op we dont have to pay £50k or have insurance to cover it. we have already paid our share and some benefit more than others. Should we complain about that? of course not. better to be safe than sorry.

We are forever talking about rip off britain but in reality it is our constant demand for higher wages that continually drives the price of things up. Look at it now. So many people asking for money because the cost of living is up. Will higher wages solve it of course not, if you earn higher wages then so will all the drivers, check out "persons" etc at your supermarket and guess what. You are back to square one.

If you took into account someone in Vietnams cost of living against their wage I would bet we are much better off percentage wise because we seem to beleive that the car loan, credit cards etc are all part of the cost of living. They are not they are living beyond our means. Take these extras away and I bet the money left over is a far greater percentage than the far east.

We are always complaining about sweatshops in the far east. If they are not earning more than their cost of living then fair enough but in most cases they are just getting what we get. If their cost of living is £200 a year then should their bosses be paying them european wages? If they did guess what. Our clothes prices go up and we all want a pay rise again. Yes its the revolving door of world econmics and the comfort feeling in the UK that has led people to be lazy and beleive that they "need" TVs, HiFis, PCs, leather sofas etc. We dont but we like having them. Its a choice.

However on the other side there is the chronic waste of taxpayers money because Governments have to do their utmost to stay in power. With the advent of celebrity and people only seeing the surface rather than looking past it this means that staying in power is all about image. Therefore we have to spend huge amounts on publicists, advisors, media gurus etc which IS digusting.

Politicians whilst trying to hide things must try to be seen to be open therefore we have to have huge consultancy periods to build a new lampost which outways the benefit by a long way.

It is true that sometimes Governments need to change and I do think this one has to but at the end of the day, the best governments are the ones that look after the economy properly. Not just claim the glory for a rising economy and lower unemployment when we they started in a recession and therefore are bound to bounce back afterwards (as this government has)

In general recessions happen every 18 years or so and this has been called the 18 year cycle. This proves true virtually for the whole century and governments can live or die from them. Take the last Tory administration. They suffered due to the recession (as well as being more and more unpopular just as Labour is today)

With the coal mines etc, these industries were becoming unaffordable as government entities. The wages increases they demand and the cost against imported far outweighed the benefits because if we kept the coal, steel etc as government companies then anyone who used their product would have to raise their prices and export would be a word of the past. We would now be sitting in a country with products even more expensive than they are, and many many people out of work. A lot of people were made redundant from these industries but weigh that amount up against the amount of people that would have been made unemployed if we kept them open. And how much would your electricity be costing by now?

I am not well off in fact I am heavily in debt. Difference is I chose to take credit, I chose to buy luxuries. I know its my fault and am not asking the government to "bail me out" of a problem which was of my own making, nor am I using bankruptcy or IVA to get out of paying what I do owe. I talk to the companies I owe money to and they are very accepting, especially in the current financial climate, that they can lower their demands and freeze the interest otherwise they are likely not to get their money back if they force the consumer through bankruptcy.

This really is a great country and worthy of the name. Its a pity there are negatives as well as positives but its the same old story "Quick to complain, slow to praise"

AC

Well said and good luck with your debts but...the topic was more about this country becoming Third World.
I have said enough about why i feel this country has lost the title of being Great and the loss of our core industries.
The reason i picked out some of these issues was because we are not making use of the resources and skill base that we have.
Most Third World countries are now making full use of their resources and work force. In that sense i feel we are a Third World country.
Coley, you hit the nail bang on the head when you speak about finances. Is it money that makes a country Third World or not Third World, or is it how the people live within those countries???
Then with that standard of living, is it a standard we need or one that we are always trying to get more from???
Many other countries do not live to our standard, but does that make us better??? Or worse???
I wonder if the measure of Third World is wealth, health, quality of life, freedom of speach, democracy or a whole host of things.
I guess Third World countries are less developed countries, against our over developed, and Third World are using their resources to the best of their ability where we only do so if the financial benefit makes it viable.
Personally i envy someone who does not have to worry about politics, money, taxes, mopeds, t.v.s, trains, benefits, credit cards, bankruptcy, supermarkets etc etc.
Who really lives in a Third World???

Depends what you think of as "third world". Mud huts, no clean water or sewage system, famine, floods, no education etc. etc. GB isn't like that. It was though, until the 1750s when "progress" started and went so fast that we are still in a way suffering from the effects.

I agree with Pyart. We want more because there is more to be had. When there was less to want we were quite happy. Maybe the native in the mud hut is far happier with his quality of life than we are with ours. Who are we to judge the living standards of that native and compare his life to ours? We live in a country with a climate that we cannot control and a government that presumably most of us put there as they got in with a majority vote, and if you didn't bother to vote more fool you. Yet we are frustrated in that there doesn't seem anything that we can do to change anything, if we knew how. That seems to be the root of the problem. IMHO it all started with Maggie and her "look after yourself and don't bother about anyone else" attitude. I think that lady has a lot to answer for.

Anneliz wrote:...IMHO it all started with Maggie and her "look after yourself and don't bother about anyone else" attitude. I think that lady has a lot to answer for.

absolutely and totally agree!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I wonder how we can get the M.P.s to read all this??? We can sure put the World to rights between us and i agree completely with the above posts.

Personnally i feel that the beginning of having both parents out at work and children with child minders was a mistake and a break down of a family unit. The financial pressures and fitting in a family life around two working parents may also be responsible for the breakdown of many relationships.

The emotional scars of all this can leave a lot of anger and negative feelings, leading to a self preservation attitude.

I'm no expert, but as far as Third World goes, i don't feel that this country is perfect. I feel very strongly that the road we are on in this country is taking us further away from any type of perfection rather than towards a first rate society.

i doubt they are interested! i know its a pity, but they seem only interested in themselves