This is quite darkly hilarious tbh. And consistent with my experience of Blackpool.
I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself to a fish-and-chip shop, feeling like a silly city boy in a greasy gritty concrete town. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember walking, late evening, lonely, on a bridge over the railtrack. The entire place felt deserted, metallic and concrete.
I went back to my room and ate the oily chips on my bed. After the first day with an old crusty – but perfectly lovely driving instructor – and a rather large heavy-haulage driver who was renewing a license, we went out for some drinks. Beers. Lots of beer. And they took me to a gay club – of which there are oddly many in Blackpool – because they thought it'd be a laugh. It was actually a massive spectacle for me. It was the first time I saw older men kissing, right there, by the entrance on a old tawdry sofa. I was still on a journey of coming out, so it felt oddly enlightening or validating or something. It was an old-england gay club – the type you hear about in the era of stonewall.
The entire town was like a time capsule to a poorer apocalyptic britain. Betting shops, cheap nail salons, boarded up derelict buildings everywhere! Even the beach was deserted. It reflected the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK. It felt like a shadow of its former self, but somehow, there was a old english magic to it that I can still feel. My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me, but I remember it fondly.
So yeh I think I understand this SLS thing. In places like Blackpool – forgotten remnants - you can feel the depression in the paving stones – the grey withering vitality – swallowing you whole.
> the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK
I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous.
Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London?
It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make good places to buy property. Surely, on the whole, they have more natural beauty than inland areas.
The advent of cheap flights made holidays within Europe affordable to most people. As a consequence, traditional UK holiday destinations became much less popular. Over time old-fashioned guest houses, B&Bs and cheap hotels transitioned into very low cost housing for people with 'problems'. The inevitable doom spiral began...
Destinations on the South Coast were not affected in the same way though and have remained a popular choice with more affluent clientele.
As others have said I’m not sure it’s right to say that all of the British coast is run down but there are a few common modes of failed places on the coast.
Fishing ports which now have few fishers left. Long term decline due to overfishing along with Brexit making it hard for them to sell their catch to markets in EU. Grimsby.
The Victorian seaside mass resorts that lost out to cheap foreign holidays. Blackpool.
Places like Cornwall which are full of second homes and outwardly look very nice but mask deep poverty as there is little affordable housing and few good jobs.
Also the definition of coastal is different in the UK, an island with nowhere more than 70 miles from the sea. Washington DC is 85 miles from the Atlantic but still populated by the ‘coastal elite’.
In modern time, coastal areas prosper when they have a desirable climate (moderate temperatures buffered by water) or concentrate commerce (e.g. shipping port, especially deep water).
A bunch of the coastal towns in the UK offer neither. They have a legacy of things like small fishing operations, which was significantly more valuable in the past when food was more scarce and fisheries were healthier.
Cheap flights and cheap - and reliably warm - holidays in Spain ruined the British seaside town, which were largely reliant on tourism once fishing was taken out of the equation (assuming fishing was in it at all originally).
Anyone living there with any skills or potential have to leave to get good jobs elsewhere. Typical brain drain and related decline.
I don't think it's accurate to say that all coastal towns in the UK are doing badly - I can't help noticing there here on the east of Scotland you have on different sides of the Firth of Forth Methil, which is deprived, and North Berwick which is doing very nicely.
Different histories, reliance on different industries, quality of transport links make a huge difference.
Not even all coastal "tourist" towns are doing badly - I live near Burntisland in Fife which actually seems to be thriving, probably because of the excellent location for commuting by train into Edinburgh, combined with nice beaches, great views (of Edinburgh!)...
Beautifully put, an answer approaching literature. I have the same feelings about Blackpool.
Coastal towns really are monuments to another time. The houses are beautiful, too - a two bedroom flat in one of the old guesthouses on the sea front with bay windows is a steal in most towns, if you can cope with the town itself.
Scarborough is another one. It was clearly so much more full of life than it is now, but its status as an elder resort is part of its charm. The poverty, so much not.
Your description of Blackpool is both eloquent and absolutely spot on!
I suggested to my friend that we go there for his stag do; and even for the debauchery of a stag do it felt a bit too grim! To the point that I felt guilty for suggesting it.
My parents used to take me for our "exotic foreign holiday" in Blackpool each year (I was from Scotland).
I actually have many happy memories from the time. There was the Doctor Who Exhibition we went to once - nothing even remotely like that anywhere near my home town. Then there was the Blackpool Tower. My parents used to complain about how expensive it was to get in, and I think we only went there once, but on that one trip me and my dad went to see a laser light show set to music (so futuristic!) and also went to a stall that used a video camera hooked up to one of those new fangled computer things that could print out an ASCII art picture of your face (such mind bogglingly advanced technology!) Also the arcades. Again they cost money so it was rare we'd go in, but there was once I was given money to try a grabbing claw machine, and won a pack of sweets. My parents thought I was good at them, and so gave me money to try and win something for my sister, which was a huge boost to my confidence (finally something I was better than my sister at!) Unfortunately I didn't manage to win anything for my sister. It was only decades later that I found out that those machines aren't skill based - there's a dial inside where the operator can control the "payout rate", i.e. the percentage of times the claw goes limp vs stays rigid. (Another childhood illusion shattered.)
Anyway, maybe that was before it got too grim, or maybe I didn't notice because I was so young, or maybe I just thought that was what England was like:-)
One awful thing I remember though was just how filthy the beaches were. The coast was lined with sewerage outlets, so where-ever you swam there would be all sorts of things floating by. Once I picked up what I thought was a funny shaped balloon and started filling it with water and playing with it. I went to show my mum how I could make the balloon bigger by squeezing it, but she just looked horrified and bashed it out of my hand. I had no idea why, but didn't ask, and just kept quiet. I did however wonder what it could have been that was so bad, but the best my innocent young mind could think of was that perhaps it was some form of artificial breast for breast feeding, given it was skin coloured and had a teat at the end. It wasn't until many years later that I realised what it almost certainly was.
Having worked on quite a few of those claw machines that made their way in to arcades around the UK and Europe back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, there were a variety of variables we, as software developers, could control, from the ramp up and down of the motors that controlled how fast the claw moved, to how much lag was introduced when responding to your joystick/button input, to how "grippy" the claw retraction was, to how strong the grip remained over time. These made for a more exciting game, which were then translated into a simple user interface consisting of a few dip switches or a trimmable pot that the owner/operator could tweak.
Please tell me that writing is a substantial part of your daily work! Or at least that you're prolific outside of your professional commitments? This was written so well..a real delight to read.
I specifically went to Sheerness to go and see the UK’s only scorpion population. A local copper saw me, asked what I was doing, and offered to get his massive UV light out of his car. Saw quite a few!
But yes, otherwise all rather run down. The extreme wealth discrepancy was an eye opener.
Poverty is extremely harsh on people. And when I was much younger (<15), like many adults now think, I used to think that poverty is the lack of power of buying expensive things. But as I have grown up, I realized that poverty is extremely harsh.
For example, relevant to the submission, is healthcare. Healthcare in India is theoretically free in government hospitals. But in most places the state of these hospitals is horrific, and getting treatment is very hard due to corruption.
But the bigger issue is opportunity cost. People who live based on daily earnings, cannot afford to go to hospitals abandoning their work as they cannot ensure next day's food. So, unless it happens to be someone young, people don't seek treatment at all. And visiting a proper doctor and buying meds take away ~10 days' income. Really unaffordable for poor people.
So, even people in their forties and fifties decide to wait it out, and easily curable ailments get chronic and beyond cure. Women fare worse than men.
Real victims are old people, and nobody bothers to spend money and weeks of their time to get them to treatment. They wither, and die without treatment. I have seen at least a dozen people die like this.
I think, the cause of SLS is opportunity cost. People often die, and more often suffer for decades from easily curable diseases because they cannot really afford either the time or money to get treatment.
I also know at least a dozen people who have something chronic, but get no treatment at all because they cannot afford it.
What you describe is a real, severe, and tragic impact of crippling poverty, but I think “SLS” is highlighting something related yet more subtle.
From what I can construct, it’s referring to people who are able to meet their basic needs, but are slowly destroying themselves in ways no doctor or medicine can fix. They appear to be able to help themselves, but don’t, because the weight of it all is too much. They could quit smoking, or quit painkillers, or quit sugar, but they just don’t, and it’s because they feel hopeless. The cards are stacked against them, they’ve practically given up, and - critically - given their circumstances, who could blame them?
For example, usually we think of depression as irrational, abnormal, and so antidepressants are a way of correcting your thinking. Except, for someone with “SLS”, maybe depression is actually a perfectly appropriate response to their life circumstances rather than temporary aberrant neurology.
I am very sorry if I could not frame my comment better.
What I didn't write explicitly, but vainly assumed that people will read between the lines.
The people I describe also suffer from SLS exactly because what you say.
Their lives are full of bad practices like alcoholism, not seeking medical health, choosing cheap and unhealthy choices whenever possible. Because of the weight.
You described it well. I assumed that people will get it- SLS is a result of helplessness at the extremes.
Another commenter wrote about the role of religion. I also think it plays a somewhat positive role.
At least in my state, days of Brahminical oppression are over. And the role of religion and social rules are positives.
This is a terribly sad phenomenon - I've noted it too in small-town-my-native-country. I've always understood it as closer to social murder [1] than shit life syndrome, though, but there is certainly considerable overlap.
Thanks for the note on life around you. I think something you touch on here is physical health. But my reading of the Wikipedia article is SLS profoundly about mental well being and the toll of neglect, abuse, and crushing poverty has on overall health and quantity of life due to the lack of well being.
Would you mind expanding your story of life in your area on that dimension? How does this harshness play out for the people as people, less about their ability to get physical health care, but how does the harshness degrade their lives as humans?
Personally I think that aspect is more locked in to the aging of the post-World power great expectations of “up and to the right.”
If people have never had decent health care, and their classmates from school haven’t either, then how are they meant to move into something as rarefied as self-assessed mental health? That is something that people with too much time and not enough existential threat get up to.
I am sorry as I closed the Incognito window and lost the previous account. I have no way of proving I am the same person. But I will answer your question.
What I described, is true for the bottom 30-40% of the people. And many people who'd get treatment for one acute illness will try to suppress a chronic one.
People of course don't realize that they are very miserable. They take this as a given. You have a curable chronic illness that requires spending weeks in a hospital and 3-4x of your monthly income? You just choose to die slowly with locally sourced meds that suppress the symptoms. People become sad and gloomy, but are not totally lost unless they happen to be very young. Young people do get treatment.
If there is no illness, they just go by regularly with their lives. Domestic violence towards women is rampant and very common among the very poor. Negligence towards old people's health is comparatively more common. Child marriage is still common.
If you are asking if they become gloomy like Dostoyevsky's characters, then no. They are far away from that. They spend disproportionately in religious festivals. Although Hindu, their worshipped deities are not mainstream, for the lack of a better word. Poor Muslims fare worse. Muslims spend big, too.
They are happy, regular people. Very pious, except when it comes to corruption. Poor or rich, ~99% people will take the opportunity of corruption if they have the chance.
And the poor are less sensitive to social stigma.
But, I have seen a large number of people uplifted from poverty. Indian economic growth is not a dummy one. There are visibly much less poor people that there were ~15 years ago.
I live in an old neighborhood (thanks to remote work trend when I entered the job market in 2021). The neighboring locality is of poor people's. If you took a walk there (we all have amiable relationships and don't live in segregated manner), you will see brick houses (pucca), motorbikes, well furnished houses. If you took the same walk 15 years ago, you would have seen much more poverty. People are uplifted out of poverty. No doubts.
India is still power bipolar. Poor people have no power. And a powerful person (mostly politically) can get what you have. This, too, people see as a way of life. They don't know better. So, big fish eats small fish is still very true in India- unless you are a white collar middle class person.
Edit: these people are very patriarchal, don't believe in personal liberty at all, so, modern values that we hold dear are absent.
I belong to a old, upper middle class family, and can live my way, or otherwise I would be fighting to escape this place as soon as possible.
Small town UK is not small town India kind of poor. I give it about 25 years at the current relative rates of progress.
In the case of UK's SLS, it's more that the (in many cases) treatable medical conditions are the end-stage manifestation of something else. And the NHS still, for example, expects people to modify their lifestyles to manage the worst effects of Type 2 diabetes; inherent to SLS is the fact that people with shit lives find such lifestyle modifications impossible.
Poverty is the lack of a buffer between you and entropy. It's rarely defined broadly enough.
It's a reduction in the margin for error that we require to exist.
Entropy is always grinding away at our attempts to order, to organize. Which is a requirement for us to exist for any meaningful duration. Poverty is the lack of a buffer against that force always trying to break down aspects of our organization.
If you lack poverty, and your car tire ruptures, you can replace it in order to continue getting to work every day. In poverty, entropy wins that battle, it grinds you down. Now you can't even get to work to try to make ends meet. Every aspect of poverty is similarly encompassed by this principle in action. Would you like nice vacations out of country for rest and relaxation and or new experiences? In poverty you face the daily erosion of entropy, unabated. No break or stimulation for you. Want access to the best medical specialists in the world? In poverty, you won't get it typically. Entropy is trying to kill you (not with homicidal intent, just inadvertently as it grinds away at order), with affluence you have a far better chance of surviving serious medical events (with or without universal healthcare).
In the poorest nations, the buffer between people and entropy is almost always very small. That usually covers food security, political stability, human rights. Affluence almost always purchases access to enormous entropy buffers, including access to nations with superior human rights, superior political stability, and so on.
The UK has typically had the highest levels of income inequality in Europe.
A previous Prime Minister had been quoted 'A pound spent in Croydon is far more of value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde', Croydon being in London and Strathclyde being an administrative area in West Scotland that ceased to exist in 1975. The quote was from 2012.
WFH has allowed me to continue working from rural Scotland, to be honest I thought COVID would radically transform society's thinking and our requirement to be in high GDP areas for certain lines of work. Doesn't seem to have had quite the impact it was supposed to.
That's how infrastructure projects are prioritised in the UK. Return on the pound. The south east returns something like 10x the investment versus the north of England.
Just look at HS2 - everything north and north east of Birmingham has effectively been cancelled, leaving yet another "national" infrastructure project serving only London.
This Government, or the previous one, or the previous one, ad nauseam, continually fail to invest in the north, and north east. In fact the last major national infrastructure in those regions would be the building of the motorways. (edit) And just look at the North East, Sedgefield had Labour PM Tony Blair, Hartlepool had MP and cabinet member Peter Mandelson, and yet the investment there during that 15 year period was negligible. It's a London-based Government thing, not a political thing.
If you're not "close" to London, you're going to be poor by comparison.
Bringing Newcastle closer to Leeds by faster road and rail, and hence York, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and the Potteries, would hugely increase economic productivity in the North of England.
I too hope that WFH will redistribute the wealth around the UK.
I hate the fact that we have an idiotic adversarial political system. Which ever party is in power is invariably hamstrung by the opposition voting the other way just 'because', is pathetically childish. The best time to build infrastructure was yesterday.
> Which ever party is in power is invariably hamstrung by the opposition voting the other way just 'because'
As the other comment has pointed out, this is irrelevant: in practice, as with Brexit, a majority of 1 can let you do almost _anything_ in the British constitution.
No, the real constraint is either internal opposition - party infighting - or what the newspapers will hammer you for.
Many of the UK's most depressed towns voted for Brexit, seemingly in the belief this might mean funding diverted towards them. It did not, because why would it? Nobody cared about them before, nobody cares about them after. Only marginal constituencies matter.
They're almost never hamstrung by the opposition voting against them. If they didn't have a majority, they wouldn't be the government. Right now the majority is, what, 80? They could pass anything they wanted.
> Sunak said: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure areas like [Tunbridge Wells, Kent] are getting the funding they deserved. We inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”
Although Croydon is a London borough, it's quite far outside of central London, to the point that it doesn't really feel part of London. It's also quite a deprived area. So that quote is weird on a number of levels!
The average "Index of Multiple Deprivation" [1] for Croydon is about 14,000, where every area (of some equal population size) is ranked from 1 to 32,884. Very roughly average for England.
Scotland isn't included, so I can't compare Strathclyde, but Blackpool's average is 5,900 — and includes 8 of the 10 most deprived places in the country.
Only one bit of London (part of Haringey) makes the top 1000. Only 106 bits of London (out of 4685) make the top 10%.
"Both Croydon and Strathclyde are shit places, but Croydon is a little less shit. By spending that pound in Croydon we can hopefully avoid it becoming Strathclyde"
I think his general idea was that money invested in London was of greater economic benefit to the whole country than investing the same amount elsewhere.
I'd say my hometown in middle America is significantly affected by Shit Life Syndrome.
Thanks to my career in tech I broke out of that and moved away, but I've definitely had my seasons back at home where I get sucked into the Shit Life Syndrome around me.
I had some post-Covid health issues and spent a month back in my hometown to recover. But after a month I couldn't stand to be around so many struggling people while I was struggling myself.
So I went back to my cosmopolitan life and surrounded myself with people who are doing well.
I still have my health issues, but surrounding myself with people who are doing well has been much more tolerable for me than sitting stuck in Shit Life Syndrome in my hometown.
I don't know what the solution is for places that have SLS, but for individual people, the best advice I can give is, to the best of your ability, surround yourself with people who are doing well.
I don't know what the solution is for places that have SLS
I don’t have a real solution either, but it seems like it would either need to involve a managed wind-down of towns in gradual, permanent decline, or somehow propping them up in perpetuity.
Some towns may just not make sense anymore. But for one reason or another, whether the problem is disappearing economic opportunity or changing climate, there’s no way to cleanly move on. There’s some discussion of this concept now under the moniker “managed retreat”, but we still need to figure out how to avoid stranding the most vulnerable.
I hope there comes a day when the rich and influential look for the next money-making venture in which to invest in, see only a sea of machine-generated uncertainty on the stock market, and decide "actually, the most profitable thing I can do to protect my wealth is to invest it in the public"
I hope there comes a day when using the money hoarded by the rich and influential to invest in the public, does not depend on the rich and influential choosing to do so out of a desire for maximal profits, or even benevolence.
TBH, I doubt it. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your values. Heck, I'm even called 'woke' by most people around me. Yet I understand that in this day in age, thanks to cryptocurrency, money is and will be a private matter. No government will be able to confiscate your wealth, at least to the extent that your wealth doesn't depend on assets related with the government (e.g. real estate is related given that you need to pay taxes to maintain it).
That’s basically every rich lefty. “I’m rich” -> “I gotta vote for small government and low taxes” is not an obvious step to me at all. I’d much rather live in a town with happy people, low crime and high income equality than in a gated community full of rich people with guards and fences to keep the bums out.
Maybe find a way to inspire in the rich the kind of philanthropy practiced by Andrew Carnegie. He wrote his views in, The Gospel of Wealth - not having read it, but having long heard Carnegie's name as an example of wealth turned to good, I'm planning to give it a read.
Unfortunately with a political system wholly owned by the wealthy (US), I fear that there may be more truth than I want in my father's admonition that things will never get better in this country until we have another revolution. I've been around a bit and so much of today seems to be a rinse and repeat of the issues I experienced when I was young - not the world I wanted to see for my daughter. Hopefully the next generation has a stronger backbone - mine and the couple after seem to have surrendered our dreams to greed and consumerism.
The uncertainty of the stock market doesn't really matter. The M3 in the UK went up around 25% over the last 3 years. So the major concern when choosing where to invest is whether the assets are optimally positioned to benefit from the growth in the money supply. Physical reality is still a concern of course.
Although arguably rich and influential are investing in the public; the UK government spending makes up about half the GDP and the wealthy are paying what I gather is a 40% income tax.
The top marginal rate of income tax (above c122k of income since this year) is 45%. On top of that, if you are employed and below state pension age then you also pay employee National Insurance of 2% and your employer also pays 13.8%. So for every additional £1 spent on salary and payroll taxes by an employer, c.53.4% goes on direct taxation.
Rates are actually even higher between 100-122k because although the income tax rate is 40%, ie 5%pts lower, the zero-rate band ("Personal Allowance") is simultaneously withdrawn by 50p for every pound earned - meaning effectively the rate is 60% and employees get to keep just over 33% of each additional pound the employer spends on salary and payroll taxes.
On the other hand, if you can take all of your money in capital gains, you'll be taxed at a top rate of 20% (or 28% for real estate and carried interest), with no payroll taxes. So the system heavily incentivises risk taking.
Its in the interest of the rich to exploit the poor; corner markets, destroy competition (I.e. welfare), price gouge. Hopefully a day will come that the future happens so fast that the rich cannot predict the market, and that the only way to secure their wealth is to invest in public services which will have some guarantee of being used.
There's an interesting dog-that-didn't-bark: the word "meth" does not appear. The drug is still not common in the UK[1]. Blackpool has precisely the demographic makeup where, if it were in America, it would be flooded with meth dealers and addicts, and become magnitudes worse than it already is.
I dread the day that drug finally makes landfall here. It will sweep through our urban underclass like the Black Death.
Nor fentanyl. Probably because while heroin is a thing, it tends to stay in its rather particular niche.
I'm not a believer in gateway drugs generally, but the prescription opioid hell that exists in the US never really took off here. A problem yes, but not a society-wrecking scale. Mostly because doctors are much less free-and-easy with prescribing the stuff, and can't easily be bribed by drugco's to do so as they were in the US.
> Blackpool exports healthy skilled people and imports the unskilled, the unemployed and the unwell. As people overlooked by the modern economy wash up in a place that has also been left behind, the result is a quietly unfolding health crisis.
I used to date someone from a small city in Northeast United States, and when I visited and met her friends and extended social network, this was the impression I got. The ambitious and privileged ones aspired to leave and never look back, while others remained to make the best of their city while taking care of aging loved ones. Half of the people I met had some awful family story (alcoholic and/or abusive parents, drug-addicted siblings, father in prison, etc.) Job prospects were dire. Monuments to that were abandoned and sometimes burned down factories that lined some of the streets in parts of the city. It's all very sad.
They probably have bits of footage from British TV companies, who are fine licencing them to be shown abroad, but have either already sold an exclusive licence for UK broadcast or want to keep that option available to them.
Readit News
I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself to a fish-and-chip shop, feeling like a silly city boy in a greasy gritty concrete town. Stuck out like a sore thumb. I remember walking, late evening, lonely, on a bridge over the railtrack. The entire place felt deserted, metallic and concrete.
I went back to my room and ate the oily chips on my bed. After the first day with an old crusty – but perfectly lovely driving instructor – and a rather large heavy-haulage driver who was renewing a license, we went out for some drinks. Beers. Lots of beer. And they took me to a gay club – of which there are oddly many in Blackpool – because they thought it'd be a laugh. It was actually a massive spectacle for me. It was the first time I saw older men kissing, right there, by the entrance on a old tawdry sofa. I was still on a journey of coming out, so it felt oddly enlightening or validating or something. It was an old-england gay club – the type you hear about in the era of stonewall.
The entire town was like a time capsule to a poorer apocalyptic britain. Betting shops, cheap nail salons, boarded up derelict buildings everywhere! Even the beach was deserted. It reflected the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK. It felt like a shadow of its former self, but somehow, there was a old english magic to it that I can still feel. My nostalgia is probably getting the better of me, but I remember it fondly.
So yeh I think I understand this SLS thing. In places like Blackpool – forgotten remnants - you can feel the depression in the paving stones – the grey withering vitality – swallowing you whole.
> the same depressing crumbling economy of coastal towns all over the UK
I'm surprised to hear that coastal towns in the UK are doing poorly. In North America, it's generally the coastal areas that are more prosperous.
Was it overbuilding during the era of British sea power? Or a great sucking-up of wealth by London?
It makes me wonder if, long term, seaside areas would make good places to buy property. Surely, on the whole, they have more natural beauty than inland areas.
Destinations on the South Coast were not affected in the same way though and have remained a popular choice with more affluent clientele.
Fishing ports which now have few fishers left. Long term decline due to overfishing along with Brexit making it hard for them to sell their catch to markets in EU. Grimsby.
The Victorian seaside mass resorts that lost out to cheap foreign holidays. Blackpool.
Places like Cornwall which are full of second homes and outwardly look very nice but mask deep poverty as there is little affordable housing and few good jobs.
Also the definition of coastal is different in the UK, an island with nowhere more than 70 miles from the sea. Washington DC is 85 miles from the Atlantic but still populated by the ‘coastal elite’.
A bunch of the coastal towns in the UK offer neither. They have a legacy of things like small fishing operations, which was significantly more valuable in the past when food was more scarce and fisheries were healthier.
Anyone living there with any skills or potential have to leave to get good jobs elsewhere. Typical brain drain and related decline.
Different histories, reliance on different industries, quality of transport links make a huge difference.
Not even all coastal "tourist" towns are doing badly - I live near Burntisland in Fife which actually seems to be thriving, probably because of the excellent location for commuting by train into Edinburgh, combined with nice beaches, great views (of Edinburgh!)...
Coastal towns really are monuments to another time. The houses are beautiful, too - a two bedroom flat in one of the old guesthouses on the sea front with bay windows is a steal in most towns, if you can cope with the town itself.
Scarborough is another one. It was clearly so much more full of life than it is now, but its status as an elder resort is part of its charm. The poverty, so much not.
I suggested to my friend that we go there for his stag do; and even for the debauchery of a stag do it felt a bit too grim! To the point that I felt guilty for suggesting it.
My parents used to take me for our "exotic foreign holiday" in Blackpool each year (I was from Scotland).
I actually have many happy memories from the time. There was the Doctor Who Exhibition we went to once - nothing even remotely like that anywhere near my home town. Then there was the Blackpool Tower. My parents used to complain about how expensive it was to get in, and I think we only went there once, but on that one trip me and my dad went to see a laser light show set to music (so futuristic!) and also went to a stall that used a video camera hooked up to one of those new fangled computer things that could print out an ASCII art picture of your face (such mind bogglingly advanced technology!) Also the arcades. Again they cost money so it was rare we'd go in, but there was once I was given money to try a grabbing claw machine, and won a pack of sweets. My parents thought I was good at them, and so gave me money to try and win something for my sister, which was a huge boost to my confidence (finally something I was better than my sister at!) Unfortunately I didn't manage to win anything for my sister. It was only decades later that I found out that those machines aren't skill based - there's a dial inside where the operator can control the "payout rate", i.e. the percentage of times the claw goes limp vs stays rigid. (Another childhood illusion shattered.)
Anyway, maybe that was before it got too grim, or maybe I didn't notice because I was so young, or maybe I just thought that was what England was like:-)
One awful thing I remember though was just how filthy the beaches were. The coast was lined with sewerage outlets, so where-ever you swam there would be all sorts of things floating by. Once I picked up what I thought was a funny shaped balloon and started filling it with water and playing with it. I went to show my mum how I could make the balloon bigger by squeezing it, but she just looked horrified and bashed it out of my hand. I had no idea why, but didn't ask, and just kept quiet. I did however wonder what it could have been that was so bad, but the best my innocent young mind could think of was that perhaps it was some form of artificial breast for breast feeding, given it was skin coloured and had a teat at the end. It wasn't until many years later that I realised what it almost certainly was.
That they forgot to close down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0LeL9BUPtA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarfolk
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/u2vu5x/i_thi...
But yes, otherwise all rather run down. The extreme wealth discrepancy was an eye opener.
Nicotine is odourless.
Dead Comment
Poverty is extremely harsh on people. And when I was much younger (<15), like many adults now think, I used to think that poverty is the lack of power of buying expensive things. But as I have grown up, I realized that poverty is extremely harsh.
For example, relevant to the submission, is healthcare. Healthcare in India is theoretically free in government hospitals. But in most places the state of these hospitals is horrific, and getting treatment is very hard due to corruption.
But the bigger issue is opportunity cost. People who live based on daily earnings, cannot afford to go to hospitals abandoning their work as they cannot ensure next day's food. So, unless it happens to be someone young, people don't seek treatment at all. And visiting a proper doctor and buying meds take away ~10 days' income. Really unaffordable for poor people.
So, even people in their forties and fifties decide to wait it out, and easily curable ailments get chronic and beyond cure. Women fare worse than men.
Real victims are old people, and nobody bothers to spend money and weeks of their time to get them to treatment. They wither, and die without treatment. I have seen at least a dozen people die like this.
I think, the cause of SLS is opportunity cost. People often die, and more often suffer for decades from easily curable diseases because they cannot really afford either the time or money to get treatment.
I also know at least a dozen people who have something chronic, but get no treatment at all because they cannot afford it.
From what I can construct, it’s referring to people who are able to meet their basic needs, but are slowly destroying themselves in ways no doctor or medicine can fix. They appear to be able to help themselves, but don’t, because the weight of it all is too much. They could quit smoking, or quit painkillers, or quit sugar, but they just don’t, and it’s because they feel hopeless. The cards are stacked against them, they’ve practically given up, and - critically - given their circumstances, who could blame them?
For example, usually we think of depression as irrational, abnormal, and so antidepressants are a way of correcting your thinking. Except, for someone with “SLS”, maybe depression is actually a perfectly appropriate response to their life circumstances rather than temporary aberrant neurology.
What I didn't write explicitly, but vainly assumed that people will read between the lines.
The people I describe also suffer from SLS exactly because what you say.
Their lives are full of bad practices like alcoholism, not seeking medical health, choosing cheap and unhealthy choices whenever possible. Because of the weight.
You described it well. I assumed that people will get it- SLS is a result of helplessness at the extremes.
Another commenter wrote about the role of religion. I also think it plays a somewhat positive role.
At least in my state, days of Brahminical oppression are over. And the role of religion and social rules are positives.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder?wprov=sfla1
Would you mind expanding your story of life in your area on that dimension? How does this harshness play out for the people as people, less about their ability to get physical health care, but how does the harshness degrade their lives as humans?
If people have never had decent health care, and their classmates from school haven’t either, then how are they meant to move into something as rarefied as self-assessed mental health? That is something that people with too much time and not enough existential threat get up to.
What I described, is true for the bottom 30-40% of the people. And many people who'd get treatment for one acute illness will try to suppress a chronic one.
People of course don't realize that they are very miserable. They take this as a given. You have a curable chronic illness that requires spending weeks in a hospital and 3-4x of your monthly income? You just choose to die slowly with locally sourced meds that suppress the symptoms. People become sad and gloomy, but are not totally lost unless they happen to be very young. Young people do get treatment.
If there is no illness, they just go by regularly with their lives. Domestic violence towards women is rampant and very common among the very poor. Negligence towards old people's health is comparatively more common. Child marriage is still common.
If you are asking if they become gloomy like Dostoyevsky's characters, then no. They are far away from that. They spend disproportionately in religious festivals. Although Hindu, their worshipped deities are not mainstream, for the lack of a better word. Poor Muslims fare worse. Muslims spend big, too.
They are happy, regular people. Very pious, except when it comes to corruption. Poor or rich, ~99% people will take the opportunity of corruption if they have the chance.
And the poor are less sensitive to social stigma.
But, I have seen a large number of people uplifted from poverty. Indian economic growth is not a dummy one. There are visibly much less poor people that there were ~15 years ago.
I live in an old neighborhood (thanks to remote work trend when I entered the job market in 2021). The neighboring locality is of poor people's. If you took a walk there (we all have amiable relationships and don't live in segregated manner), you will see brick houses (pucca), motorbikes, well furnished houses. If you took the same walk 15 years ago, you would have seen much more poverty. People are uplifted out of poverty. No doubts.
India is still power bipolar. Poor people have no power. And a powerful person (mostly politically) can get what you have. This, too, people see as a way of life. They don't know better. So, big fish eats small fish is still very true in India- unless you are a white collar middle class person.
Edit: these people are very patriarchal, don't believe in personal liberty at all, so, modern values that we hold dear are absent.
I belong to a old, upper middle class family, and can live my way, or otherwise I would be fighting to escape this place as soon as possible.
In the case of UK's SLS, it's more that the (in many cases) treatable medical conditions are the end-stage manifestation of something else. And the NHS still, for example, expects people to modify their lifestyles to manage the worst effects of Type 2 diabetes; inherent to SLS is the fact that people with shit lives find such lifestyle modifications impossible.
It's a reduction in the margin for error that we require to exist.
Entropy is always grinding away at our attempts to order, to organize. Which is a requirement for us to exist for any meaningful duration. Poverty is the lack of a buffer against that force always trying to break down aspects of our organization.
If you lack poverty, and your car tire ruptures, you can replace it in order to continue getting to work every day. In poverty, entropy wins that battle, it grinds you down. Now you can't even get to work to try to make ends meet. Every aspect of poverty is similarly encompassed by this principle in action. Would you like nice vacations out of country for rest and relaxation and or new experiences? In poverty you face the daily erosion of entropy, unabated. No break or stimulation for you. Want access to the best medical specialists in the world? In poverty, you won't get it typically. Entropy is trying to kill you (not with homicidal intent, just inadvertently as it grinds away at order), with affluence you have a far better chance of surviving serious medical events (with or without universal healthcare).
In the poorest nations, the buffer between people and entropy is almost always very small. That usually covers food security, political stability, human rights. Affluence almost always purchases access to enormous entropy buffers, including access to nations with superior human rights, superior political stability, and so on.
A previous Prime Minister had been quoted 'A pound spent in Croydon is far more of value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde', Croydon being in London and Strathclyde being an administrative area in West Scotland that ceased to exist in 1975. The quote was from 2012.
WFH has allowed me to continue working from rural Scotland, to be honest I thought COVID would radically transform society's thinking and our requirement to be in high GDP areas for certain lines of work. Doesn't seem to have had quite the impact it was supposed to.
Just look at HS2 - everything north and north east of Birmingham has effectively been cancelled, leaving yet another "national" infrastructure project serving only London.
This Government, or the previous one, or the previous one, ad nauseam, continually fail to invest in the north, and north east. In fact the last major national infrastructure in those regions would be the building of the motorways. (edit) And just look at the North East, Sedgefield had Labour PM Tony Blair, Hartlepool had MP and cabinet member Peter Mandelson, and yet the investment there during that 15 year period was negligible. It's a London-based Government thing, not a political thing.
If you're not "close" to London, you're going to be poor by comparison.
Bringing Newcastle closer to Leeds by faster road and rail, and hence York, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool and the Potteries, would hugely increase economic productivity in the North of England.
I too hope that WFH will redistribute the wealth around the UK.
I hate the fact that we have an idiotic adversarial political system. Which ever party is in power is invariably hamstrung by the opposition voting the other way just 'because', is pathetically childish. The best time to build infrastructure was yesterday.
As the other comment has pointed out, this is irrelevant: in practice, as with Brexit, a majority of 1 can let you do almost _anything_ in the British constitution.
No, the real constraint is either internal opposition - party infighting - or what the newspapers will hammer you for.
Many of the UK's most depressed towns voted for Brexit, seemingly in the belief this might mean funding diverted towards them. It did not, because why would it? Nobody cared about them before, nobody cares about them after. Only marginal constituencies matter.
It's not like their local MP is going to help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackpool_South_(UK_Parliament... was sacked from the party after a bribery sting https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-65193097
> Bringing Newcastle closer to Leeds by faster road and rail
"Fun" fact: Leeds is the largest city in Europe that doesn't have a metro, tube, or tram system.
> Sunak said: “I managed to start changing the funding formulas to make sure areas like [Tunbridge Wells, Kent] are getting the funding they deserved. We inherited a bunch of formulas from Labour that shoved all the funding into deprived urban areas and that needed to be undone. I started the work of undoing that.”
Scotland isn't included, so I can't compare Strathclyde, but Blackpool's average is 5,900 — and includes 8 of the 10 most deprived places in the country.
Only one bit of London (part of Haringey) makes the top 1000. Only 106 bits of London (out of 4685) make the top 10%.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/english-indices-of-...
"Both Croydon and Strathclyde are shit places, but Croydon is a little less shit. By spending that pound in Croydon we can hopefully avoid it becoming Strathclyde"
1) Why did you think that?
2) Why do you assume that people are only in "high GDP areas" for work?
Personally I moved from rural New Zealand to London and I work 100% remotely.
/added
Also, I prefer a rural setting, no doubt others do too. Cost of living is lower also.
Thanks to my career in tech I broke out of that and moved away, but I've definitely had my seasons back at home where I get sucked into the Shit Life Syndrome around me.
I had some post-Covid health issues and spent a month back in my hometown to recover. But after a month I couldn't stand to be around so many struggling people while I was struggling myself.
So I went back to my cosmopolitan life and surrounded myself with people who are doing well.
I still have my health issues, but surrounding myself with people who are doing well has been much more tolerable for me than sitting stuck in Shit Life Syndrome in my hometown.
I don't know what the solution is for places that have SLS, but for individual people, the best advice I can give is, to the best of your ability, surround yourself with people who are doing well.
I don’t have a real solution either, but it seems like it would either need to involve a managed wind-down of towns in gradual, permanent decline, or somehow propping them up in perpetuity.
Some towns may just not make sense anymore. But for one reason or another, whether the problem is disappearing economic opportunity or changing climate, there’s no way to cleanly move on. There’s some discussion of this concept now under the moniker “managed retreat”, but we still need to figure out how to avoid stranding the most vulnerable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
One day maybe.
I hope there comes a day when using the money hoarded by the rich and influential to invest in the public, does not depend on the rich and influential choosing to do so out of a desire for maximal profits, or even benevolence.
One day maybe.
TBH, I doubt it. Don't get me wrong, I sympathize with your values. Heck, I'm even called 'woke' by most people around me. Yet I understand that in this day in age, thanks to cryptocurrency, money is and will be a private matter. No government will be able to confiscate your wealth, at least to the extent that your wealth doesn't depend on assets related with the government (e.g. real estate is related given that you need to pay taxes to maintain it).
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36
I won't hold my breath, but it's a nice thought.
"Power concedes nothing without a demand." - Frederick Douglas https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-fred...
"the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land." - Moses Finley
Unfortunately with a political system wholly owned by the wealthy (US), I fear that there may be more truth than I want in my father's admonition that things will never get better in this country until we have another revolution. I've been around a bit and so much of today seems to be a rinse and repeat of the issues I experienced when I was young - not the world I wanted to see for my daughter. Hopefully the next generation has a stronger backbone - mine and the couple after seem to have surrendered our dreams to greed and consumerism.
Although arguably rich and influential are investing in the public; the UK government spending makes up about half the GDP and the wealthy are paying what I gather is a 40% income tax.
Rates are actually even higher between 100-122k because although the income tax rate is 40%, ie 5%pts lower, the zero-rate band ("Personal Allowance") is simultaneously withdrawn by 50p for every pound earned - meaning effectively the rate is 60% and employees get to keep just over 33% of each additional pound the employer spends on salary and payroll taxes.
On the other hand, if you can take all of your money in capital gains, you'll be taxed at a top rate of 20% (or 28% for real estate and carried interest), with no payroll taxes. So the system heavily incentivises risk taking.
Deleted Comment
https://www.ft.com/blackpool
There's an interesting dog-that-didn't-bark: the word "meth" does not appear. The drug is still not common in the UK[1]. Blackpool has precisely the demographic makeup where, if it were in America, it would be flooded with meth dealers and addicts, and become magnitudes worse than it already is.
I dread the day that drug finally makes landfall here. It will sweep through our urban underclass like the Black Death.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7jdd8/uk-british-dont-use-m...
I'm not a believer in gateway drugs generally, but the prescription opioid hell that exists in the US never really took off here. A problem yes, but not a society-wrecking scale. Mostly because doctors are much less free-and-easy with prescribing the stuff, and can't easily be bribed by drugco's to do so as they were in the US.
Deleted Comment
I used to date someone from a small city in Northeast United States, and when I visited and met her friends and extended social network, this was the impression I got. The ambitious and privileged ones aspired to leave and never look back, while others remained to make the best of their city while taking care of aging loved ones. Half of the people I met had some awful family story (alcoholic and/or abusive parents, drug-addicted siblings, father in prison, etc.) Job prospects were dire. Monuments to that were abandoned and sometimes burned down factories that lined some of the streets in parts of the city. It's all very sad.
Makes you wonder if there’s a conspiracy to stop those of us in the UK watching it even though we know how awful it is at times.