It’s rather remarkable how big the wealth gap is in England. I don’t mean the gap between working class and the elite class, but the lower class and the upper class, since the middle class hardly seems to exist. People seem either more than comfortable, or they are living pay check to pay check, barely able to keep their finances together.
You can see it in the amount of homeless people. It’s not just London, Birmingham and Manchester, it’s even in small and mid-sized cities. Also in Exeter, as city that barely reaches above 100 thousand people. Sleeping in doorways, panhandling, begging, and largely ignored by the average passers by. They are ignored because the average person has their own issues to deal with and they know that helping won’t change the systemic problems that caused them to become homeless. Help one off the streets and another will take their place. These people have no place to go because there are no shelters and there are few resources that can help them get a grip on whatever problem caused them to spiral into homelessness. Whatever services do exist have limited funds and simply can’t help everyone. And so you see people sleeping in doorways and pitching tents underneath overpasses.
You can see it in the corpulence of the people. So many of the people here are incredibly obese. To me this indicates that people either don’t have the funds for nutritious food, don’t have the education to differentiate nutritious food from garbage, or eat because it offsets some of the misery they deal with in life. It’s not surprising that people rely on the NHS so heavily, since their overall levels of health are so poor. They have no choice.
This ties neatly into part of the xenophobia underlying the Brexit sentiment, because the debate was successfully framed by Brexiteers as a matter of free movement causing undue strain on already strained social services like the NHS. Of course, research shows that people from outside Britain were less likely to make use of these services, and that if they were to leave, the NHS would have a crippling shortage of qualified personnel that British people wouldn’t be able to fill.
Another sign; education is slowly becoming unaffordable in the same way that it already has in the United States. A lot of people who are recently graduated are stuck with enormous debts which will take a decade or two to pay off, depending on their chosen field. This means that people start buying houses late, don’t build their assets, which causes anxiety in a society where retirement benefits are a joke. England has enormous levels of personal debt.
I could go on. In the end, anxiety reigns, which in turn leads to sincere mental health issues, which exacerbates all of the above problems. Unless you have a good income, some personal wealth, then you are better off growing up elsewhere in Western Europe, where there are more opportunities for upward mobility.
