Comment by jdietrich

Comment by jdietrich 16 hours ago

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Twenty years ago, I think there was still a sense that we were collectively laughing with each other about the dullness of small towns. We all had the same shops - Woolworths, Dixons, Our Price, BHS. We all had a leisure centre that looked like everyone else's leisure centre. Some towns were better off than others, some towns had parts that you were better off avoiding after dark, but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity.

Today, I think it's clear who would be being laughed at by whom. The fates of places have so radically diverged that we no longer have a sense of collective identity. All of the places listed in Crap Towns are now unrecognisable, for better or worse. Those familiar shops are now gone; in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all. Half the leisure centres have shut and we all know which half.

The upper middle class might have become more humourless and puritanical, but I think that's a subconscious self-defence mechanism, a manifestation of noblesse oblige without real obligation. The working class are too angry to laugh and certainly aren't willing to be laughed at. We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.

JimDabell 14 hours ago

This is what I was going to say. Back then, a book like this would have been perceived as the UK making fun of itself. Now it’s perceived as being cruel to those less fortunate.

I think it’s worth putting into context that the economy was doing great in the era this book was first published and huge progress was being made with things like homelessness, inequality, and poverty. It felt like the country had turned a corner from the lows of the 80s.

Since then, we’ve had the global financial crisis, local councils being bankrupted, and a huge rise in homelessness and inequality. The rich have more and the poor have less.

If you published that book today, the contents might be the same, but the story it tells would be quite different.

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  • jll29 10 hours ago

    Good point re: facts versus story.

    One problem may be that the UK is very London-centric in a way that is markably different from France being Paris-centric.

    Just my perception (and I know London much better than Paris) is that in France, if you are not in Paris you are seen as "living in the 'province'", but politicians still fight for farmers there etc. In contrast, in the UK, on the surface there is the appearance that yes, London is the capital and more important, but that people are trying to do initiatives like moving part of the BBC to Glasgow and Manchester - to decentralize a bit.

    Yet the wealth concentrated in Greater London and its commutable satellites - as contrasted with the rest of the country - is many orders of magnitude bigger, also due to the financial industry there.

    If you live in Knightsbridge and commute to your trader job in Canary Wharf you will never see how derelict Portsmouth or Blackpool really are (the only time I went to Portsmouth, I recall some people sitting in the street with nothing to do).

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    • everfrustrated 3 hours ago

      Fun UK fact. only

      >One in five civil servants are based in London (20.1%), down from 20.7% in 2022.

      https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-stati...

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      • jdietrich an hour ago

        True, but "civil servant" is a very broad term. A majority of civil servants - a very large majority outside of London - work in Operational Delivery. They work in JobCentres or prisons, they do clerical work in the DVLA or the Passport Office, but they have no actual involvement in or influence over policy. The centre of power is still overwhelmingly in London.

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    • Earw0rm 2 hours ago

      You can walk out of Canary Wharf, within a mile or two you'll see much the same.

      Not that the Knightsbridge set ever do.

      Heck, even from Knightsbridge itself you don't have to go that far. North End Road is what, two, three miles?

      I don't know of anywhere in London that has quite the profound sense of hopelessness you find in Blackpool, but a lot of it's really not great.

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    • vladvasiliu 7 hours ago

      Meh. As someone who's in the opposite situation (familiar with France and not with the UK), I get the feeling that what you're saying applies here, too.

      It's funny you should talk about farmers. Yes, politicians say they'll move mountains for them. Yet, in practice, farmers are still barely making ends meet. And we also have the EU on top, which is run by bureaucrats even more removed from the actual "bas peuple". Just look at the whole situation with the Mercosur treaty.

      Politicians keep yapping about how ICE cars are the devil and should be banned. After all, you can take a bike or ride the metro, right? It's not like anybody lives outside Paris or its close "satellites". It's very easy when you don't even have an idea how much a ticket costs, since you're carted around by police escort on the people's dime.

      We've also had a push for "decentralization", with all kinds of hilariously bad results.

      I don't know about Portsmouth nor Blackpool, but I ride around France a fair bit, and outside the biggest cities, many small towns have empty, run-down centers, with mayors fighting to get stores and whatnot back. But people simply move out for lack of jobs.

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  • jl6 13 hours ago

    The Gini coefficient of the UK is about the same now as it was then:

    https://equalitytrust.org.uk/how-has-inequality-changed/

    What has actually changed? A whole bunch of other economic malaise, but also perceptions, amplified to your personal taste by social media.

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    • gnfargbl 10 hours ago

      What has actually changed is that thirty years ago, the ratio between house prices and average earnings was about 4. By twenty years ago it had doubled and, most importantly, it has been at that level ever since with no real sign of dropping [1].

      This is a structural change. We now have at least one, and perhaps two, generations of people who can't really alter their economic situation through hard work. That's the classic recipe for populism to thrive.

      [1] https://www.schroders.com/en-gb/uk/individual/insights/what-...

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      • tonyedgecombe 4 hours ago

        Interest rates were much higher back then which accounts for most of the change. The base rate was around 6% through most of the nineties (it hit 15% at its peak).

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      • ndsipa_pomu 9 hours ago

        And as with so many modern issues, the housing problem was largely created by Thatcher - her Right to Buy policy.

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    • teamonkey 12 hours ago

      Gini coefficient usually only measures income inequality. Wealth inequality is hard to measure for various reasons but…

      https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/

      “for the UK as a whole, the WID found that the top 0.1% had share of total wealth double between 1984 and 2013, reaching 9%.”

      “If the wealth of the super rich continues to grow at the rate it has been, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP.”

      Etc.

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      • Earw0rm 2 hours ago

        The super rich aren't the problem. 200 families is too few to have any meaningful effect on the housing market.

        By all means tax them til their eyes bleed, but it'll mostly just make people feel better rather than being a useful contribution to public finances.

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      • dmurray 10 hours ago

        > by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK GDP

        Those things are measured in different units, which automatically throws doubt on the ability of the source to be statistically rigorous in any other way.

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        • amenhotep 8 hours ago

          One is measured in pounds. The other is measured in pounds. Seems pretty comparable.

          If you're being deliberately stupid you could pretend it's a comparison between pounds and pounds per year, but everyone who is at least minimally literate in the subject understands that "GDP" here means "the amount of value produced in a year".

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      • anovikov 10 hours ago

        Highly unlikely because the rich are now just running away from UK pulling all their cash with them; it's likely that leftists will get what they want - reduction of wealth inequality - just not in the way that pleases them: with the cash being simply gone.

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        • ferbivore 10 hours ago

          Sounds good to me. The problem is the rich don't actually take their money and fuck off, they just keep owning wealth here forever. I expect that won't change until the UK gets an actual leftist government, which seems unlikely to happen in the next 10 years.

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    • quantumgarbage 13 hours ago

      Switzerland and Afghanistan have an almost equal Gini coefficient.

      My point is: the Gini coefficient might indicate what your country's income distribution looks like, it however does not tell anything about actual life conditions.

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      • jll29 10 hours ago

        Quality of life encompasses many factors, e.g.

          Switzerland has 98 days of maternity leave, 
  Afghanistan has 90(+15) days of maternity leave
  (Wikipedia even puts it at #1 worldwide with two years,
  but that may be incorrect?).

  In Switzerland, women have been able to vote since 1971.
  In Afghanistan, women have been able to vote since 1919
  (but interrupted during the *previous* Taliban regime).
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      • jolux 12 hours ago

        Sure but that’s a bit silly. Switzerland’s GDP is something like 50x that of Afghanistan. UK GDP in 2025 is much higher than in 2003, too. Of course not 5000%

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    • Earw0rm 2 hours ago

      Wealth has moved from public to private, and consumer spending from high streets to out-of-town shopping centres and Amazon, Deliveroo etc.

      Leaving a badly depleted public sphere.

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    • jdietrich 9 hours ago

      >What has actually changed?

      The value of grants paid from central government to local government have fallen by over 80%. In 2005, the poorest local authorities received most of their funding from central government; today, they're dependent on council tax and business rates for the vast majority of their income. During that time, demand for social care has vastly increased, disproportionately so in the poorest local authorities, eating away at the already shrinking resources of local authorities.

      The result of those cuts have been drastic for people living in poorer communities, particularly the poorest members of those communities. They quite justifiably feel abandoned by society. Youth clubs and children's centres, social work, homelessness provision, subsidised bus routes, parks and libraries have all been cut to the bone. None of that is captured in the Gini coefficient, but it's felt acutely by the people who rely on those services.

      The wealthy are largely unaffected by this, because they live in local authorities that were never particularly reliant on central government funding and because they never really relied on council services anyway. For the very poorest, the impact of austerity is often dominated by one big failure of provision - being stuck in unsuitable temporary accommodation for months or years because there's no social housing available, being denied support for a disabled child etc. For the majority, it's just a slow but pervasive erosion of their quality of life - their kids have nowhere to go after school, their street is full of potholes, the bus they take into town has been cut from four an hour to one an hour, their back alley is full of rubbish because the council can't afford to deal with fly-tipping.

      https://neweconomics.org/uploads/files/NEF_Local_Government_...

      https://www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/cbrwp51...

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    • graemep 11 hours ago

      The share of the middle 40% has fallen sharply according to the bottom chart on that page.

      The bottom 50% is unchanged in aggregate , but there will be groups within in that have done a lot worse.

      I would also guess (I cannot find numbers) that the proportion of income that is spent on essentials has risen.

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    • acatnamedjoe 9 hours ago

      I think the argument is less that inequality has increased overall, and more that the country is increasingly stratified by geography - with greater concentrations of wealth in the South East relative to the rest of the country.

      This is especially true in formerly undesirable areas of London (e.g. Hackney, #10 on the 2003 list) and towns within commuting distance of London (e.g. Hythe, #3).

      Presumably this is due to the gradual shift to a London-centric services economy as well as the increasingly ludicrous price of houses in Central London.

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    • darkwater 12 hours ago

      Oh, lies, damned lies and statistics. One could also say that the Gini coefficient rose, reached its peak ~2006 and now is going down...

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    • incangold 11 hours ago

      “About the same” is not “the same”, and there are tipping points. The gini coefficient has still seen a decent bump.

      But anyway, gini is a coarse measure. Look at the chart below that, showing income percentages going steadily upwards for the top 10 and 1%.

      Most worryingly, look at the decline of the middle 40%. A healthy middle class keeps countries stable. You need a good chunk of society who feel like the system works for them.

      And it’s not just perceptions, it’s fundamental stuff. A teacher could afford a house in the 90s; they can’t now. For all the boomers bang on about mobile phones and flat screen TVs, in the end those are luxuries compared to clean, secure accommodation. The days of getting a mortgage on one income, or having access to nice council housing are gone.

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    • JimDabell 13 hours ago

      Look at the graphs as a whole, not just individual points. Compare the 90s to the 10s.

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    • scotty79 3 hours ago

      Gini coefficient of what? Income or wealth?

      Is borrowing money with appreciating assets as collateral treated as income for purposes of thsese calculations?

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  • card_zero 12 hours ago

    Not sure about homelessness rising versus the 90s. Possibly the rate is similar to 1998. I looked at ourworldindata, but their graph only goes back to 2010. Wikipedia has wildly different figures from the charities Shelter and Crisis because they're counting different things. It then gives government figures: just over 100,000 in 1998, 135,000 in 2003, 40,000 in 2009 and 2010 (so ourworldindata gives a chart that begins with this low), and "record levels, with 104,510 people" in 2023, though that's less than 135,000 so the way in which this is a record is not specified.

    In summary, it goes up and down a lot, is counted in different ways, was (counted to be) far lower in 2010 (two years after the financial crisis?), but pretty much the same as now in 1998, although the kind of people who have an interest in saying "homelessness has hit record levels" are saying that homelessness has hit record levels.

    This makes me nostalgic for 1991 when the Big Issue was first published, and there were songs like Gypsy Woman by Crystal Waters and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl.

    Edit: was your "80s" a typo for "90s" perhaps?

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parpfish 15 hours ago

Well put.

A few decades of compounding inequality transforms what used to be good natured ribbing amongst chums into bullying.

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  • arrowsmith 15 hours ago

    What compounding inequality? The UK's Gini coefficient has been trending downwards since the global financial crisis.

    14 years of Conservative government made this country more equal, not less, because they flattened the income distribution by making everybody poorer.

    The big pattern among rich people in the UK nowadays is not that they're getting richer, it's that they're leaving.

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    • rhubarbtree 14 hours ago

      You’re looking at the wrong numbers. Wealth, not income. Wealth inequality is through the roof. Poverty is through the roof. More people using food banks than ever. More people on zero hours and low paid contracts.

      If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving, then you have no idea about the reality of living in the UK. Visiting some of the towns in this book would be a starting point.

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      • arrowsmith 13 hours ago

        > Poverty is through the roof. More people using food banks than ever. More people on zero hours and low paid contracts.

        Is that supposed to prove me wrong? I said that everybody is getting poorer.

        > Wealth inequality is through the roof.

        Wealth inequality, while high, is still roughly where it was in 2007. (Source: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk/)

        > If you think the problem with the UK is that rich people are leaving

        I said it's a problem, not the problem. And it's not just the ultra-rich who are leaving, but vast swathes of the middle classes. Many poor people would leave too if they had the means.

        You and the other replier seem to think I'm defending the status quo. How on earth did I imply that? You think I think it's a good thing for the entire country to get poorer?

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      • chgs 11 hours ago

        The problem in the U.K. is the availability of housing.

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        • arrowsmith 11 hours ago

          If only our problems could be reduced to a single "the".

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    • PaulRobinson 13 hours ago

      Go get an airbnb in a poor suburb for a few weeks and live there, talk to people, and ask them if they think they're more or less equal with other Britons in the last 15 years. Show them your Gini coefficient and see what they think of it. Ask them if they feel the income distribution has been flattened in a way that favours them.

      The rich people living here for the last 40 years all leaving does not bother most people. In fact, it's cause for celebration. They're leeches who don't pay tax on their piles of cash held in off-shore accounts - they just drive up the price of everything, particularly property. Meanwhile there are plenty of people trying to get here from the US to replace them who understand the purpose of capital is to put it to work and create jobs, not stare at it on a screen.

      Your kind of thinking is not unusual within centre right politics, but it's also why nationalist populism is a credible threat. Farage is currently favourite with most bookmakers to be next PM because of the kind of defence of Tory policy you're making. Please think on that.

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      • arrowsmith 13 hours ago

        Me: "The Tories made everyone poorer!"

        You: "How dare you defend the Tories?"

        Learn to read.

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    • chgs 11 hours ago

      The major change to income levels has been the massive increase in minimum wage. This removes the incentive to work hard and get skills because they aren’t valued, especially outside of London.

      The other major change is the continual divergence of wealth.

      If you are a 20 year old living near London you can get a crap paying junior job and live rent free for 5 years with parents while you save a 100k deposit (which using things like LISAs).

      By the time you’re in your early 30s you have a decent paying job, have met a partner with a similar income, and can buy a house and repeat the cycle.

      If you don’t you get the same job but have to pay rent to someone else’s parents, and you never get that deposit, so you’re trapped in the rent cycle.

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      • taurath 10 hours ago

        Shocking how similar the fates of the US and the UK are similar. I’m in my 30s and the divergence is starting to become extremely stark between people who had middle class financially supportive parents and those who didn’t.

        Kids who’s parents who are well off but wouldn’t pay for college is an entire cohort who are functionally locked out of the housing market. For most of my generation, there is little opportunity, only gatekeeping.

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      • arrowsmith 10 hours ago

        We've also seen a huge compression in net income as the tax thresholds haven't kept up with inflation. So someone who paid a 20% marginal rate twenty years ago is now paying 40% on the same real-terms income. And the 0% personal allowance has been eroded too.

        Not to mention the 60% effective marginal rate between £100k and £125k - 69% if you have student debt, oh and that's not even counting employee's NICs.

        And don't get me started on the stealth tax that is employer's NICs. (Those were just increased even further, and the morons are all defending it by pretending it doesn't come from wages... where exactly do they think the employer gets the money from?)

        Plus all the insane traps where earning extra money can actually reduce your net income. E.g. there are situations in which increasing your salary by £1 can leave you thousands of pounds poorer because certain benefits are withdrawn with a cliff.

        What's the point in working harder? You'd think that with such eye-wateringly high levels of taxation, we'd at least have something to show for it in the public sector, but... okay, I need to stop writing now for the sake of my blood pressure.

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        • chgs 10 hours ago

          Everyone goes on about the 100k issue. For 10 years I paid 60% between 50 and 60k due to child tax. The child tax has recently shifted to between 60k and 80k and reduced so it’s now about 51% (plus student loans)

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  • nickdothutton 10 hours ago

    The chief economist of the resolution foundation spoke about this quite eloquently. The divide began in the 80 with the “new industries” (finance, pharma, technology, telecoms), it’s just that it is less visible during good times. When the tide retreats it uncovers the ugly rocks and the unevenness of the underlying strata.

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tomaytotomato 11 hours ago

> in some places they have been replaced by artisan bakeries and pop-up boutiques, while in others they have been replaced by charity shops or nothing at all.

Charity shops, vape shops (used for money laundering), Turkish Barbers (used for money laundering), Automated Laundrettes (used for money laundering), Car Washes (used for money laundering), Phone shops (used for money laundering), Kebab shops (used for money laundering)

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  • TheOtherHobbes 9 hours ago

    Banks and privatised utilities (used for money laundering.) Politicians (used for money laundering.)

    This is the UK's entire economy now - extracting the wealth of the people who work in the UK and moving it to foreign owners.

    London looks rich because some of the money sticks to the sides while it's passing through, but it's still being siphoned from the provinces through the City and out - to tax havens, foreign mafias, foreign aristocrats, and giant foreign corporations.

    It's important the population isn't allowed to understand that the UK is a colonised country. So there's a huge media machine making sure the peasants blame "immigrants" for small-scale criminality, and poor people for being feckless and unproductive. It's useful to make sure everyone keeps fighting about racism/immigration and gender issues to keep them from looking at structural economics and the destruction of democracy.

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    • throwaway2562 2 hours ago

      How can invest in money laundering? Serious question. No crypto please, I do have some limits.

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  • switch007 9 hours ago

    We really do excel at money laundering. Go UK !

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amelius an hour ago

> but the majority of towns belonged to the same broad spectrum of bland mediocrity

Isn't it to be expected that the majority of X are average (mediocre)? I mean, you could have a statistically skewed distribution, but would that be very desirable?

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tarkin2 10 hours ago

> We all know that we're teetering on the brink of a populist wave, but no-one in a position of power seems willing or able to do anything about it.

This, I believe, is because the problem is psychological more than political: social division and alienation.

Of course, an increase in economic prosperity will lessen populism.

But if people continue to be alienated then they will be drawn to populists offering collective causes against perceived wrongdoers.

The large majority of online activities increase social alienation and social division.

Local, apolitical activities that breed cohension rather than division will decrease the psychological benefits that populism offers the alienated. I see no other solution.

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eleveriven 4 hours ago

If you recognize deep inequality but feel powerless (or complicit), doubling down on seriousness might feel like the only "responsible" move.

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Neil44 13 hours ago

That seems an extremely cynical take to me, I don't think that's true at all. It divides people into monoliths and makes assumptions then uses those assumptions to restrict and hold back.

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brickfaced an hour ago

It's characteristic that your comment says nothing about mass migration, cultural dispossession, and ethnic alienation, for example the Muslim grooming gangs which have gang-raped and abused at least tens, and possibly hundreds of thousands of white British girls:

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/grooming-gang-victim-i...

If the English were doing this to Pakistanis or Nigerians in their own countries you'd be protesting for their deportation and removal.

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rvz an hour ago

But we were promised that "AGI" will save us and humanity and AI will be able to clean up the crap towns and turn them into cool towns.

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zmgsabst 15 hours ago

I’d argue that your last paragraph has the cause-and-effect reversed:

We’re entering into a populist phase because the managerial class is incapable of addressing the problems experienced by most people — so they’re going to try dismantling the current elite systems and rebuilding them. To say that the problem is elites inability to suppress populism is to miss that the elites own chronic failures is what caused the populist surge.

Similar to populist waves circa 1900, where aristocratic systems were replaced with managerialism via populist revolts. Now, managerialism has failed so we’re again seeing the stirrings of change. At a broad scale, communism, fascism, and progressivism were all different technocratic managerial solutions to the problems and excesses of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

I think it’ll be interesting to see what comes next.

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  • ffsm8 14 hours ago

    The only issue is that - in the past - weapons had to be wielded by people. The same working people that revolted.

    There is very strong evidence that this will not be the case by the time this wave you have imagined gets really rolling.

    I hope it does not happen for decades yet, because frankly: I cannot see the working class (of which I am part of) win that conflict.

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    • graemep 10 hours ago

      Change does not have to be violent, let alone be a violent internal conflict.

      I think between the rise of China, America's reaction to it, and the general shift in economic power to Asia from the west, and the lack of trust in government in the west, things will change.

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    • zmgsabst 14 hours ago

      Currently, weapons and logistics are not automated to that extent; I don’t think it’s meaningful to guess about decades from now, given the current flux.

      I’d argue that your perspective means that the time to revolt is now (ie, next few years) — while the technical and social systems are in mutual flux and before a new regime solidifies. A regime that might be more autocratic totalitarian in nature (as you suggest will be the case).

      People will reasonably come to different conclusions.

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h2zizzle 4 hours ago

Yet another signal of the sad state of affairs is that you probably genuinely think we're "on the brink" and not well over the cliff, Wile E.-style. Buildings burned during leftist protests (whether or not leftists actually set the fires is up for debate), and the Capital was ransacked by a mob looking to overthrow an election.

That was half a decade ago.

The interim has consisted of a corrupt centrist presidential administration that spent most of its time denying that things are getting worse ("It's not a recession"; "We didn't fumble the Afghanistan draw-down"; "Those weren't significant bank failures"; "That's not a genocide"), followed by a corrupt fascist admin that is openly dedicated to making things worse.

All the while, the intellectuals who understand what is happening - not just what will happen, what is happening - have been begging anyone who will listen to take the situation seriously - to understand that their attempted conservation of the previous normal is actually vascillation, while the ground falls out from under us. But my property values! But my American dream! But my rules-based order! They're already dead. And we can't start rebuilding until people with money and influence face it.

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  • frereubu an hour ago

    I think you're from the USA and the commenter you're replying to is British, which probably explains the difference. Those shop names are recognisably British.

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bufferoverflow 14 hours ago

[flagged]

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  • okkdev 10 hours ago

    How is this your #1 problem? We have so much serious issues and you are hung up on women having sex? Let them fuck how much they want. Nobody stopped men from fucking and if it works, doesn't that indicate a different problem?

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  • graemep 10 hours ago

    There is more to puritanical attitudes than sex. It generally means anti-pleasure.

    One thing the real puritans are against that people have turned against very strongly is alcohol. It never stopped being a problem in the US, of course, but there are far more preachy teetotalers in the UK than there used to be, and government policy is very anti too.

    Then there is the push for achievement and the acquisition of wealth. You are supposed to dedicate your life to the cause of high achievement, rather than stop to enjoy it.

    Sex acts online actually fit in with all this as they are safe and controlled alternative to enjoying sex in real life.

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  • taurath 10 hours ago

    The amount of people having sex has dropped quite a bit in the last decade.

    People get into sex work for money - they can’t afford rent.

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  • Smithalicious 9 hours ago

    Girls are having sex with 1000 guys a day and some people clearly still aren't getting any... Inequality in theUUK is even worse than I thought :(

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  • pydry 14 hours ago

    puritanism is often linked to a backlash against this type of thing.

    Weimar berlin was very open about this stuff too and was followed by a puritanical backlash. The world feels like it is going through something very similar.

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  • Spivak 14 hours ago

    These are… specific examples. Something on your mind? Puritanical cultures do have an association with being sex-negative lack of a better term because purity culture sounds circular. But they're far from the only aspect of culture that can embody puritan thinking.

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  • khazhoux 14 hours ago

    They've been a naughty girls, they let their knickers down!

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throwaway519 15 hours ago

A popular protestantism is not a bandwagon the current political circus troupe will fit on.

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