Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government. Like maybe Adolescence or basically any mention of the NHS. The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
One of these seems like the solution to the other.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income
Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.
I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.
IMO, the wheels fell off decades before I was born.
The peak of the empire was around WW1, where the victory was immediately followed by Irish home rule, and Churchill(!) putting the UK military into austerity to save money, which is how it came to be that evacuating from Dunkirk involved a lot of civilian ships, amongst other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule
I'm not sure the people of the UK have yet fully internalised this decline, given the things said and written during the Brexit process. Perhaps social media really did make it all worse, but it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson may or may not have taken an arrow to the eyeball.
> it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson
This. The UK was a band of feudal kingdoms that somehow managed to create an overseas empire. The empire is now gone, and the feudal kingdom is struggling to transform itself into a modern nation.
That happened a long time ago, the realization was the 70s.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.
Here's some Farage quotes, so you can see that there is no contradiction between the comment you were replying to (him saying it was a disaster is compatible with all this) and him still being a leaver:
“I don’t think that for a moment,” Mr Farage replied when he was asked if the UK would have been better off staying in the EU, the world’s largest single market area. “But what I do think is we haven’t actually benefitted from Brexit economically, what we could have done.”
“I mean, what Brexit’s proved, I’m afraid, is that our politicians are about as useless as the commissioners in Brussels were,” he added. “We’ve mismanaged this totally, and if you look at simple things…such as takeovers, such as corporation tax, we are driving business away from our country.
“Arguably, now we’re back in control, we’re regulating our own businesses even more than they were as EU members. Brexit has failed.”
Not sure why this was downvoted, maybe the use of "foreigners" is a bit loaded, but this is basically it.
Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.
We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
It’s true that too much of the U.K. is a piggy bank for those who don’t live there, but that is true of much of the West now.
> taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
This would end very poorly because what the U.K. sorely needs is investment (to create new productive capacity). For example, Americans invested huge sums in North Sea oil and created an entire industry (before we destroyed it). Conversely, if you force people to keep wealth in the country then you just make things more expensive: they will bid up the price of property and the like. Nothing is added to the UK’s real economy by increasing the number of pounds flowing around in it - it’s only helpful if it’s invested. So what you actually want is tax breaks for foreign investment, but with some kind of ownership cap.
The problem is that the investment in this day and age is entirely extractive. Strip the assets, do minimal infra, and jack up the prices. Water here is a classic example. Investors want their returns, and the best way to get it is by rent-seeking and minimal outlay. I'd go so far to argue that "investment" is the problem.
There's been enough in the way of tax breaks and "derisking". A huge part of the problem with our public finances is being on the hook for some very ill-advised "investments".
The money going out exceeds the money going in, because that's what an investment is. An opportunity to make money.
The response of "we cannot stop water companies dumping raw sewage into our rivers and lakes because it might impact profits of their Saudi Arabia investment funds" is really all we need to know about the issues. It's sickening.
This is not true. There is no Saudi ownership of Thames Water. 90% or so is owned by Australian, European, and Canadian pension funds. Specifically it was the Macquarie Group (Australian) that loaded it up with debt and pushed it off a cliff.
Our politics does have some good parts. The political system we have is reasonably good. We have many political parties due to the proportional representation system. A single party is also unlikely to get a majority in parliament on their own, so parties with different backgrounds will have to work together to form a functioning government.
We do suffer from many political parties not willing to cause short term pain to improve long term outcomes. There are a few urgent issues going on in politics at the moment. Stuff where a decision needs to be made now and action should be taken. But the political parties do not want to make those decisions because they would inflict short term pain to some voters but would also improve the long term quality of life and economics of the Netherlands.
The worst part is that those issues have been known for a long time, but decisions were postponed over and over again because politicians didn't want to make the decision. Making the issues worse and more urgent over time.
At the same time populism is clearly on the rise in the Netherlands. A famous thing happening in a debate before the previous elections was a populist saying "But this woman cannot wait for the costs to be decreased, she needs it now." about decreasing a specific part of healthcare costs for citizens. Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.
>Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.
The difference between social media and traditional media is, roughly speaking, the absence of a centralised editor that has the ability to gatekeep the nation’s discourse. If that’s not authoritarian I’m not sure what is!
Social media is a forum for people to complain about the problems they face, if you don’t like that the solution is not to censor the messenger but to fix the problems.
As someone who grew up in the UK I can tell you that the elitist mindset of the UK is a huge part of their problem: only the elite are capable sophisticated right-think, all others are wrong-thinking simpletons and must be silenced for their own safety. The BBC is a huge part of the problem as it is inevitably pro-government but trades off a strong image of neutrality, to the extent that it regularly misleads the public and they lap it up.
If editors are authoritarian for controlling what people see, then social media algorithms are super-authoritarian for the same reason. They also decide what people see, they also modify the cultural and political consciousness, just on a more granular level. An editor can try to push one group of people in one direction, but a social media algorithm can push multiple groups of people in multiple different directions.
IMHO, there's nothing authoritarian about either editors or social media. It only becomes authoritarian when they intentionally align with a central political authority.
> Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe
I only have to look as far as my own wallet to see the effects. I'm being taxed to the eyeballs while there is a glass ceiling preventing me taking any more pay home without a major jump which just isn't coming due to stupid tax rules keeping the working class from bumping into the middle class.
I see mine and my family's living standards drop only to be told by the news that I'm a likely target for more tax hikes, and there's just no room to tax me more while my bills have also gone up significantly, and something will have to give. If it gets to the point where I can't pay my bills despite being a "high earner" I'll have to start considering whether I leave with my family, and where to.
I'm not exactly the milky bar kid, but I imagine beyond my friends and family, I imagine the consensus would be very much the same, yet there goes two "successful" professionals and the children we were raising probably to be high earning professionals too.
I don't do social media, but I do keep on top of the news from all outlets, I try to look beyond the biases and form an opinion on a combination of sources.
That is not how marginal tax rates work. Each income band is taxed at the rate for that band. It’s why it’s called “marginal” - because the rate change happens at the margin between brackets.
You are taxed 0% on your first £12571. You are taxed 20% on your next £37669, or, £7359.80 on £50270 of income. If you then earned one more pound, or £50271, you would owe £0.40 (40%) on that one additional pound only, for a total of £7361.20. There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.
> There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less
If you go from £99,999 to £100,000 and have pre-school aged children, you lose £2000 in tax-free childcare per child. If you have 2 children, that extra penny cost you £4000, 3 children, £6000, you take home less, fact.
Combined with the 60% marginal rate, you now have to get to £110,000 just earn the same you did at £99,999 and then there's the side point that a couple can earn £99,999 each, or £198,999.98 and still benefit from it while any single parent who hits £100,000 loses it completely, so a single parent high earner loses out vs a couple. I'm not a single parent but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.
EDIT: and that person who hit £100,000 has the extra burden of having to file a tax return from now on simply because they hit an arbitrary number, and despite being on PAYE, though perhaps some people love doing tax returns, so not necessarily a negative point.
Also at £100k you start to lose your tax-free personal allowance. The commitment of successive governments to avoid raising taxes on "ordinary working people" has created a bizarrely inconsistent tax regime for above-average earners, where people earning £65k could end up paying a much higher marginal rate than people earning £165k.
Yes, once you go from 99,999 to 100,000 you lose 2000 per pre-school aged child you have and have to file your own tax returns for the privilege despite being PAYE.
Annoying that those are, it’s probably more accurate to say you don’t qualify for benefits when you earn considerably more than the median wage (£38k).
Also, if you’re paying a decent amount in to your pension your effective salary is lowered and won’t hit that child benefit threshold until your salary exceeds £60k or more, and you still get to keep all of that money.
Tax free childcare is already extremely lacking in my opinion, if you want professionals to work, it shouldn't be extortionate to have your children in nursery, and costing you 2000 per child per year for one parent earning 100,000 when two parents can earn 99,999 each is also ridiculous.
The real kicker is the 99,999->100,000 trap where you lose all tax free childcare care allowance, £2000 per year per child, it's assessed quarterly, and if you exceed it by a single penny, not only do you lose it, they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.
>>they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.
So this might or might not be in line with official guidance but I was exactly in this situation and I expected to earn around £99k last tax year then I was given an unexpected £4k bonus in my march salary, and I wasn't told about it until it was in my account already so it was too late to put it into pension. I asked HMRC about it and they said as long as I was being truthful at every quarterly questionnaire where they ask if you expect to make over £100k and I told them the situation changed as soon as I became aware of it I don't have to pay anything back for the free childcare hours. I asked my accountant and she said since I have it in writing it should be fine(but HMRC can always change their mind so who the hell knows).
Compare that to the insane situation of the benefit for carers where people are being asked to repay benefits going back years if they went over the threshold by a single pound - I imagine HMRC is being incentivieed to go after benefit takers more than other areas like childcare hours, for various more or less political reasons.
That sounds extraordinarily linient of them, but I suspect as you say, it's political.
I take it you lost your allowance for the rest of the year due to the bonus?
Luckily for me the childcare tax people contacted me about it the first time it could have become an issue because I received a bonus at the start of a tax year, so I adjusted my pension contributions for the rest of the year lowering my take home. By this point though I'd already been taxed that marginal 60% thanks to the bonus being paid to me, like yourself without being notified.
Don't quote me but I don't think this is quite true if you take tax credits and other "benefits" into account - especially when it comes to child support.
The problem isn't the percentage, it's that there are tax traps where earning a single penny more end up in you taking home thousands less, then you hit a marginal tax bands of 60%+, and suddenly you have to earn tens of thousands more just to break even.
They're well known an documented, but I'm sure you know that already.
That jump in childcare costs definitely sounds annoying but if the overall percentage isn't very high then you're not being taxed to the eyeballs.
We could imagine fixing the problem by making the childcare voucher phase out between 80k and 100k, and at 100.2k you'd get exactly the same amount as you get under the current system.
In this hypothetical would you still say taxed to the eyeballs? If so, what would your justification be?
I figured you'd say that. It's a well-used talking point to change the topic. Because if you give me a %, you know I'll compare it to other countries, and point out it's actually not that high.
I also note you ignored my other question.
For other readers: even a £140k salary, your net deduction is 39%. At £200k, it's 41%. This is why people like OP don't like talking about total deductions, because it isn't aligned with their Daily Mail cliche talking points. And once you're earning very high salaries, you don't do PAYE and start using a good accountant.
edit: but yes I do agree about the £100-£125k tax band being a glass ceiling of sorts. But that is a different topic to "I'm taxed too much", which is what you claimed
Perhaps my wording was the problem, and I didn't ignore your other question, I said the percentage isn't the problem, I also don't know the number, but I'm sure you do.
Perhaps it was a problem with my wording but your statement about the daily mail suggests you've entirely misunderstood me, but to be specific I'm generally left leaning and prefer broadsheets, though I currently mostly use aggregators to combine sources to find where the facts are as opposed to "cliche talking points".
I thought I was clear when I said that the effect on my wallet is where my opinion is formed, but it seems you might have missed that.
I have no problem with paying more tax as a higher earner, but I don't agree with a tax system that literally prevents me from earning a penny more and would even have me earn less unless I can find a significant jump.
You clearly have a different view on this but the facts of what I see right in front of me have little to do with talking points and consensus and everything, right now, to do with tax or the tax system.
I'm taxed too much on every penny I've earned over over £99,999 and way too much because of the privilege of having pre-school aged children, that's my opinion, agree or not.
>privilege of having pre-school aged children, that's my opinion,
Look at salary sacrifice. This give you the option of buying childcare vouchers before tax. So taking you below the 100,000. Otherwise pay more into pension and drop below the 100,000 threshold.
I wasn't aware of this, I'll take a look and see if it applies thanks.
The pension route is the way I've gone to deal with it, but it doesn't fix the issue of "my bills are going up while my income can't". I'm sure retired me will be glad for it if it makes it that far, and we don't somehow end up being taxed to the hilt on _that_ too when we eventually get there.
Can you provide an example for others? I know I often hear this complaint here in Canada about entering a new tax bracket, but the reality is that only the money earned above the bracket's lower bound is taxed at that higher rate (if the bracket is $10k and you make $10,001, only that $1 is taxed at that higher brackets rate), and so I'm wondering what the UK is doing differently.
Edit: Ah, there's a baseline personal deduction (12.5k) that disappears between 100-125k, meaning, for that narrow band, every dollar earned in that range has a higher effective tax rate due to that deduction slowly disappearing. It's still progressive, so you don't suddenly start paying 60% tax on everything.
See another comment of mine that also shows how going from 99,999 to 100,000 also costs you 2000 for each pre-school aged child you have per year meaning you actually earn thousands less, and to top it off, you now also have to do your own tax returns because you hit 100,000 despite being PAYE.
EDIT: it's interesting that anyone genuinely asking and trying to understand is getting downvoted as opposed to anyone who just disagrees with me.
Having to do your own tax returns is funny to hear as a North American, we always have to do them.
I struggle with the child tax credits. If I'm childless and move from 99,999 to 100,000 it doesn't change my situation at all. I don't think we can view that in the same light - it's a tax credit benefit, but it's not just a matter of earnings. The goal is to support lower income families, so the line has to be drawn somewhere, and whether it's gradual or not someone is still going to complain about it going away.
It comes at a problematic point where at 100,000 you also lose your personal allowance. It means that when I received a pay rise from whatever to exactly 100,000 I lost £4000 in tax-free childcare meaning I actually earned less.
Nobody is expected not to use it if they earn below the point it is taken away, it's just an arbitrary tax on parents who earn 100,000, while at the same time a few other paper cuts are piled on.
I know Americans always do tax returns, sounds like a pita for you guys, and I believe until recently you had no choice but to use some sort of service and couldn't DIY it?
Here if you're PAYE (salaries), it's dealt with on your behalf, the tax is deducted before you're paid and you don't have to deal with it, unless you're self employed. It's not necessarily a huge issue, but it's a time cost and that has to have a price, and if you get it wrong, HMRC are notoriously hard and will demand full payment immediately, if you're lucky and they accept your "excuse" (their word), they might let you split it over 3 months.
At this point it's best to make sure you have £10,000+ in savings aside just in case.
I've not had to do a tax return yet, but I've frequently seen tax bills in the tens of thousands from family and friends because their accountant got it wrong, and holds no liability.
I don't think it's as big an issue for me people have taken from my original wording, that's fine, poor choice of words on my part perhaps, but it has certainly been blown out of proportion including some minor jabs at me and (incorrectly) at my political leanings etc. Despite this really all having nothing to do with politics or news and quite clearly as I pointed out at it's direct effect on my family finances.
As the saying goes here in England, "I'm sorry I mentioned it".
I can't believe you're playing the victim. What minor jabs at your political leanings?
At least you've finally admitted your current or past salary, so we can determine the total deductions: 31%, reduced even more by pension contributions.
Cry me a river. Acting like we have the highest tax in the world. You're obviously a foreigner in the UK. If you don't like it here, feel free to move - as you already said you were looking at doing. I feel like you just dislike the UK and are moaning about the tax. I hope you enjoy Dubai. (Don't get me wrong, I think the UK is a shit hole too - but I can't stand people moaning about extremely high tax)
> but I've frequently seen tax bills in the tens of thousands from family and friends because their accountant got it wrong
So they picked a crap accountant. So what? The tax owed is the correct amount.
You certainly know a lot about the tax system yet in another comment said you don't know your total deductions. Hilarious
Yes, I'm a Brit, and very much entitled to this opinion.
> I struggle with the child tax credits. If I'm childless and move from 99,999 to 100,000 it doesn't change my situation at all. I don't think we can view that in the same light - it's a tax credit benefit, but it's not just a matter of earnings. The goal is to support lower income families, so the line has to be drawn somewhere, and whether it's gradual or not someone is still going to complain about it going away.
Having it go away is less of a problem than having it go away all at once. If it was phased out over a range of incomes such that every marginal dollar of gross is still a marginal increase in net, that'd solve the problem mentioned in this thread. Key property of a tax system: the function from gross income to net income should always be monotonically increasing.
To be fair, the original topic of this thread was "tax traps", one of the most famous in the UK being a gradual decrease of benefit that was still a marginal increase in net, but it was still deemed worth complaining about.
For those in the US: the UK tax return (actually a partial return and declaration of income) takes 10 minutes. It’s all done online. There are no complicated calculations, you just declare your income, investment income, interest and other sources, minus any tax already paid. You don’t need an accountant and there are no costs for filing.
If it takes you only 10 minutes to declare all your "income, investment income, interest and other sources" then you're either lying or doing taxes wrong. It takes me more than 10 minutes just to download all the tax slips, let alone totalling them up.
I'm in the pay bracket requiring annual self assessment and 10 minutes is probably too generous, purely because you log in to your SA account and the PAYE section from your employer is already pre-filled. You don't need to look at your pay slips, HMRC already has all the info from your employer and literally all you need to do is have a cursory glance whether the numbers look right then click confirm few times and submit at the end.
Obviously very different if you're self employed or have income mostly from investments or properties, but the you have an accountant to do it for you.
No, I was talking about the amount of time it takes to fill in an high-earner income declaration in the UK, which you only need to do if you are indeed a high earner or have multiple sources of income, and it is not anywhere near as arduous as a full tax return (either in the UK or the US).
For other readers who don't want to go through that:
Say you earn £99,999 and get a pay rise to £100,000 and have two pre-school aged children, you lose £4000 (£2000 per child) per year, so you now earn less.
Now for the next ~£25,140 you earn you'll pay an effective tax rate of 60%, so from £99,999 you first have to hit ~£110,000 to break even, then it's ~60% tax up to £125,140, then beyond that it's 45%.
I'm not familiar with the UK tax system but the usual solution is to have progressive (?) tax bands. Example:
On the part from 0 to 1000, no taxes
1001 to 10000, ten percent
10001 to 20000, twenty percent
20000 to 30000, thirty percent
30001 and more, forty percent
So if you were earning 29000 and get a raise to 31000 those 29000 are still taxed as they used to and the extra 2000 are split among the two bands around 30k.
Yes, except like many others have pointed out there are thresholds where you lose certain tax credits and benefits, so it's entirely possible to make £1 more but lose multiple thousand(for example if you're a parent and you go from making £99,999 a year to £100k a year)
> One of these seems like the solution to the other.
If the per capita spending is exceeding per capita taxation, increased immigration does not solve the problem. More people requires more spending.
> The UK has always been an empire in decline
I find this fatalistic attitude to be very unhelpful in determining good policy decisions. If you start with the assumption that the empire is in decline then it doesn’t seem as bad to add policies that contribute to decline, as long as you get some short-term win out of it.
> I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
There have been a number of public scandals regarding immigrant crimes, along with subsequent anti-immigrant riots started via social media and people being sent to jail for internet posts. Social media seems to be more of accelerant for social unrest than than the cause. For me (an outsider) observing the situation, it seems to be mainly caused by immigration.
Many of the areas most upset by immigration barely see any immigrants, whilst many of the most persistent spreaders of rumours about terrible things caused by immigration to the UK don't actually live there. Of course, it isn't just social media that obsesses over immigrants in the UK (and many other places), mainstream print media and politicians are pretty obsessed with them too.
Personally, I would rate the grooming gangs scandal as one of the worse things that happened to a western nation in decades. It literally made me sick to stomach when I read the details. I think the obsession is somewhat justified.
News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly
THOUSANDS of young girls were sexually exploited for YEARS and the government did nothing about it because they didn't want to appear to be racist. There is no equivalence with any of the "average" sex crimes that happen in modern advanced nations. There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.
I always thought linking all the main things not working in the actual world to the alienation caused by too much digital consumption to be wrong/not really making sense. However, gradually, I am getting closer and closer to that conclusion... In your case, what brought you to the stance "Too much social media is what ails the whole world"? What do you think we could do to solve it?
Social Media used to be better when you actually had a connection to the other person. Nowadays it's mostly anonymous or parasocial. All social media sites have drifted to influencer content (TikTok, Meta, Youtube) or to moving the identity of the other person to the background (reddit, HN). The inbetween of early social media with smaller groups of people who know each other has gotten very rare
The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues
If you go back in history you can find examples of people making the same claims about too much television. Prior to that, too much radio. Prior to that, too much newspaper consumption.
A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.
This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.
Did you ever consider that all the concerns regarding the negatives of new media might have some truth to them?
Technology is advancing much faster than humans can biologically evolve and very few people seem ready to seriously tinker with the human genome to keep pace.
Perhaps "the feeds" are just the inflection point where the information overload becomes obvious and baseline humans actually need a majority baseline human experience with all of the associated problems in order to prosper?
So, because some people in the past made (to you) incorrect arguments about something, that means anyone in the future making a remotely similar argument automatically has to be wrong? People in 2025 discussing social media have to be "wrong" because some subset of the population supposedly (to you) made a bad argument about radio 100 years ago?
All of that is broadcast / one direction. Social media is two-way. We've never had two-way mass communication. The rate of communication was an order of magnitude different also.
That doesn't make those claims invalid. Too much television is also a problem, and a lot of television content is junk. Tabloid newspapers are a scourge, as are opinion writers whose output often consists of fallacious propaganda designed to maximize confirmation bias.
In what ways? What things would be better without TV and radio? You think they would be more informed? Or harder to manipulate?
People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far?
Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors.
To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.
As the other user said, people have been warning about new forms of media since the invention of writing. It has always been in vogue to be a nay sayer.
But social media is different. For most forms of media, TV, movies, books, radio etc. You had some degree of agency and choice over what you consumed. You couldn't set what a channel or station was playing, but you could change the channel.
You don't choose what you see on social media. You see what an algorithm thinks is most likely to keep you hooked / going.
Our brains only know what's real based on what's in front of it. You can acknowledge something is rage bait, but as you process it, you will still feel some degree of anger / discomfort. You can acknowledge that something is a cherry picked example, designed to tug the sensibilities of users, but it will still tug on your sensitivities.
And so sure enough, as you keep getting rage baited, concern trolled into algorithmic oblivion, it changes your gestalt. Your worldview shifts to one where those are data points, and it starts distorting your perception of reality.
Garbage In. Garbage Out.
Other people have said that it's like electricity consumption. No. This is very much like tobacco. I don't use social media. Even though I get paid to post to it.
However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.
organize things offline. political stuff, social stuff, hobbies, exercise. The things that people want, that online life isn't providing. I can't see another option other than waiting until tech is so commonplace that the advances don't interest people anymore.
> I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
Absolutely. It's not the only problem, but it is a serious and deep problem.
> The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
Have they though about joining some sort of economic union, maybe one with like minded countries that share the same continent?
I think it's always a bit of a bummer when someone takes the time to write a really well-thought out comment and someone comes in with a reddit-style quip that adds nothing to the conversation but derails it for everyone else.
There are so many charitable and earnest ways to make the point you're getting at, why reach for such intellectually low hanging fruit?
It's not a "reddit style quip" to mention the UK deliberately shot themselves in the foot economically when talking about the economic situation in the UK.
So if we’ve agreed with OPs assessment that the problem in the UK is the government attempting to seize more power…how will becoming subjects of yet another government body that is even more powerful and less beholden to the people…help things?
The EU might be better on digital privacy right now, however the emotional winds of the political mob change often and many people in EU government feel differently. The EU is also an aging population of technologically illiterate and immigrant-afraid retirees. I wouldn’t expect much different coming from them in the future.
The EU is facing the same fundamental situation as the U.K. The latter recklessly accelerated their problems but an aging and shrinking population coupled with unsustainable social spending and precious little technological investment can only result in a downwards spiral. Just look at how far behind the US the EU is since 2008.
The one that just agreed to pay 3000 dollars per capita to the USA to prevent a trade war?
The one that is also working on a digital age verification system?
The one that created an AI regulation that stopped all innovation, and a data protection innovation who's single result is billions of people having to spend 3 seconds before visiting every website clicking a button that doesn't actually do anything (in 80% of cases)?
> but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here
I don't know anyone that doesn't complain about the state of the NHS. The only time I've heard anyone defending it would be when compared to countries without national healthcare (e.g. America).
Nothing stops you from getting private healthcare here and still end up paying a fraction of the average per capita cost for Americans - the NHS costs about the same per capita as Medicare + Medicaid, and private health insurance is overall cheaper in the UK, because they "fall back" on using the NHS as a first line.
I haven't lived in another country, but I have never had an issue with healthcare in the USA. It does seem like you can step on a landmine if you are negligent, but I have employer paid healthcare now and it works great. When I was low income (during my early 20s) medicaid would legitimately hound me to keep me on it. I actually had an issue because they kept enrolling me after I got I job that no longer required them.
I imagine medicaid funding is directly tied to the enrollment count so they are very aggressive about getting people on it. Granted it was trash insurance and most specialists wouldn't take it, but it covered basic care fully.
This isn’t the story we generally hear - what we hear about us healthcare is that you need a well paid job and even then medicines are ridiculously expensive - like thousands of dollars a month for something that is tens of pounds in the uk.
My medication is billed as "thousands per month" but the insurance company pays a different rate than the 'billing' rate and all I pay is $20/month for my biologic infusions. If I didn't have insurance I could enroll in the drug program and get it nearly free. I think its really very rare for the case you mention.
Healthcare coverage generally comes with any fulltime job. It's cheap for individuals (I pay about $150/month) but gets more expensive with families, which is a real problem. Most medications are cheap. The only medications I've heard of that are expensive are new ones not yet approved by the insurer. I pay less than $10/month for my medications.
That's different. Yes, everyone complains about the state of the NHS but the "religion" is that the NHS may not be criticised itself. So it is in a bad state because it does not receive enough money, that's it, nothing else. Any suggestion that the organisation itself might be improved or, god forbid, that patients might pay is indeed usually seen as "blasphemy".
> So it is in a bad state because it does not receive enough money, that's it
In real terms the budget is the largest it's ever been, it's a relic of the time when people worked and died shortly (a decade) after retiring, not when they live for 30+ years longer.
> In real terms the budget is the largest it's ever been
Which it needs to be given the demographic changes you note. It's about 15% smaller per capita than comparable countries spend. That would suggest that we need to increase the budget if we want comparable service.
That has changed in recent years. Now greater than in France in absolute spend per capita, would need a 7.5% increase to match in terms of GDP. It would still require a 15% increase to match Germany in absolute per capita, but only 8.5% in percentage of GDP.
The UK spends about 18% less per capita on the NHS than the EU14 countries do on their health systems.
A lot of that money has gone on stealth privatisation through inefficient outsourcing of contract staff and PFI of infrastructure.
So the actual standard of care is far lower than the funding suggests. And it has been deliberately run down so a US-style system can be implemented.
So yes, the organisation should be improved, but in the exact opposite direction to the one you're suggesting.
The UK's real problem is that it's run by an out-of-touch inbred aristocracy with vast inherited wealth, working through a political system which prioritises stealth corruption over public service.
They don't see why they should contribute anything to the welfare of the peasants. The obligation is all one way - from the peasants to the gentry.
And there's a layer of middle class professionals who have convinced themselves they're the gentry, even though they can't afford to pay their school fees, never mind maintain a huge estate.
So - private ownership good, public spending bad. More sensible countries don't have this attitude problem, and are proud their public services actually benefit the public.
I like the cut of your jib. I see the class system in much the same way but with different analogies. The middle class professionals are like the 'house n-gro' described by Malcolm X and the minimum wage workers are like the 'field n-gro' (not sure we can use that word even in academic discussions given where the UK free speech laws are going!).
There is also a lack of a respected teaching class. With the changes to universities and schools, there is no longer any respect for those with an education and able to teach.
If you go to, say, France, you'll find that healthcare isn't free at the point of use and that the system is much more private than in the UK. I believe this is so in many other European countries, too.
So public/NHS vs private/US system is a false dichotomy, and "free at the point of use" is a red herring.
Looking at the reactions, this whole threads does exemplifies what the OP said about the NHS being a "religion".
I moved to Finland from the UK and found exactly the same thing you mentioned in France. Plus extra layers of beauracracy (there's no national health service, there are public hospitals that send a bill to the public insurer and you get a bill for an excess unless you are absolutely down-and-out. Either way, a nice job program for public administrators). Prescriptions are far more expensive than the UK (your co-pay on them is something like €600 a year)
One nice perk though is that [private, corporate] jobs offer cushy health insurance as part of the deal as standard really so you can go and see one of the many private doctors in their offices at your choice and leisure.
It's not a "religion" to have people disagree with you on philosophical points.
In addition, I'd say most of this thread is a bunch of people debating what issues there are with the NHS (I don't see anyone claiming there aren't any) with some people for it, and some against it.
A fair few people believe that it is the duty of the state to care for individuals, and that one right that people have is free access to healthcare.
If someone expresses that viewpoint I don't think it's fair to say that they're being religious or dogmatic about it, just like it wouldn't be fair for people to argue that your view (which I assume is for a more privatised healthcare system) is religious or dogmatic, it's a simple disagreement.
Same with Canada, they have public health insurance run by provinces which private hospitals bill to. While the UK has a giant national public hospital system run across an entire country (NHS England, NHS Scotland etc).
The UK has NHS trusts that run hospitals etc. For a limited period of time - just a few years -, the trusts in England were reporting to NHS England. NHS England is being abolished.
These ca. 200 trusts operate with a great degree of operational independence, though they are public entties.
The distinction is important because they are what makes the scale manageable, and it also provides resilience.
The distinction is important because they are what makes the scale manageable, and it also provides resilience.
Though it also leads to inconsistency and the "postcode lottery" problem where the quality of treatment a patient receives for a specific condition can be extremely variable depending on where they live.
That's true, but now mitigated at least to some extent by the right to choose (though people are woefully unaware of this, and GP's in my experience never ask so you need to bring it up if you have issues with your local hospital - the NHS could do better at requiring this; in some cases I've been given links to pick treatment provider after being referred, and it'd be nice if that was the norm).
But it's better to have management failings contained to individual trusts, that are monitored, than to have these failing affect the system as a whole. Not least because it does allow patients going elsewhere as a last resorts.
I guess you're talking about healthcare for the unemployed or non-residents or non-French people, because if you're employed there is additionnal and mandatory healthcare.
There's still basic free healthcare if you don't yet fit well in the system but it's like for example to remove a tooth instead of clean it and reconstruct it.
> because if you're employed there is additionnal and mandatory healthcare
Yes, if you are employed in the private sector there is now mandatory additional private health insurance to cover what public healthcare does not.
Healthcare isn't free at the point of use in any case. Things may be automatically paid/reimbursed as the case may be. Private sector is much more involved than in the UK, too, starting from GPs who are all private practices.
The point is that it's not because you have to pay at point of use or because things are more private that you end up like in the US. This is an FUD argument against change.
All the GP practices in England are private businesses working under contract to the NHS. Most people don't notice since the majority of services are covered under that contract.
The one country whose healthcare I’ve studied in depth aside from the US is Costa Rica. Our Plan B is to establish permanent residence there and starting next year we will be spending a couple of months there every winter and maybe in July.
Costa Rica has an affordable all inclusive public health care system
(Caja). But you can also pay for extra for private healthcare. Is it the same in the UK?
Yes. Like no matter what someone thinks about the NHS, it's always affordable, and it's entirely inclusive. And if you want private healthcare, you can absolutely get it. I've had private health insurance at every post-university job I've had, it's a standard offering in tech.
The main criticism of two tier healthcare systems (public+private) is that it creates an unstable system. The private system steals all the talent, the rich don’t care if the public system is good since they don’t use it, and thus the public system dies a slow death of 1,000 cuts.
In canada we’re in a phase where this is just starting. Private clinics (e.g. telus health) have started to pull doctors out of the public system and put them behind subscription paywalls. We’re still paying the majority of their salary, but they can only be accessed if you pay their private overlords a monthly fee.
We certainly have this issue in the UK right now. In dentistry in particular there is a problem that basically everyone agrees on which is that the NHS dental contract makes little sense for the dentists providing the care. In many cases they would literally lose money by performing routine treatments on NHS patients and then claiming what allowances they can back from the government. So of course many don't do that and in large areas of the country it is now literally impossible for someone moving there to register with a local NHS dentist because 100% of the surgeries within a reasonable distance are only accepting new private patients. Meanwhile I can register with a private dentist based just a few minutes from my home who offers a full range of treatments and excellent service with near instantaneous responsiveness - at a price that many people in normal jobs can't afford to pay.
I moved to the UK with my family just before the Brexit vote and left last year. I love the country, but the changes I saw over that time period were so stark -- and, similarly, so many of the friends I made in that time had already left the country.
That I could have multiple negative NHS experiences relating to missed cancer diagnoses of friends in that relatively short span of time is suggestive of a real problem. The institution seemed to have less of an issue with elder care (in the US, the phantom menace posed by Obamacare or any governmental involvement in healthcare was meant to be "death panels" deciding the fate of grandparents) than with avoiding at all costs detecting potential long-term problems in the young. It's a 'rational' fear in the sense, as you note, that such cases put tremendous pressure on services, but there's no world where the best health outcome is refusing to screen your working age population.
This mirrors my experience of the UK. A dysfunctional country whose wheels were slowly falling off and now not so slowly. I’m generally pro devolution but in the UKs case their political class is so god awful that giving them more power didn’t seem to be a good idea.
I left for greener pastures a long time ago and subsequently all of my friends and anyone I knew of any talent has also left, it feels weird visiting a place I once called home and not being able to see friends.
> suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here
That's really not my experience. In fact, almost everyone is surprised when I suggest that despite its many problems, the NHS does better for the people than most modern countries' health systems.
No one I know who has lived in France or Germany or any developed country other than the US thinks the NHS is better than the systems in those countries.
I've heard from Spanish friends living in the UK that the NHS is so bad, they fly back to Spain for medical checks and even to see the dentist. That's mind blowing.
Having lived in the UK for 25 years, and being from Norway, which has one of the consistently top ranked (though extremely costly compared to the NHS) healthcare systems, I have not had any problems relying on the NHS for 25 years for most things.
There are times I opt for private services for speed, because I can afford to, but I could also afford private health insurance (which is cheap in the UK), and haven't felt the need to.
That said, dental is a weak spot of the NHS, with too few dentists offering NHS services, and there's a perceived quality difference in that the NHS treatments have fee caps that mean they will often not include the best aesthetic options. For dental I do tend to go private (but dental for adults is also excluded in quite a few other "universal" healthcare systems - like Norway; don't know about Spain)
> There are times I opt for private services for speed
I'm guessing the NHS, being public, comes with long waiting lists. So it's more about speed than quality of service? I'd assume most doctors with 20–30 years of experience are working in the private sector, right?
It's very much more about speed. Waiting lists varies greatly - I just took my son to the GP this morning, after we booked last week. The only reason it wasn't sooner was that they wanted blood test results first. He had blood tests booked in the morning after we booked, and we were seen ahead of time - the appointment took 5 minutes. There was zero wait when we checked in at the GP.
New Years Eve, my son was referred to an out-of-hours GP service within an hour of a phone consultation.
But while the shortest wait I've had for a video consultation for myself (via the NHS) was literally 10 minutes, the longest was two weeks.
If you have an emergency, you will be triaged and given a faster appointment if you use the right channels (111 - the non-emergency alterantive to 999/911, or urgent care walkin centres, or A&E as the last resort), but of course many things that are not an emergency will seem intolerable to wait for, and then it absolutely sucks if you can't afford to pay your way to be seen faster.
This is a political/cost issue - the NHS is bargain basement in terms of amount spent per patient compared to many other countries.
A large proportion of doctors in the private sector also works for the NHS, so quality of clinical experience has never been a concern to me.
E.g. when my ex looked for a doctor when she considered having a c-section done private, the top expert she could find was an NHS consultant that worked privately on the side. This is the widespread, and often the private clinics are operated by NHS trusts, as a means to supplement their budgets, and/or the operating rooms etc. are rented from NHS trusts.
If anything, my only negative experiene with lack of experience here has been with private providers (the only nurse that has ever struggled to draw blood from me in my entire life failed to get any blood from me after 3 agonisingly slow attempts where she rooted around in my arm for a vein. Every NHS nurse that has drawn blood from me or my son have been so fast at drawing blood you hardly notice before they're done even when they're filling multiple containers)
But if you want to be pampered, then private providers will be nicer. They're also nicer if you e.g. want more time - GP's are expected to allocate an average of something like 7 minutes per appointment for the NHS patients, for example, and how flexible they will be varies, while with a private GP you can pay for however long appointments you want.
Location is a huge factor. I live in a rural part of the country where the main hospital serves mainly small towns and villages. The service is not perfect but, compared to the nearest big city, (20 miles away) it is night and day.
I live in London and have mostly been satisfied here too, but you're right it does certainly vary. More people should be aware they often have a right to choose, though, including sometimes private hospitals (though choosing a private hospital is usually only available when the private hospital costs the same or less as the NHS rate).
Oh that's interesting. I wouldn't expect a surgeon with 20 years experience to show up at a public hospital. I do like the idea though, it gives new doctors a chance to learn from them. But I'm not sure what the experienced doctor gets out of it, to be honest.
It's pretty much the other way around here. For a private hospital, getting someone with experience from the NHS is to a large extent a prestige thing, and you'll find that the practioners profiles on private provider websites often highlights their NHS background.
So what they get out of it is at least to some extent that it is expected many places as a means to getting job offers from private providers.
I have heard the exact same thing. The reason given being a lack of confidence in whoever they were dealing with. For many people, first contact with the NHS is the 111 call centre which really is akin to a health lottery.
Living in the UK but being from another EU country, I definitely see that happening. However, a lot of times it is just due to habits, wrongly-placed mistrust, or not being well settled-in yet because, at the end of the day, there are eg. better GPs and worse GPs everywhere in the world, but if you are still "new" to the country you simply do not know which ones are which, so you prefer to go to the ones you know already.
I'm not entirely sure if the UK has a public-private health system. What I do know is that companies offer private health insurance, even though everyone has access to the NHS. That suggests there's a private system in place, one that probably attracts the most experienced and competent doctors and GPs?
About 10% of people have private health insurance, but note that a large proportion of service providers in the private space also work for the NHS.
E.g. my old GP used to provide both private and NHS services (they were precluded by their NHS contracts from providing private services to people registered with them with the NHS).
Many NHS trusts also provide private services, as they are allowed to do so to improve utilisation and supplement their budgets, so in practice this is part of the reason the NHS is so cheap compared to universal systems in similarly rich countries.
Most private hospitals in the UK also e.g. rely on NHS for intensive care, and this, along with relying on the NHS for first-line care (A&E, GP's unless there's a wait, etc.) is also why private health insurance in the UK is unusually cheap, and why private hospitals in the UK are unusually cheap (if you're in the US, and planning elective treatments, it can be cheaper to fly to London and do it here, even factoring in hotels - and some Central London hospitals have hotel suites, and at least one have or had a previously Michelin starred chef because they cater - literally - to high-end international healthcare tourism).
Oh yeah, healthcare in the US is insanely expensive. They have top professionals, but if you don't have money for long, complex treatments, your options are basically: sell your house, or fly to Cuba, Costa Rica, or the UK for treatment.
The median wait to be seen by a specialist is currently 14 weeks, but the range is much larger and some patients will wait as much as a year for a non-urgent referral. Those waits are on top of a lot of de-facto rationing; referrals will often be rejected for fairly spurious reasons, purely to manage demand.
Speaking personally, the biggest issue isn't the waiting, but the chaos and uncertainty. Every part of the NHS is in a constant state of crisis management. I don't terribly mind that I usually have to wait about two weeks to see my GP (family doctor), but I do object to the fact that I'll invariably be seen by a locum (temporary) doctor who doesn't know how the local systems work and won't be there if I need a follow-up appointment. I could live with waiting lists if they were always 14 weeks, but it's incredibly disruptive to not know if it might be 14 or 40 weeks, to not know if your long-awaited appointment will be cancelled with no notice due to staff shortages or industrial action. I've almost got used to the fact that the corridors of my local hospital are permanently full of "temporary" overflow beds, primarily occupied by frail elderly people, often in considerable distress, sometimes obviously neglected.
I'm fairly high-agency and I feel that the system is hostile and difficult to navigate; I have no doubt that many patients who are less able to advocate for themselves suffer preventable deaths because they fell through the cracks.
If it were only France or Germany, it wouldn't be as bad. I returned to Poland after almost 15 years in the UK, and despite our health service being an absolute shambles, I still prefer it to the NHS.
The resistance to innovation in the screening invitations is more down to empire building by low-talent management than to the NHS 'religion'. Dr Ben Goldacre wrote a memorable X thread on a closely related topic some years ago.
Where do you see people leaving heading towards? What’s your emigration destination? It seems like most countries have their challenges and I’m curious where people who have inevitably done more research than me are landing, literally!
Personally I've known people moving to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, the US, Singapore. There's obviously a variety of factors that go into the choices people make and certainly no perfect choice.
For me, it'll be the UAE. Instinctively, some people will probably attack that choice, which is fine. I've lived in the Middle East previously, it's not perfect to say the least and I have some personal history with that, but I understand the choice I'm making. One thing people won't like is the headline tax rate, but I probably won't come out ahead there initially as cost of living is quite high - it'll cost me about USD 70k just to put three kids in school. Accommodation is also quite expensive, private healthcare also needs paying for, but at least you get what you pay for then.
Where the tax situation is appealing though is that then I'll be incentivised to earn more beyond those high living costs, where I just don't feel I am in the UK. Sun and swimming works for me too. Job adverts there are absolutely rammed with literally thousands of applicants and I'm hearing from recruiters that a lot of people from the UK and wider Europe are trying to head in the same direction. I'll be working for myself though.
I likely won't see out my days there. I'd imagine we'll retire to somewhere on the Med, my wife would prefer NZ but I don't think that works for me. The US is perhaps desirable, but it seems quite hard for a Brit to get into unless they happen to have a job with a company there. We'll have to see.
I was going to ask the same thing and I hope they answer.
I can't speak for OP but I can report on what I'm seeing... I know a lot of British, Canadian, and Australian expats that have moved to California in the past 5-15 years.
Why? Healthcare is probably everyone's first concern, but expats tend to be well educated successful people who can afford excellent healthcare... I'm an expat from a different country and seeing the top end of the healthcare facilities in the States is a luxury experience compared to national healthcare where I'm from. I wish everyone here had access to that, but at least poor people in California do have access to state healthcare.
Politics is a shit show, and has gotten worse recently of course, but that's true in a lot of places now and everyone I know came in before the most recent decline. I know a couple of families who have gone back to their countries, but all of them went back because they wanted to be close to family again, but none of them left because they didn't like it here.
Across everyone I know, the main appeals for coming to California seem to be weather and lower taxes than their home country. Cost of living is similar to many of the big cities in the countries I mentioned above. I'm not suggesting America is a better place, that's a different calculation for everyone, just reporting on what I'm seeing.
The worst part is I don't see really any western country that's not in decline at the moment. Seeing the "surrender"'s from EU and other countries on tariffs makes me feel so bad. It's like there is no place in the world that's socially and economically strong anymore. The US remains economically strong at least, but they're now run by bullies. Even so, I see people all over the world leaving to immigrate to the US. Canada has the same growing cynicism and economic troubles and emigration, maybe less of a police state though. We're all just pathetic vassals to the US now.
> Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it.
I left around the time of Brexit so I have no useful opinion on the recent financial/admin state of the UK, though it seems from afar that austerity has done the place no favours. But...
- this kind of authoritarian nonsense is just what Home Secretaries do. David Blunkett brought in RIP (then, to his very slight credit, changed his mind). Jack 'boot' Straw was famous for his I-AM-THE-LAWing. I don't think the Tories are any better.
- No, criticizing the NHS is not against the religion there. The newspapers are forever getting in digs about long waits, unpopular (but perfectly rational) decision from NICE about what drugs to pay for, and junior doctors and their apparent insistence on being paid properly.
- And with that in mind, having lived in three countries (four if you accept that the NHS in England and Scotland are different) I personally think the NHS is fucking fantastic. Someone close to me was diagnosed with a serious illness and immediately swept up in a production line of modern, effective treatment. Sure, it was somewhat impersonal, the biscuits are rubbish, and they were a widget on the production line, but they're also still alive ten years later, and we still have a house and savings.
- kudos to your sister. The UK is an ethnically diverse place, one of the least racist and divided that I've seen, but - like everywhere else - imperfect. The NHS always seemed to me to be a reflection of what things could be elsewhere with doctors, nurses and cleaners hired from all over the world. [which reminds me that while the right-wing press hates the NHS for being free, the left wing press occasionally hates the NHS for bringing in medical staff from poorer parts of the world. They just can't win]
- No, criticizing the NHS is not against the religion there. The newspapers are forever getting in digs about long waits, unpopular (but perfectly rational) decision from NICE about what drugs to pay for, and junior doctors and their apparent insistence on being paid properly.
This is exactly what I'm saying. The NHS are seen as perfect by some. All criticism is digs that are wrong.
I'm pro-NHS. But this perspective that it's infallible is beyond all reality.
Often, when people criticize the NHS they have an ulterior motive, like privatisation. Consider all the political difficulties the NHS has had in the past few years. As such, negative remarks can be read or misread as dogwhistles for other views, so they're something that have to be phrased carefully and within context.
I was unclear: did you publish a book, or did your sister?
In general, for something both as key and as endangered as the NHS is, criticism isn't always useful -- support is. Problems can be recognised and addressed through support.
I'm not anti-NHS, I've no agenda to see it privatised, I just want it to be better. I tried many, many private routes first. I tried NHS England, NHS Digital, the Innovation Service, AHSNs (many sections having since been renamed/reorganised). About 20 different contact points over two or three years, most of which seemed inappropriate but I made sure if anyone told me it was someone else's responsibility I checked with them.
The problems had already been recognised through public inquiries and yet were still ongoing.
I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive. But as far as I could see, offering support was getting me nowhere.
I just had people acknowledging the issue and then shrugging their shoulders, pointing fingers at everyone else. So I wrote a book on it, spoke about the issue publicly and within months it was decided to spend tens of millions on sorting it.
> I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive.
I think it's wonderful that you offered to do that but it simply isn't realistic. Who is going to support this software in the long term? How are you handling privacy concerns? What guarantees can you offer about server security? Who is paying for and maintaining the servers in the long term? What happens (to be blunt) if you die the day after the software is delivered?
There's so, so much wrong with the way governments provision software projects from outside parties. But there is good reason to have contracts the length of the Bible. Picking up work from individuals on a whim is courting disaster.
> I think it's wonderful that you offered to do that but it simply isn't realistic. Who is going to support this software in the long term? How are you handling privacy concerns? What guarantees can you offer about server security? Who is paying for and maintaining the servers in the long term? What happens (to be blunt) if you die the day after the software is delivered?
Good questions, but the quickest way I can answer them all is to say that my company had delivered software for national security purposes to central government departments. This really was nothing.
It certainly wasn't my preferred option. The offer was mostly a tool to ensure that cost of development could not be used as a reason to reject.
I don't live in the UK, but the stories we hear about the NHS from people who lived and worked there are honestly shocking.
One guy had a brain infection and was told to wait four months for an appointment. Another went in for a root canal, left without a tooth, and fainted outside the clinic. Someone else was refused an X-ray after an accident.
Meanwhile, in my tiny country, we have a dual public-private health system, and the facilities, doctors, and dentists are top notch. It really makes you wonder what's gone wrong in the UK, considering how much taxes British people pay.
The UK pays less per capita towards the NHS than most similar-income countries do.
And, it's very much a "public-private" health system. E.g. all GP's and most dentists are private businesses, paid for by the NHS to varying degree, but also with many providing private services.
The NHS uses an extensive network of private providers, including (when sufficient funding is provided) to drive down waiting lists. I've personally had a procedure carried out at a private hospital at the NHS's expense.
The NHS has many problems, but at the root of a whole lot of them is that the NHS needs a funding increase of 20%-30% to get to similar levels of funding per capita as similarly wealthy countries.
The UK spends about as much per capita on the NHS, providing universal care, as the US does on just Medicare and Medicaid.
>at the root of a whole lot of them is that the NHS needs a funding increase of 20%-30% to get to similar levels of funding per capita as similarly wealthy countries
As a percentage of GDP, UK healthcare spending is well above the EU and OECD averages. We spend a greater share of our national income on healthcare than Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Finland or Norway.
I think a great many countries have problems with healthcare. I think if you went hunting for anecdotes of healthcare failures you'd be rich in examples in a lot of countries. That said, I think in the UK it's a result of inefficiency and chronic underfunding for, at this point, decades.
I've lived in both the UK and the US and there are issues with healthcare in both. Maybe the model your country uses could scale up to populations the size of the UK and the US, maybe it wouldn't. Difficult to know.
It really makes you wonder what's gone wrong in the UK, considering how much taxes British people pay.
Unfortunately the main problem is chronic underinvestment by successive governments of all political inclinations. We tend not to fix our roof in the summer because we hope the other guys will be in government by winter when everyone inside is getting wet and they'll get blamed for the consequences of our decision. We've also made some poor choices historically around selling off national assets and questions of privatisation or public ownership.
This isn't unique to the NHS and ironically among the current Labour government the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is one of the few people suggesting significant changes that actually do make sense for the long term future of our country. Unfortunately a lot of them will probably require more than 5 years to implement and that puts the results over the horizon beyond the next general election. So the price for trying to "do the right thing" might be that he won't get re-elected to see it through. This enables the cycle of short-termism and lack of consistent investment to continue even though its horrible results are increasingly clear for all to see.
I see. A polarised two-party system makes long-term planning really hard, like in the US.
Ironically, that's not a problem in China, they have a one-party authoritarian state and can plan 10, 20 years ahead without worrying about elections or political instability.
China also has a healthcare system that has been far more private than public for the majority of the existence of the PRC, that is only in recent years getting close to providing universal coverage for basic service provisions....
TBF the government and its agencies - including the NHS - are doing themselves no favours with how they're managing IT at the moment.
There are persistent and valid claims that the NHS is inefficient in its use of technology. It wastes lots of money, wastes clinicians' time, and sometimes fails to get accurate information to the people who need it in time to be used.
But there is a best being the enemy of the good problem here. The amount of regulation involved in supplying any kind of tech product or IT service to these public sector organisations is becoming prohibitive. Parts of the industry that have been providing these products and services into the NHS are being crippled in productivity or even literally shutting down whole supply chains because it's too onerous to comply with all the red tape. It's not just individuals but the small businesses that employ or engage them and then the medium-sized business that use the small ones.
If you're working with big consultancies with their own legal and compliance teams then sure you can write hundreds of pages of contracts and require compliance with several external standards about managing personal data and IT security and whatever else. But that regulation flows downhill to the smaller suppliers who don't have resources already available to deal with those issues and at some point it becomes overwhelming and everyone has had enough and decides to become a gardener. Now your only options for supply are big consultancies engaging big suppliers who charge big prices and provide big company levels of service and responsiveness (in the most pejorative sense of these terms).
Surely this isn't the best strategy for a system that desperately needs to be more efficient and sometimes more innovative. There is a broad spectrum between "adopt a one-off product with no support from a single well-meaning individual" and "everything requires so much red tape that only the places charging those £x000-per-day consulting rates we're always mocking are actually allowed to provide it".
As someone who does software for NHS Scotland, I can easily believe the tale of multiple difference directorates/orgs believing it was someone else's remit as the NHS is a super complex organization of organizations. But in your case specifically data protection laws probably made it far worse and that's true of pretty much any tech you build/deploy in the NHS. There are strict information governance rules that have to be followed for any personal information, even just emails, which exist for very good reasons and aren't particularly onerous, but they are strict so in situation like your where it's not clear who would own/be responsible for what you were offering I can could see them getting in the way.
There are some rules that exist for very good reasons - and which have been widely undermined by front-line healthcare services though this does at least seem to be improving a bit over time.
There are also plenty of rules that exist for dogmatic reasons and impose absolute requirements that don't always make much sense in context instead of stating principles that should be appropriately applied.
I understand that those administering these rules don't want to leave loopholes where people or cost-conscious suppliers will cut corners for convenience and/or to save money. There is obviously a danger of that happening if you don't write everything down in black and white.
But you have to remember that the starting point here is receptionists at medical facilities asking people to email over sensitive health information or casually discuss it on the phone when they don't even know who they're talking to and what information is appropriate to share with them. Doctors are trying to read vital patient information from scrawled handwriting on actual paper in potentially time-sensitive life-and-death situations. Expensive scanning equipment in hospitals relies on software that runs on 20-year-old versions of Windows from a supplier that shut down long ago.
In this context you probably win a lot just by having clear policies and guidelines that really are short and simple enough for rank and file staff working in a wide variety of different jobs to understand. A reasonable set of basic technical measures would be far better than much of what is in widespread use today. Trying to make everything perfect so we have fully computerised health records and integrated diagnostic and treatment systems and everything is 100% secure and privacy-protected and supported is a laudable goal that would obviously be much better for patient outcomes and also for the daily lives of everyone working in healthcare. And in 50 or 100 years maybe we'll be able to do it. But not today and not tomorrow.
> Often, when people criticize the NHS they have an ulterior motive, like privatisation
This kind of political insecurity is toxic for rational conversation. Blindly rejecting the criticisms of our political opponents is just as naive as blindly accepting their criticisms. Either way we handover control of the conversation.
Rhetoric exists. Astroturfing exists. Wishful thinking and name-calling do not make them go away. You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.
Just read the comment further above to see that there are people who cannot stomach any criticism of it.
Many years ago now my sister turned down the chance to go to an international conference held in the Netherlands, when I asked why, she said it was because the NHS was the best in the world and had nothing to learn from other healthcare systems. I'm still stunned, and she still doesn't know anything about other healthcare systems.
> But this perspective that it's infallible is beyond all reality
Very very very few people think the NHS is infallible. What are you even talking about? We all understand the NHS has many many problems, and those of us that have used the NHS understand this even more.
However, we still think it's a lot better than the private healthcare model.
Not sure what you're getting out of this weird strawman argument you're putting forward.
> However, we still think it's a lot better than the private healthcare model.
What private healthcare mode? WHat they have in the US? Then definitely yes. What they have on France or Germany or Japan or almost every other developed country.? Then No. What they have in Singapore? Still No.
I'm afraid there are people who cannot tolerate NHS criticism, you may not be aware of them until you've tried to see a change in the NHS. Some of them would even describe their very existence as a strawman, but it's not a strawman to the people they've blocked from seeing the NHS improve.
Yet private healthcare is a strawman, I've never argued for it.
You've moved from saying the NHS is like a religion that no one can criticise, to "some people cannot tolerate NHS criticism". I'm glad you've toned down the ridiculous complaints to something more reasonable.
Well if they are you're probably getting a greater amount of other selfish, unpatriotic people to replace them so idk if it's a net gain from your pov.
Depends on why they are there. Refugees tend to care about the country they came from more and the one they landed in they view as a temporary shelter.
Complaining is the British pastime so complaining about the NHS is grandfathered in. However if you try and offer any suggestion for improvements to the NHS you soon realise you cannot criticise it in any meaningful form and be decried a blasphemous heretic.
>I don't think anyone objects to what the UK had 20 years ago - genuinely skilled immigration
20 years ago it was mostly Poles whose only quality was that they were willing to work for less than native UK citizens in jobs that said UK citizens supposedly did not want to do (which is doublespeak for businesses not wanting to pay a decent wage). This kind of immigration was one of the reasons Brexit happened.
The Poles we've historically had a great relationship with and there was already a huge ex-pat community of Poles here from WW2.
It was more the later additions to the EU a few years later that were actually problematic and got people's backs up.
It didn't help that we were allowed to restrict immigration from those countries but didn't as the government needed mass immigration to disguise the fact there was no growth.
In the UK attending a protest against putting illegal immigrants from Afghanistan in a hotel by your kids school is likely to have you on a watch list or arrested. This might not sound that bad to our European friends, but you guys in the US might be quite surprised to hear this.
It's not just "right-wing" positions which are dealt like this either, I should note for legal reasons that I strongly disagree with the actions and views of "Palestine Action", but arrests of peaceful protestors who simply wish to voice support of them as a group (without actually being part of the group themselves) is in my mind absurd. It's one thing to make membership of the group illegal, but to also make debating that judgement illegal is highly problematic in my mind. For those interested you'll find videos of the police arresting elderly women for terror charges for simply peacefully voicing their opinions on Palestine Action. It's vile.
The UK government has announced a new "squad" who will check social media for anti-migrant sentiment. Even if you are not "anti-migration" (whatever that means), I think we can agree that opposing migration is still a valid opinion to hold in a democratic society.
Capitalism always turns to authoritarianism once the rich can't maintain their power within the bounds of reasonable laws. The UK was rich for many reasons in the past, but most recently because the City of London was the EU's money laundering haven for people who got money legitimately (what's the name for this?) until they left the EU.
The spice/money must flow. Making money selling addictive products like smartphones? Probably the least bad way it can be made to flow. When that sort of thing breaks down, the rich run down the list: increasing taxes (except their own), culling the poor, outright seizing property, etc.
The UK has a low crime rate, even compared to its peers - other rich northern European countries.
Hysteria about crime is just far right propaganda.
(Obviously keeping crime low is important, and a generally low crime rate doesn't reduce the impact on those who are victims. But pretending that high crime is a pressing problem for the country as a whole is disingenuous)
But… you have discrepancies like the town of Middlesbrough , a small North Yorkshire town with crime rates on par with large European cities and rampant poverty and drug abuse with no clear way out because no one seems willing to invest in the once infant Hercules.
I hear about the North turning into a kind of rust belt as the population concentrates around London. I'm not sure how you solve that in a finance centered economy with no local industry - small towns are struggling across the developed world for similar reasons.
If you find a good strategy for Reindustrialization especially in developed countries that have gotten used to high wage white collar work please share it around. Are there any good countries to look at for this?
Maybe a little cynical, but genuinely if any country has got some good strategies for building industry back up after a decline I think we should be stealing their notes. Right now arguably China seems like the only one to me? And I'd definitely favor trying their massive state investment, but I'm not sure if the UK can do that one.
> Right now arguably China seems like the only one to me?
They didn't build it up on their own. They saw opportunity in western businesses who wanted lower wages and less strict environmental laws, and lured them in. The western businesses then moved all their manufacturing to China who then spied on these factories to out-compete the western businesses with "home grown" products they copied.
It’s kind of the opposite. The North is underfunded and often ignored by central government, but it’s also cheap.
There have been an influx of Londoners who have discovered that they can actually afford a house in the North and enroll their kids in decent schools and maintain a good standard of living, especially those who are able to move while maintaining a London salary.
Also second hand from British friends but the current leadership seems really weird to me. Went back on their election pledges, tacking this way and that for something to do to raise poll numbers.
It doesn't fit together as a strategy to me and I don't see it fixing the economy, but I guess they can talk about it as a success?
The British political class has been collapsing for decades. The population just flip-flops between completely awful unpalatable options, Starmer is just reheated third way Blairism. Brits aren't this stupid and they want optimistic view of future not go on the war path or austerity.
They will slowly cycle out this historical group of parties resulting in painful economic results and poor social cohesion nationally.
From tourist point of view UK felt to me like a police state, and I'm leaning more towards the former view. Cameras everywhere, non-stop reminders that you're being watched, being tracked everywhere(including which train car you're in now), constant reminders about possible dangerous bags being left alone etc.
Tracking would feel helpful and useful, if not for constant oppressive reminders that "Bad Thing could happen any second, be vigilant!".
While at the same time, it was vastly more unsafe than Eastern Europe.. and cities themselves were vastly dirtier.
Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.
To be honest and to give some context - they have been under threat of terrorism(due to The Troubles first - the name itself seems to reinforce this view, seems innocent..) roughly since end of WW2. well WW2 was a factor too.
To add a bit more context: this wasn't my first nor last trip to UK, and each time i visit it the worse it feels in every aspect:
Cleanliness of cities, safety, and oppressiveness.
I always thought a police state would demand identification at every street corner (perhaps I'm wrong?) and any minor breaking of the law being dealt with severe justice. The UK has always been against a "state ID" unlike a lot of European countries, so I'm not completely convinced the description of "police state" is accurate. In fact I think it's the opposite given people can freely break the law despite cameras being on every street corner.
The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.
Bureaucracy kills any kind of infrastructure project (see HS2), so don't expect any improvements any time soon.
We do have some nice cities: Manchester, York, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge. (I've probably missed a few from this list). London feels pretty far from 30 years ago - and not in a good way.
>The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.
Reminds me the latter three dune novels. Frank Herbert had this idea he was exploring about how the inevitable end-state of society is this sort of stalemate between opposing bureaucratic factions which have become optimized towards preventing their own destruction to the point that they aren't capable of doing anything other than prolonging their own existence.
It reminds me of the Republicans and the democrats in America which have become utterly unresponsive towards their own voterbases because they have already rigged the political system to prevent any viable competitors from displacing them but in general it seems like the whole of western civilization has reached this point over the last 50 years or so, because just about any country which is referred to as 'western' has a set of very obvious problems on the horizon with very obvious solutions being stalled by a ruling class which is concerned with maintaining its own existence at all costs even if it has to bring down the entire nation with it.
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
Other countries are moving in the same direction. The EU has repeatedly tried to push things like on device scanning or banning encryption.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government.
Mostly a failure of democracy - we have two major parties that are hard to tell apart.
They are both cynical and scared, and have for decades believed the future of Britain is managed decline. They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
The sugar tax is a strange example to pick as an example of British decline.
As of 2022, the WHO reported on SSB (sugar-sweetened beverages):
> Currently, at least 85 countries implement some type of SBB taxation.
It feels to me like this was a rare step in the opposite direction - recognising that industry is the driving cynical force and pushing back on its over reach where it has failed. Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately to avoid the tax, with what net loss? (The class-targeting comments were a straw man)
In principle I support taxes that disincentivise production of negative externalities (in this case, adverse health effects).
However the way this works out in practice is a reduction in consumer choice, one that I'm reminded of every time I walk into a shop.
> Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately
This is the problem, really. Rather than adding new "low sugar" product lines, in most instances they're modifying existing ones to replace the sugar with artificial sweeteners. The "original recipe" is often no longer available to consumers at any price.
As someone who struggles to consume enough calories to stay healthy, this sucks! (Mostly unrelated to pricing, just as a matter of practicality)
Cigarette smokers for example can still walk into just about any shop and purchase their favourite cigarettes, they just have to pay more for them - this seems fine.
Overall I'm quite on the fence about the whole thing, but on a purely emotional level it feels like an instance of government overreach.
Its not an example of decline, it is an example of nudge politics and trying to control what the hoi polloi do. I was making two points which is why I said "they ALSO believe".
It is a prime example of class targetting because manufacturers of more expensive drinks still put sugar in them, its the cheap drinks that have switched to sugar substitutes.
Is it though? Are other forms of government more successful while remaining respectful of privacy? Or is it more of a reaction to social or societal changes? Why would these social or societal changes be different than previous changes?
> They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
A non insulting way to view that is that central goverments understand incentives, and in the same way there are child incentives for people starting families, having incentives for healthier eating is something a central goverment should use its taxation policy for.
More control over education standards is also a common purview of many good educational systems. Decentralisation is not necesirely better, with teh extreme being homeschooling failing every time its attempted. Centrally dictated standards was the method of the French revolution, believing that a society where everyone roughly understands the world the same way was a society that was more unified. French "equality , fraternity and legality " is a basis for modern liberal democracy almost everywhere, but they didnt get there without authoritarian imposition of their standards, with entire minority cultures getting trampled along the way.
The hyperbole and bad faith explanations of legislation is not a good representation or argument against why britain is more accepting of som legislation many feel intrusive.
A better argument is that this piece of legislation was passed late on the rule of a disastrous administration and the number of problems in day to day society largely are unaffected by it, so it got no time in the spotlight for people to complaint or know it was coming until it was days away from being implemented. Society is also largely technologically illiterate, this is pretty much the case everywhere in the planet, which means the nuances of tech legislation are lost even on the people writting and voting on it.
If most of the public are in favour of the Online Safety Act, then how is it a failure of democracy to have it? I give you the top FT comment:
>I, for one, am glad that porn is being age-restricted online. It gives young people false ideas. You'll never get a plumber to come around to your house that quickly in real life.
The Online Safety Act has a reach and consequences than restricting access to porn. As has been mentioned on HN many times it is causing forums to shut down, and people to move to social media instead. It is causing forums in other countries to shut out British users. It is essentially making UGC something only businesses, especially the tech giants, can do. Even with porn age verification is a concern.
> There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
Its because the popular press has, for a very long time, been pushing a narrative of a country under siege. It sells papers, but to keep selling papers, it has to keep steadily upping the narrative over time.
It is the case elsewhere, remember how close France once got to Frexit and how close the far right were to winning their most recent general election with the same claims.
But the UK has always to some extent enjoyed a fantasy of being an island under siege from mainland Europe and it something the nationalist press like to drum up.
As for its increasing poverty, the UK went all-in on neoliberalism since the ‘80s, and especially in on austerity since 2008. Entry-level wages barely grew for over 10 years. Blame the EU for that, get Brexit, more expensive goods and damage to the financial sector the country relied on. Then Covid…
To me, the most disturbing part isn’t just the laws themselves, it’s the complete shift in the cultural zeitgeist. When I was younger, people distrusted the government by default. We stood for freedom of speech, anonymity, the right to speak without being censored. Now, even among software developers, people in tech who should know better, I see them practically begging Big Brother for more censorship, more control.
It makes me sick. It brings to mind that old quote from Mussolini: “The truth is evident to all who are unblinded by dogmatism, that men nowadays are tired of liberty.”
Is the dogmatism what blinded or unblinded? Considering the source I assume he meant that Italians desired fascism. I’m not familiar with the rise of Mussolini, was he genuinely popular or more of a Hitleresque thug that used violence to suppress his opponents and control measured public opinion?
In a word, division. The UK is so divided that people are too busy pointing the finger at each other to realise the root cause of the deterioration of our quality of life is entirely generations of mismanagement of the public purse.
Instead of questioning how MPs are entitled to a pay rise while your average person gets made redundant, people are questioning why people fleeing persecution should ‘be paid for with my tax money’.
Brain fatigue and mixed signals combined with destitution and desperation drastically impede the average person’s ability and desire to fact check and extrapolate. We are moving towards a society of down and out people living with no hope serving the elite and those with a bit of money behind them.
My fiancée and I have had enough and are also leaving in October. No idea where to all we know is we have a one way ticket away and will figure the rest out.
>people are questioning why people fleeing persecution
Except many of them are not, they are economic migrants. And some have even realised that claiming that they're persecuted for lgbt reasons is an instant in - there was a case with a guy (with a wife and a bunch of children) that claimed to have written a pro lgbt article and now he's persecuted.
As a gay man the thought of that sickens me, economic migrants using who I am as a shortcut to entry, I have no problem at all with genuinely lgbt individuals seeking refugee status; we're still persecuted in so many places and there's not enough of us to make change happen in those places.
But the economic migrants...all they're doing is ensuring their home country never improves and that a steady stream of migrants continues into Europe. It'll never end.
It’s an example, it’s not a mutually exclusive situation. The point is that people are busy pointing the finger at each other instead of the people whom are paid to actually improve their lives.
> Instead of questioning how MPs are entitled to a pay rise while your average person gets made redundant, people are questioning why people fleeing persecution should ‘be paid for with my tax money’.
Your misstating their concerns. I don't know whether you are misinformed or doing so deliberately.
The migrants on the boats are not people fleeing persecution. Firstly these boats are coming from France. Are you claiming that France is persecuting people?
Secondly. I have a relative that work in social services. They do age assessments. These men claim they are children. It takes time to do these age assessments to take place and process and while that is happening they have to be housed. Since they claim they are children, they have to be put into foster homes. So foster homes are forced to take strange men, while an age assessment is taking place. This is an obvious risk to the actual children housed there.
These migrants talk to each other and have worked out that if register with Counties outside of London it will take longer for them to be found out, because the local authorities in these counties have less resources to process them. One of these men admitted as much over the phone.
Things like this are what people are unhappy about. They don't have an issue with legitimate asylum claims. People aren't divided on this issue BTW.
In my high school drivers ed there was a kid who looked like he was in his 20's with a full thick beard, stocky muscular build, deep voice. I thought he got left back a bunch but turns out he was my age - 16. So "obviously not a kid" doesn't really work and potentially puts people at risk.
Politicians have not taken action on a wide spectrum of problems (some of which are crime related, other problems in society below the level of crime) for many decades now. While the economy is good, this doesn't occupy the mind of the public too much, life is OK. Now that the economy is not good, and has not been good since at least 2008, the public has begun to notice these things. The public has even started to notice domestic opinion management (nudge unit, 77th Brigade etc). Passing this sort of "manage the symptom not the cause" legislation has become popular. It's easier to do than deal with the cause, it pushes the actions onto 3rd parties, and superficially it sounds good to the general public. At least for a while. To get an idea of how "off target" the state itself is in managing serious crimes look no further than [1] (warning, pretty grim story, but very typical).
Crime has, despite everything, gradually been falling. Scotland has a 100% murder clearup rate for the past several years.
The incident you mentioned is yet another piece of fallout from Rochdale, but if you look closely the offences mentioned are from 20 years ago. I don't think that should be used to talk about the present. There is a lot more safeguarding these days.
The main negative factor is the press, responsible for both "opinion management", doomerism, and sensationalist demands to Do Something in a way that doesn't help. The Online Safety Act and Brexit are both victories for the Daily Mail that are losses for the rest of the public.
Don't believe the things that you read. Our newspapers have been openly biased for centuries, and there's some very shoddy journalism at times. See, for example:
Outside of techn journalism, this is a non story in the UK. I think it's hard to say much about the society's attitude when they don't know ow about this, never mind understand.
Average UKian is, IME, surprisingly technologically unsavvy. This might be the root cause of lack of interest or protest.
If I were to guess how this whole thing came to be, it would be thus: the UK government is increasingly dysfunctional and polarised. The attention of government and opposition goes increasingly into futile, high-stakes but always drawn battles. But that means that motivated and organised groups can push through things that look benign from the outside and don't trigger the Great Polarisation. Protecting children from suicide, what's not to like? The Parliament, where this should be shredded to pieces, is too busy trying to reshuffle deckchairs.
Meanwhile this is printed on vellum, welcome to the new reality.
Not saying I agree with the legislation, but the UK experienced a lot of pretty bad domestic terrorism in the rememberable past (namely IRA bombs detonating in towns and cities etc, often with devastating impacts). Then there were the tube and bus suicide bombings more recently. And there has also been a constant pitter-patter of "radicalised lone wolf" type things like the Ariana Grande concert bomber, the guy who killed a load of 8 year old girls at a summer camp and so on.
None of this is porn of course, but supposedly a lot of the lone wolf's are radicalised online so it creates a lot of "someone needs to do something!!!!" type attitudes (and no public gun ownership would not work like everyone says it would because the USA had that yet no one lifted a finger when they needed to recently, and now look what's happened), and sadly the older and more little-c conservative population carriers more clout in terms of policies because historically they tend to vote in greater numbers than younger groups. N.b. that 16 and 17 year olds have very recently been given the right to vote so things may change.
Yes but they are part of the lived experience of a large part of the country.
So these are not some dusty forgotten thing from history books that people might read about, it was stuff they saw on TV and is back in the news whenever a round-number anniversary comes up etc.
The point I was trying to make is that quite shocking bad things happened semi-recently, and more shocking bad things continue to happen. It appears in the news over and over and over about people being radicalised online.
I get why people think this is a good idea - you need to prove age to buy knives and cigarettes etc, so they think "why not" for porn and other "adult" things online.
Because the media always paints other countries in certain lights, as it helps them build a narrative for their own governments?
> complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government
I disagree with this sentiment, however it does show how bad "democracy" can be when voting for a complete government change results in absolutely no change whatsoever.
I think its highly relevant when we have people pushing the faulty logic narrative that the UK is China and using CCTV as a measurement for their case.
UK bad because online safety rules, let's ignore US states that already do this.
> Don't mind what we are doing, the UK is worse.
Not defending the UK, but they aren't the first and you dont get the same inflammatory racist language with other countries.
How so? If I have a car lot, I'll have multiple cameras for a tiny area bumping the average camera per person without meaningful results. Sounds like the worst measurement unless you are trying to push a narrative.
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action
Historically there is no formal constitution in the UK so Parliament is not limited in their power. IHMO it's the main factor why the UK is an outlier.
You are approaching this from a uniquely U.S. perspective. The U.K. is pretty middle of the road as far as “surveillance” and while this may offend the freedom-at-all-costs sensibilities, it’s a fairly milquetoast change.
Visiting the Heineken website in the U.S. requires that you assert you are over the age of 21. Texas has instituted I.D. verification for pornography.
Regardless of how you feel about this law, it is not accurate to say the U.K. is unique in implementing it.
Discord’s own articles about this change explain that the fundamentals (content filtering) are applied to all accounts owned by teenagers worldwide. The only U.K. specific aspect of all of this is that if you tell Discord you are over 18 you must prove it. That’s a very small difference and not something most people in most countries care about. I’d go as far as to say, I think the majority of people in the majority of the world would be in favour of requiring people to prove they’re over 18 online if they want to claim to be over 18 online.
Again, this is a radical internet-libertarian-freedom-at-all-costs view. Normal people do not think that proving you are 18 is notable. We’ve been doing it for decades with credit cards. The system is more mature now but it is not fundamentally different.
Uploading your government-issued ID to random sites to prove your age is insanity.
We have daily reporting about database breaches where people were duped into uploading their picture/ID, and then it gets posted on 4chan. This is true for the latest "Tea" app this past week, but also ID verification services for big companies like TikTok and Uber. I draw a hard line: I will not upload my ID for some private business to review, because they will never delete it.
My position is very simple. I believe that most of the world is fine with age checks on the Internet. I think that the U.S. free speech laws and attitudes are unique and because English speaking internet culture is U.S. culture, these discussions always end up with an assumption that U.S. values are the values shared by the subjects.
I don’t think my view on the law matters, I haven’t shared it. I am speaking specifically about how everyone here is talking as if people in the U.K. care about “draconian” surveillance. People in the U.K. are not people from the U.S. Age verification is not a philosophical issue for U.K. people as it is for people in the U.S. People from the U.K. are not principled free speech absolutists. Ask a person in the U.K. if porn should require age verification and they will not think nor care about the free speech or surveillance implications of voting for such a law.
And people in the U.K. are not unique. People in the U.S. are. Spend any amount of time outside of our U.S. Internet bubble and you’ll discover nobody cares about any of this.
Whether I care and whether you care is not relevant to the British voters. Not the Australian voters. Nor the Swedish voters. Or the Thai voters. Or the Japanese voters…
Yeah, you are right, we would be fine with age checks. If and only if it was done through zk-SNARE or ZKPs in general. Uploading a photo of myself to a random company's server is a no-go, whether for having my age checked or whatever else.
I am Eastern European, and there is no way in hell I will ever use a service that requires me to verify my age through a photo of my ID.
In fact you have shared your opinion: 'Again, this is a radical internet-libertarian-freedom-at-all-costs view. Normal people do not think that proving you are 18 is notable.'
I would actually argue you've expressed dozens of opinions related to this law and very few facts. Any source on whether Swedish or Japanese voters care for example? What led you to this conclusion?
Furthermore in your last comment you first argue you are only speaking to UK sentiment ('I am speaking specifically about how everyone here is talking as if people in the U.K. care about “draconian” surveillance.') and then double down on your argument that US is the outlier.
You don’t need age verification to access all of Discord, just NSFW servers. You can certainly argue that that’s an unjustifiable interference in people’s freedom to access the internet services that they want to access. But please don’t exaggerate.
> You don’t need age verification to access all of Discord, just NSFW servers.
That’s not correct. The Discord support explains that it’s required to change automatic content filtering or unblur any content that gets caught by the automatic filters.
Yes, that’s what I meant. You can still access Discord, just not any content that’s detected as NSFW. Generally speaking that content will be on NSFW servers (the kind that e.g. the iPhone app would block you from accessing by default).
Obviously there is not going to be a “nah I really want to see this tho” button, or the age check would be completely pointless.
That is not true. Try going to a server that asks for your age and then go ahead to choose "2020".
> Obviously there is not going to be a “nah I really want to see this tho” button, or the age check would be completely pointless.
That is exactly how "ignoring" an user on Discord works. Their messages are still there and you have to click on it to have it uncollapsed, so that is kind of ironic of you to say, lmao. So yeah, there actually is a "nah I really want to see this tho" button.
Look, create an account and when you join a server that asks for your age, make sure you set the birth year to one that makes you less than 13 years old.
For what it is worth, it has to do with Discord ToS (per / by country).
In some countries you must be over 13 to use Discord, other countries 14, but if you are below, you MUST verify yourself to be able to access your Discord account after you set it to below 13. This verification process is done through sending Discord an e-mail requesting them to restore your account, with a video of yourself holding your ID card as an attachment.
The list per country can be found on Discord's website.
What I am talking about is separate from the server settings (require phone verification and/or age verification).
It his law combined with all the other iffy laws in the UK which make this nefarious. This is the issue about discussing anything about how draconian the UK is. If you compare any single law in isolation, it isn't that different. However if you take how the British authorities and how they operate it, and all the other laws you start to see a more draconian picture.
That is what many people, especially those that do live in the UK don't appreciate.
I lived in the U.K. for decades and I have lived in many other countries. I’ll criticise the U.K. government and society endlessly but to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense.
From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
The U.K. is a flawed place going to hell in a hand basket that many U.K. citizens have strong opinions on but outside of us, the freedom loving nerds on the internet, this identity verification law is not a part of the conversation. “Draconian” and “authoritarian” aren’t in the vocabulary of most U.K. citizens. They’re far more concerned about immigration and the economy.
The long-standing “the U.K. has the most cctv cameras per person” meme is further evidence of this. A well-loved fact carted out by freedom-loving anti-surveillance types… that the mainstream of the U.K. could not care less about.
It's a "blip in your radar" until you want to say something that is forbidden by the government. Or when someone thinks that you said it, such as with "non-crime hate incidents" where anyone can report "hate speech" to the police, which will be added to your public file.
Same in France, many things are forbidden to say, most of time censored, sometimes even punished (either socially or by the law). US is way way way more advanced in terms of freedom.
You are allowed to say there is censorship but not allowed to say what is forbidden (and you are not allowed to criticize some laws, without breaking the law). You can really go to jail or have your life ruined, or your business burned because of a TikTok video.
This censorship benefits a lot of bad people, but naming them is a crime by itself.
For example, in France, there is no insecurity in the streets. If you say the opposite and start naming examples, you will get shamed or even physically attacked by some people and be prosecuted for “spreading hate” and other crimes whereas your attackers will have zero issues.
This phenomenon is known as “juges rouges” (the red judges), somewhat similar to USSR
Given the US government is actually defunding major universities because "reasons", I find your comment laughable. Problem with arguing about "freedoms" is usaians still believe their constitution applies. Also, Colbert show, etc.
Your take about French censorship is equally ridiculous. I would gather that 90% of French press would not survive a month in the US before being pressured/defunded or worse. What happened to Charlie Hebdo would have happened in the US, by "patriots" instead of islamists.
And let's not even start about the separation of church and state...
You can write to several climate activists in prison if you would like first hand accounts. I means ones who held up placards, rather than the ones that climbed onto trains or glued themselves to roads.
Just weeks ago a couple of pop bands got hauled in front of judges or had police investigations aimed at them for voicing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. (Ok, so they used incediary language, but they’re 20-somethings at festivals and the Gaza situation is abhorrent).
Fairly recently, an activist group which uses tactics reminiscent of the anti-nuclear-proliferation movement and animal rights movements of the 70s-90s got proscribed a terrorist organisation. At present, the law around this and recent implementations of its enforcement are such that I can’t tell if I’ll be arrested for writing this paragraph. I’ve tried to stick to the facts, but interpretation can get you locked up.
Section 127(1) makes it an offence to:
"Send by means of a public electronic communications network a message that is a -
(a) grossly offensive,
(b) indecent, obscene, or menacing, or
(c) false, known to be false, for causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety."
Section 127(2) adds that: "A person is also guilty of an offence if they cause a message or other matter to be sent that is similarly offensive or menancing.
In the U.K. people can be prosecuted for speech found to be offensive.
There have been several high profile cases used as examples, like the guy who was convicted for making a video of his girlfriend’s dog pretending to do a Nazi salute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan
Doing anything considered “grossly offensive” online can result in the police knocking on your door and financial penalties. It’s a foreign concept if you’re in a country where making jokes online doesn’t constitute a risk to your freedoms and finances (which is more than just the U.S.)
There’s no such thing as a public police file in the UK. What I assume you’re referring to is that these records are accesible for the purposes of certain kinds of police background checks (which, as in many other countries, are required for certain jobs).
> I lived in the U.K. for decades and I have lived in many other countries. I’ll criticise the U.K. government and society endlessly but to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense.
I am English. I was born in England, my parents are English, my Grandparents were English, My Great Grandparents were English etc. etc.
I have lived my majority of my life here. So I am English.
You obviously didn't read what I said. I understand that it is nothing special in isolation. However I am not talking about it in isolation. I was talking about the entirety of how the current laws are constructed as well as how the UK state operates.
Also just because other countries have rubbish laws, doesn't mean we should have adopted similar ones.
> From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
Many people do not like this and are actively seeking work-arounds. These aren't uber nerds like myself BTW.
> The U.K. is a flawed place going to hell in a hand basket that many U.K. citizens have strong opinions on but outside of us, the freedom loving nerds on the internet, this identity verification law is not a part of the conversation.
So you admit there is a problem. But you then pretend that this can't possibly be part of the entire picture because you say so.
Sorry it very much well is part of the problem. You stating it isn't doesn't make it so.
So because it isn't discussed through UK mainstream news and publications that means people aren't concerned about it? A lot of things people are actually concerned about isn't mentioned at all in the mainstream news or publications that is why increasingly fewer people are paying attention to them.
People are talking about these things ironically on places like twitter/X, facebook, whatsapp, discord and in person (shock horror I know). I was at a boys football match this weekend and people were talking about it there.
BTW quite hilariously twitter/X are censoring some footage from the commons as that content has to be age-gated.
The myth of things “not being talked about” in the mainstream is a convenient way to excuse being unable to provide any meaningful evidence that a notable portion of the country care about something.
I know it might shock you but people on twitter and discord are not representative of voters. Most voters do not engage with any social media.
People on the internet get so caught up in the international perspective we are exposed to that we forget what national voters actually care about.
> The myth of things “not being talked about” in the mainstream is a convenient way to excuse being unable to provide any meaningful evidence that a notable portion of the country care about something.
If social media wasn't important, politicians, mainstream news publications themselves, and other political activists wouldn't bother with it. So this is patently False.
Pretending this hasn't been a trend now for 15 years is completely asinine and shame on you for attempting to pretend the opposite is true.
> I know it might shock you but people on twitter and discord are not representative of voters. Most voters do not engage with any social media.
False. Almost everyone I know is on social media of some sort. They might not be actively engaging but they do engage regularly in some form or another. Most of them would be called lurkers, or they will check out stuff if some piques their interests.
You conveniently missed out where I said "facebook" and "in person"
> People on the internet get so caught up in the international perspective we are exposed to that we forget what national voters actually care about.
I don't care about the international perspective. I am English (I've already told you this). I care about this issue and I know plenty of other people who are British care about this issue.
The same YouGov polling that had almost every about Brexit issue at 71% vs 29%. Their polling isn't to be trusted.
Even if I took that at face value, that means 1/5 people don't support it. Which isn't an insignificant amount of people. So there are a decent number of people that care about it, even using your own figures. This disproves your statements about it not being cared about and only uber nerds caring about it.
You are simply over indexing for your own circle. Your circle (by virtue of being a nerd) is deeply biased towards people heavily influenced by U.S. attitudes towards freedom. I’m an internet nerd too, I know how easy it is to get caught up in this idea that what you see online is representative of the people, but it isn’t. Go out and talk to real people. Go and stand in the street and ask every passer by whether they feel the U.K. is “draconian” or not. You’ll be shocked to discover that almost nobody cares about anything that doesn’t directly impact their day to day life. Look at the rise of Reform, Farage’s embrace of trumpism. That’s authoritarianism, and the people love it. You’re completely out of touch with the common person if you think any of this matters.
You can take a principled stance, you can have strong views, you can believe in freedom, I’m with you, but it’s patently absurd to suggest that any of what you believe is representative of the people. The people, in the U.K. and beyond, simply do not have a single solitary regard for any of this. Porn bad so porn ban good. That’s the entire thought process.
Could more than 5% of the U.K. voting public even define “draconian”? or “authoritarian”?
> You are simply over indexing for your own circle. Your circle (by virtue of being a nerd) is deeply biased towards people heavily influenced by U.S. attitudes towards freedom. I’m an internet nerd too, I know how easy it is to get caught up in this idea that what you see online is representative of the people, but it isn’t.
False. Most of the people I engage with in real life are not nerds. You keep on stating things that you know nothing about as truisms. How about instead of trying to gaslight people about what is real and what isn't, you actually engage in the points being made by your interlocutor?
> Go out and talk to real people. Go and stand in the street and ask every passer by whether they feel the U.K. is “draconian” or not.
I would imagine if someone thought about it, I would get a statement something about all the cameras everywhere or how buying some with a bank transfer is difficult (if you buy something cash like a vehicle it sets off anti-fraud detection in your bank and transactions can be blocked).
They won't talk about it in terms you are familiar with. They will point to stuff like cameras, unfair charges etc and how difficult some of this makes their lives.
All of this normal people have experienced.
> You’ll be shocked to discover that almost nobody cares about anything that doesn’t directly impact their day to day life. Look at the rise of Reform, Farage’s embrace of trumpism. That’s authoritarianism, and the people love it. You’re completely out of touch with the common person if you think any of this matters.
You mentioned all of those. I didn't mention them. You are projecting onto me what your experience is. The irony here is astounding.
Shrug. I’m not sure what else to say. I’ve shown you that polling shows the majority support age verification. I have asked you to provide evidence of mainstream objection to this law, which you are unable to provide. You have asserted that polling is wrong because you know people who disagree.
You may not like it and I may not like it but the view of the U.K. voting public is that age verification to look at porn is reasonable and that “protecting” children justifies limiting freedoms.
My exercise for you: decide what evidence is needed to convince you that most British people are happy with this law.
> Shrug. I’m not sure what else to say. I’ve shown you that polling shows the majority support age verification. I have asked you to provide evidence of mainstream objection to this law, which you are unable to provide. You have asserted that polling is wrong because you know people who disagree.
You said it "wasn't part of the conversation" originally. Not what the majority agreed with. You've subtly tried to change what the discussion was about. That is known as moving the goalposts:
Then you asked me to provide evidence of something I can't possibly provide. That quite frankly bullshit.
> You may not like it and I may not like it but the view of the U.K. voting public is that age verification to look at porn is reasonable and that “protecting” children justifies limiting freedoms.
I don't doubt that the majority are OK with it. I am taking issue with the fact that you are pretending only libertarian nerds online care about this. I know that isn't true.
> My exercise for you: decide what evidence is needed to convince you that most British people are happy with this law.
Don't talk to me like a child.
I don't have you provide you with anything. You made the claim that only a few people care about this. When even your own evidence disputes. 20% of a large group of people is still a lot. That isn't "nobody cares" like you pretend is the case.
“The conversation” is well understood to mean “the things being talked about in the mainstream”. 80% in favour of a law is so overwhelmingly positive that it is rarely seen. My initial comment, a lifetime ago, was in the context of someone asking why the U.K. is unique when it comes to these laws. I said the U.K. is not and that most people support them. I’ve showed surveying that backs that up. The absence of any mainstream articles about this should be evidence enough it isn’t part of the conversation. Maybe that’ll change in future, but at least for now, nobody cares. Maybe you’re right and there’s a conspiracy amongst the mainstream to suppress the real views of the people, we will see.
(I don’t want to talk to you like a child, but a little lesson: mainstream news is mostly a cynical cash grab by harnessing outrage. Mainstream news loves things that outrage people. If there was any real outrage about this law, it would be harnessed by the dailymail and the Sun and Reach PLC to make money hand over fist. They would milk it so hard they would have to implement age verification.)
> From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
You're commenting on a story about VPN use surging in the country after the law came into effect. Clearly folks noticed.
>to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense.
From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
This is a very dangerous measure of how worryingly authoritarian or not a particular place is becoming. People's perceptions are notoriously subject to all kinds of blindness and unknowns. The perceptions of most average Germans living in the first years of the Nazi state were also of minimal concern for authoritarianism, and little more than a series of modest blimps on the radar, and where did that take them?
This is not to compare the underlying savagery of something like the Nazi state with the soft bureaucratic smarminess of the modern UK, but the underlying risks of any creeping authoritarianism are the same: a steady normalization of deviance.
Do you know of other western countries that send cops to your house because you posted memes on X ?
Saying that illegal migrants should be sent back home can literally land you at the police station. A hotel worker was arrested for testifying to what he saw in his hotels, ie. migrants being hosted, given a phone, meals, and NHS visit once every two weeks.
>The U.K. is pretty middle of the road as far as “surveillance”
Just, no.
5-eyes is the most heinous human-rights-destroying apparatus under the sun, and it wouldn't be happening if it weren't for the British desire to undermine cultures they have deemed inferior.
While I appreciate the concern, it's worth pointing out that 30 or so years ago "government should mandate id checks for harmful content" was not some radical dystopian notion.
The UK was also one of the first nations to ban indoor smoking and in cars with kids. I think this is very much in that vein (politically).
It's about corporate control - the more regulations like this - the more entrenched the market becomes. Higher barrier to enter for smaller players plus government gets all the surveillance apparatus as a sweetener.
Basically Labour continues taking UK into corporate fascist utopia.
That's the combined power of the worst tendencies of the media and a deliberate propaganda campaign.
Take this law: it's not new, it was passed in 2023 by the previous government. The law had a two year deadline attached to it, and companies didn't introduce any restriction before the deadline. The new government has a lot on its plate, so it's hardly surprising that repealing a law that was already passed with little attention to it was not high on the list of priorities compared to things like not defaulting or unblocking planning permissions. And yet, twitter and other places are full of very loud voices describing the law as new and designed to oppress them now, even though the deadline was set two years ago.
On a more general note, we have our problems, but the UK is in a pretty good place. Sam Freedman covered some bases in his recent post [1] (crime is down, the economy is struggling but improving, etc), but I'll add some more:
* We're probably the least racist, most integrated society in the world. The leader of the opposition is a black woman and first generation immigrant [2]. When Rishi Sunak became a PM, his race wasn't brought up once in any media, including very right wing; compare and contrast with all the bullshit about Obama and his birth certificate dog whistles.
* First time in years we're reducing the backlog of asylum applications. People applying for asylum can't work because they haven't proved their status yet, so naturally they need to be looked after. All the noise you hear is caused entirely by the conservative party defunding and then outright pausing application processing. This means that people looking for asylum had to live in limbo for years, which caused multiple problems. No backlog, no problems.
* We punch WAY above our weight in arts and theatre, and the industry is flourishing. Ever noticed how overrepresented British actors are in Hollywood?
* Compared to our main ally overseas, we have a very effective parliament. The executive is kept in check even with the very large majority Labour has now, and the Lords proved their worth during Brexit, putting brakes at the worst impulses of the previous government.
* We largely preserved our core military capabilities and alliances over the decade of austerity, slowly repairing, recovering, and expanding now. We're a major partner on nuclear programs, tier-1 partner on F-35, AUCUS is happening, we do a lot in Ukraine, and we're one of the only two nuclear countries in Europe and just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with France.
* We are helping people in Hong-Kong, Ukraine, and Afghanistan with targeted immigration programs.
* We're rolling back anti-nuclear nonsense, building two large NPPs, and deployed wind generation at a massive scale.
* A bunch of important reforms are going through the parliament [3], from enhancing renters right to a YIMBY reform.
But very little of that filters into online environments. The most unhinged, xenophobic, paranoid voices get amplified, creating the impression that you cited, even though it can't be further from truth.
Britain is a beautiful country, open to the world, with a globe-spanning network of alliances and relationships, and an incredibly resilient democracy. We should do SO MUCH MORE, yes! But it doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate where we are now, too.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society
I feel like this is 100% true of the US as well, the only difference is there are multiple factions (the blue EAs, the blue EAccs, the red pro-Trump, the red anti-Trump, the red EAccs, ...) scared and cynical of different things.
> The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
When it comes to pedos in specific, the UK got absolutely shaken by the scandals of the last few years - Jimmy Savile, Epstein being involved right into the Royal Family, just to state the obvious ones.
As for terrorism, the problem dates back a bit deeper, the UK has had the IRA conflict for decades, and to this day the conflict isn't resolved, the only thing that did happen was the IRA got formally disbanded in 2005.
The Bourgeois love to divide the working class, typical divide and conquer. Indigenous worker vs imported worker, men vs women, queer vs straight, old vs young, car user vs bicycle rider. This is important because it weakens existing solidarities and prevent the emergence of class consciousness. It's part of their modus operandi and has been for centuries, only now they master it thanks to algorithms and machine learning. This increased surveillance also happens to be extremely useful at taming future strikes and protests, or rat out future pro-workers groups
This view (“the Bourgeois’, etc.) seems to imply there’s a group of very clever manipulators somewhere, overtly planning and executing this (presumably in a dark room with armchairs and cigars). But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.
What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
Elements of the UK media fulfil this role, continually advancing a corrosive narrative that the country is broken. E.g. frequently using the words ‘lawless’ or ‘tinderbox’ in any headline or op-ed title that also contains the word ‘Britain’
The closest I can imagine would be media owners - the Murdochs, the Barclays, etc. And of course, they can all be in bed with their own special interest groups, or particular friends. But they're also acting differently, mostly out of self-interest, and in totally different uncoordinated directions.
Are you aware of the reason Epstein island existed? Do you know about the history of intelligence agencies influence on national governments? Transnational corporate lobbying? (All incompetence. I suppose.)
No dark rooms, armchairs or cigars are needed. Did you guys even read Wikileaks?
Yes indeed. But aren't these all discrete examples, rather than a centralised deliberate process of manipulation of the proletariat?
e.g. corporate lobbying clearly exists and operates, and may be nefarious, but is broadly directed towards the corporate entity's gain, rather than dividing and conquering the masses.
You are still not truly understanding Epstein Island, how is that NOT a centralised hub to subvert democratic processes to divide masses? (Not just the USA…)
Conspiracies are a very common part of business law, people just do not accept that it can happen in the political realm.
> This view (“the Bourgeois’, etc.) seems to imply there’s a group of very clever manipulators somewhere, overtly planning and executing this (presumably in a dark room with armchairs and cigars). But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.
If you read any history about any daring military action during WW2, a lot of it was done by men thinking up of stuff in dark rooms while smoking cigars. Why is this so unbelievable now?
BTW, The UK ran the world's largest empire and until recently this was in living memory.
> What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
Hanlon's razor IMO is nonsense. It is honestly believe it was invented so people could explain away their malice.
Anyone who is relatively intelligent will work at out some point, that if they don't want to do something they can passively aggressively work against the authority while working withing the rules. My father (who builds luxury yachts and is near retirement) was telling me how he maliciously complies with various companies rules to make his superior's life more difficult, this is a way to get back at them for their poor planning.
Even if you accept that Hanlon's razor is mostly true. It cannot be applied when you are dealing with political actors. Political actors, the media and anything related are literally trying to manipulate you. In fact it is a good rule that whatever they tell you that it is, assume the opposite and that is typically true.
They are not a hivemind, after all they also suffer from intraclass conflict, as seen in the NATO-Russian war. But there are definitely interest groups, and we know since the mid 19th century that the class that controls the economy is also the class that shapes society as a whole. So no, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's sociology and marxism. After all, it's not crazy to think that the handful of capitalists who own the British press also defend their own interests through this same press.
>But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.
No need to imagine it. Read the Wikileaks. Names are named. The class division is real, and it is fomented by those who seek to profit from the subterfuge - and they DO profit, at massive scale.
Regulating porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, and alcohol has nothing to do with authoritarianism or a lack of freedom. It's about protecting people, just like we already do with seatbelts, speed limits, and food safety.
Why do you think shops ask for proof of age when you buy cigarettes? Not because they care about cancer or want to sell less, it's because they're required to by law. Of course, teenagers can still find workarounds. They can ask an older friend to buy it for them, just like they can use a VPN to access porn.
The difference is, regulation shifts accountability. It moves the responsibility from a greedy, insensitive business owner to the kids. And at least with the kids we can guide them, and help them spend their time and money where it actually matters.
Note: I know people who love guns or porn are probably going to downvote this, but someone has to say it.
“It’s for your own good” is always a laughable argument.
The state doesn’t regulate these things to protect people, it does so to manage risk to itself. Porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, etc., are tolerated so long as they are contained, taxable, and politically useful.
Regulating porn is this system likely trying to move the needle on declining birth rates. You can look to a host of pro-natalist efforts in China as the likely inspiration.
And without a doubt, overreach by governments will continue.
Regulate porn to increase birth rates? How does that work? Less porn usually means less sexual activity overall, which would lower birth rates, not raise them. In China for example porn is banned, and their birth rates are still low.
Banning pornography alone hasn’t moved the needle on fertility in China. However, in places like Tianmen, where broader pro-natalist strategies were implemented, including porn bans, there’s evidence those multi-pronged efforts had measurable impact.
What’s less clear is the claim that pornography is inherently harmful to children’s development or wellbeing, the research is mixed at best. And the justification that age-gating websites and apps is purely about safety remains deeply unconvincing.
So then either this effort is misguided, a hollow gesture for optics, or a small piece of a broader agenda that hasn’t been made explicit. It just seems to me that this is creating a lot of chaos for a hollow gesture.
We have a history of trying banning bad stuff. Magna Carta in the 1200s against the right of kings, slavery abolition in the 1800s, now porn being pushed to kids.
I don't think child grooming or hate is particularly bad here but we tend to try to stop that kind of thing. We also had the first modern police force in 1829 and other innovations which have caught on in some other countries.
Some of the US alt right media pushes broken Britain stories because we have some muslim immigrants or something. The majority of the public support the bill https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-poll-finds-7-in-10-ad... I wonder if it's more the US is afraid of the their government that if they say they are promoting online saftey they are really going 1984 on the populace? Here people tend to assume they are in fact promoting what it says on the tin.
It's more the protect kids from sites 'that carry pornography as well as other “harmful” material that relates to self-harm, eating disorders or suicide.'
I guess other counties are like screw the kids, I'm terrified of being IDd in case my government does bad things?
I've done this for so many issues in the past and not once have I had anything more than an automated reply. Often those replies then go on and reference a totally different bill that I'm voicing an opinion on. This isn't all just one MP either, I've lived in many different areas of the UK in recent years and most of them have flipped parties at some point or another.
Maybe this is the "Westminster Bubble" the journo's keep talking about. Whatever it is, MP's seem very reluctant to interact with their constituents unless they're campaigning for re-election. At that point they'll turn up on your door step in the middle of the day, expecting a half hour conversation.
How is a citizen meant to adovcate and voice their opinions when their representivies, and every candidate looking to replace them, refuses to engage?
This isn't really a specific question, or a critism on your point. It's just venting on my experience in recent years. Maybe someone else has had a more positive experience they'd be interested in sharing?
> The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
The VPN trick potentially won’t last long. We’ve seen it go stale already in the world of intellectual property rights. For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.
What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?
This is just a cat a mouse game. VPN services will start to offer residential endpoints when enough websites start blocking them enough to damage the value proposition. There is no way on the current internet to verify an ip address means anything at all other than it's an ip address.
There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.
I have a residential fibre connection that’s 3Gbps symmetrical, unmetered. If there was something in it for me (and I was legally shielded) I would consider renting some of that out. And there’s definitely other people out there who would change that “consider” to “definitely.” It’s possible to even get a residential 8Gbps symmetrical connection here for not a ton of money; that can support a lot of video traffic.
It is absolutely possible and multiple providers already do it, just search for “residential ip vpn”. The legit ones pay people $20 a month or so to plug a mysterious box into their network which the provider will route traffic through. The shadier ones will just route your traffic straight through a botnet.
As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most get people for one month when they cancel after realizing they can't watch Canadian Netflix from Florida, or whatever.
> As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Yep, they are all lying to you, but with a wiggle room for a workaround or to point the blame at Netflix. Once you get in, you'll notice that Netflix, Prime Video, Steam, some of YouTube, and pretty much any legitimate service with geo-fencing not working. You then email support complaining that this is not working for you. The answer varies depending on the company. For example:
- Private Internet Access will try to up sell you for your own static IP. That hopefully remains undiscovered by Netflix et al for a bit. (Obviously you're trading anonymity and privacy aspects of a VPN if it's a static ip attached to you, but I don't think people trying to stream Netflix from Italy or where ever care about that)
- Mullvad will tell you: yeah that doesn't work. We never advertised that. Don't renew next month.
- Proton will keep asking you to try endpoints manually (each country has hundreds of endpoints and their app picks a random one. Just keep trying different ones manually. They might give your account access to some "new endpoints" (if they have them) that are not blocked yet. Hopefully once the refund period has passed, they will tell you "sorry we're having trouble with Netflix currently. we're working on it"
Some of them will suggest using "another streaming service??" because "Netflix is having issues in [INSERT_COUNTRY]"
I can confirm that PIA does not reliably get around geo restrictions. There's only so many IPs in the pool, and the content providers will block them.
There are alternatives like Hola VPN, a "free" peer to peer VPN except non-paying users have traffic routed through them. But performance of peer to peer VPNs are not as good.
Apart from the first month don't forget those that subscribe and forget about it or subscribe for Netflix and use it for something else on top of those that cancel after the first period.
The 1 month period is also usually priced much higher anways. E.g. PIA is currently $11.95/m for 1 month, $39.96 for 1 year, and $79.17 for 3.25 years (instead of half a year @ monthly). With a curve that steep it's obvious they have severe retention issues at short intervals.
This cat and mouse game applies to OP's first category of sites that want to comply for fear of the British government, but not the second category of sites that actively don't want to comply. Let's refer to the second category as deliberately non-compliant.
The UK instructs ISPs to block access to deliberately non-compliant sites, however users want to make connections to the sites and those sites want to receive connections to those users. VPNs will be effective in allowing access to non-compliant sites as long as ISPs can't identify the VPN traffic.
Of course, the British ISPs can initiate the tactics used by China to identify and block illegal traffic. However there are limits to this. Unlike Chinese users, British internet users regularly make connections to international servers so various bridging techniques are possible. Like VPNs, proxies or even Remote Desktop.
> One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The UK does not have jurisdictional power over anything outside their country - they can not a foreign site to do age verification of foreign residents.
Now, the UK can say that they need to check for all UK residents, regardless of them using VPNs. But if there are no practical way to do this, I think the UK will have diplomatic issues enforcing anything to non UK companies breaking that laws - as they would need, eg. Germany, to help them enforcing the law on certain providers.
I don't know. A lot of countries in the Middle East block all sorts of stuff and yet VPN usage is ubiquitous, but the governments appear to turn a blind eye. Like "we've done our bit and made the law." So it remains to be seen how far they'll go with this.
> but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP
It's up to service provider to implement such involved checks. Not sure about e.g. Netflix allocating resources to implementing this, clearly resulting in customer loss.
I expect service providers to cut corners to both comply with local laws and not frighten customers away.
Yes... and for clarity, perhaps I should have instead said for the implementation of this law to actually make any moral sense, which is like saying for this chocolate tea pot to be functional on a daily basis, one would have to provision a way of shutting down sites which refuse to participate in the age-verification laws of the UK.
>For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
If the vpn endpoint is in Rome or New York City, how will the UK government force that non-British vpn service and that non-British porn site to verify the age of anyone using it?
It's easy enough to get a list of IP addresses from those vpn services and just block them if you're Netflix, but to force compliance on anyone traversing the tunnel is another thing entirely. The UK government would have an easier time banning vpns outright.
I've found Tor is mostly useful for reading, not participating. Exit nodes get blocked from registering on most sites. One workaround is to register at a café or library then use the account over Tor, but sometimes even if you're being civil (see my comment history for a a pretty good picture of the style of discussions I have anonymously) sometimes you'll wake up to find the account nuked.
Tor exit nodes are the _first_ thing they ban! If your origin is not from within one of the top residential ISPs then you can expect to be selected for enhanced screening.
It definitely seems like she’s conflating two issues: access to pornography and child grooming. I don’t see why she thinks regulating VPNs would reduce the latter.
Everyone always does this. Then they conflate mention of LGBT topics with porn so they can equate it with "grooming". Not helped by the UK's anti-trans panic of the last few years (self-ID was such a mainstream idea that it was in the 2018 Tory manifesto)
It does not. As I have said before, pedophilia is rampant on Roblox and Discord. Go monitor those platforms, and hold these platforms responsible, not VPNs. Regulating VPNs will not reduce child grooming, and I am sure they are not stupid enough to actually think it does.
Or, to put it another way, in order to protect the most children, focus your efforts on where the most children actually are, not where you're afraid they might end up.
Immaterial how independent they are because it's completely impossible to get honest opinions of repressive regimes. The people within the regime have no real way to know whether a poll response will make it back to the government or not, so they must assume that it will. When the repercussions for having the wrong opinion are that you disappear or find yourself "volunteered" for the front line, it's best to either lie or say you think the leader is a top bloke.
You can watch Youtube videos of citizens refusing to answer contentious questions quite easily. I believe William Spaniel has produced videos (relating to the Russian General Election) where he points this out, too.
When asked in a way where the opinion can't be identified, the support numbers do drop significantly, but the approval is still estimated to be about 50-70%. In western countries governments with clear minority support start to be almost the norm.
UK government approval has surpassed 50% in a handful of polls in over 10 years, and approval peaks are typically immediately after elections before the government starts to implement its policies. The approval is currently 14%.
How can you tell it is a repressive regime? They have elections, a press and they are pretty satisfied about their form of governance, actually much more than their western counterparts.
So let me sum this up. We cannot ask the people. We cannot base ourselves on how their institutions function and how well they perform.
This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs), and everything outside of their little group of friends is a masquerade. The issue with that is that westerners disconnect themselves from reality. They are losing ground and it shows.
"Elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Direct elections, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, occur only at the local level people's congresses and village committees, with all candidate nominations preapproved by the CCP. By law, all elections at all levels must adhere to the leadership of the CCP."
> This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs)
There is democracy in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Just say, "I'm a tankie and I support Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
> Elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Direct elections, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, occur only at the local level people's congresses and village committees, with all candidate nominations preapproved by the CCP. By law, all elections at all levels must adhere to the leadership of the CCP.
I personally see nothing wrong with this. The word "authoritarian" is virtually meaningless. And those local elections are paramount; Locally elected representatives end up electing MPs on the provincial level, then they chose MPs of the National People's Congress. The rest is common sense: just because we are used to "elect" pedophiles, racists and parasites doesn't mean all other countries should do the same.
In Switzerland we don't elect our Federal Council, which is our executive branch. A bit like in the UK too. Would you say its what matters in a democracy?
Germans and Americans refuse to answer contentious questions about the genocide of Palestinian... They also probably live in a repressive regime, right?
(Also I agree with you, Russia is a capitalist dictatorship)
> This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs)
You are quite literally commenting on a topic where Brits are complaining about our democracy. You will find reams of articles about the problems with western democracies.
However, you're also commenting about countries that quite literally changed our governments in the last year. USA voted in Trump, the UK voted in Labour. Germany just voted in a new party.
China and Russia, the main comparison points, have not changed government since the 90s. This is nothing to do with phenotypes, it's 100% just looking at the facts.
Russia is very similar to the rest of western democracies, so I won't comment further on that.
Regarding China, their leading party hasn't switched in 80 years, but their policies have and have plenty actually. Changing parties matters only a little bit in the grand scheme of things. I'd argue, for example, that Japan, that has been ruled by a single party for all of his modern existence, is still considered by many in the west as a functioning democracy.
In any case, I think all the replies have made my point for me that your dismissal of our rhetoric as based on "western arrogance" are simply nonsense. It's in fact you who's displayed a lack of understanding of those you argue against.
Which is the aim of restricting every information channel and starting the brainwashing in primary school? I'm sure Kim Jong Un is very popular in North Korea, too!
This is an insane take. You'd know this if you had ever talked with a Chinese person before instead of believing the silly propaganda they spread in your "free" press.
What’s your source for the labour government’s unpopularity? Not that I necessarily think you’re wrong, it’s just more indifference towards them that I see, more of the same etc.
"Keir Starmer falls to lowest net favourability rating on record"
"Labour’s popularity hit isn’t merely limited to Keir Starmer, with worst-ever net favourability scores also recorded this month by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner (-31) and home secretary Yvette Cooper (-25), while Rachel Reeves has equalled her -48 net favourability rating recorded in mid-April."
"65% of Britons dislike the Labour Party, the most in the eight years YouGov has been asking the question"
Seriously? You can't make this up: she represents the town that did nothing about a massive (and completely offline) child grooming and molestation network for years and she has the gall to say, "think of the children on the Internet"?
Destroy cultural integrity, national identity, create a low-trust society, become more authoritarian to manage low-trust society, import more immigrants at an exponential rate while house costs rise along with unemployment. The list keeps going. This is why far-right is surging on the polls. The country has completely lost all sense.
UK needs immigrants to increase stagnating productivity. this has been the case for decades and it's why no government has done, or will do anything serious to curb it.
Note that to the best of my knowledge, these numbers don't include the Afghan resettlement scheme which would further lower the proportion of employment driven visas.
I always find funny how the new, supposedly progressive, arguments in favor of mass immigration run so close to the ones given against when slavery was abolished, that society can only exist with cheap,exploitative, labor.
Also it seems a teensy bit unfair to rob the developing world of its skilled workers so that we don't have to bother training them ourselves (plus they'll accept lower pay than natives).
Why do they have a young population? What happens to the old people who live in those countries? Why would that not happen in the receiving countries if enough people are imported?
Its because both the left and right argue for extremes which are just the same energy with different wording.
I do not distinguish the far-left from far-right as they equally polarizing and extreme, and only seeks to pull people in the center towards them through violence, censorship and intimidation.
People in the center seeks a balance between the extremes. Some industries require immigration of labor force but it can't come with delusional ideologies that seek to manipulate the wages.
This is a far-right talking point that ignores the other concerns of progressives that are bundled up in the argument.
Progressives (in the US at least) generally support immigration with protections and fair wages. They also recognize, rightfully, that systems built for decades upon exploitative practices (low wages, no protections) if removed overnight will cause mass disruption of those systems.
Neither of these is in any way supportive of slavery, modern or otherwise. The first - suggesting that immigrants be treated civilly and paid a living wage - has been fought tooth and nail by 'free market' literalists. The second - that there will be disruptions in social and economic systems when an entire workforce is suddenly removed from the systems that it has propped up for decades - is common sense and historically founded.
You're conflating these things to try to justify a talking point that was just created three months ago.
It's because the arguments ultimately originate from the same place as they did back then: the elites who benefit greatly from the existence of said cheap, exploitative labor.
The sorts of "progressives" who unconditionally support mass immigration are just useful idiots being used as tools by said elites to enforce their narrative. Just have to push the idea that "disagreeing with this is racist" and they'll all support it without question.
I mean I support what could be termed "mass immigration" and hold no biases as to what kinds of work they would do. I see no reason they wouldn't find work in all sorts of fields. But one of the most common talking points against this kind of immigration is that because they're "unskilled" they won't find work and be a burden on our welfare programs and social services or whatever. So then you start to list jobs that are positive value to society and don't require specialized training—that even if I accept the (admittedly racist premise) that immigrants won't seek education and skilled positions that we will still be fine.
Canada has legal immigration pathways for nurses, I don't see why any other country couldn't if there was strong demand. Gambling on illegal (and dangerous) border crossings to fill those sort of roles seems deeply irresponsible.
The only employment related categories on that report are the skilled worker visa and the health & care worker visa. I presume nurses would come under the latter.
For cleaners it's a little less clear which employment visa they'd have been more likely to use. Potentially either depending on the specifics of their job, their income and the precise definition of skilled worker.
How does immigration boost productivity? It's labor-saving automation and machinery investments that boost productivity. I would expect these to be driven mainly by labour scarcity. Growing the labour pool seems like it would drive exactly the opposite. As two examples, Japan has low immigration and an aging population and despite that its productivity has never been higher. By contrast Canada has had extremely high immigration and rapid population growth, and its productivity has flatlined since 2019.
At the end of the day, you still have to have humans to both carry out certain labor tasks and consume the outputs of that labor. For example, having the ability to manufacture a car with minimal human intervention doesn't mean that you can ship steel to the stamping plant without human intervention, and it doesn't mean that the robot used to weld the car will buy one after it's built. And since "real" Americans/Canadians/Brits/etc. haven't made the babies to do the labor and consumption demanded by capital for almost 60 years now, the labor and consumption must be brought in some other way.
Ultimately you have to balance the incoming immigration with the demands that produces, and that's where a lot of countries fall short. For being as similar as they are, Americans and Canadians have radically different experiences and opinions on immigration from India, for example. Why? Americans mainly think of them as either business owners providing needed services (even if it's just as the stereotypical convenience store owner) or people working in cutting-edge and important industries, because that's who American immigration policy allows in from India. Canadians have far less charitable views, because over the last decade or so, Canadian immigration policy has been far less discriminatory. Whether it should or not, this produces social friction with people who have roots in the society that receives the immigration.
I don't think that should be the be-all and end-all overriding the natives qualms but regardless.....Is it increasing productivity? In nearby mainland European countries that doesn't appear the case.
I remember when Gordon Brown promised "An end to boom and bust economics." I didn't that meant realise no more booms.
In the 90s in the UK, skilled working class tradesmen making huge amounts of money was such a stereotype that there was even a comedy character about it. I can't imagine seeing that happen again.
Welcome to the sticking plaster economy. This may be the economic orthodoxy, but it completely ignores the root causes of poor productivity - and ultimately leads to the state of xenophobia you're seeing today in Britain.
Sad thing as that the good times are very likely never coming back, and the far-right in power will only make everything worse by bolstering even more tribalism and mistrust among the public.
I think this is the most uncharitable reading and understand of Hobbes that exists. The main argument (and context) is that men is evil and can only live in "civilization" by being forced into it by an absolutely powerful state.
The fact this state is a monarchy, a dictatroship or a democracy is not the issue. The fact (in which he is right) a state needs absolute power and monopoly of that power. Modern democracies are a good example, they have the absolute power and thus are more stable and peaceful that warlord controlled pseudo-countries in Africa.
Incredible that you’ve managed to bring this conversation to immigration. In fact, it sounds like you’re saying the root cause of this crappy policy is somehow immigrants.
It's a valid topic for discussion. Even as a foreigner who was in UK on a visa and eventually got ilr I'm still concerned about it.
The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable, particularly when it's proven that the majority are not fleeing persecution but are economic migrants. They're taking advantage of a system designed to help people in trouble, how could you defend that?
And when does it end? Will the UK always accept small boats ad infinitum?
I played by the (harsh) rules and got here legitimately. Why should I have bothered.
> The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable
the current situation regarding small boats is the inevitable conclusion to a badly implemented brexit policy and a negligent tory party rule over 13 years. Startmer took 5 months in power to talk to France and have them agree to tackle it on their side of the water. Also no brexit, no boats. The anti immigration chest thumpers caused the problem and then scurried like rats. Farage was impossible to be found the year after brexit won, dude aws the face and suddenly wanted to part of the "glory"
None of these problems live in isolation. It all feeds back to the same system that is driving itself into the ground.
The refusal to accept these problems is what is creating a surge in far-right popularity. The very people that oppose them have inadvertently become their biggest cheerleaders.
Immigration is becoming the #1 political issue in the UK for a reason.
If they didn't want this, they could have just restricted it and it would have largely gone away as a topic of discussion, but current levels makes it inevitable it will become the main thing people think about
One of the reasons they want to make discourse on the internet as painful as possible is because immigration has become an mainstream concern in the UK. Many of the things that are being soft censored is clips about from the British parliament where this and related issues are being discussed.
Just because people like yourself happen to think it is uncouth to discuss, doesn't mean that it isn't part of the equation.
Everyone always wants to bring it back to immigration, because they've seen US ICE snatch squads and internment camps and decide that they want some of that here.
Growth is much easier with mass immigration than mass emigration, regardless of if those crossing either direction are skilled or unskilled.
And the UK welfare system isn't all that good. I'm a landlord, and at one point a letting agency told me they refuse to deal with anyone on the welfare system because it's simply too difficult to actually get the council, who are supposed to pay, to actually pay. The necessity for food banks is another big hint that the government system isn't covering basics.
(As in: migrants will be asked to prove entitlement, it won't be assumed).
If you moved to the UK for work, you're paying twice for the NHS, because not only is it supposed to be covered by national insurance contributions, but there's also an NHS immigrant surcharge: https://www.gov.uk/healthcare-immigration-application/how-mu...
States such as California were allowing them access to Medi-cal, their version of medicaid. Many get free housing- NYC entered into a $980 million dollar contract to house people in hotels.
Federally, no, they aren't getting assistance, but it's all a slush fund as money flows back and forth between local and the federal governments anyway.
The US guarantees ER health services regardless of citizenship or ability to pay. They also get free public education (with all the burdens of being non-english speaking).
They pay taxes (in Texas) through gas, property and sales taxes which fund much of the state.
Yes, immigrants are a critical component of several industries like healthcare.
Legal permanent residency/work visas should be easier for skilled workers who want to work in high demand jobs. And all wealthy nations should be more wary of unlimited, unchecked economic migration by poorer populations.
(IOW it's complicated)
I think social media is at least as big a cultural weapon against us, and if I had to choose between deport/imprison a small number of business and political leaders who abuse that weapon or four million undocumented US residents, I would choose the former.
> “West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content.”
I’m not involved with X or with its chatbot. Is its chatbot ordinarily an authoritative source for facts about assumptions like this one, that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
It’s a bad look either way, but I feel like there are important differences between the law leading to overly conservative automated filtering, vs political actors using it deliberately in specific cases. Bad symptom either way, but different medicines, right?
> that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
You've misquoted the chatbot, which is a new one.
The video wasn't "taken down" and Grok never said that. It was blocked for some users in the UK due to the new authoritarian age verification laws which everyone should be concerned about if access to newsworthy content requires "papers please".
In this case, Grok is stating the obvious. I'm not sure how you can arrive at any other conclusion. The clip is inaccessible to some users in the UK on the day the act comes online, replaced with a message about local laws and age verification.
If you need to use a VPN in your country, maybe your government and elected officials have failed you, are not representing you, and need to be voted out.
This sort of thing is why the US has turned into a governance-averse society in some pretty bothersome ways.
People suggest some sort of regulation for something, or some social service, often ones that are similar to those in the UK, and people who oppose it will point to things like this and use them to illustrate the slippery slope fallacy.
Well, if you look at the US, similar laws are being enacted at the state level as those you see in the UK, often by the same people who would reject the other features of governance you see in the UK (the NHS, stricter firearms regulations, etc.) because of them being "overbearing".
I really don't understand why it wasn't just a requirement for Apple and Google to include a client side filter. Parent sets up the phone and it's enabled by default. Much simpler option for everyone involved.
It's because this law isn't about protecting children, but about control of the Internet. They want online activity tied to real identity as a power grab.
Yea, it's all about a permanent Digital ID and the end of any independent forums. It's the first essential steps before you get to great firewalls and social credit scores.
Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
> Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US
Interesting, since when? I'm curious about how it's turned out in practise. For web services I mean. An for anyone hosting a message board or comment section.
The US states are just targeting the big porn sites like Pornhub to add ID checks AFAIK, I haven't heard of them going after random forums like in the UK. But obviously that sort of power always expands, just like how the UK went from arresting a couple people for offensive tweets back in 2010 to doing 12k arrests/yr in 2025
The UK law was designed to be all encompassing. Why block just the 'porn sites' when you can see porn on forums?
The UK law is actually a good implementation if you put child 'safety' as your number one priority, with any other considerations as, in practise, moot.
Unfortunately I think free civil discourse between adults, privacy, etc. are just as important as child safety which makes the current law a bit crap.
This is similar to the video game and MasterCard/VISA issue - you can buy games that promote sexual violence and incest. Nothing stops children downloading them for free, or using their under-18s debit card from purchasing the non-free versions. In this instance it was private companies leveraging their freedom of association rather than an all encompassing law from a sovereign state, but the intent is the same.
As a collective society we do really need to come to grips with what it is that we want. Allowing kids to freely access gang torture/execution videos and playing pro-rape entertainment should probably be tackled. I'm not sure I agree with the implementations though.
At least in the US the Supreme Court ruled that these sorts of laws are only kosher because they target porn, which is afforded a lower degree of legal protection (albeit not no protection at all). Trying to restrict access to protected political speech or the like the way the UK and Australia did would likely be a very different court case.
If the 'political speech' is not adult in nature, which is true 99.9% of the time, then it can't/won't be blocked under this rule.
Unless of course this political speech is happening on a porn site, or a subreddit that has been deemed 18+. Which I can't see a legitimate reason for.
It seems like videos of violence are also getting blocked, and I expect eventually stuff about LGBT relationships etc will fall under it. Lots of things are adult that aren't porn.
'videos of violence' is quite wide: children shouldn't be watching videos of people being executed by gangs for example.
A lot of LGBT content is aimed at adults. I think we should always be clear when we are making statements like this because it causes great stress, a worked example:
People will claim that LGBT is under attack because this law potentially affects some LGBT spaces. These spaces will clearly be meant for 18+ audiences and so fall correctly under the law. Then other people see the first group of people, and from their point of view that group is complaining that their 18+ spaces are blocked from children. "Think of the children" drama ensues.
It is similar to Steam taking down incest/rape games and people claiming it was an action against LGBT creators. I don't think that's an argument that should ever be made for obvious reasons.
I don't think the government, even if it were under the Conservatives, have banning gay spaces on their current agenda.
One possibly significant difference is that the cultural attitudes in the US tend to lean more rebellious and distrustful of the government, and "it's legal if you don't get caught" is a somewhat popular sentiment.
> Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
I’m not sure what gun laws have to do with anything but guns are not unreasonably difficult to legally purchase in the UK or EU if you have a specific need for one. It’s a tool and treated as such
>It's because this law isn't about protecting children, but about control of the Internet.
Also in an overpopulated world it's not a given that children should be protected if it comes at the expense of basic freedoms. We need to move away from this narrative that "think of the children" is a persuasive argument. Little Timmy needs to avoid danger or the ghost of Darwin will work his magic.
Probably based on long term concerns that escalating inequality will lead to widespread unrest and violence. Which it will, if unaddressed.
Interesting that decades of government leaves half the country to rot, and their solution is to try to stop that half from rioting about it, rather than - perhaps - making society fairer?
Adding a browser header field would be sufficient, could be easily integrated into the OS and browser, and would let developers handle this issue in a few hours worth of effort.
ID verification is such an invasive measure and prone to the exact same failures as the simplest solutions.
I like this solution, integrated with whatever existing parental controls are in the OS.
That would empower parents to keep their kids from accidentally or casually accessing porn. Of course, an intelligent and determined teenager will probably find a way around it, which is also good; then they've learned a bit about computers.
While I'd agree, the issue with that solution is that validating against government issued identity solutions aren't always free. I don't know if this is the case with the UK digital ID, but the Danish version certainly isn't free to query. The Danish one has, to my knowledge, a solution that would allow you to do an age for a person, without getting any other information, so yes, the browser could do that, but there cryptographic bits ensure that now body messed with the header data is still missing. And again, who's suppose to pay for the API calls if the browser does it, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft... Ladybird?
This is the exact system I suggested to a friend. I don't mind having to 'prove' my age, but I do not really want a third party to have my identifiable information nor do I really want the Government knowing what fetishes I may or may not have.
For a digital only solution, I think the best system would be some form of public-private key attestation:
The government advertises their public keys for 18+ verification.
A website generates a unique token - this token is then taken by the user and submitted to the government receiving a signed attestation. This can then be given back to the website to prove the user is 18. It only has to be done once per profile and no information is shared between the Government and the website on who is who.
Unless of course the token is saved by both the website and government in some forever database and then a lookup is done.
Another solution could be a timed/signed token produced by the government that has no input from the website. But this still has the downside that this could just be saved by both parties and in future you could identified if both sides compare data.
I don't really understand why every adult should need to jump through hoops because parents won't spend 5 minutes enabling it on their kid's devices.
Hell, modern parental control software with an image classifier is arguably better than these online age verification systems since it works with anything that appears onscreen.
This is just moving personal data responsibilities from service providers (e.g. porn sites) to the central authority (QR code maker and verifier). Unless there is a semi-anonymous way of purchasing age proofs, e.g. over the counter.
That also happens with alcohol and tobacco. Cops can run sting operations to catch illegal dealers. But IRL id verification removes easy access for most children while preserving the privacy of adults.
This reminds me that when payment processors cut off an adult site in Japan, they were able to fall back on users paying for points in cash at convenience stores instead or something like that.
Not a bad system really? Pseudo anonymity and avoids some third party tech firm getting involved?
I don't think anyone has a problem with verifying their age.
What many people do have a problem with is requiring disclosure of unmodifiable biometric data and government documents that once "hacked"/sold into the data collection pipeline becomes forever tainted and easily stolen.
You can't "reset my password" with biometric data once a malicious actor has it
I’m sure it’s only the adults using VPNs so don’t worry, this is still a fantastic law that is definitely helping children not watch porn and absolutely not just a massive attack on civil liberties in disguise.
There are a lot of comments and thinking along the demo and gloom lines.
On the "silver lining" side, could be a eye-opener for the population of the UK, that things they take for granted cant get summarily yanked away if they don't actually do something.
And with any luck it will pull up the technical competency of every person using these services (pretty much every adult).
With any luck parents might even be forced to gain the skill their kids already live and breathe and don't think twice about.
I used to be optimistic that way, but if you look somewhere similar developments happened before like China: yes, people adapted to circumvent their regime's oppression, but the laws never changed.
Since surveillance is only a 2nd tier issue in terms of mind share (at best), it's untouched by electoral democracy. And because rulers automatically support more surveillance, there are no mechanisms for positive developments on that side, both in the UK and in China.
But we did, I've been protesting against laws like this for 17 years now! Genuinely, they've always been trying to implement these laws, and simply relied on us missing the ship one time.
Everyone with any ability to open their eyes migrated to the US from the UK ages ago. The civilization that exists today is what happens when people too scared to get on a boat live in the dregs of a dying empire.
If COVID policies and mandates including the vaccine passports which absolutely paved the way for digital IDs for any action in society, didn't wake up populations around the world, nothing will.
You just need to scare them when there's an appearance of dissent and that's that.
Few people can combat them effectively from a tech and legal framework, for sure, but don't expect magic from nowhere.
Every time this comes up, an accusation with some label becomes sufficient to dismiss any arguments from a person.
What message does it send when your government tries to impose costs on your preferred behavior while at the same time being unable to do it when you download a single app?
The words that come to mind are malicious and incompetent. The only 'achievement' is to increase contempt towards the government. And the times aren't exactly stable to begin with.
Or target it under the same law. All you need to do is shift the blame for providing adult content onto the vpn provider and suddenly they'll stop providing services to the UK. Might be a little more tricky to enforce globally but perfect enforcement isn't necessary to be a deterrent
Since it's about VPNs - what are good VPNs for someone looking for safety/privacy but not anonymity or even IP hiding?
Not even for streaming. But for general "safety while on the Internet" when the devices (Mac, iPhone) are mostly on public or not-so-secure WiFi (at the residence or on the go). Plan is to keep it always ON or almost always ON.
The best VPN is to host your own. I used Digital Ocean. They have preconfigured droplet images for OpenVPN access server. The droplet even serves a client pre-configured with the connection settings.
Oh god. I should have said "other than self-hosted". I swear to god I thought about it but forgot and added only Mullvad. I can't edit it now.
And thank you for saying this but I have tried. Both on DigitalOcean and on a VPS bought from a deal on LET - didn't do it for me. It was a pain unless I left it literally untouched, un-updated, un-upgraded forever and ever. I know, I know - I must have done something wrong or I need more patience or both. But sadly it didn't cut it for me. It made it hate the entire thing.
Other self-hosted option could be one of those sites where you can use one service and pay for it like pikapods or so but then if I am doing that then why not just use a VPN because anyway I would have to sign up for different services and then pay for it too while not having the control a droplet or vps will offer (talked about above)
You can recreate the instance every 60 minutes, I've tried such approach once. But such setup is useless anyway, most services block datacenter traffic by default.
Please give a bit more detail and justification when you give opinions like this.
Otherwise it sounds like you’re saying everybody already knows which one is good and which one is bad -- but if everybody knew, you wouldn’t need to say anything, right?
I am not the original poster, but there are a few reasons to pick Wireguard.
Performance is better due to the in-kernel drivers, UDP design and crypto choices. If you're simply looking for the fastest option wireguard is it.
Openvpn's protocol is somewhat more janky than wireguard. It looks tls-like but then does its own transport thing. It has a lot of flexible options and ciphersuite choices meaning you could very well pick something less than ideal. The complexity of the code makes an undiscovered bug slightly more likely.
The downside of wireguard, mitigated by some VPN providers, is that it is UDP-only. You may find environments where you cannot tunnel out this way, even if you try to impersonate QUIC by running the remote port on 443. Mullvad has a udp-to-tcp proxy as part of their client and server to work around this.
I have tried NextDNS and I think I should try it again but the last few experiences ended in a lot of sites breaking. Maybe this time I will try someone from country who has written a tutorial about it.
But a VPN would have been more appropriate for this task and if ever I needed to use a different IP from a different country (that would be rare and mostly to access websites for a short period) I could just do it easily.
Connectivity and IP blockage (I assumed) issues last time I tried it.
But the main reason is — it’s the default recommendation on HN. So I would prefer to know what else good there that people are using. Because it would be really sad if it’s the only one. I kind of refuse to believe that.
iCloud Private Relay has the benefit of more accepted by payment processors etc, but the downside is that because it doesn't mask your country of origin the UK censorship rules still apply whilst using it.
I've found that Mullvad generally has the best privacy reputation, but I've also been blocked by a lot of sites whilst using it.
The mainstream consumer VPNs like Nord, Proton etc aren't as great for privacy but I suspect they're less likely to be blocked. I'd love to have more data to justify this though.
Leaving the complexity of attempting to circumvent the great firewall aside, VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year just to avoid identifying yourself on PH. Easier to find a website that doesn't enforce it.
In the UK case, TOR seems to happily get around these restrictions for free (I gave it a quick check yesterday). I'd imagine that there might be some kind of crackdown on TOR exit nodes in the future though
For a self-hosted VPN, you'll need to use a protocol that is specifically designed to be resilient to censorship. VLESS, for example. Things like WireGuard and OpenVPN are very easily detected.
Maybe it's changed recently, but I knew a lot of locals just using the VPN stuff to use the outside internet (though, like a couple other countries, they have a big enough homegrown market to where for most people not having fb or whatever is a no-op)
My experiences in the country using VPN stuff was pretty interesting though... it _really_ felt like depending on where you were physically in the country that you were going through completely different censorship pipes. And things like Apple push notifications would just get through no problem so you could at least receive stuff via push from banned apps.
I wonder what kind of detailed explanations of the mechanics there are, because I don't have a mental model of it that works beyond "censors just tell each regional office of national operaors to do stuff and they all do it slightly differently"
"Seems to be working in China."
Yeah, let's follow the example of the authoritarian countries just to prove how liberal "democracies" have nothing to do with freedom.
The parent comment is not about following examples, but rather that the impact Streisand effect is going to be very limited, and the common folk will not bother to circumvent.
This is how it worked out in Russia. First, around 10 years ago, they adopted very limited laws that required ISPs to block websites. Things like drugs and suicide, with the classic rationale "won't someone please think of the children". Then piracy websites were added to that. Fast forward to now, ISPs were mandated to install black-box "ТСПУ" devices on their networks, "to protect against threats", so now Roskomnadzor doesn't even pretend to care about the law. Half the internet is broken. More if you're on mobile data. Everyone knows what a VPN is. I personally have set up DPI bypass tools for many of my relatives.
In other words, if you censor enough of the internet that your population knows ways around that, your censorship simply ceases being effective.
At least in Russia and in china, the governments don't pretend that what they are doing is to save the children(TM) whereas in the west we like to drape our authoritarian tendencies under such false pretenses.
In Russia, access to websites was restricted initially "to prevent the spread of information that might harm children", it's in the names of the first censorship laws.
Just a reminder “Brexit” happened just a few years ago. Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”. You can’t even move to Switzerland and setup a company.
Yes technically it’s possible but I was told my a Swiss accountant “just don’t bother trying unless you can get a European passport - if you can”
This is from personal experience. As odd as it sounds Brexit really affected business ( always thought it was posturing) I can’t imagine what it did to mega corps etc
> As odd as it sounds Brexit really affected business
With all due respect, this was never odd. It was immediately predicted from the day the UK voted for Brexit, along with many of the other very obvious side effects of leaving the EU, like free movement & ability to work, logistical challenges etc.
Unironically, people thought it would end free movement for other people and not them.
When Brits go to another Country, they are expats, bringing their wealth and culture with them. When people come to the UK they are immigrants or economic migrants refusing to get jobs, learn the language or integrate while taking all the jobs.
> Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”
That’s how visas work in most of the world.
I’m curious now, did you vote for it and not expect this? It doesn’t sound odd at all, it is exactly what everyone said would happen other than people promoting Brexit as some form of nationalism/pride movement.
As a Brit that was too young to vote in the referendum I feel like I’m stuck in a venus fly trap and the jaws are closing. I would have liked to live in Europe for a while, but welp, now that option’s gone. An image of a frog boiling in a pot also comes to mind.
If anything I would have expected the market to explode in Portugal. The digital nomad visa they offer is one of the easiest for us to get and after living there for five years you regain the right to live in the EU. I’ve considered moving there but their immigration system is dysfunctional apparently.
The new online safety rules are already being used to shut down government criticism. How it works is their new elite protection squad, if someone is deigned an influential critic of government policy, trawls through your social media posts until they find something against the laws. A lot of government critique is coming from the working class here now, who have virtually no political representation in the UK. As you can imagine, some of these social media posters don't mince their words, and end up getting caught out and arrested.
They're not really being arrested for criticising a law though.
They're arrested for supporting a group that's been banned for causing around £30 million's worth of damage to our national defences at a time of hightened national security.
There's the implication that Palastinian Action are going to continue attacking us.
If they just stuck to protesting they would have been fine.
And at the same time, while people burning down hotels have been arrested, other people who have been egging them on and causing "stochastic terrorism" have been left alone.
What gets classed as "support for" and "terrorism" is not evenly enforced.
I think this is an inaccurate description of what has been happening: people have criticised the government heavily for being extremely harsh on people "just making tweets". A woman was sentenced to nearly three years in jail for posting a message online that said "set fire to the hotels for all I care" (paraphrased).
These riots are spontaneous and "organised" via people getting riled up online. There isn't a central organisation that people see as leading these anti-migrant riots/attacks. They seem to be an emergent property of the protests. If there is a named group organising criminal action and it includes things that threaten/damage national security then that group should be banned.
Palestine Action was conducting organised criminal raids with the specific intent to cause damage to anything it felt was Israeli, Israel related, or somehow benefited Israel. A lot of the time the link was tenuous at best. They also attacked national security assets. Honestly this group's actions has done more harm than good for the Palestinian cause.
There are discussions in parliament about grooming gangs on X. These are soft-censored (you can't see it without passing the the age verification). Few people will be bothered to make an account to see a post and pass age verification. Therefore it slows the sharing of information.
It isn't about outright banning the discussion, because that will cause considerable push-back by the public. So you dress up a policy as doing one thing knowing that the effect will be another. I don't take anything the British State says at face value. If you do, you are simply being naive.
Whenever one of these stories come up, we find there is a side missing. In this case, it's a school, so for safeguarding reasons they're not going to say anything at all about the children. Quite often "arrested for saying X" turns out to be "arrested for a lengthy campaign of targeted harrasment, culminating in X"
This alternative approach is fine. When people use extra money to pay for such services, it boosts economic activity and creates a market-driven filter. If you are economically advanced, you can afford this workaround. If you are not, well you are surrendering to govt safety rules. And thus everything works.
I don't care for the framing: users evading the law.
First, this is a law limiting the actions of service providers not users.
But by using a VPN, I'm making my own safety choices. I wish there was an easier opt-out (like an ISP account-level flag), but it I want to present to service providers as (eg) Swedish, so what? I'm an adult, the "safety" laws do nothing for my safety.
The truth is service providers and ISPs have done next to nothing to stop children signing up for (eg) Snapchat, despite a plethora of laws. Of course the parents are to blame, but fixing shitty parenting is hard.
The "VPN use surges in UK" articles are bought and paid for by the VPN industry.
I don't believe it is possible to convince me that VPN's as sold and marketed are anything but a massive scam. Yes, that includes the company that you say is honest.
What do you mean by "scam"? That you pay and that they don't work at all? That they don't bypass the geo restrictions? Because they do.
Perhaps you mean that they are bad value(ripoff vs scam)? Then sure, probably they are. But you're basically paying to not get flagged by cloudfare. Back in the day, you bought a cheap server from OVH or some other lowcost provider, stuck openvpn on it (nowdays wireguard) and you were golden. But now that Cloudfare middle-mans half the internet, it doesn't really work anymore.
You pay the VPN providers for "clean"(ish) IPs so you don't get stuck behind Cloudfare captcha-loops.
They banned porn with choking in it. They banned toy advertising in the evening. They tried to ban client side encryption for iCloud. Make no mistake they will go for vpns too.
Funnily enough. They just need to claim it's "protecting the children" and people fall for it.
The funniest part is that high profile criminal cases go unpunished very visibly. Even if they have minors in their context, because the elite figures in question must be protected from the enforcement of rules.
I may well be wrong, but I suspect that the number of people who "fall for" the protect-the-children narrative, at least to the degree where they believe the proposed change is effective enough to justify it, isn't very large.
I'd argue it works because it's a rhetorical tactic that's highly effective at suppressing dissent. Anybody sticking their head above the parapet is going to get painted as somebody who favours pornography over the safety of children, even though this legislation and opposition to it has very little to do with either.
In my experience, people in real life do absolutely parrot the talking points that are deemed to be good (TM). Whether they do it out of fear or not, ends up being a moot point since they create an environment of apparent cohesion.
Banning porn depicting choking "to protect women from violence" is so funny. You could not ask for a better example of moral panic from people that didn't do their research. Choking is a strongly women preferred kink.
There's also a reported epidemic of women being choked during sex unprovoked, and who certainly don't want it. Unfortunately these laws are being made from things happening in the real world that get traction.
Is the law a good way to stop this? I don't know. The main tool of governance for our elected leaders are laws, and so that's what they do.
I mean, it's a sovereign state. The government can legislate for the sky to be purple if it wants to (though obviously that won't affect actual reality).
UK and Australia are slowly going the way of China in their blocking, and the eventual end effect could be that they will get their citizens cut off from the internet.
I run a website that provides English articles to trending topics from Chinese social media. It’s kinda funny that topics discussed there are sometimes “too sensitive” for western LLMs who will straight up refuse to write about them.
Take from that what you will re: China vs western censorship
It's just that Australia and UK tend to lead the way when it comes to authoritarianism and then it becomes "this has always been like this, you conspiracy theorist".
They're coming for AI tools next. Here in Australia they're rolling out the academic socialist activists on the public broadcaster. These experts know how to keep us safe apparently.
This morning it was all about "think of the children" in the context of banning AI tools that could potentially be used to make AI generated CSAM. Even adult nudity is in the firing line. Ban the lot was the advice from the expert. Not just banning access, but making it a crime to even possess the tools.
What next? Ban paint brushes because someone might use them to paint offensive images?
As is the next step: a slow but steady expansion of what's considered "unsafe" or "harmful" used to justify ever-increasing restrictions and censorship.
As a student of 1930s and 1940s history, I can say for sure that the most terrifying aspect of what took place wasn't the "Gestapo" and all the open terror, it was the propaganda that fooled so many people and the censorship that kept the lies alive. Humanity still has not fully come to terms with the layers upon layers of lies that took place before and during WWII.
I went on a weekend vacation with three guys. I was asked what I thought a good VPN was. They all have VPNs on their phones apparently. Here I am thinking they are technologically adept, maybe a little bit security conscious. Or maybe misled by advertisements.
It wasn't until after I got home I realized it was because of adult content.
They listen to podcasts and watch youtube. They know that a good VPN will stop their internet banking details being stolen, protect their family in their home and add 2-4 inches to their manhood.
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Until like a week ago there was no age checking system for porn and no reason to use a VPN really. Although your friends could have been into some very strange stuff.
I see many are focusing on the aspect of VPN itself and not enough as to why this is occurring in UK in particular and we should expect it in countries like Canada, and other EU countries as well in the near future.
The fact of the matter is conservative movements are surging not only in UK, EU, US but in Asia as well (ex. Recent surprise seat gains by moderate right parties).
The reason there is a common reaction across borders is the decoupling from globalism which pushed the overton window so far left that its brought a yo-yo effect to the right.
Globalism isn't a conspiracy theory its real established and demonstrable political movement to dilute all cultures by attacking their national identity, heritage through mass immigration which ultimately leads to a low trust social dynamic via crime (proven by statistics) or incompatibility (belligerence against their host counry and refusal to integrate and pushing imported foreign culture and values).
It's no wonder that such reckless push to gaslight its own ethnic/religious incumbents have swung polls in the opposite direction, and in a desperate attempt to hold on to the power that globalism has given to those that preach it, ironically turn to fascist tactics such as censorship, criminalization of speech and increased surveillance that only emboldens more overton window shift to the right.
You kept calling people "far right" yesterday for slightest disagreements to progressive policies in order to censor and intimidate them and today you have huge number of people who no longer care for that label as they find safety in size and number.
At this rate, given the way things are going in UK and EU and many other countries, its going to manifest in extremely far right wing policies being normalized and coming to power as majority of the population becomes "far right" and the new normal center, and those that called themselves "liberal progressive left" will find themselves outside the Overton window.
We've probably seen these ebbs and flows in politics countless times throughout human history and I understand better as to why things like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Communists came to rise.
The demand to bypass political censorship and surveillance increasing in the West, the so called bastion of democracy and freedom, will backfire into wide scale civil unrest. We've already seen a preview of it in Spain recently, where a group of Moroccan migrant gangs have attacked locals and in turn locals fought back and burned down a large mosque.
I've been to UK, France and Ireland recently and there is deep deep resentment from the locals towards the Muslim and North African population, and it reminded me of my childhood growing up in Lebanon, witnessing the arrival of Muslim refugees, neighborhood demographics changing, ppl being jailed and labeled racist for complaining, then came civil war between the new majority group and the incumbents, political concession by virtue signaling equity and harmony which lead to even more corruption within those demographics that did not respect agreements and its ultimate demise today.
I cannot see a future without the same events unfolding in Lebanon playing out in UK. All it takes is one major event (for us in Lebanon, it was Muslim militant group attacking a church) to ignite the flame, and as you saw Torres, Spain it finally took an elderly Spain man being victim of attack by 3rd gen Moroccan youth to explode into violence.
Remigration unfortunately is the only way that can peacefully diffuse smoe of the tensions and to avoid the same fate as Lebanon but I can see this will be a difficult path especially innocent individuals of that demographic caught in the middle during this rapid Overton Window shift accelerated by an increasingly sophisticated users and dystopian surveillance apparatus....
I must be honest with you, as far as I am pro net-neutrality, I can observe people using internet irresponsibly. As the internet stood up to allow sharing of science publications, now mostly shared is the pornographic type of content. When Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about people sending themselves a book he probably (we still may ask him) haven't predicted people sending boob/dick pics. As the content technical level lowers, amount of people sharing their stupidity increases. Meanwhile other irresponsible people give phones to their children (I am amongst them) hoping the children won't go into the bad places and trusting in freedom.
Currently my kids got already out of my hand, and I really wonder how could I filter the content that goes to them. Internet became something else, so maybe I won't install a VPN to their phones and they won't be able to see the most horrible things anymore.
> now mostly shared is the pornographic type of content
What is your source? I believe you are incredibly biased. Netflix is one of the biggest user of bandwidth worldwide, and if we're talking about the percentage of "pornographic" IP packets, I think it's even less than the former.
> and I really wonder how could I filter the content that goes to them
Parental control on device and DNS-level blocker (think AdGuard, PiHole, ...). Hosts file could also work as long as they're not admin on their PC. If they're skilled enough to circumvent all of that, then I think your kids will be fine.
I must admit the amount of pornography in different forms is now apparently everywhere on social media. Including social media I thought was "safe":
I see videos that I think are overtly sexual in nature on YouTube, even if the video is something supposedly "innocent". If you click through to their profiles there is an inevitable link to 18+ content most of the time. I am subscribed to only tech/film/gaming channels on youtube and this content is now always put into my feed. I probably have cursed myself by checking these people's profiles after the fact.
You are right though that by bandwidth, streaming services including Netflix make up the majority of data over the Internet and it is not pornographic/dangerous for children at all.
> I probably have cursed myself by checking these people's profiles after the fact
I think you really did. I don't watch much YouTube and don't use social media beside Instagram—which I mostly use for messaging friends and not exchanging photos—but I don't see a lot of erotic content on the mainstream platforms.
I wouldn't call it Erotic. It's hard to describe but you just know that it's somehow sexualised. I would think that somehow maybe I am a crazy prude but these profiles then do link to adult content (from their youtube via link aggregators, which is definitely not an 'adult content' platform). I think it's some form of cross platform advertising while skirting around the 'no adult content' rules of youtube.
>When Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about people sending themselves a book he probably (we still may ask him) haven't predicted people sending boob/dick pics.
You are asking tech to solve people problems. That is a recipe for disaster.
https://archive.is/GWdx5
Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government. Like maybe Adolescence or basically any mention of the NHS. The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
On the NHS, I tried for years to push for improvements to switch to digital cancer screening invitations after they missed my mother (offering to build the software for free), which is now happening, but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here. My sister who works in NHS DEI hasn't spoken to me since publishing a book on it.
Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it. Anecdotally, many of my friends have already left, some of the older generation want to leave but feel tied in. My flight out is in 6 weeks. Good riddance, no doubt.
> Taxes are rising (with tax take falling)
> just mentioning increased immigration
One of these seems like the solution to the other.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income
Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe.
I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
The UK has always been an empire in decline, but the wheels didn't come off until everyone became glued to feeds. It's Garbage In, Garbage Out. If your view of reality is driven by stuff that you see online, it's a distorted lens which then leads to distorted decision making that then leads to authoritarian creep.
Just my 2¢.
IMO, the wheels fell off decades before I was born.
The peak of the empire was around WW1, where the victory was immediately followed by Irish home rule, and Churchill(!) putting the UK military into austerity to save money, which is how it came to be that evacuating from Dunkirk involved a lot of civilian ships, amongst other things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Year_Rule
WW2 was a Pyrrhic victory. Not that Westminster collectively realised the nation's weakness until the Suez Crisis and the Wind of Change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(speech)
I'm not sure the people of the UK have yet fully internalised this decline, given the things said and written during the Brexit process. Perhaps social media really did make it all worse, but it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson may or may not have taken an arrow to the eyeball.
> it's been authoritarian, chauvinistic (both internationally with imperialism and domestically via the aristocracy), and theocratic, ever since Harold Godwinson
This. The UK was a band of feudal kingdoms that somehow managed to create an overseas empire. The empire is now gone, and the feudal kingdom is struggling to transform itself into a modern nation.
That happened a long time ago, the realization was the 70s.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.
Brexit may have been the emotional response, but like most it didn't help.
Is "emotional" supposed to trivialise the complaints? People would vote the same way now, most likely. The opinion hasn't shifted around much…
>People would vote the same way now, most likely. The opinion hasn't shifted around much…
I don't know where you're getting this information, but it's in stark contrast to all of the statistics I've ever seen on the matter.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51484-how-do-britons-...
Even Nigel Farage has called it a disaster.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-...
Nigel Farage's entire career was built on Euroskepticism and you claim in 2025 he would vote REMAIN — what are you talking about??
The original opinion poll in the other comment seemed quite clear: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51484-how-do-britons-...
Here's some Farage quotes, so you can see that there is no contradiction between the comment you were replying to (him saying it was a disaster is compatible with all this) and him still being a leaver:
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/nigel-farage-...>>you claim in 2025 he would vote REMAIN
Are you sure you replied to the right comment? Where have they claimed that?
>People would vote the same way now
my original comment
Oh, it really has shifted. A lot.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52410-nine-years-afte...
yougov
Yes, founded by a Brexit voting Tory
I see your point.
Not sure why this was downvoted, maybe the use of "foreigners" is a bit loaded, but this is basically it.
Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.
We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
It’s true that too much of the U.K. is a piggy bank for those who don’t live there, but that is true of much of the West now.
> taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
This would end very poorly because what the U.K. sorely needs is investment (to create new productive capacity). For example, Americans invested huge sums in North Sea oil and created an entire industry (before we destroyed it). Conversely, if you force people to keep wealth in the country then you just make things more expensive: they will bid up the price of property and the like. Nothing is added to the UK’s real economy by increasing the number of pounds flowing around in it - it’s only helpful if it’s invested. So what you actually want is tax breaks for foreign investment, but with some kind of ownership cap.
The problem is that the investment in this day and age is entirely extractive. Strip the assets, do minimal infra, and jack up the prices. Water here is a classic example. Investors want their returns, and the best way to get it is by rent-seeking and minimal outlay. I'd go so far to argue that "investment" is the problem.
There's been enough in the way of tax breaks and "derisking". A huge part of the problem with our public finances is being on the hook for some very ill-advised "investments".
The money going out exceeds the money going in, because that's what an investment is. An opportunity to make money.
The response of "we cannot stop water companies dumping raw sewage into our rivers and lakes because it might impact profits of their Saudi Arabia investment funds" is really all we need to know about the issues. It's sickening.
This is not true. There is no Saudi ownership of Thames Water. 90% or so is owned by Australian, European, and Canadian pension funds. Specifically it was the Macquarie Group (Australian) that loaded it up with debt and pushed it off a cliff.
The Netherlands is politically dysfunctional and the people are egotistical assholes but at least the economy is ticking.
Without money society is just doomed.
> The Netherlands is politically dysfunctional and the people are egotistical assholes
Could you elaborate? From over here the Netherlands seems almost a paradise of modern society.
Our politics does have some good parts. The political system we have is reasonably good. We have many political parties due to the proportional representation system. A single party is also unlikely to get a majority in parliament on their own, so parties with different backgrounds will have to work together to form a functioning government.
We do suffer from many political parties not willing to cause short term pain to improve long term outcomes. There are a few urgent issues going on in politics at the moment. Stuff where a decision needs to be made now and action should be taken. But the political parties do not want to make those decisions because they would inflict short term pain to some voters but would also improve the long term quality of life and economics of the Netherlands.
The worst part is that those issues have been known for a long time, but decisions were postponed over and over again because politicians didn't want to make the decision. Making the issues worse and more urgent over time.
At the same time populism is clearly on the rise in the Netherlands. A famous thing happening in a debate before the previous elections was a populist saying "But this woman cannot wait for the costs to be decreased, she needs it now." about decreasing a specific part of healthcare costs for citizens. Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.
>Of course when the same populist became the biggest party during the elections, they never introduced anything to decrease that part of the healthcare costs.
So THEY LIED?! Color me shocked.
The difference between social media and traditional media is, roughly speaking, the absence of a centralised editor that has the ability to gatekeep the nation’s discourse. If that’s not authoritarian I’m not sure what is!
Social media is a forum for people to complain about the problems they face, if you don’t like that the solution is not to censor the messenger but to fix the problems.
As someone who grew up in the UK I can tell you that the elitist mindset of the UK is a huge part of their problem: only the elite are capable sophisticated right-think, all others are wrong-thinking simpletons and must be silenced for their own safety. The BBC is a huge part of the problem as it is inevitably pro-government but trades off a strong image of neutrality, to the extent that it regularly misleads the public and they lap it up.
If editors are authoritarian for controlling what people see, then social media algorithms are super-authoritarian for the same reason. They also decide what people see, they also modify the cultural and political consciousness, just on a more granular level. An editor can try to push one group of people in one direction, but a social media algorithm can push multiple groups of people in multiple different directions.
IMHO, there's nothing authoritarian about either editors or social media. It only becomes authoritarian when they intentionally align with a central political authority.
Turns out most people are bad at editing the firehose of information coming at them to determine what's true and what's not.
I don't support censorship. But increasing the accuracy of the information most people are getting is a difficult problem to solve.
> Having UK work experience and having talked to thousands of british folks over a decade, I find this hard to believe
I only have to look as far as my own wallet to see the effects. I'm being taxed to the eyeballs while there is a glass ceiling preventing me taking any more pay home without a major jump which just isn't coming due to stupid tax rules keeping the working class from bumping into the middle class.
I see mine and my family's living standards drop only to be told by the news that I'm a likely target for more tax hikes, and there's just no room to tax me more while my bills have also gone up significantly, and something will have to give. If it gets to the point where I can't pay my bills despite being a "high earner" I'll have to start considering whether I leave with my family, and where to.
I'm not exactly the milky bar kid, but I imagine beyond my friends and family, I imagine the consensus would be very much the same, yet there goes two "successful" professionals and the children we were raising probably to be high earning professionals too.
I don't do social media, but I do keep on top of the news from all outlets, I try to look beyond the biases and form an opinion on a combination of sources.
> earn a penny more
That is not how marginal tax rates work. Each income band is taxed at the rate for that band. It’s why it’s called “marginal” - because the rate change happens at the margin between brackets.
You are taxed 0% on your first £12571. You are taxed 20% on your next £37669, or, £7359.80 on £50270 of income. If you then earned one more pound, or £50271, you would owe £0.40 (40%) on that one additional pound only, for a total of £7361.20. There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.
> There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less
If you go from £99,999 to £100,000 and have pre-school aged children, you lose £2000 in tax-free childcare per child. If you have 2 children, that extra penny cost you £4000, 3 children, £6000, you take home less, fact.
Combined with the 60% marginal rate, you now have to get to £110,000 just earn the same you did at £99,999 and then there's the side point that a couple can earn £99,999 each, or £198,999.98 and still benefit from it while any single parent who hits £100,000 loses it completely, so a single parent high earner loses out vs a couple. I'm not a single parent but that doesn't seem reasonable to me.
EDIT: and that person who hit £100,000 has the extra burden of having to file a tax return from now on simply because they hit an arbitrary number, and despite being on PAYE, though perhaps some people love doing tax returns, so not necessarily a negative point.
https://www.gov.uk/tax-free-childcare
> There is no income stage where earning more money has you taking home less.
there are several
there's one at around 50k (where child benefit is removed) and another at 100k (where childcare vouchers are removed)
Yes exactly at 100k you lose free childcare. It’s not a taper you lose the whole thing.
Here’s an explanation of the figures:
https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/money/article/high-i...
Also at £100k you start to lose your tax-free personal allowance. The commitment of successive governments to avoid raising taxes on "ordinary working people" has created a bizarrely inconsistent tax regime for above-average earners, where people earning £65k could end up paying a much higher marginal rate than people earning £165k.
https://taxpolicy.org.uk/2024/10/17/reform-income-tax-end-th...
Yes, once you go from 99,999 to 100,000 you lose 2000 per pre-school aged child you have and have to file your own tax returns for the privilege despite being PAYE.
How many preschool age children do you have?
Annoying that those are, it’s probably more accurate to say you don’t qualify for benefits when you earn considerably more than the median wage (£38k).
Also, if you’re paying a decent amount in to your pension your effective salary is lowered and won’t hit that child benefit threshold until your salary exceeds £60k or more, and you still get to keep all of that money.
Tax free childcare is already extremely lacking in my opinion, if you want professionals to work, it shouldn't be extortionate to have your children in nursery, and costing you 2000 per child per year for one parent earning 100,000 when two parents can earn 99,999 each is also ridiculous.
The real kicker is the 99,999->100,000 trap where you lose all tax free childcare care allowance, £2000 per year per child, it's assessed quarterly, and if you exceed it by a single penny, not only do you lose it, they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.
>>they also demand immediate repayment of all childcare allowance so far that year.
So this might or might not be in line with official guidance but I was exactly in this situation and I expected to earn around £99k last tax year then I was given an unexpected £4k bonus in my march salary, and I wasn't told about it until it was in my account already so it was too late to put it into pension. I asked HMRC about it and they said as long as I was being truthful at every quarterly questionnaire where they ask if you expect to make over £100k and I told them the situation changed as soon as I became aware of it I don't have to pay anything back for the free childcare hours. I asked my accountant and she said since I have it in writing it should be fine(but HMRC can always change their mind so who the hell knows).
Compare that to the insane situation of the benefit for carers where people are being asked to repay benefits going back years if they went over the threshold by a single pound - I imagine HMRC is being incentivieed to go after benefit takers more than other areas like childcare hours, for various more or less political reasons.
That sounds extraordinarily linient of them, but I suspect as you say, it's political.
I take it you lost your allowance for the rest of the year due to the bonus?
Luckily for me the childcare tax people contacted me about it the first time it could have become an issue because I received a bonus at the start of a tax year, so I adjusted my pension contributions for the rest of the year lowering my take home. By this point though I'd already been taxed that marginal 60% thanks to the bonus being paid to me, like yourself without being notified.
It's a classic result of step functions, which are popular in tax codes and regulations.
For example, if you pollute 99 ppm, then you're good. If you pollute 100 ppm, you're bad.
Don't quote me but I don't think this is quite true if you take tax credits and other "benefits" into account - especially when it comes to child support.
That is only true of income tax. Not all taxes are marginal, and several have thresholds that behave exactly as the OP described.
The people arguing only seem to care about income tax and NI, ignoring that other taxes exist at almost every level on your money.
> taxed to the eyeballs
Emotional phrases aside, what is your total NI + income tax deduction percentage, and what percentage do you think you should be paying?
The problem isn't the percentage, it's that there are tax traps where earning a single penny more end up in you taking home thousands less, then you hit a marginal tax bands of 60%+, and suddenly you have to earn tens of thousands more just to break even.
They're well known an documented, but I'm sure you know that already.
That jump in childcare costs definitely sounds annoying but if the overall percentage isn't very high then you're not being taxed to the eyeballs.
We could imagine fixing the problem by making the childcare voucher phase out between 80k and 100k, and at 100.2k you'd get exactly the same amount as you get under the current system.
In this hypothetical would you still say taxed to the eyeballs? If so, what would your justification be?
> there are tax traps
I figured you'd say that. It's a well-used talking point to change the topic. Because if you give me a %, you know I'll compare it to other countries, and point out it's actually not that high.
I also note you ignored my other question.
For other readers: even a £140k salary, your net deduction is 39%. At £200k, it's 41%. This is why people like OP don't like talking about total deductions, because it isn't aligned with their Daily Mail cliche talking points. And once you're earning very high salaries, you don't do PAYE and start using a good accountant.
edit: but yes I do agree about the £100-£125k tax band being a glass ceiling of sorts. But that is a different topic to "I'm taxed too much", which is what you claimed
Perhaps my wording was the problem, and I didn't ignore your other question, I said the percentage isn't the problem, I also don't know the number, but I'm sure you do.
Perhaps it was a problem with my wording but your statement about the daily mail suggests you've entirely misunderstood me, but to be specific I'm generally left leaning and prefer broadsheets, though I currently mostly use aggregators to combine sources to find where the facts are as opposed to "cliche talking points".
I thought I was clear when I said that the effect on my wallet is where my opinion is formed, but it seems you might have missed that.
I have no problem with paying more tax as a higher earner, but I don't agree with a tax system that literally prevents me from earning a penny more and would even have me earn less unless I can find a significant jump.
You clearly have a different view on this but the facts of what I see right in front of me have little to do with talking points and consensus and everything, right now, to do with tax or the tax system.
I'm taxed too much on every penny I've earned over over £99,999 and way too much because of the privilege of having pre-school aged children, that's my opinion, agree or not.
>privilege of having pre-school aged children, that's my opinion,
Look at salary sacrifice. This give you the option of buying childcare vouchers before tax. So taking you below the 100,000. Otherwise pay more into pension and drop below the 100,000 threshold.
Not tax advice, not financial advice...
> childcare vouchers before tax
I wasn't aware of this, I'll take a look and see if it applies thanks.
The pension route is the way I've gone to deal with it, but it doesn't fix the issue of "my bills are going up while my income can't". I'm sure retired me will be glad for it if it makes it that far, and we don't somehow end up being taxed to the hilt on _that_ too when we eventually get there.
EDIT: does > doesn't
> because it isn't aligned with their Daily Mail cliche talking points.
He keeps on top of the news from all outlets, and tries to look beyond the biases and form an opinion on a combination of sources.
Can you provide an example for others? I know I often hear this complaint here in Canada about entering a new tax bracket, but the reality is that only the money earned above the bracket's lower bound is taxed at that higher rate (if the bracket is $10k and you make $10,001, only that $1 is taxed at that higher brackets rate), and so I'm wondering what the UK is doing differently.
Edit: Ah, there's a baseline personal deduction (12.5k) that disappears between 100-125k, meaning, for that narrow band, every dollar earned in that range has a higher effective tax rate due to that deduction slowly disappearing. It's still progressive, so you don't suddenly start paying 60% tax on everything.
https://www.brewin.co.uk/insights/earn-over-100k-beware-the-...
See another comment of mine that also shows how going from 99,999 to 100,000 also costs you 2000 for each pre-school aged child you have per year meaning you actually earn thousands less, and to top it off, you now also have to do your own tax returns because you hit 100,000 despite being PAYE.
EDIT: it's interesting that anyone genuinely asking and trying to understand is getting downvoted as opposed to anyone who just disagrees with me.
Having to do your own tax returns is funny to hear as a North American, we always have to do them.
I struggle with the child tax credits. If I'm childless and move from 99,999 to 100,000 it doesn't change my situation at all. I don't think we can view that in the same light - it's a tax credit benefit, but it's not just a matter of earnings. The goal is to support lower income families, so the line has to be drawn somewhere, and whether it's gradual or not someone is still going to complain about it going away.
It comes at a problematic point where at 100,000 you also lose your personal allowance. It means that when I received a pay rise from whatever to exactly 100,000 I lost £4000 in tax-free childcare meaning I actually earned less.
Nobody is expected not to use it if they earn below the point it is taken away, it's just an arbitrary tax on parents who earn 100,000, while at the same time a few other paper cuts are piled on.
I know Americans always do tax returns, sounds like a pita for you guys, and I believe until recently you had no choice but to use some sort of service and couldn't DIY it?
Here if you're PAYE (salaries), it's dealt with on your behalf, the tax is deducted before you're paid and you don't have to deal with it, unless you're self employed. It's not necessarily a huge issue, but it's a time cost and that has to have a price, and if you get it wrong, HMRC are notoriously hard and will demand full payment immediately, if you're lucky and they accept your "excuse" (their word), they might let you split it over 3 months.
At this point it's best to make sure you have £10,000+ in savings aside just in case.
I've not had to do a tax return yet, but I've frequently seen tax bills in the tens of thousands from family and friends because their accountant got it wrong, and holds no liability.
I don't think it's as big an issue for me people have taken from my original wording, that's fine, poor choice of words on my part perhaps, but it has certainly been blown out of proportion including some minor jabs at me and (incorrectly) at my political leanings etc. Despite this really all having nothing to do with politics or news and quite clearly as I pointed out at it's direct effect on my family finances.
As the saying goes here in England, "I'm sorry I mentioned it".
I can't believe you're playing the victim. What minor jabs at your political leanings?
At least you've finally admitted your current or past salary, so we can determine the total deductions: 31%, reduced even more by pension contributions.
Cry me a river. Acting like we have the highest tax in the world. You're obviously a foreigner in the UK. If you don't like it here, feel free to move - as you already said you were looking at doing. I feel like you just dislike the UK and are moaning about the tax. I hope you enjoy Dubai. (Don't get me wrong, I think the UK is a shit hole too - but I can't stand people moaning about extremely high tax)
> but I've frequently seen tax bills in the tens of thousands from family and friends because their accountant got it wrong
So they picked a crap accountant. So what? The tax owed is the correct amount.
You certainly know a lot about the tax system yet in another comment said you don't know your total deductions. Hilarious
Yes, I'm a Brit, and very much entitled to this opinion.
> I struggle with the child tax credits. If I'm childless and move from 99,999 to 100,000 it doesn't change my situation at all. I don't think we can view that in the same light - it's a tax credit benefit, but it's not just a matter of earnings. The goal is to support lower income families, so the line has to be drawn somewhere, and whether it's gradual or not someone is still going to complain about it going away.
Having it go away is less of a problem than having it go away all at once. If it was phased out over a range of incomes such that every marginal dollar of gross is still a marginal increase in net, that'd solve the problem mentioned in this thread. Key property of a tax system: the function from gross income to net income should always be monotonically increasing.
To be fair, the original topic of this thread was "tax traps", one of the most famous in the UK being a gradual decrease of benefit that was still a marginal increase in net, but it was still deemed worth complaining about.
For those in the US: the UK tax return (actually a partial return and declaration of income) takes 10 minutes. It’s all done online. There are no complicated calculations, you just declare your income, investment income, interest and other sources, minus any tax already paid. You don’t need an accountant and there are no costs for filing.
If it takes you only 10 minutes to declare all your "income, investment income, interest and other sources" then you're either lying or doing taxes wrong. It takes me more than 10 minutes just to download all the tax slips, let alone totalling them up.
I'm in the pay bracket requiring annual self assessment and 10 minutes is probably too generous, purely because you log in to your SA account and the PAYE section from your employer is already pre-filled. You don't need to look at your pay slips, HMRC already has all the info from your employer and literally all you need to do is have a cursory glance whether the numbers look right then click confirm few times and submit at the end.
Obviously very different if you're self employed or have income mostly from investments or properties, but the you have an accountant to do it for you.
The person I responded to was referring to US taxes.
No, I was talking about the amount of time it takes to fill in an high-earner income declaration in the UK, which you only need to do if you are indeed a high earner or have multiple sources of income, and it is not anywhere near as arduous as a full tax return (either in the UK or the US).
Can't help but noticed that you didn't answer the question. It's so good: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44712327
That is not how marginal tax works. Marginal tax is… uh… tax on the marginal part?
It is funny you say these are well known and documented, yet provide no links or sources.
Apologies, I thought "well known and documented" implies it should be easy to find", but here you go:
https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates https://www.gov.uk/tax-free-childcare
For other readers who don't want to go through that:
Say you earn £99,999 and get a pay rise to £100,000 and have two pre-school aged children, you lose £4000 (£2000 per child) per year, so you now earn less.
Now for the next ~£25,140 you earn you'll pay an effective tax rate of 60%, so from £99,999 you first have to hit ~£110,000 to break even, then it's ~60% tax up to £125,140, then beyond that it's 45%.
I'm not familiar with the UK tax system but the usual solution is to have progressive (?) tax bands. Example:
On the part from 0 to 1000, no taxes
1001 to 10000, ten percent
10001 to 20000, twenty percent
20000 to 30000, thirty percent
30001 and more, forty percent
So if you were earning 29000 and get a raise to 31000 those 29000 are still taxed as they used to and the extra 2000 are split among the two bands around 30k.
Yes, except like many others have pointed out there are thresholds where you lose certain tax credits and benefits, so it's entirely possible to make £1 more but lose multiple thousand(for example if you're a parent and you go from making £99,999 a year to £100k a year)
You are right. Those are common in my country too.
I just need to say that this is such a great question. Everyone is going to apply their own idea of "to the eyeballs" unless and until it is defined.
I did answer the question, you just didn't like the answer.
The truth is I don't know the exact numbers but it's not relevant to my point, as I've tried to point out elsewhere.
> One of these seems like the solution to the other.
If the per capita spending is exceeding per capita taxation, increased immigration does not solve the problem. More people requires more spending.
> The UK has always been an empire in decline
I find this fatalistic attitude to be very unhelpful in determining good policy decisions. If you start with the assumption that the empire is in decline then it doesn’t seem as bad to add policies that contribute to decline, as long as you get some short-term win out of it.
> I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
There have been a number of public scandals regarding immigrant crimes, along with subsequent anti-immigrant riots started via social media and people being sent to jail for internet posts. Social media seems to be more of accelerant for social unrest than than the cause. For me (an outsider) observing the situation, it seems to be mainly caused by immigration.
Many of the areas most upset by immigration barely see any immigrants, whilst many of the most persistent spreaders of rumours about terrible things caused by immigration to the UK don't actually live there. Of course, it isn't just social media that obsesses over immigrants in the UK (and many other places), mainstream print media and politicians are pretty obsessed with them too.
Personally, I would rate the grooming gangs scandal as one of the worse things that happened to a western nation in decades. It literally made me sick to stomach when I read the details. I think the obsession is somewhat justified.
Sure, these guys were disgusting scumbags, but they weren't immigrants https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dxj570n21o
News coverage of child grooming convictions in the month of their conviction was dominated by a different group of scumbags who were convicted of similar crimes up to a decade earlier though, which underlines my point about obsessions quite neatly
THOUSANDS of young girls were sexually exploited for YEARS and the government did nothing about it because they didn't want to appear to be racist. There is no equivalence with any of the "average" sex crimes that happen in modern advanced nations. There really is no equivalence with anything that has happened recently - it is a crime unique in its depravity.
>Sure, these guys were disgusting scumbags, but they weren't immigrants
Yeah they were: https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/operation-stovewood-seven-me...
You're pointing to another case but the other one was the OG that exposed the British government being involved in the cover up.
I always thought linking all the main things not working in the actual world to the alienation caused by too much digital consumption to be wrong/not really making sense. However, gradually, I am getting closer and closer to that conclusion... In your case, what brought you to the stance "Too much social media is what ails the whole world"? What do you think we could do to solve it?
Social Media used to be better when you actually had a connection to the other person. Nowadays it's mostly anonymous or parasocial. All social media sites have drifted to influencer content (TikTok, Meta, Youtube) or to moving the identity of the other person to the background (reddit, HN). The inbetween of early social media with smaller groups of people who know each other has gotten very rare
The other factor is that everyone now knows how powerful social media can be. Remember when we had positive movements like Occupy Wallstreet, the Arab Spring and Anonymous Hacktivism all facilitated by social media? That doesn't happen anymore. Small things like getting traction for a petition still work, but anything that questions existing structures has no chance of succeeding anymore. Instead social media is overrun by bots that simulate broad consensus on many issues
Bingo. In a nutshell: parasocial relationships doing psychological and financial damage; anonymous inflammatory content doing social damage.
And that’s without putting things like dating apps, advertisements and privacy violations in the mix.
If you go back in history you can find examples of people making the same claims about too much television. Prior to that, too much radio. Prior to that, too much newspaper consumption.
A common thread is that when people complain about too much media consumption, they’re always talking about other people consuming other media. Few people believe their own consumption to be a societal level problem. Almost nobody believes that their sources of media are the bad ones. It’s always about other sources that other people are consuming.
This is why age verification has the most support of these topics: Adults see it as targeted specifically at a group that isn’t them (young people) whose media they dislike the most.
Did you ever consider that all the concerns regarding the negatives of new media might have some truth to them?
Technology is advancing much faster than humans can biologically evolve and very few people seem ready to seriously tinker with the human genome to keep pace.
Perhaps "the feeds" are just the inflection point where the information overload becomes obvious and baseline humans actually need a majority baseline human experience with all of the associated problems in order to prosper?
So, because some people in the past made (to you) incorrect arguments about something, that means anyone in the future making a remotely similar argument automatically has to be wrong? People in 2025 discussing social media have to be "wrong" because some subset of the population supposedly (to you) made a bad argument about radio 100 years ago?
All of that is broadcast / one direction. Social media is two-way. We've never had two-way mass communication. The rate of communication was an order of magnitude different also.
That doesn't make those claims invalid. Too much television is also a problem, and a lot of television content is junk. Tabloid newspapers are a scourge, as are opinion writers whose output often consists of fallacious propaganda designed to maximize confirmation bias.
They were right.
In what ways? What things would be better without TV and radio? You think they would be more informed? Or harder to manipulate?
People also complained about literacy rates and the printing press, but how would we have been better off without any of these things so far?
Maybe whatever X newest way to communicate is bad, but when the only evidence against it is the same old arguments that failed to hold up to scrutiny over and over again, I see no reason to give it any more prudence than someone claiming carbonated beverages have caused all out problems. There needs to be compelling evidence beyond people complaining about the collective woes of society that have a cacophony of sources and contributing factors.
To me, different and new communication methods only bring a spot light on issues that we already had. Having a town crier instead of a newspaper, radio, or TV isn't going to make me better informed or less likely to have my information manipulated against me. Sure, it limits the number of sources of information, but that doesn't curate the sources of that information any better when I have no control over them.
As the other user said, people have been warning about new forms of media since the invention of writing. It has always been in vogue to be a nay sayer.
But social media is different. For most forms of media, TV, movies, books, radio etc. You had some degree of agency and choice over what you consumed. You couldn't set what a channel or station was playing, but you could change the channel.
You don't choose what you see on social media. You see what an algorithm thinks is most likely to keep you hooked / going.
Our brains only know what's real based on what's in front of it. You can acknowledge something is rage bait, but as you process it, you will still feel some degree of anger / discomfort. You can acknowledge that something is a cherry picked example, designed to tug the sensibilities of users, but it will still tug on your sensitivities.
And so sure enough, as you keep getting rage baited, concern trolled into algorithmic oblivion, it changes your gestalt. Your worldview shifts to one where those are data points, and it starts distorting your perception of reality.
Garbage In. Garbage Out.
Other people have said that it's like electricity consumption. No. This is very much like tobacco. I don't use social media. Even though I get paid to post to it.
You can still change the channel, it turn it off.
However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.
Get people hooked on local solutions and local social networks that exist "IRL."
Ok, but how could we do that? Especially since thing like eg. work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote...
>work is moving little by little but more and more towards remote...
I wish this were the case so badly... it seems to be more the opposite with many companies doing RTO now.
organize things offline. political stuff, social stuff, hobbies, exercise. The things that people want, that online life isn't providing. I can't see another option other than waiting until tech is so commonplace that the advances don't interest people anymore.
> One of these seems like the solution to the other.
Humans are not fungible cogs
That’s absolutely spot on!
> I started working with folks from the UK right at the start when social media really took off, and I personally think that what ails the UK is the same as what ails the world. Too much social media.
Absolutely. It's not the only problem, but it is a serious and deep problem.
> The UK is becoming increasingly authoritarian in ways that feel increasingly antagonistic to the majority of the population, regardless of political party. Taxes are rising (with tax take falling), crimes are going unchecked, just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up, but as GDP per capita continues to stall and even fall, the pressure it puts on services is a factor for many. And we're seeing those with a few quid to rub together leave, but as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance" regardless of the brain drain and loss of tax income.
Have they though about joining some sort of economic union, maybe one with like minded countries that share the same continent?
I think it's always a bit of a bummer when someone takes the time to write a really well-thought out comment and someone comes in with a reddit-style quip that adds nothing to the conversation but derails it for everyone else.
There are so many charitable and earnest ways to make the point you're getting at, why reach for such intellectually low hanging fruit?
It's not a "reddit style quip" to mention the UK deliberately shot themselves in the foot economically when talking about the economic situation in the UK.
> I think it's always a bit of a bummer when someone takes the time to write a really well-thought out comment
Is this the same comment where they said good riddance to the entire country?
The comment I'm referring to is the one made by cs02rm0, yes. I thought it was an interesting perspective, even if it's not one I fully agree with.
I really prefer that sort of earnest, thoughtful comment compared to short-form little quips.
FWIW, they did not say that. Yes, the words "good riddance" where there, but you've grabbed the wrong end of the stick I'm afraid.
You're right.
So if we’ve agreed with OPs assessment that the problem in the UK is the government attempting to seize more power…how will becoming subjects of yet another government body that is even more powerful and less beholden to the people…help things?
The EU might be better on digital privacy right now, however the emotional winds of the political mob change often and many people in EU government feel differently. The EU is also an aging population of technologically illiterate and immigrant-afraid retirees. I wouldn’t expect much different coming from them in the future.
> So if we’ve agreed with OPs assessment that the problem in the UK is the government attempting to seize more power
Most of the OP's assessment that I quoted is about the UKs failing economics
The EU is facing the same fundamental situation as the U.K. The latter recklessly accelerated their problems but an aging and shrinking population coupled with unsustainable social spending and precious little technological investment can only result in a downwards spiral. Just look at how far behind the US the EU is since 2008.
Yes? The idea that EU-era Britain is still a north star for you is interesting.
The one that just agreed to pay 3000 dollars per capita to the USA to prevent a trade war?
The one that is also working on a digital age verification system?
The one that created an AI regulation that stopped all innovation, and a data protection innovation who's single result is billions of people having to spend 3 seconds before visiting every website clicking a button that doesn't actually do anything (in 80% of cases)?
Yeah, great.
some sort of an European Union?
perhaps they voted on this in a sort of Brexit? Stop being coy
> but suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here
I don't know anyone that doesn't complain about the state of the NHS. The only time I've heard anyone defending it would be when compared to countries without national healthcare (e.g. America).
I'm an American living in London and I'd gladly return to the US just for the healthcare.
Granted I'm in tech so that's steady employment with benefits, but there you go.
Nothing stops you from getting private healthcare here and still end up paying a fraction of the average per capita cost for Americans - the NHS costs about the same per capita as Medicare + Medicaid, and private health insurance is overall cheaper in the UK, because they "fall back" on using the NHS as a first line.
I haven't lived in another country, but I have never had an issue with healthcare in the USA. It does seem like you can step on a landmine if you are negligent, but I have employer paid healthcare now and it works great. When I was low income (during my early 20s) medicaid would legitimately hound me to keep me on it. I actually had an issue because they kept enrolling me after I got I job that no longer required them.
I imagine medicaid funding is directly tied to the enrollment count so they are very aggressive about getting people on it. Granted it was trash insurance and most specialists wouldn't take it, but it covered basic care fully.
This isn’t the story we generally hear - what we hear about us healthcare is that you need a well paid job and even then medicines are ridiculously expensive - like thousands of dollars a month for something that is tens of pounds in the uk.
My medication is billed as "thousands per month" but the insurance company pays a different rate than the 'billing' rate and all I pay is $20/month for my biologic infusions. If I didn't have insurance I could enroll in the drug program and get it nearly free. I think its really very rare for the case you mention.
Healthcare coverage generally comes with any fulltime job. It's cheap for individuals (I pay about $150/month) but gets more expensive with families, which is a real problem. Most medications are cheap. The only medications I've heard of that are expensive are new ones not yet approved by the insurer. I pay less than $10/month for my medications.
The opposite of survivorship bias I guess.
If you have a kid that landmine can be larger than you think if you’re at the wrong hospital.
That’s the entire point of the NHS
That's different. Yes, everyone complains about the state of the NHS but the "religion" is that the NHS may not be criticised itself. So it is in a bad state because it does not receive enough money, that's it, nothing else. Any suggestion that the organisation itself might be improved or, god forbid, that patients might pay is indeed usually seen as "blasphemy".
> god forbid, that patients might pay is indeed usually seen as "blasphemy".
There are policies that are wildly popular. Free public healthcare is one of such policies in many countries, and perhaps for a good reason.
> So it is in a bad state because it does not receive enough money, that's it
In real terms the budget is the largest it's ever been, it's a relic of the time when people worked and died shortly (a decade) after retiring, not when they live for 30+ years longer.
> In real terms the budget is the largest it's ever been
Which it needs to be given the demographic changes you note. It's about 15% smaller per capita than comparable countries spend. That would suggest that we need to increase the budget if we want comparable service.
That has changed in recent years. Now greater than in France in absolute spend per capita, would need a 7.5% increase to match in terms of GDP. It would still require a 15% increase to match Germany in absolute per capita, but only 8.5% in percentage of GDP.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?locat... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?end=2...
It's still one of the cheapest healthcare systems among similarly wealthy countries per capita - it's seriously underfunded.
To bring it to a comparable level to similarly wealthy countries would take an increase in funding of 20%-30%.
The UK spends about 18% less per capita on the NHS than the EU14 countries do on their health systems.
A lot of that money has gone on stealth privatisation through inefficient outsourcing of contract staff and PFI of infrastructure.
So the actual standard of care is far lower than the funding suggests. And it has been deliberately run down so a US-style system can be implemented.
So yes, the organisation should be improved, but in the exact opposite direction to the one you're suggesting.
The UK's real problem is that it's run by an out-of-touch inbred aristocracy with vast inherited wealth, working through a political system which prioritises stealth corruption over public service.
They don't see why they should contribute anything to the welfare of the peasants. The obligation is all one way - from the peasants to the gentry.
And there's a layer of middle class professionals who have convinced themselves they're the gentry, even though they can't afford to pay their school fees, never mind maintain a huge estate.
So - private ownership good, public spending bad. More sensible countries don't have this attitude problem, and are proud their public services actually benefit the public.
I like the cut of your jib. I see the class system in much the same way but with different analogies. The middle class professionals are like the 'house n-gro' described by Malcolm X and the minimum wage workers are like the 'field n-gro' (not sure we can use that word even in academic discussions given where the UK free speech laws are going!).
There is also a lack of a respected teaching class. With the changes to universities and schools, there is no longer any respect for those with an education and able to teach.
If you go to, say, France, you'll find that healthcare isn't free at the point of use and that the system is much more private than in the UK. I believe this is so in many other European countries, too.
So public/NHS vs private/US system is a false dichotomy, and "free at the point of use" is a red herring.
Looking at the reactions, this whole threads does exemplifies what the OP said about the NHS being a "religion".
I moved to Finland from the UK and found exactly the same thing you mentioned in France. Plus extra layers of beauracracy (there's no national health service, there are public hospitals that send a bill to the public insurer and you get a bill for an excess unless you are absolutely down-and-out. Either way, a nice job program for public administrators). Prescriptions are far more expensive than the UK (your co-pay on them is something like €600 a year)
One nice perk though is that [private, corporate] jobs offer cushy health insurance as part of the deal as standard really so you can go and see one of the many private doctors in their offices at your choice and leisure.
It's not a "religion" to have people disagree with you on philosophical points.
In addition, I'd say most of this thread is a bunch of people debating what issues there are with the NHS (I don't see anyone claiming there aren't any) with some people for it, and some against it.
A fair few people believe that it is the duty of the state to care for individuals, and that one right that people have is free access to healthcare.
If someone expresses that viewpoint I don't think it's fair to say that they're being religious or dogmatic about it, just like it wouldn't be fair for people to argue that your view (which I assume is for a more privatised healthcare system) is religious or dogmatic, it's a simple disagreement.
Same with Canada, they have public health insurance run by provinces which private hospitals bill to. While the UK has a giant national public hospital system run across an entire country (NHS England, NHS Scotland etc).
The UK has NHS trusts that run hospitals etc. For a limited period of time - just a few years -, the trusts in England were reporting to NHS England. NHS England is being abolished.
These ca. 200 trusts operate with a great degree of operational independence, though they are public entties.
The distinction is important because they are what makes the scale manageable, and it also provides resilience.
The distinction is important because they are what makes the scale manageable, and it also provides resilience.
Though it also leads to inconsistency and the "postcode lottery" problem where the quality of treatment a patient receives for a specific condition can be extremely variable depending on where they live.
That's true, but now mitigated at least to some extent by the right to choose (though people are woefully unaware of this, and GP's in my experience never ask so you need to bring it up if you have issues with your local hospital - the NHS could do better at requiring this; in some cases I've been given links to pick treatment provider after being referred, and it'd be nice if that was the norm).
But it's better to have management failings contained to individual trusts, that are monitored, than to have these failing affect the system as a whole. Not least because it does allow patients going elsewhere as a last resorts.
I guess you're talking about healthcare for the unemployed or non-residents or non-French people, because if you're employed there is additionnal and mandatory healthcare. There's still basic free healthcare if you don't yet fit well in the system but it's like for example to remove a tooth instead of clean it and reconstruct it.
No, I am talking about everyone.
> because if you're employed there is additionnal and mandatory healthcare
Yes, if you are employed in the private sector there is now mandatory additional private health insurance to cover what public healthcare does not.
Healthcare isn't free at the point of use in any case. Things may be automatically paid/reimbursed as the case may be. Private sector is much more involved than in the UK, too, starting from GPs who are all private practices.
The point is that it's not because you have to pay at point of use or because things are more private that you end up like in the US. This is an FUD argument against change.
All the GP practices in England are private businesses working under contract to the NHS. Most people don't notice since the majority of services are covered under that contract.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/long-reads...
Yes they are but they are indeed service providers as you mention.
That's quite different from a private practice (like a solicitor here) that you pay directly and/or that seeks payment from health insurance.
The one country whose healthcare I’ve studied in depth aside from the US is Costa Rica. Our Plan B is to establish permanent residence there and starting next year we will be spending a couple of months there every winter and maybe in July.
Costa Rica has an affordable all inclusive public health care system (Caja). But you can also pay for extra for private healthcare. Is it the same in the UK?
Yes. Like no matter what someone thinks about the NHS, it's always affordable, and it's entirely inclusive. And if you want private healthcare, you can absolutely get it. I've had private health insurance at every post-university job I've had, it's a standard offering in tech.
The main criticism of two tier healthcare systems (public+private) is that it creates an unstable system. The private system steals all the talent, the rich don’t care if the public system is good since they don’t use it, and thus the public system dies a slow death of 1,000 cuts.
In canada we’re in a phase where this is just starting. Private clinics (e.g. telus health) have started to pull doctors out of the public system and put them behind subscription paywalls. We’re still paying the majority of their salary, but they can only be accessed if you pay their private overlords a monthly fee.
We certainly have this issue in the UK right now. In dentistry in particular there is a problem that basically everyone agrees on which is that the NHS dental contract makes little sense for the dentists providing the care. In many cases they would literally lose money by performing routine treatments on NHS patients and then claiming what allowances they can back from the government. So of course many don't do that and in large areas of the country it is now literally impossible for someone moving there to register with a local NHS dentist because 100% of the surgeries within a reasonable distance are only accepting new private patients. Meanwhile I can register with a private dentist based just a few minutes from my home who offers a full range of treatments and excellent service with near instantaneous responsiveness - at a price that many people in normal jobs can't afford to pay.
The issue is the same in the US. A lot of specialist say they aren’t taking new Medicaid patients and a few who don’t accept Medicare.
> But you can also pay for extra for private healthcare. Is it the same in the UK?
Yes
I moved to the UK with my family just before the Brexit vote and left last year. I love the country, but the changes I saw over that time period were so stark -- and, similarly, so many of the friends I made in that time had already left the country.
That I could have multiple negative NHS experiences relating to missed cancer diagnoses of friends in that relatively short span of time is suggestive of a real problem. The institution seemed to have less of an issue with elder care (in the US, the phantom menace posed by Obamacare or any governmental involvement in healthcare was meant to be "death panels" deciding the fate of grandparents) than with avoiding at all costs detecting potential long-term problems in the young. It's a 'rational' fear in the sense, as you note, that such cases put tremendous pressure on services, but there's no world where the best health outcome is refusing to screen your working age population.
The NHS is cheap but quite ropey.
This mirrors my experience of the UK. A dysfunctional country whose wheels were slowly falling off and now not so slowly. I’m generally pro devolution but in the UKs case their political class is so god awful that giving them more power didn’t seem to be a good idea.
I left for greener pastures a long time ago and subsequently all of my friends and anyone I knew of any talent has also left, it feels weird visiting a place I once called home and not being able to see friends.
> suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here
That's really not my experience. In fact, almost everyone is surprised when I suggest that despite its many problems, the NHS does better for the people than most modern countries' health systems.
I am certainly surprised by that suggestion.
No one I know who has lived in France or Germany or any developed country other than the US thinks the NHS is better than the systems in those countries.
I've heard from Spanish friends living in the UK that the NHS is so bad, they fly back to Spain for medical checks and even to see the dentist. That's mind blowing.
Having lived in the UK for 25 years, and being from Norway, which has one of the consistently top ranked (though extremely costly compared to the NHS) healthcare systems, I have not had any problems relying on the NHS for 25 years for most things.
There are times I opt for private services for speed, because I can afford to, but I could also afford private health insurance (which is cheap in the UK), and haven't felt the need to.
That said, dental is a weak spot of the NHS, with too few dentists offering NHS services, and there's a perceived quality difference in that the NHS treatments have fee caps that mean they will often not include the best aesthetic options. For dental I do tend to go private (but dental for adults is also excluded in quite a few other "universal" healthcare systems - like Norway; don't know about Spain)
Oh, so the UK has a public-private health system.
> There are times I opt for private services for speed
I'm guessing the NHS, being public, comes with long waiting lists. So it's more about speed than quality of service? I'd assume most doctors with 20–30 years of experience are working in the private sector, right?
It's very much more about speed. Waiting lists varies greatly - I just took my son to the GP this morning, after we booked last week. The only reason it wasn't sooner was that they wanted blood test results first. He had blood tests booked in the morning after we booked, and we were seen ahead of time - the appointment took 5 minutes. There was zero wait when we checked in at the GP.
New Years Eve, my son was referred to an out-of-hours GP service within an hour of a phone consultation.
But while the shortest wait I've had for a video consultation for myself (via the NHS) was literally 10 minutes, the longest was two weeks.
If you have an emergency, you will be triaged and given a faster appointment if you use the right channels (111 - the non-emergency alterantive to 999/911, or urgent care walkin centres, or A&E as the last resort), but of course many things that are not an emergency will seem intolerable to wait for, and then it absolutely sucks if you can't afford to pay your way to be seen faster.
This is a political/cost issue - the NHS is bargain basement in terms of amount spent per patient compared to many other countries.
A large proportion of doctors in the private sector also works for the NHS, so quality of clinical experience has never been a concern to me.
E.g. when my ex looked for a doctor when she considered having a c-section done private, the top expert she could find was an NHS consultant that worked privately on the side. This is the widespread, and often the private clinics are operated by NHS trusts, as a means to supplement their budgets, and/or the operating rooms etc. are rented from NHS trusts.
If anything, my only negative experiene with lack of experience here has been with private providers (the only nurse that has ever struggled to draw blood from me in my entire life failed to get any blood from me after 3 agonisingly slow attempts where she rooted around in my arm for a vein. Every NHS nurse that has drawn blood from me or my son have been so fast at drawing blood you hardly notice before they're done even when they're filling multiple containers)
But if you want to be pampered, then private providers will be nicer. They're also nicer if you e.g. want more time - GP's are expected to allocate an average of something like 7 minutes per appointment for the NHS patients, for example, and how flexible they will be varies, while with a private GP you can pay for however long appointments you want.
Location is a huge factor. I live in a rural part of the country where the main hospital serves mainly small towns and villages. The service is not perfect but, compared to the nearest big city, (20 miles away) it is night and day.
I live in London and have mostly been satisfied here too, but you're right it does certainly vary. More people should be aware they often have a right to choose, though, including sometimes private hospitals (though choosing a private hospital is usually only available when the private hospital costs the same or less as the NHS rate).
Great to hear personal experiences like this, thanks for sharing.
In a lot of cases they are the same doctors working for both the NHS and having private patients.
Oh that's interesting. I wouldn't expect a surgeon with 20 years experience to show up at a public hospital. I do like the idea though, it gives new doctors a chance to learn from them. But I'm not sure what the experienced doctor gets out of it, to be honest.
It's pretty much the other way around here. For a private hospital, getting someone with experience from the NHS is to a large extent a prestige thing, and you'll find that the practioners profiles on private provider websites often highlights their NHS background.
So what they get out of it is at least to some extent that it is expected many places as a means to getting job offers from private providers.
I have heard the exact same thing. The reason given being a lack of confidence in whoever they were dealing with. For many people, first contact with the NHS is the 111 call centre which really is akin to a health lottery.
Living in the UK but being from another EU country, I definitely see that happening. However, a lot of times it is just due to habits, wrongly-placed mistrust, or not being well settled-in yet because, at the end of the day, there are eg. better GPs and worse GPs everywhere in the world, but if you are still "new" to the country you simply do not know which ones are which, so you prefer to go to the ones you know already.
Makes sense.
I'm not entirely sure if the UK has a public-private health system. What I do know is that companies offer private health insurance, even though everyone has access to the NHS. That suggests there's a private system in place, one that probably attracts the most experienced and competent doctors and GPs?
About 10% of people have private health insurance, but note that a large proportion of service providers in the private space also work for the NHS.
E.g. my old GP used to provide both private and NHS services (they were precluded by their NHS contracts from providing private services to people registered with them with the NHS).
Many NHS trusts also provide private services, as they are allowed to do so to improve utilisation and supplement their budgets, so in practice this is part of the reason the NHS is so cheap compared to universal systems in similarly rich countries.
Most private hospitals in the UK also e.g. rely on NHS for intensive care, and this, along with relying on the NHS for first-line care (A&E, GP's unless there's a wait, etc.) is also why private health insurance in the UK is unusually cheap, and why private hospitals in the UK are unusually cheap (if you're in the US, and planning elective treatments, it can be cheaper to fly to London and do it here, even factoring in hotels - and some Central London hospitals have hotel suites, and at least one have or had a previously Michelin starred chef because they cater - literally - to high-end international healthcare tourism).
Oh yeah, healthcare in the US is insanely expensive. They have top professionals, but if you don't have money for long, complex treatments, your options are basically: sell your house, or fly to Cuba, Costa Rica, or the UK for treatment.
Not just Spanish, Polish people do the same.
Do you know why that is? Are the waiting lists just too long, or is the service actually bad? Or a bit of both?
The median wait to be seen by a specialist is currently 14 weeks, but the range is much larger and some patients will wait as much as a year for a non-urgent referral. Those waits are on top of a lot of de-facto rationing; referrals will often be rejected for fairly spurious reasons, purely to manage demand.
Speaking personally, the biggest issue isn't the waiting, but the chaos and uncertainty. Every part of the NHS is in a constant state of crisis management. I don't terribly mind that I usually have to wait about two weeks to see my GP (family doctor), but I do object to the fact that I'll invariably be seen by a locum (temporary) doctor who doesn't know how the local systems work and won't be there if I need a follow-up appointment. I could live with waiting lists if they were always 14 weeks, but it's incredibly disruptive to not know if it might be 14 or 40 weeks, to not know if your long-awaited appointment will be cancelled with no notice due to staff shortages or industrial action. I've almost got used to the fact that the corridors of my local hospital are permanently full of "temporary" overflow beds, primarily occupied by frail elderly people, often in considerable distress, sometimes obviously neglected.
I'm fairly high-agency and I feel that the system is hostile and difficult to navigate; I have no doubt that many patients who are less able to advocate for themselves suffer preventable deaths because they fell through the cracks.
I know of Polish people who do this too.
Do you know why that is? Are the waiting lists just too long, or is the service actually bad? Or a bit of both?
If it were only France or Germany, it wouldn't be as bad. I returned to Poland after almost 15 years in the UK, and despite our health service being an absolute shambles, I still prefer it to the NHS.
There is an old irish song called "The man of the daily mail", I think they could use your views to update the song for our times.
The resistance to innovation in the screening invitations is more down to empire building by low-talent management than to the NHS 'religion'. Dr Ben Goldacre wrote a memorable X thread on a closely related topic some years ago.
Where do you see people leaving heading towards? What’s your emigration destination? It seems like most countries have their challenges and I’m curious where people who have inevitably done more research than me are landing, literally!
Personally I've known people moving to Portugal, Malta, Cyprus, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, the US, Singapore. There's obviously a variety of factors that go into the choices people make and certainly no perfect choice.
For me, it'll be the UAE. Instinctively, some people will probably attack that choice, which is fine. I've lived in the Middle East previously, it's not perfect to say the least and I have some personal history with that, but I understand the choice I'm making. One thing people won't like is the headline tax rate, but I probably won't come out ahead there initially as cost of living is quite high - it'll cost me about USD 70k just to put three kids in school. Accommodation is also quite expensive, private healthcare also needs paying for, but at least you get what you pay for then.
Where the tax situation is appealing though is that then I'll be incentivised to earn more beyond those high living costs, where I just don't feel I am in the UK. Sun and swimming works for me too. Job adverts there are absolutely rammed with literally thousands of applicants and I'm hearing from recruiters that a lot of people from the UK and wider Europe are trying to head in the same direction. I'll be working for myself though.
I likely won't see out my days there. I'd imagine we'll retire to somewhere on the Med, my wife would prefer NZ but I don't think that works for me. The US is perhaps desirable, but it seems quite hard for a Brit to get into unless they happen to have a job with a company there. We'll have to see.
I was going to ask the same thing and I hope they answer.
I can't speak for OP but I can report on what I'm seeing... I know a lot of British, Canadian, and Australian expats that have moved to California in the past 5-15 years.
Why? Healthcare is probably everyone's first concern, but expats tend to be well educated successful people who can afford excellent healthcare... I'm an expat from a different country and seeing the top end of the healthcare facilities in the States is a luxury experience compared to national healthcare where I'm from. I wish everyone here had access to that, but at least poor people in California do have access to state healthcare.
Politics is a shit show, and has gotten worse recently of course, but that's true in a lot of places now and everyone I know came in before the most recent decline. I know a couple of families who have gone back to their countries, but all of them went back because they wanted to be close to family again, but none of them left because they didn't like it here.
Across everyone I know, the main appeals for coming to California seem to be weather and lower taxes than their home country. Cost of living is similar to many of the big cities in the countries I mentioned above. I'm not suggesting America is a better place, that's a different calculation for everyone, just reporting on what I'm seeing.
Which countries would you recommend to move to?
Isn't the cost of living crisis and rising wealth inequalities a problem that many western countries face?
The worst part is I don't see really any western country that's not in decline at the moment. Seeing the "surrender"'s from EU and other countries on tariffs makes me feel so bad. It's like there is no place in the world that's socially and economically strong anymore. The US remains economically strong at least, but they're now run by bullies. Even so, I see people all over the world leaving to immigrate to the US. Canada has the same growing cynicism and economic troubles and emigration, maybe less of a police state though. We're all just pathetic vassals to the US now.
> Every time someone with the finances, vision and ability leaves I think the situation gets a little bit worse, it increases the proportion of people remaining willing to put up with all of it.
This is the issue.
I left around the time of Brexit so I have no useful opinion on the recent financial/admin state of the UK, though it seems from afar that austerity has done the place no favours. But...
- this kind of authoritarian nonsense is just what Home Secretaries do. David Blunkett brought in RIP (then, to his very slight credit, changed his mind). Jack 'boot' Straw was famous for his I-AM-THE-LAWing. I don't think the Tories are any better.
- No, criticizing the NHS is not against the religion there. The newspapers are forever getting in digs about long waits, unpopular (but perfectly rational) decision from NICE about what drugs to pay for, and junior doctors and their apparent insistence on being paid properly.
- And with that in mind, having lived in three countries (four if you accept that the NHS in England and Scotland are different) I personally think the NHS is fucking fantastic. Someone close to me was diagnosed with a serious illness and immediately swept up in a production line of modern, effective treatment. Sure, it was somewhat impersonal, the biscuits are rubbish, and they were a widget on the production line, but they're also still alive ten years later, and we still have a house and savings.
- kudos to your sister. The UK is an ethnically diverse place, one of the least racist and divided that I've seen, but - like everywhere else - imperfect. The NHS always seemed to me to be a reflection of what things could be elsewhere with doctors, nurses and cleaners hired from all over the world. [which reminds me that while the right-wing press hates the NHS for being free, the left wing press occasionally hates the NHS for bringing in medical staff from poorer parts of the world. They just can't win]
- No, criticizing the NHS is not against the religion there. The newspapers are forever getting in digs about long waits, unpopular (but perfectly rational) decision from NICE about what drugs to pay for, and junior doctors and their apparent insistence on being paid properly.
This is exactly what I'm saying. The NHS are seen as perfect by some. All criticism is digs that are wrong.
I'm pro-NHS. But this perspective that it's infallible is beyond all reality.
> All criticism is digs that are wrong.
Often, when people criticize the NHS they have an ulterior motive, like privatisation. Consider all the political difficulties the NHS has had in the past few years. As such, negative remarks can be read or misread as dogwhistles for other views, so they're something that have to be phrased carefully and within context.
I was unclear: did you publish a book, or did your sister?
In general, for something both as key and as endangered as the NHS is, criticism isn't always useful -- support is. Problems can be recognised and addressed through support.
I did.
I'm not anti-NHS, I've no agenda to see it privatised, I just want it to be better. I tried many, many private routes first. I tried NHS England, NHS Digital, the Innovation Service, AHSNs (many sections having since been renamed/reorganised). About 20 different contact points over two or three years, most of which seemed inappropriate but I made sure if anyone told me it was someone else's responsibility I checked with them.
The problems had already been recognised through public inquiries and yet were still ongoing.
I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive. But as far as I could see, offering support was getting me nowhere.
I just had people acknowledging the issue and then shrugging their shoulders, pointing fingers at everyone else. So I wrote a book on it, spoke about the issue publicly and within months it was decided to spend tens of millions on sorting it.
> I even offered to build the software for free, which, hopefully, for an individual dealing with an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions, falls under supportive.
I think it's wonderful that you offered to do that but it simply isn't realistic. Who is going to support this software in the long term? How are you handling privacy concerns? What guarantees can you offer about server security? Who is paying for and maintaining the servers in the long term? What happens (to be blunt) if you die the day after the software is delivered?
There's so, so much wrong with the way governments provision software projects from outside parties. But there is good reason to have contracts the length of the Bible. Picking up work from individuals on a whim is courting disaster.
> I think it's wonderful that you offered to do that but it simply isn't realistic. Who is going to support this software in the long term? How are you handling privacy concerns? What guarantees can you offer about server security? Who is paying for and maintaining the servers in the long term? What happens (to be blunt) if you die the day after the software is delivered?
Good questions, but the quickest way I can answer them all is to say that my company had delivered software for national security purposes to central government departments. This really was nothing.
It certainly wasn't my preferred option. The offer was mostly a tool to ensure that cost of development could not be used as a reason to reject.
I don't live in the UK, but the stories we hear about the NHS from people who lived and worked there are honestly shocking.
One guy had a brain infection and was told to wait four months for an appointment. Another went in for a root canal, left without a tooth, and fainted outside the clinic. Someone else was refused an X-ray after an accident.
Meanwhile, in my tiny country, we have a dual public-private health system, and the facilities, doctors, and dentists are top notch. It really makes you wonder what's gone wrong in the UK, considering how much taxes British people pay.
The UK pays less per capita towards the NHS than most similar-income countries do.
And, it's very much a "public-private" health system. E.g. all GP's and most dentists are private businesses, paid for by the NHS to varying degree, but also with many providing private services.
The NHS uses an extensive network of private providers, including (when sufficient funding is provided) to drive down waiting lists. I've personally had a procedure carried out at a private hospital at the NHS's expense.
The NHS has many problems, but at the root of a whole lot of them is that the NHS needs a funding increase of 20%-30% to get to similar levels of funding per capita as similarly wealthy countries.
The UK spends about as much per capita on the NHS, providing universal care, as the US does on just Medicare and Medicaid.
>at the root of a whole lot of them is that the NHS needs a funding increase of 20%-30% to get to similar levels of funding per capita as similarly wealthy countries
As a percentage of GDP, UK healthcare spending is well above the EU and OECD averages. We spend a greater share of our national income on healthcare than Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Finland or Norway.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_...
Thanks for the info
I think a great many countries have problems with healthcare. I think if you went hunting for anecdotes of healthcare failures you'd be rich in examples in a lot of countries. That said, I think in the UK it's a result of inefficiency and chronic underfunding for, at this point, decades.
I've lived in both the UK and the US and there are issues with healthcare in both. Maybe the model your country uses could scale up to populations the size of the UK and the US, maybe it wouldn't. Difficult to know.
I agree. Every country has its own set of challenges, and in the end, it all comes down to personal experience.
It really makes you wonder what's gone wrong in the UK, considering how much taxes British people pay.
Unfortunately the main problem is chronic underinvestment by successive governments of all political inclinations. We tend not to fix our roof in the summer because we hope the other guys will be in government by winter when everyone inside is getting wet and they'll get blamed for the consequences of our decision. We've also made some poor choices historically around selling off national assets and questions of privatisation or public ownership.
This isn't unique to the NHS and ironically among the current Labour government the Health Secretary, Wes Streeting, is one of the few people suggesting significant changes that actually do make sense for the long term future of our country. Unfortunately a lot of them will probably require more than 5 years to implement and that puts the results over the horizon beyond the next general election. So the price for trying to "do the right thing" might be that he won't get re-elected to see it through. This enables the cycle of short-termism and lack of consistent investment to continue even though its horrible results are increasingly clear for all to see.
I see. A polarised two-party system makes long-term planning really hard, like in the US.
Ironically, that's not a problem in China, they have a one-party authoritarian state and can plan 10, 20 years ahead without worrying about elections or political instability.
China also has a healthcare system that has been far more private than public for the majority of the existence of the PRC, that is only in recent years getting close to providing universal coverage for basic service provisions....
TBF the government and its agencies - including the NHS - are doing themselves no favours with how they're managing IT at the moment.
There are persistent and valid claims that the NHS is inefficient in its use of technology. It wastes lots of money, wastes clinicians' time, and sometimes fails to get accurate information to the people who need it in time to be used.
But there is a best being the enemy of the good problem here. The amount of regulation involved in supplying any kind of tech product or IT service to these public sector organisations is becoming prohibitive. Parts of the industry that have been providing these products and services into the NHS are being crippled in productivity or even literally shutting down whole supply chains because it's too onerous to comply with all the red tape. It's not just individuals but the small businesses that employ or engage them and then the medium-sized business that use the small ones.
If you're working with big consultancies with their own legal and compliance teams then sure you can write hundreds of pages of contracts and require compliance with several external standards about managing personal data and IT security and whatever else. But that regulation flows downhill to the smaller suppliers who don't have resources already available to deal with those issues and at some point it becomes overwhelming and everyone has had enough and decides to become a gardener. Now your only options for supply are big consultancies engaging big suppliers who charge big prices and provide big company levels of service and responsiveness (in the most pejorative sense of these terms).
Surely this isn't the best strategy for a system that desperately needs to be more efficient and sometimes more innovative. There is a broad spectrum between "adopt a one-off product with no support from a single well-meaning individual" and "everything requires so much red tape that only the places charging those £x000-per-day consulting rates we're always mocking are actually allowed to provide it".
As someone who does software for NHS Scotland, I can easily believe the tale of multiple difference directorates/orgs believing it was someone else's remit as the NHS is a super complex organization of organizations. But in your case specifically data protection laws probably made it far worse and that's true of pretty much any tech you build/deploy in the NHS. There are strict information governance rules that have to be followed for any personal information, even just emails, which exist for very good reasons and aren't particularly onerous, but they are strict so in situation like your where it's not clear who would own/be responsible for what you were offering I can could see them getting in the way.
There are some rules that exist for very good reasons - and which have been widely undermined by front-line healthcare services though this does at least seem to be improving a bit over time.
There are also plenty of rules that exist for dogmatic reasons and impose absolute requirements that don't always make much sense in context instead of stating principles that should be appropriately applied.
I understand that those administering these rules don't want to leave loopholes where people or cost-conscious suppliers will cut corners for convenience and/or to save money. There is obviously a danger of that happening if you don't write everything down in black and white.
But you have to remember that the starting point here is receptionists at medical facilities asking people to email over sensitive health information or casually discuss it on the phone when they don't even know who they're talking to and what information is appropriate to share with them. Doctors are trying to read vital patient information from scrawled handwriting on actual paper in potentially time-sensitive life-and-death situations. Expensive scanning equipment in hospitals relies on software that runs on 20-year-old versions of Windows from a supplier that shut down long ago.
In this context you probably win a lot just by having clear policies and guidelines that really are short and simple enough for rank and file staff working in a wide variety of different jobs to understand. A reasonable set of basic technical measures would be far better than much of what is in widespread use today. Trying to make everything perfect so we have fully computerised health records and integrated diagnostic and treatment systems and everything is 100% secure and privacy-protected and supported is a laudable goal that would obviously be much better for patient outcomes and also for the daily lives of everyone working in healthcare. And in 50 or 100 years maybe we'll be able to do it. But not today and not tomorrow.
> Often, when people criticize the NHS they have an ulterior motive, like privatisation
This kind of political insecurity is toxic for rational conversation. Blindly rejecting the criticisms of our political opponents is just as naive as blindly accepting their criticisms. Either way we handover control of the conversation.
Rhetoric exists. Astroturfing exists. Wishful thinking and name-calling do not make them go away. You might not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you.
"The NHS are seen as perfect by some"
I've never met anyone who thinks that the NHS is perfect - least of all anyone who has used it or anyone who works there.
Just read the comment further above to see that there are people who cannot stomach any criticism of it.
Many years ago now my sister turned down the chance to go to an international conference held in the Netherlands, when I asked why, she said it was because the NHS was the best in the world and had nothing to learn from other healthcare systems. I'm still stunned, and she still doesn't know anything about other healthcare systems.
> But this perspective that it's infallible is beyond all reality
Very very very few people think the NHS is infallible. What are you even talking about? We all understand the NHS has many many problems, and those of us that have used the NHS understand this even more.
However, we still think it's a lot better than the private healthcare model.
Not sure what you're getting out of this weird strawman argument you're putting forward.
> However, we still think it's a lot better than the private healthcare model.
What private healthcare mode? WHat they have in the US? Then definitely yes. What they have on France or Germany or Japan or almost every other developed country.? Then No. What they have in Singapore? Still No.
Yes I agree that the UK should spend as much per capita on healthcare as France, Germany and Singapore.
I'm afraid there are people who cannot tolerate NHS criticism, you may not be aware of them until you've tried to see a change in the NHS. Some of them would even describe their very existence as a strawman, but it's not a strawman to the people they've blocked from seeing the NHS improve.
Yet private healthcare is a strawman, I've never argued for it.
You've moved from saying the NHS is like a religion that no one can criticise, to "some people cannot tolerate NHS criticism". I'm glad you've toned down the ridiculous complaints to something more reasonable.
> the biscuits are rubbish
This is why I'm pleased that for the ward I visit, biscuits and snacks are provided by a charity, it is the best of both worlds.
Not only I am not bankrupt from medical care, but I also get to enjoy decent snacks and a good coffee machine.
Why stay in a declining 1st word country when you can move to Bulgaria and live like a king?
We had talented people piling in and GDP going up and all that pre Brexit. It's the gift that keeps giving.
Is there enough support to reverse brexit (yet)?
With the general public, yes. With politicians, no.
It’s also not entirely up to the UK, the EU has to be convinced about the seriousness of such a decision and how it would benefit them.
> My flight out is in 6 weeks
Where are you going?
Out of curiosity, where are people going?
They aren't. The figures suggesting the rich are leaving come from Henley & Partners, who aren't impartial.
Anecdotally, the loaded people I know are all still here and largely back up polling data that the rich tend to favour higher taxes on themselves.
> as long as those people leaving are straight, white males, or their families, they're being told "good riddance"
This is totally untrue. As long as it's selfish, unpatriotic people leaving, I couldn't care less what their skin color or sexual orientation is.
Patriotism is the only thing that's kept me here so long, despite what Emily Thornberry thinks of it.
Selfish? I'll take that. I'm choosing to put the future of my children ahead of those who couldn't care less about them in any respect.
Well if they are you're probably getting a greater amount of other selfish, unpatriotic people to replace them so idk if it's a net gain from your pov.
I doubt that's the case; people who want to live in a country are usually more patriotic than those who don't want to live in it, in my experience.
Depends on why they are there. Refugees tend to care about the country they came from more and the one they landed in they view as a temporary shelter.
What is your experience of this?
Sounds like you’re actually proving the parents point…
"suggesting the NHS isn't perfect is against the religion here."
Errr, what? A lot of people complain about the NHS, whilst conceding there are issues that are difficult to address eg staff, lack of investment etc.
Complaining is the British pastime so complaining about the NHS is grandfathered in. However if you try and offer any suggestion for improvements to the NHS you soon realise you cannot criticise it in any meaningful form and be decried a blasphemous heretic.
Is your suggestion for improvement just privatization? Because that’d explain the backlash.
> mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up
Skilled immigration or the Channel crossing?
Either, both.
I don't think anyone objects to what the UK had 20 years ago - genuinely skilled immigration (in American terms, closer to O-1 than H1B).
Unfortunately due to the Boris Wave, we got mass, unskilled legal migration.
The channel crossings are a rounding error compared to that (but should be stopped as well).
>I don't think anyone objects to what the UK had 20 years ago - genuinely skilled immigration
20 years ago it was mostly Poles whose only quality was that they were willing to work for less than native UK citizens in jobs that said UK citizens supposedly did not want to do (which is doublespeak for businesses not wanting to pay a decent wage). This kind of immigration was one of the reasons Brexit happened.
The Poles we've historically had a great relationship with and there was already a huge ex-pat community of Poles here from WW2.
It was more the later additions to the EU a few years later that were actually problematic and got people's backs up.
It didn't help that we were allowed to restrict immigration from those countries but didn't as the government needed mass immigration to disguise the fact there was no growth.
>The Poles we've historically had a great relationship with
Not really?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Polish_alliance
there was also a Trudeau wave here in Canada. Why did they all decide to start mass unskilled immigration then? Just to keep labour costs down?
Labour costs down and house prices up.
> just mentioning increased immigration gets a lot of people's backs up
This significantly underplays the situation here. The UK state views "anti-migrant" views as extreme: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/07/26/elite-police...
In the UK attending a protest against putting illegal immigrants from Afghanistan in a hotel by your kids school is likely to have you on a watch list or arrested. This might not sound that bad to our European friends, but you guys in the US might be quite surprised to hear this.
It's not just "right-wing" positions which are dealt like this either, I should note for legal reasons that I strongly disagree with the actions and views of "Palestine Action", but arrests of peaceful protestors who simply wish to voice support of them as a group (without actually being part of the group themselves) is in my mind absurd. It's one thing to make membership of the group illegal, but to also make debating that judgement illegal is highly problematic in my mind. For those interested you'll find videos of the police arresting elderly women for terror charges for simply peacefully voicing their opinions on Palestine Action. It's vile.
Are you referring to https://archive.is/HgLRj ? Your summary is poor.
No? I linked what I was referring to...
The UK government has announced a new "squad" who will check social media for anti-migrant sentiment. Even if you are not "anti-migration" (whatever that means), I think we can agree that opposing migration is still a valid opinion to hold in a democratic society.
Capitalism always turns to authoritarianism once the rich can't maintain their power within the bounds of reasonable laws. The UK was rich for many reasons in the past, but most recently because the City of London was the EU's money laundering haven for people who got money legitimately (what's the name for this?) until they left the EU.
The spice/money must flow. Making money selling addictive products like smartphones? Probably the least bad way it can be made to flow. When that sort of thing breaks down, the rich run down the list: increasing taxes (except their own), culling the poor, outright seizing property, etc.
The UK has a low crime rate, even compared to its peers - other rich northern European countries.
Hysteria about crime is just far right propaganda.
(Obviously keeping crime low is important, and a generally low crime rate doesn't reduce the impact on those who are victims. But pretending that high crime is a pressing problem for the country as a whole is disingenuous)
But… you have discrepancies like the town of Middlesbrough , a small North Yorkshire town with crime rates on par with large European cities and rampant poverty and drug abuse with no clear way out because no one seems willing to invest in the once infant Hercules.
I hear about the North turning into a kind of rust belt as the population concentrates around London. I'm not sure how you solve that in a finance centered economy with no local industry - small towns are struggling across the developed world for similar reasons.
> I'm not sure how you solve that in a finance centered economy with no local industry
You change it to be a not-finance-centered economy.
If you find a good strategy for Reindustrialization especially in developed countries that have gotten used to high wage white collar work please share it around. Are there any good countries to look at for this?
OP is not charge of the world economy but this just seems defeatist.
Maybe a little cynical, but genuinely if any country has got some good strategies for building industry back up after a decline I think we should be stealing their notes. Right now arguably China seems like the only one to me? And I'd definitely favor trying their massive state investment, but I'm not sure if the UK can do that one.
> Right now arguably China seems like the only one to me?
They didn't build it up on their own. They saw opportunity in western businesses who wanted lower wages and less strict environmental laws, and lured them in. The western businesses then moved all their manufacturing to China who then spied on these factories to out-compete the western businesses with "home grown" products they copied.
China rebuilt industry with heavy-handed state control and no concern for human rights. Impressive results, but not exactly a model.
Nobody with money (i.e. in finance) thinks this is a good idea, so there's no funding available.
It’s kind of the opposite. The North is underfunded and often ignored by central government, but it’s also cheap.
There have been an influx of Londoners who have discovered that they can actually afford a house in the North and enroll their kids in decent schools and maintain a good standard of living, especially those who are able to move while maintaining a London salary.
Interesting how Westminster has taken the "don't get mad online though" approach given the challenges you highlight.
Also second hand from British friends but the current leadership seems really weird to me. Went back on their election pledges, tacking this way and that for something to do to raise poll numbers.
It doesn't fit together as a strategy to me and I don't see it fixing the economy, but I guess they can talk about it as a success?
The British political class has been collapsing for decades. The population just flip-flops between completely awful unpalatable options, Starmer is just reheated third way Blairism. Brits aren't this stupid and they want optimistic view of future not go on the war path or austerity.
They will slowly cycle out this historical group of parties resulting in painful economic results and poor social cohesion nationally.
From tourist point of view UK felt to me like a police state, and I'm leaning more towards the former view. Cameras everywhere, non-stop reminders that you're being watched, being tracked everywhere(including which train car you're in now), constant reminders about possible dangerous bags being left alone etc.
Tracking would feel helpful and useful, if not for constant oppressive reminders that "Bad Thing could happen any second, be vigilant!".
While at the same time, it was vastly more unsafe than Eastern Europe.. and cities themselves were vastly dirtier.
Whole trip felt more like what i would imagine visit to mainland China would be like rather than a trip to a free western country.
To be honest and to give some context - they have been under threat of terrorism(due to The Troubles first - the name itself seems to reinforce this view, seems innocent..) roughly since end of WW2. well WW2 was a factor too.
To add a bit more context: this wasn't my first nor last trip to UK, and each time i visit it the worse it feels in every aspect: Cleanliness of cities, safety, and oppressiveness.
I always thought a police state would demand identification at every street corner (perhaps I'm wrong?) and any minor breaking of the law being dealt with severe justice. The UK has always been against a "state ID" unlike a lot of European countries, so I'm not completely convinced the description of "police state" is accurate. In fact I think it's the opposite given people can freely break the law despite cameras being on every street corner.
The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.
Bureaucracy kills any kind of infrastructure project (see HS2), so don't expect any improvements any time soon.
We do have some nice cities: Manchester, York, Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge. (I've probably missed a few from this list). London feels pretty far from 30 years ago - and not in a good way.
>The UK is basically an end-of-days advanced state: bureaucracy taken to the extreme, with a heavy dose of nanny-state "mind the gap" messaging.
Reminds me the latter three dune novels. Frank Herbert had this idea he was exploring about how the inevitable end-state of society is this sort of stalemate between opposing bureaucratic factions which have become optimized towards preventing their own destruction to the point that they aren't capable of doing anything other than prolonging their own existence.
It reminds me of the Republicans and the democrats in America which have become utterly unresponsive towards their own voterbases because they have already rigged the political system to prevent any viable competitors from displacing them but in general it seems like the whole of western civilization has reached this point over the last 50 years or so, because just about any country which is referred to as 'western' has a set of very obvious problems on the horizon with very obvious solutions being stalled by a ruling class which is concerned with maintaining its own existence at all costs even if it has to bring down the entire nation with it.
> I always thought a police state would demand identification at every street corner (perhaps I'm wrong?)
The facial recognition technology for that already exists. And the UK has a sufficiently dense CCTV coverage.
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
Other countries are moving in the same direction. The EU has repeatedly tried to push things like on device scanning or banning encryption.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society that's complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government.
Mostly a failure of democracy - we have two major parties that are hard to tell apart.
They are both cynical and scared, and have for decades believed the future of Britain is managed decline. They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
The sugar tax is a strange example to pick as an example of British decline.
As of 2022, the WHO reported on SSB (sugar-sweetened beverages):
> Currently, at least 85 countries implement some type of SBB taxation.
It feels to me like this was a rare step in the opposite direction - recognising that industry is the driving cynical force and pushing back on its over reach where it has failed. Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately to avoid the tax, with what net loss? (The class-targeting comments were a straw man)
https://www.who.int/news/item/13-12-2022-who-calls-on-countr...
In principle I support taxes that disincentivise production of negative externalities (in this case, adverse health effects).
However the way this works out in practice is a reduction in consumer choice, one that I'm reminded of every time I walk into a shop.
> Most manufacturers reformulated their drinks immediately
This is the problem, really. Rather than adding new "low sugar" product lines, in most instances they're modifying existing ones to replace the sugar with artificial sweeteners. The "original recipe" is often no longer available to consumers at any price.
As someone who struggles to consume enough calories to stay healthy, this sucks! (Mostly unrelated to pricing, just as a matter of practicality)
Cigarette smokers for example can still walk into just about any shop and purchase their favourite cigarettes, they just have to pay more for them - this seems fine.
Overall I'm quite on the fence about the whole thing, but on a purely emotional level it feels like an instance of government overreach.
> As someone who struggles to consume enough calories to stay healthy, this sucks! (Mostly unrelated to pricing, just as a matter of practicality)
Even without the price difference I have a hard time imagining how such an outcome would be necessary, maybe you can clarify?
I don't understand the question, could you clarify?
Personally, I enjoy an energy drink here and there. But I loathe sugar in my drinks.
However, sugar sweatened energy drinks are much more available.
So I share your frustration in the opposite direction.
The said. Taxation is not for the individual but the society.
Whilr I am sorry to hear that you have issue getting enough calories, that is simply a non concern for the society.
So this seems to be a good use of tax for incentivizing.
Its not an example of decline, it is an example of nudge politics and trying to control what the hoi polloi do. I was making two points which is why I said "they ALSO believe".
It is a prime example of class targetting because manufacturers of more expensive drinks still put sugar in them, its the cheap drinks that have switched to sugar substitutes.
> Mostly a failure of democracy
Is it though? Are other forms of government more successful while remaining respectful of privacy? Or is it more of a reaction to social or societal changes? Why would these social or societal changes be different than previous changes?
> They also strongly believe the hoi polloi have to be forced to do what is good for them - e.g. the sugar tax and other "nudge politics", or the currently Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill which is basically about imposing central policy on how children are brought up and educated.
A non insulting way to view that is that central goverments understand incentives, and in the same way there are child incentives for people starting families, having incentives for healthier eating is something a central goverment should use its taxation policy for.
More control over education standards is also a common purview of many good educational systems. Decentralisation is not necesirely better, with teh extreme being homeschooling failing every time its attempted. Centrally dictated standards was the method of the French revolution, believing that a society where everyone roughly understands the world the same way was a society that was more unified. French "equality , fraternity and legality " is a basis for modern liberal democracy almost everywhere, but they didnt get there without authoritarian imposition of their standards, with entire minority cultures getting trampled along the way.
The hyperbole and bad faith explanations of legislation is not a good representation or argument against why britain is more accepting of som legislation many feel intrusive.
A better argument is that this piece of legislation was passed late on the rule of a disastrous administration and the number of problems in day to day society largely are unaffected by it, so it got no time in the spotlight for people to complaint or know it was coming until it was days away from being implemented. Society is also largely technologically illiterate, this is pretty much the case everywhere in the planet, which means the nuances of tech legislation are lost even on the people writting and voting on it.
If most of the public are in favour of the Online Safety Act, then how is it a failure of democracy to have it? I give you the top FT comment:
>I, for one, am glad that porn is being age-restricted online. It gives young people false ideas. You'll never get a plumber to come around to your house that quickly in real life.
The Online Safety Act has a reach and consequences than restricting access to porn. As has been mentioned on HN many times it is causing forums to shut down, and people to move to social media instead. It is causing forums in other countries to shut out British users. It is essentially making UGC something only businesses, especially the tech giants, can do. Even with porn age verification is a concern.
that is a joke comment
Yes, it is. Well observed.
Didn't there used to be a explainingthejoke user on here? Whatever happened to them?
> There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Winston -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.
- George Orwell, 1984
Its because the popular press has, for a very long time, been pushing a narrative of a country under siege. It sells papers, but to keep selling papers, it has to keep steadily upping the narrative over time.
I agree, but isn't that the case in lots of other countries? I think it's a contributing factor, but there's more to it.
It is the case elsewhere, remember how close France once got to Frexit and how close the far right were to winning their most recent general election with the same claims.
But the UK has always to some extent enjoyed a fantasy of being an island under siege from mainland Europe and it something the nationalist press like to drum up.
As for its increasing poverty, the UK went all-in on neoliberalism since the ‘80s, and especially in on austerity since 2008. Entry-level wages barely grew for over 10 years. Blame the EU for that, get Brexit, more expensive goods and damage to the financial sector the country relied on. Then Covid…
Westerners point fingers at China for its Great Firewall, citing a lack of freedom.
Being a free society comes with both good and bad. This type of law, whether it's good or bad, is akin to China's Great Firewall
To me, the most disturbing part isn’t just the laws themselves, it’s the complete shift in the cultural zeitgeist. When I was younger, people distrusted the government by default. We stood for freedom of speech, anonymity, the right to speak without being censored. Now, even among software developers, people in tech who should know better, I see them practically begging Big Brother for more censorship, more control.
It makes me sick. It brings to mind that old quote from Mussolini: “The truth is evident to all who are unblinded by dogmatism, that men nowadays are tired of liberty.”
Scary times indeed.
Is the dogmatism what blinded or unblinded? Considering the source I assume he meant that Italians desired fascism. I’m not familiar with the rise of Mussolini, was he genuinely popular or more of a Hitleresque thug that used violence to suppress his opponents and control measured public opinion?
In a word, division. The UK is so divided that people are too busy pointing the finger at each other to realise the root cause of the deterioration of our quality of life is entirely generations of mismanagement of the public purse.
Instead of questioning how MPs are entitled to a pay rise while your average person gets made redundant, people are questioning why people fleeing persecution should ‘be paid for with my tax money’.
Brain fatigue and mixed signals combined with destitution and desperation drastically impede the average person’s ability and desire to fact check and extrapolate. We are moving towards a society of down and out people living with no hope serving the elite and those with a bit of money behind them.
My fiancée and I have had enough and are also leaving in October. No idea where to all we know is we have a one way ticket away and will figure the rest out.
> No idea where to all we know is we have a one way ticket away and will figure the rest out.
You'll probably find how few places let you in as economic migrants.
I recommend you go, but I bet good money you'll see that the UKs problems aren't remotely unique.
>people are questioning why people fleeing persecution
Except many of them are not, they are economic migrants. And some have even realised that claiming that they're persecuted for lgbt reasons is an instant in - there was a case with a guy (with a wife and a bunch of children) that claimed to have written a pro lgbt article and now he's persecuted.
As a gay man the thought of that sickens me, economic migrants using who I am as a shortcut to entry, I have no problem at all with genuinely lgbt individuals seeking refugee status; we're still persecuted in so many places and there's not enough of us to make change happen in those places.
But the economic migrants...all they're doing is ensuring their home country never improves and that a steady stream of migrants continues into Europe. It'll never end.
MPs pay is a drop in a bucket there are many better things to question than that.
It’s an example, it’s not a mutually exclusive situation. The point is that people are busy pointing the finger at each other instead of the people whom are paid to actually improve their lives.
> Instead of questioning how MPs are entitled to a pay rise while your average person gets made redundant, people are questioning why people fleeing persecution should ‘be paid for with my tax money’.
Your misstating their concerns. I don't know whether you are misinformed or doing so deliberately.
The migrants on the boats are not people fleeing persecution. Firstly these boats are coming from France. Are you claiming that France is persecuting people?
Secondly. I have a relative that work in social services. They do age assessments. These men claim they are children. It takes time to do these age assessments to take place and process and while that is happening they have to be housed. Since they claim they are children, they have to be put into foster homes. So foster homes are forced to take strange men, while an age assessment is taking place. This is an obvious risk to the actual children housed there.
These migrants talk to each other and have worked out that if register with Counties outside of London it will take longer for them to be found out, because the local authorities in these counties have less resources to process them. One of these men admitted as much over the phone.
Things like this are what people are unhappy about. They don't have an issue with legitimate asylum claims. People aren't divided on this issue BTW.
What about the "obviously not a kid" types? Please tell me you can at the very least estimate.
> What about the "obviously not a kid" types?
In my high school drivers ed there was a kid who looked like he was in his 20's with a full thick beard, stocky muscular build, deep voice. I thought he got left back a bunch but turns out he was my age - 16. So "obviously not a kid" doesn't really work and potentially puts people at risk.
Strange how close V for Vendetta got, even though Alan Moore was ostensibly complaining about Thatcherism at the time, innit?
Politicians have not taken action on a wide spectrum of problems (some of which are crime related, other problems in society below the level of crime) for many decades now. While the economy is good, this doesn't occupy the mind of the public too much, life is OK. Now that the economy is not good, and has not been good since at least 2008, the public has begun to notice these things. The public has even started to notice domestic opinion management (nudge unit, 77th Brigade etc). Passing this sort of "manage the symptom not the cause" legislation has become popular. It's easier to do than deal with the cause, it pushes the actions onto 3rd parties, and superficially it sounds good to the general public. At least for a while. To get an idea of how "off target" the state itself is in managing serious crimes look no further than [1] (warning, pretty grim story, but very typical).
[1]. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvg87yvq529o
Edited for typo.
Crime has, despite everything, gradually been falling. Scotland has a 100% murder clearup rate for the past several years.
The incident you mentioned is yet another piece of fallout from Rochdale, but if you look closely the offences mentioned are from 20 years ago. I don't think that should be used to talk about the present. There is a lot more safeguarding these days.
The main negative factor is the press, responsible for both "opinion management", doomerism, and sensationalist demands to Do Something in a way that doesn't help. The Online Safety Act and Brexit are both victories for the Daily Mail that are losses for the rest of the public.
And the EU is following suit. Brexit has never looked so stupid. They could have worked on expanding an authoritarian regime together.
It's making me cynical, and I don't know what to do about it.
Australia is doing its best to hardline digital (and more broadly social) authoritarianism too. It’s a sad future we’re accelerating towards.
Neither, they’re just the most convenient excuses for instituting draconian laws.
Don't believe the things that you read. Our newspapers have been openly biased for centuries, and there's some very shoddy journalism at times. See, for example:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44623091
Idk I think the main cause of public discontent in the UK isn't what anyone is reading, it's the extremely obvious change in material conditions.
Outside of techn journalism, this is a non story in the UK. I think it's hard to say much about the society's attitude when they don't know ow about this, never mind understand.
Average UKian is, IME, surprisingly technologically unsavvy. This might be the root cause of lack of interest or protest.
If I were to guess how this whole thing came to be, it would be thus: the UK government is increasingly dysfunctional and polarised. The attention of government and opposition goes increasingly into futile, high-stakes but always drawn battles. But that means that motivated and organised groups can push through things that look benign from the outside and don't trigger the Great Polarisation. Protecting children from suicide, what's not to like? The Parliament, where this should be shredded to pieces, is too busy trying to reshuffle deckchairs.
Meanwhile this is printed on vellum, welcome to the new reality.
Not saying I agree with the legislation, but the UK experienced a lot of pretty bad domestic terrorism in the rememberable past (namely IRA bombs detonating in towns and cities etc, often with devastating impacts). Then there were the tube and bus suicide bombings more recently. And there has also been a constant pitter-patter of "radicalised lone wolf" type things like the Ariana Grande concert bomber, the guy who killed a load of 8 year old girls at a summer camp and so on.
None of this is porn of course, but supposedly a lot of the lone wolf's are radicalised online so it creates a lot of "someone needs to do something!!!!" type attitudes (and no public gun ownership would not work like everyone says it would because the USA had that yet no one lifted a finger when they needed to recently, and now look what's happened), and sadly the older and more little-c conservative population carriers more clout in terms of policies because historically they tend to vote in greater numbers than younger groups. N.b. that 16 and 17 year olds have very recently been given the right to vote so things may change.
The IRA was active before internet even existed. This is more about controlling the internet discourse, rather than preventing terrorism.
> Then there were the tube and bus suicide bombings more recently.
That was 20 years ago. Not really recently.
If you read very carefully, you'll see that the word "more" is key in that sentence.
Technically true, but also besides the point. These are not recent events.
Yes but they are part of the lived experience of a large part of the country.
So these are not some dusty forgotten thing from history books that people might read about, it was stuff they saw on TV and is back in the news whenever a round-number anniversary comes up etc.
The point I was trying to make is that quite shocking bad things happened semi-recently, and more shocking bad things continue to happen. It appears in the news over and over and over about people being radicalised online.
I get why people think this is a good idea - you need to prove age to buy knives and cigarettes etc, so they think "why not" for porn and other "adult" things online.
The government is doing this because it's scared of the press that runs all these scare stories.
Because the media always paints other countries in certain lights, as it helps them build a narrative for their own governments?
> complacent to or in support of increasing surveillance and control by the government
I disagree with this sentiment, however it does show how bad "democracy" can be when voting for a complete government change results in absolutely no change whatsoever.
Authoritarian CCTV cameras in Shenzhen Vs democratic CCTV cameras in London
Heavily monitored London, freedom America.
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-prevalence-cctv-cameras-...
Oh wait, Paris, NYC, SF, Tokyo have more cameras per sq. Km. Narrative.
> Paris, NYC, SF, Tokyo have more cameras per sq. Km
You listed extremely dense cities. Of course they have more cameras per square.
This isn’t a narrative violation, it’s basic math.
I think its highly relevant when we have people pushing the faulty logic narrative that the UK is China and using CCTV as a measurement for their case.
UK bad because online safety rules, let's ignore US states that already do this.
> Don't mind what we are doing, the UK is worse.
Not defending the UK, but they aren't the first and you dont get the same inflammatory racist language with other countries.
Paris and Seoul are much denser than London. A better measure is the cameras/habitant or the % of coverage. London has 100% coverage for instance.
> better measure is the cameras/habitant
How so? If I have a car lot, I'll have multiple cameras for a tiny area bumping the average camera per person without meaningful results. Sounds like the worst measurement unless you are trying to push a narrative.
> I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action
Historically there is no formal constitution in the UK so Parliament is not limited in their power. IHMO it's the main factor why the UK is an outlier.
The U.S. is only slightly less far down this path, but we are trying our best to catch up.
You are approaching this from a uniquely U.S. perspective. The U.K. is pretty middle of the road as far as “surveillance” and while this may offend the freedom-at-all-costs sensibilities, it’s a fairly milquetoast change.
Visiting the Heineken website in the U.S. requires that you assert you are over the age of 21. Texas has instituted I.D. verification for pornography.
Regardless of how you feel about this law, it is not accurate to say the U.K. is unique in implementing it.
> You are approaching this from a uniquely U.S. perspective.
It’s not uniquely U.S. at all
What other countries require ID checks for services like Discord?
The U.K.’s implementation of this law is much more unique than you’re claiming.
Discord’s own articles about this change explain that the fundamentals (content filtering) are applied to all accounts owned by teenagers worldwide. The only U.K. specific aspect of all of this is that if you tell Discord you are over 18 you must prove it. That’s a very small difference and not something most people in most countries care about. I’d go as far as to say, I think the majority of people in the majority of the world would be in favour of requiring people to prove they’re over 18 online if they want to claim to be over 18 online.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/33362401287959...
> The only U.K. specific aspect of all of this is that if you tell Discord you are over 18 you must prove it. That’s a very small difference
Requiring ID verification in one country is not a small difference.
The rest of the world checks a box. People in the U.K. must submit to ID verification.
It’s so strange to see things like this claimed to be small differences.
Again, this is a radical internet-libertarian-freedom-at-all-costs view. Normal people do not think that proving you are 18 is notable. We’ve been doing it for decades with credit cards. The system is more mature now but it is not fundamentally different.
Uploading your government-issued ID to random sites to prove your age is insanity.
We have daily reporting about database breaches where people were duped into uploading their picture/ID, and then it gets posted on 4chan. This is true for the latest "Tea" app this past week, but also ID verification services for big companies like TikTok and Uber. I draw a hard line: I will not upload my ID for some private business to review, because they will never delete it.
> Again, this is a radical internet-libertarian-freedom-at-all-costs view
The current global status quo is “radical” and the U.K. is the only country doing it right?
You were accusing others of being U.S. centric a few posts back, but now you’re pushing the U.K.’s unique laws as the only valid solution.
> We’ve been doing it for decades with credit cards
Age checks for credit cards are required because minors legally couldn’t be forced to pay their debts.
If companies issued credit cards to minors then the minors could spend as much as they want and the bank would have no recourse to collect.
I don’t think you understand these issues if you’re using this as a comparison. Either that or you’re not even trying to have an honest conversation.
My position is very simple. I believe that most of the world is fine with age checks on the Internet. I think that the U.S. free speech laws and attitudes are unique and because English speaking internet culture is U.S. culture, these discussions always end up with an assumption that U.S. values are the values shared by the subjects.
I don’t think my view on the law matters, I haven’t shared it. I am speaking specifically about how everyone here is talking as if people in the U.K. care about “draconian” surveillance. People in the U.K. are not people from the U.S. Age verification is not a philosophical issue for U.K. people as it is for people in the U.S. People from the U.K. are not principled free speech absolutists. Ask a person in the U.K. if porn should require age verification and they will not think nor care about the free speech or surveillance implications of voting for such a law.
And people in the U.K. are not unique. People in the U.S. are. Spend any amount of time outside of our U.S. Internet bubble and you’ll discover nobody cares about any of this.
Whether I care and whether you care is not relevant to the British voters. Not the Australian voters. Nor the Swedish voters. Or the Thai voters. Or the Japanese voters…
Yeah, you are right, we would be fine with age checks. If and only if it was done through zk-SNARE or ZKPs in general. Uploading a photo of myself to a random company's server is a no-go, whether for having my age checked or whatever else.
I am Eastern European, and there is no way in hell I will ever use a service that requires me to verify my age through a photo of my ID.
In fact you have shared your opinion: 'Again, this is a radical internet-libertarian-freedom-at-all-costs view. Normal people do not think that proving you are 18 is notable.'
I would actually argue you've expressed dozens of opinions related to this law and very few facts. Any source on whether Swedish or Japanese voters care for example? What led you to this conclusion?
Furthermore in your last comment you first argue you are only speaking to UK sentiment ('I am speaking specifically about how everyone here is talking as if people in the U.K. care about “draconian” surveillance.') and then double down on your argument that US is the outlier.
You don’t need age verification to access all of Discord, just NSFW servers. You can certainly argue that that’s an unjustifiable interference in people’s freedom to access the internet services that they want to access. But please don’t exaggerate.
> You don’t need age verification to access all of Discord, just NSFW servers.
That’s not correct. The Discord support explains that it’s required to change automatic content filtering or unblur any content that gets caught by the automatic filters.
Yes, that’s what I meant. You can still access Discord, just not any content that’s detected as NSFW. Generally speaking that content will be on NSFW servers (the kind that e.g. the iPhone app would block you from accessing by default).
Obviously there is not going to be a “nah I really want to see this tho” button, or the age check would be completely pointless.
That is not true. Try going to a server that asks for your age and then go ahead to choose "2020".
> Obviously there is not going to be a “nah I really want to see this tho” button, or the age check would be completely pointless.
That is exactly how "ignoring" an user on Discord works. Their messages are still there and you have to click on it to have it uncollapsed, so that is kind of ironic of you to say, lmao. So yeah, there actually is a "nah I really want to see this tho" button.
There must be a misunderstanding here. I said in my post that some servers are indeed gated on age verification. Just not all of Discord.
Look, create an account and when you join a server that asks for your age, make sure you set the birth year to one that makes you less than 13 years old.
For what it is worth, it has to do with Discord ToS (per / by country).
In some countries you must be over 13 to use Discord, other countries 14, but if you are below, you MUST verify yourself to be able to access your Discord account after you set it to below 13. This verification process is done through sending Discord an e-mail requesting them to restore your account, with a video of yourself holding your ID card as an attachment.
The list per country can be found on Discord's website.
What I am talking about is separate from the server settings (require phone verification and/or age verification).
It his law combined with all the other iffy laws in the UK which make this nefarious. This is the issue about discussing anything about how draconian the UK is. If you compare any single law in isolation, it isn't that different. However if you take how the British authorities and how they operate it, and all the other laws you start to see a more draconian picture.
That is what many people, especially those that do live in the UK don't appreciate.
I lived in the U.K. for decades and I have lived in many other countries. I’ll criticise the U.K. government and society endlessly but to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense.
From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
The U.K. is a flawed place going to hell in a hand basket that many U.K. citizens have strong opinions on but outside of us, the freedom loving nerds on the internet, this identity verification law is not a part of the conversation. “Draconian” and “authoritarian” aren’t in the vocabulary of most U.K. citizens. They’re far more concerned about immigration and the economy.
The long-standing “the U.K. has the most cctv cameras per person” meme is further evidence of this. A well-loved fact carted out by freedom-loving anti-surveillance types… that the mainstream of the U.K. could not care less about.
> but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
This isn’t true at all. Age verification to use services like Discord in the U.K. is very unusual.
The U.K.’s approach to online speech and freedoms is not shared by many countries.
I don’t understand why you’re trying to reduce this to a normal outcome when it’s not normal at all
It's a "blip in your radar" until you want to say something that is forbidden by the government. Or when someone thinks that you said it, such as with "non-crime hate incidents" where anyone can report "hate speech" to the police, which will be added to your public file.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-crime_hate_incident
"until you want to say something that is forbidden by the government."
Please give a few examples. I'm intrigued.
Same in France, many things are forbidden to say, most of time censored, sometimes even punished (either socially or by the law). US is way way way more advanced in terms of freedom.
You are allowed to say there is censorship but not allowed to say what is forbidden (and you are not allowed to criticize some laws, without breaking the law). You can really go to jail or have your life ruined, or your business burned because of a TikTok video.
This censorship benefits a lot of bad people, but naming them is a crime by itself.
For example, in France, there is no insecurity in the streets. If you say the opposite and start naming examples, you will get shamed or even physically attacked by some people and be prosecuted for “spreading hate” and other crimes whereas your attackers will have zero issues.
This phenomenon is known as “juges rouges” (the red judges), somewhat similar to USSR
Given the US government is actually defunding major universities because "reasons", I find your comment laughable. Problem with arguing about "freedoms" is usaians still believe their constitution applies. Also, Colbert show, etc.
Your take about French censorship is equally ridiculous. I would gather that 90% of French press would not survive a month in the US before being pressured/defunded or worse. What happened to Charlie Hebdo would have happened in the US, by "patriots" instead of islamists.
And let's not even start about the separation of church and state...
laughable; I would say saddening on both sides for both of us :/
You can write to several climate activists in prison if you would like first hand accounts. I means ones who held up placards, rather than the ones that climbed onto trains or glued themselves to roads.
Just weeks ago a couple of pop bands got hauled in front of judges or had police investigations aimed at them for voicing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. (Ok, so they used incediary language, but they’re 20-somethings at festivals and the Gaza situation is abhorrent).
Fairly recently, an activist group which uses tactics reminiscent of the anti-nuclear-proliferation movement and animal rights movements of the 70s-90s got proscribed a terrorist organisation. At present, the law around this and recent implementations of its enforcement are such that I can’t tell if I’ll be arrested for writing this paragraph. I’ve tried to stick to the facts, but interpretation can get you locked up.
Communications Act 2003
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/21/section/127You can be caged on a whim.
In the U.K. people can be prosecuted for speech found to be offensive.
There have been several high profile cases used as examples, like the guy who was convicted for making a video of his girlfriend’s dog pretending to do a Nazi salute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan
Doing anything considered “grossly offensive” online can result in the police knocking on your door and financial penalties. It’s a foreign concept if you’re in a country where making jokes online doesn’t constitute a risk to your freedoms and finances (which is more than just the U.S.)
There’s no such thing as a public police file in the UK. What I assume you’re referring to is that these records are accesible for the purposes of certain kinds of police background checks (which, as in many other countries, are required for certain jobs).
Not from US. It’s not a blip in my radar. It’s terrifying and you seem to be dismissing it as “it’s just some Americans”.
> I lived in the U.K. for decades and I have lived in many other countries. I’ll criticise the U.K. government and society endlessly but to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense.
I am English. I was born in England, my parents are English, my Grandparents were English, My Great Grandparents were English etc. etc.
I have lived my majority of my life here. So I am English.
You obviously didn't read what I said. I understand that it is nothing special in isolation. However I am not talking about it in isolation. I was talking about the entirety of how the current laws are constructed as well as how the UK state operates.
Also just because other countries have rubbish laws, doesn't mean we should have adopted similar ones.
> From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
Many people do not like this and are actively seeking work-arounds. These aren't uber nerds like myself BTW.
> The U.K. is a flawed place going to hell in a hand basket that many U.K. citizens have strong opinions on but outside of us, the freedom loving nerds on the internet, this identity verification law is not a part of the conversation.
So you admit there is a problem. But you then pretend that this can't possibly be part of the entire picture because you say so.
Sorry it very much well is part of the problem. You stating it isn't doesn't make it so.
Share some examples, then? I just took a look across all major U.K. mainstream news publications and I cannot find any outrage about these changes.
So because it isn't discussed through UK mainstream news and publications that means people aren't concerned about it? A lot of things people are actually concerned about isn't mentioned at all in the mainstream news or publications that is why increasingly fewer people are paying attention to them.
People are talking about these things ironically on places like twitter/X, facebook, whatsapp, discord and in person (shock horror I know). I was at a boys football match this weekend and people were talking about it there.
BTW quite hilariously twitter/X are censoring some footage from the commons as that content has to be age-gated.
The myth of things “not being talked about” in the mainstream is a convenient way to excuse being unable to provide any meaningful evidence that a notable portion of the country care about something.
I know it might shock you but people on twitter and discord are not representative of voters. Most voters do not engage with any social media.
People on the internet get so caught up in the international perspective we are exposed to that we forget what national voters actually care about.
Go look at polling about this law for a real insight, 80% of people support it: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
> The myth of things “not being talked about” in the mainstream is a convenient way to excuse being unable to provide any meaningful evidence that a notable portion of the country care about something.
If social media wasn't important, politicians, mainstream news publications themselves, and other political activists wouldn't bother with it. So this is patently False.
Pretending this hasn't been a trend now for 15 years is completely asinine and shame on you for attempting to pretend the opposite is true.
> I know it might shock you but people on twitter and discord are not representative of voters. Most voters do not engage with any social media.
False. Almost everyone I know is on social media of some sort. They might not be actively engaging but they do engage regularly in some form or another. Most of them would be called lurkers, or they will check out stuff if some piques their interests.
You conveniently missed out where I said "facebook" and "in person"
> People on the internet get so caught up in the international perspective we are exposed to that we forget what national voters actually care about.
I don't care about the international perspective. I am English (I've already told you this). I care about this issue and I know plenty of other people who are British care about this issue.
> Go look at polling about this law for a real insight, 80% of people support it: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/survey-results/daily/202...
The same YouGov polling that had almost every about Brexit issue at 71% vs 29%. Their polling isn't to be trusted.
Even if I took that at face value, that means 1/5 people don't support it. Which isn't an insignificant amount of people. So there are a decent number of people that care about it, even using your own figures. This disproves your statements about it not being cared about and only uber nerds caring about it.
You are simply over indexing for your own circle. Your circle (by virtue of being a nerd) is deeply biased towards people heavily influenced by U.S. attitudes towards freedom. I’m an internet nerd too, I know how easy it is to get caught up in this idea that what you see online is representative of the people, but it isn’t. Go out and talk to real people. Go and stand in the street and ask every passer by whether they feel the U.K. is “draconian” or not. You’ll be shocked to discover that almost nobody cares about anything that doesn’t directly impact their day to day life. Look at the rise of Reform, Farage’s embrace of trumpism. That’s authoritarianism, and the people love it. You’re completely out of touch with the common person if you think any of this matters.
You can take a principled stance, you can have strong views, you can believe in freedom, I’m with you, but it’s patently absurd to suggest that any of what you believe is representative of the people. The people, in the U.K. and beyond, simply do not have a single solitary regard for any of this. Porn bad so porn ban good. That’s the entire thought process.
Could more than 5% of the U.K. voting public even define “draconian”? or “authoritarian”?
> You are simply over indexing for your own circle. Your circle (by virtue of being a nerd) is deeply biased towards people heavily influenced by U.S. attitudes towards freedom. I’m an internet nerd too, I know how easy it is to get caught up in this idea that what you see online is representative of the people, but it isn’t.
False. Most of the people I engage with in real life are not nerds. You keep on stating things that you know nothing about as truisms. How about instead of trying to gaslight people about what is real and what isn't, you actually engage in the points being made by your interlocutor?
> Go out and talk to real people. Go and stand in the street and ask every passer by whether they feel the U.K. is “draconian” or not.
I would imagine if someone thought about it, I would get a statement something about all the cameras everywhere or how buying some with a bank transfer is difficult (if you buy something cash like a vehicle it sets off anti-fraud detection in your bank and transactions can be blocked).
They won't talk about it in terms you are familiar with. They will point to stuff like cameras, unfair charges etc and how difficult some of this makes their lives.
All of this normal people have experienced.
> You’ll be shocked to discover that almost nobody cares about anything that doesn’t directly impact their day to day life. Look at the rise of Reform, Farage’s embrace of trumpism. That’s authoritarianism, and the people love it. You’re completely out of touch with the common person if you think any of this matters.
You mentioned all of those. I didn't mention them. You are projecting onto me what your experience is. The irony here is astounding.
Shrug. I’m not sure what else to say. I’ve shown you that polling shows the majority support age verification. I have asked you to provide evidence of mainstream objection to this law, which you are unable to provide. You have asserted that polling is wrong because you know people who disagree.
You may not like it and I may not like it but the view of the U.K. voting public is that age verification to look at porn is reasonable and that “protecting” children justifies limiting freedoms.
My exercise for you: decide what evidence is needed to convince you that most British people are happy with this law.
> Shrug. I’m not sure what else to say. I’ve shown you that polling shows the majority support age verification. I have asked you to provide evidence of mainstream objection to this law, which you are unable to provide. You have asserted that polling is wrong because you know people who disagree.
You said it "wasn't part of the conversation" originally. Not what the majority agreed with. You've subtly tried to change what the discussion was about. That is known as moving the goalposts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts
Then you asked me to provide evidence of something I can't possibly provide. That quite frankly bullshit.
> You may not like it and I may not like it but the view of the U.K. voting public is that age verification to look at porn is reasonable and that “protecting” children justifies limiting freedoms.
I don't doubt that the majority are OK with it. I am taking issue with the fact that you are pretending only libertarian nerds online care about this. I know that isn't true.
> My exercise for you: decide what evidence is needed to convince you that most British people are happy with this law.
Don't talk to me like a child.
I don't have you provide you with anything. You made the claim that only a few people care about this. When even your own evidence disputes. 20% of a large group of people is still a lot. That isn't "nobody cares" like you pretend is the case.
Anyway I am done with you. Go away!
“The conversation” is well understood to mean “the things being talked about in the mainstream”. 80% in favour of a law is so overwhelmingly positive that it is rarely seen. My initial comment, a lifetime ago, was in the context of someone asking why the U.K. is unique when it comes to these laws. I said the U.K. is not and that most people support them. I’ve showed surveying that backs that up. The absence of any mainstream articles about this should be evidence enough it isn’t part of the conversation. Maybe that’ll change in future, but at least for now, nobody cares. Maybe you’re right and there’s a conspiracy amongst the mainstream to suppress the real views of the people, we will see.
(I don’t want to talk to you like a child, but a little lesson: mainstream news is mostly a cynical cash grab by harnessing outrage. Mainstream news loves things that outrage people. If there was any real outrage about this law, it would be harnessed by the dailymail and the Sun and Reach PLC to make money hand over fist. They would milk it so hard they would have to implement age verification.)
How many mainstream outlets are owned by Murdoch in the UK?
> From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
You're commenting on a story about VPN use surging in the country after the law came into effect. Clearly folks noticed.
>to describe these changes as notable or remarkable relative to most other countries is nonsense. From a U.S. internet libertarian freedom-at-all-costs perspective, sure, it’s a draconian nightmare, but for normal people from the U.K. or any other country, it’s barely a blip on their radar.
This is a very dangerous measure of how worryingly authoritarian or not a particular place is becoming. People's perceptions are notoriously subject to all kinds of blindness and unknowns. The perceptions of most average Germans living in the first years of the Nazi state were also of minimal concern for authoritarianism, and little more than a series of modest blimps on the radar, and where did that take them?
This is not to compare the underlying savagery of something like the Nazi state with the soft bureaucratic smarminess of the modern UK, but the underlying risks of any creeping authoritarianism are the same: a steady normalization of deviance.
Do you know of other western countries that send cops to your house because you posted memes on X ?
Saying that illegal migrants should be sent back home can literally land you at the police station. A hotel worker was arrested for testifying to what he saw in his hotels, ie. migrants being hosted, given a phone, meals, and NHS visit once every two weeks.
> "Do you know of other western countries that send cops to your house because you posted memes on X ?"
This guy was prosecuted in the US for posting a meme on Twitter [0].
I imagine this can happen in almost every country. What ones do you think it can't happen in?
[0] https://www.courthousenews.com/on-trial-for-memes-man-asks-s...
The U.S. is the outlier, not the U.K. Go do a Nazi salute in Germany, or Australia. Burn the Quran in Sweden. So on and so forth.
>The U.K. is pretty middle of the road as far as “surveillance”
Just, no.
5-eyes is the most heinous human-rights-destroying apparatus under the sun, and it wouldn't be happening if it weren't for the British desire to undermine cultures they have deemed inferior.
It's called 5-eyes because it's not just the UK.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society
Empires take a very long time to die, but when they finally do, it is never pretty.
Historical example are abundant.
While I appreciate the concern, it's worth pointing out that 30 or so years ago "government should mandate id checks for harmful content" was not some radical dystopian notion.
The UK was also one of the first nations to ban indoor smoking and in cars with kids. I think this is very much in that vein (politically).
It's about corporate control - the more regulations like this - the more entrenched the market becomes. Higher barrier to enter for smaller players plus government gets all the surveillance apparatus as a sweetener.
Basically Labour continues taking UK into corporate fascist utopia.
Every story about every law from everywhere paints that picture because those are the only ones that make it to stories.
That's the combined power of the worst tendencies of the media and a deliberate propaganda campaign.
Take this law: it's not new, it was passed in 2023 by the previous government. The law had a two year deadline attached to it, and companies didn't introduce any restriction before the deadline. The new government has a lot on its plate, so it's hardly surprising that repealing a law that was already passed with little attention to it was not high on the list of priorities compared to things like not defaulting or unblocking planning permissions. And yet, twitter and other places are full of very loud voices describing the law as new and designed to oppress them now, even though the deadline was set two years ago.
On a more general note, we have our problems, but the UK is in a pretty good place. Sam Freedman covered some bases in his recent post [1] (crime is down, the economy is struggling but improving, etc), but I'll add some more:
* We're probably the least racist, most integrated society in the world. The leader of the opposition is a black woman and first generation immigrant [2]. When Rishi Sunak became a PM, his race wasn't brought up once in any media, including very right wing; compare and contrast with all the bullshit about Obama and his birth certificate dog whistles.
* First time in years we're reducing the backlog of asylum applications. People applying for asylum can't work because they haven't proved their status yet, so naturally they need to be looked after. All the noise you hear is caused entirely by the conservative party defunding and then outright pausing application processing. This means that people looking for asylum had to live in limbo for years, which caused multiple problems. No backlog, no problems.
* We punch WAY above our weight in arts and theatre, and the industry is flourishing. Ever noticed how overrepresented British actors are in Hollywood?
* Compared to our main ally overseas, we have a very effective parliament. The executive is kept in check even with the very large majority Labour has now, and the Lords proved their worth during Brexit, putting brakes at the worst impulses of the previous government.
* We largely preserved our core military capabilities and alliances over the decade of austerity, slowly repairing, recovering, and expanding now. We're a major partner on nuclear programs, tier-1 partner on F-35, AUCUS is happening, we do a lot in Ukraine, and we're one of the only two nuclear countries in Europe and just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with France.
* We are helping people in Hong-Kong, Ukraine, and Afghanistan with targeted immigration programs.
* We're rolling back anti-nuclear nonsense, building two large NPPs, and deployed wind generation at a massive scale.
* A bunch of important reforms are going through the parliament [3], from enhancing renters right to a YIMBY reform.
But very little of that filters into online environments. The most unhinged, xenophobic, paranoid voices get amplified, creating the impression that you cited, even though it can't be further from truth.
Britain is a beautiful country, open to the world, with a globe-spanning network of alliances and relationships, and an incredibly resilient democracy. We should do SO MUCH MORE, yes! But it doesn't mean we shouldn't celebrate where we are now, too.
[1]: https://bsky.app/profile/samfr.bsky.social/post/3luwmp2vpd62...
[2]: she was technically born in Britain, but she and her mother returned to Nigeria very soon after her birth
[3]: https://labourreforms.uk
I'd like to believe this is true. Maybe all the shit is just increasing disconnection between media portrayals and reality.
> Basically every new law, piece of news or media I see coming from the UK paints a picture of a beat-down, cynical & scared society
I feel like this is 100% true of the US as well, the only difference is there are multiple factions (the blue EAs, the blue EAccs, the red pro-Trump, the red anti-Trump, the red EAccs, ...) scared and cynical of different things.
> The crimes they cite like child grooming or terrorism/hate being incited sound pretty terrible too, but I wonder why the UK specifically is taking action - is the issue bigger there, or are they just more aware of and willing to act on it.
When it comes to pedos in specific, the UK got absolutely shaken by the scandals of the last few years - Jimmy Savile, Epstein being involved right into the Royal Family, just to state the obvious ones.
As for terrorism, the problem dates back a bit deeper, the UK has had the IRA conflict for decades, and to this day the conflict isn't resolved, the only thing that did happen was the IRA got formally disbanded in 2005.
The Bourgeois love to divide the working class, typical divide and conquer. Indigenous worker vs imported worker, men vs women, queer vs straight, old vs young, car user vs bicycle rider. This is important because it weakens existing solidarities and prevent the emergence of class consciousness. It's part of their modus operandi and has been for centuries, only now they master it thanks to algorithms and machine learning. This increased surveillance also happens to be extremely useful at taming future strikes and protests, or rat out future pro-workers groups
This view (“the Bourgeois’, etc.) seems to imply there’s a group of very clever manipulators somewhere, overtly planning and executing this (presumably in a dark room with armchairs and cigars). But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.
What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
Elements of the UK media fulfil this role, continually advancing a corrosive narrative that the country is broken. E.g. frequently using the words ‘lawless’ or ‘tinderbox’ in any headline or op-ed title that also contains the word ‘Britain’
The closest I can imagine would be media owners - the Murdochs, the Barclays, etc. And of course, they can all be in bed with their own special interest groups, or particular friends. But they're also acting differently, mostly out of self-interest, and in totally different uncoordinated directions.
Smells like coded antisemitism, in this case.
What a bizarre statement to make.
Jesus Christ lol
Are you aware of the reason Epstein island existed? Do you know about the history of intelligence agencies influence on national governments? Transnational corporate lobbying? (All incompetence. I suppose.)
No dark rooms, armchairs or cigars are needed. Did you guys even read Wikileaks?
Yes indeed. But aren't these all discrete examples, rather than a centralised deliberate process of manipulation of the proletariat?
e.g. corporate lobbying clearly exists and operates, and may be nefarious, but is broadly directed towards the corporate entity's gain, rather than dividing and conquering the masses.
You are still not truly understanding Epstein Island, how is that NOT a centralised hub to subvert democratic processes to divide masses? (Not just the USA…)
Conspiracies are a very common part of business law, people just do not accept that it can happen in the political realm.
Have you read the Telegraph or pretty much any UK media lately?
> This view (“the Bourgeois’, etc.) seems to imply there’s a group of very clever manipulators somewhere, overtly planning and executing this (presumably in a dark room with armchairs and cigars). But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.
If you read any history about any daring military action during WW2, a lot of it was done by men thinking up of stuff in dark rooms while smoking cigars. Why is this so unbelievable now?
BTW, The UK ran the world's largest empire and until recently this was in living memory.
> What I see instead is the other side of Hanlon’s razor —incompetence— coupled with a political class riven with pockets of self-interest, and very few seemingly with an intellectual hypothesis to explain the UK’s current predicament, or to chart a path out of it.
Hanlon's razor IMO is nonsense. It is honestly believe it was invented so people could explain away their malice.
Anyone who is relatively intelligent will work at out some point, that if they don't want to do something they can passively aggressively work against the authority while working withing the rules. My father (who builds luxury yachts and is near retirement) was telling me how he maliciously complies with various companies rules to make his superior's life more difficult, this is a way to get back at them for their poor planning.
Even if you accept that Hanlon's razor is mostly true. It cannot be applied when you are dealing with political actors. Political actors, the media and anything related are literally trying to manipulate you. In fact it is a good rule that whatever they tell you that it is, assume the opposite and that is typically true.
They are not a hivemind, after all they also suffer from intraclass conflict, as seen in the NATO-Russian war. But there are definitely interest groups, and we know since the mid 19th century that the class that controls the economy is also the class that shapes society as a whole. So no, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's sociology and marxism. After all, it's not crazy to think that the handful of capitalists who own the British press also defend their own interests through this same press.
>But I just can’t imagine this, in the UK’s example.
No need to imagine it. Read the Wikileaks. Names are named. The class division is real, and it is fomented by those who seek to profit from the subterfuge - and they DO profit, at massive scale.
You're right, I don't read Wikileaks. I'd be interested to be pointed towards a few examples which support your point?
Regulating porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, and alcohol has nothing to do with authoritarianism or a lack of freedom. It's about protecting people, just like we already do with seatbelts, speed limits, and food safety.
Why do you think shops ask for proof of age when you buy cigarettes? Not because they care about cancer or want to sell less, it's because they're required to by law. Of course, teenagers can still find workarounds. They can ask an older friend to buy it for them, just like they can use a VPN to access porn.
The difference is, regulation shifts accountability. It moves the responsibility from a greedy, insensitive business owner to the kids. And at least with the kids we can guide them, and help them spend their time and money where it actually matters.
Note: I know people who love guns or porn are probably going to downvote this, but someone has to say it.
Except in Britain you can be arrested for complaining about the quality of your school, or an offensive Halloween costume: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
This isn't about protecting people.
“It’s for your own good” is always a laughable argument.
The state doesn’t regulate these things to protect people, it does so to manage risk to itself. Porn, guns, gambling, tobacco, alcohol, etc., are tolerated so long as they are contained, taxable, and politically useful.
Regulating porn is this system likely trying to move the needle on declining birth rates. You can look to a host of pro-natalist efforts in China as the likely inspiration.
And without a doubt, overreach by governments will continue.
Regulate porn to increase birth rates? How does that work? Less porn usually means less sexual activity overall, which would lower birth rates, not raise them. In China for example porn is banned, and their birth rates are still low.
Banning pornography alone hasn’t moved the needle on fertility in China. However, in places like Tianmen, where broader pro-natalist strategies were implemented, including porn bans, there’s evidence those multi-pronged efforts had measurable impact.
What’s less clear is the claim that pornography is inherently harmful to children’s development or wellbeing, the research is mixed at best. And the justification that age-gating websites and apps is purely about safety remains deeply unconvincing.
So then either this effort is misguided, a hollow gesture for optics, or a small piece of a broader agenda that hasn’t been made explicit. It just seems to me that this is creating a lot of chaos for a hollow gesture.
This is over intellectualising degerate porn. It should be banned on account of poor taste.
>why the UK specifically is taking action
We have a history of trying banning bad stuff. Magna Carta in the 1200s against the right of kings, slavery abolition in the 1800s, now porn being pushed to kids.
I don't think child grooming or hate is particularly bad here but we tend to try to stop that kind of thing. We also had the first modern police force in 1829 and other innovations which have caught on in some other countries.
Some of the US alt right media pushes broken Britain stories because we have some muslim immigrants or something. The majority of the public support the bill https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-poll-finds-7-in-10-ad... I wonder if it's more the US is afraid of the their government that if they say they are promoting online saftey they are really going 1984 on the populace? Here people tend to assume they are in fact promoting what it says on the tin.
"Magna Carta in the 1200s against the right of kings"
Seems like the pendulum has swung back now, doesn't it? Increasing authority/rights of the government instead of a king.
~80% in favour of this stuff. Democracy for you.
If opposing a bill could cause you to be put on a watchlist, it's pretty easy to get a "large majority" favoring it.
It's not at all like that.
It's more the protect kids from sites 'that carry pornography as well as other “harmful” material that relates to self-harm, eating disorders or suicide.'
I guess other counties are like screw the kids, I'm terrified of being IDd in case my government does bad things?
Stop strawmanning. Other countries care about kids and use normal parental supervision and controls without being authoritarian.
Congratulations. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to compare stupid repression like the OSA to the Magna Carta.
There is a petition to repeal the Online Safety Act[0].
The initial government response can be read as “lol, no”.
[0] https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903
Whether age verification is a justified idea or not, it feels awfully like the UK is createing a new generation of single-issue voters here.
Even wilder, they're lowering voting age to 16 [0]. So there would be a demographic group who can vote but cannot watch porn...?
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c628ep4j5kno
Or watch certain films because they can’t be trusted to contextualise them correctly. It’s pretty absurd.
Well, you cannot drink alcohol if you are less than 21 in the USA, but you can vote.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a petition on that website with a positive outcome.
Online petitions aren't worth the paper they're written on.
If people want change, they'll need to find alternative avenues. (Like civil disobedience.)
Or write to your MP. They care slightly more about that.
I've done this for so many issues in the past and not once have I had anything more than an automated reply. Often those replies then go on and reference a totally different bill that I'm voicing an opinion on. This isn't all just one MP either, I've lived in many different areas of the UK in recent years and most of them have flipped parties at some point or another.
Maybe this is the "Westminster Bubble" the journo's keep talking about. Whatever it is, MP's seem very reluctant to interact with their constituents unless they're campaigning for re-election. At that point they'll turn up on your door step in the middle of the day, expecting a half hour conversation.
How is a citizen meant to adovcate and voice their opinions when their representivies, and every candidate looking to replace them, refuses to engage?
This isn't really a specific question, or a critism on your point. It's just venting on my experience in recent years. Maybe someone else has had a more positive experience they'd be interested in sharing?
At which point you just get the usual stock response from their secretary which is basically no different than the response you get from the petition.
> The Government has no plans to repeal the Online Safety Act, and is working closely with Ofcom to implement the Act as quickly and effectively as possible to enable UK users to benefit from its protections.
Government responded
"I would like to thank all those who signed the petition."
Who "I" ?
i dont understand after (15?) years of petitions with zero results, how anyone is stupid enough to keep thinking they should be mentioned
The VPN trick potentially won’t last long. We’ve seen it go stale already in the world of intellectual property rights. For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The more troubling thing about these laws is enforcement. The threat of fines only works against websites that map to a business entity. For anything else there will surely see a ramp up in the size of The Great British Firewall Ruleset, edited by the courts, and distributed to the Big N (5?) ISPs.
What will become of the smaller ISPs that refuse to block illegal sites?
This is just a cat a mouse game. VPN services will start to offer residential endpoints when enough websites start blocking them enough to damage the value proposition. There is no way on the current internet to verify an ip address means anything at all other than it's an ip address.
There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites. As shown by the very effective Netflix strategy of blocking VPN addresses, it’s been very hard to slip through for a good four or five years now.
I have a residential fibre connection that’s 3Gbps symmetrical, unmetered. If there was something in it for me (and I was legally shielded) I would consider renting some of that out. And there’s definitely other people out there who would change that “consider” to “definitely.” It’s possible to even get a residential 8Gbps symmetrical connection here for not a ton of money; that can support a lot of video traffic.
Your terms of service with the ISP almost certainly forbid any form of reselling, or sharing the connection outside of your household.
> There is no way to offer “residential endpoints” at scale with sufficient bandwidth for anything other than simple browsing of text websites
They can, it’s just a lot more expensive than a $10 a month VPN. They’re typically metered and you pay by the byte.
It is absolutely possible and multiple providers already do it, just search for “residential ip vpn”. The legit ones pay people $20 a month or so to plug a mysterious box into their network which the provider will route traffic through. The shadier ones will just route your traffic straight through a botnet.
As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most get people for one month when they cancel after realizing they can't watch Canadian Netflix from Florida, or whatever.
> As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Yep, they are all lying to you, but with a wiggle room for a workaround or to point the blame at Netflix. Once you get in, you'll notice that Netflix, Prime Video, Steam, some of YouTube, and pretty much any legitimate service with geo-fencing not working. You then email support complaining that this is not working for you. The answer varies depending on the company. For example:
- Private Internet Access will try to up sell you for your own static IP. That hopefully remains undiscovered by Netflix et al for a bit. (Obviously you're trading anonymity and privacy aspects of a VPN if it's a static ip attached to you, but I don't think people trying to stream Netflix from Italy or where ever care about that)
- Mullvad will tell you: yeah that doesn't work. We never advertised that. Don't renew next month.
- Proton will keep asking you to try endpoints manually (each country has hundreds of endpoints and their app picks a random one. Just keep trying different ones manually. They might give your account access to some "new endpoints" (if they have them) that are not blocked yet. Hopefully once the refund period has passed, they will tell you "sorry we're having trouble with Netflix currently. we're working on it"
Some of them will suggest using "another streaming service??" because "Netflix is having issues in [INSERT_COUNTRY]"
I can confirm that PIA does not reliably get around geo restrictions. There's only so many IPs in the pool, and the content providers will block them.
There are alternatives like Hola VPN, a "free" peer to peer VPN except non-paying users have traffic routed through them. But performance of peer to peer VPNs are not as good.
Apart from the first month don't forget those that subscribe and forget about it or subscribe for Netflix and use it for something else on top of those that cancel after the first period.
The 1 month period is also usually priced much higher anways. E.g. PIA is currently $11.95/m for 1 month, $39.96 for 1 year, and $79.17 for 3.25 years (instead of half a year @ monthly). With a curve that steep it's obvious they have severe retention issues at short intervals.
Streaming services don't have any incentive to ban traffic from non-residential addresses right now. But they might with enough legislative pressure.
Netflix was blocking by endpoint IP? That is just a cat and mouse game. They should have been blocking if the MTU was not 1500 bytes.
Hola, eso suficiente.
I mean, it’s more of a bot network really, but there is a massive amount of bandwidth there.
This cat and mouse game applies to OP's first category of sites that want to comply for fear of the British government, but not the second category of sites that actively don't want to comply. Let's refer to the second category as deliberately non-compliant.
The UK instructs ISPs to block access to deliberately non-compliant sites, however users want to make connections to the sites and those sites want to receive connections to those users. VPNs will be effective in allowing access to non-compliant sites as long as ISPs can't identify the VPN traffic.
Of course, the British ISPs can initiate the tactics used by China to identify and block illegal traffic. However there are limits to this. Unlike Chinese users, British internet users regularly make connections to international servers so various bridging techniques are possible. Like VPNs, proxies or even Remote Desktop.
> One tweak to the rules and all of a sudden not only do porn sites have to verify the age of their UK visitors but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP.
The UK does not have jurisdictional power over anything outside their country - they can not a foreign site to do age verification of foreign residents.
Now, the UK can say that they need to check for all UK residents, regardless of them using VPNs. But if there are no practical way to do this, I think the UK will have diplomatic issues enforcing anything to non UK companies breaking that laws - as they would need, eg. Germany, to help them enforcing the law on certain providers.
I don't know. A lot of countries in the Middle East block all sorts of stuff and yet VPN usage is ubiquitous, but the governments appear to turn a blind eye. Like "we've done our bit and made the law." So it remains to be seen how far they'll go with this.
Doesn't make any sense, it's in Netflix's interest to prevent this, but it's the opposite for porn sites.
Only a little bit of legislation would be needed to change incentives around though
How so?
> but also anyone connecting from something other than a residential ISP
It's up to service provider to implement such involved checks. Not sure about e.g. Netflix allocating resources to implementing this, clearly resulting in customer loss.
I expect service providers to cut corners to both comply with local laws and not frighten customers away.
This isn't about illegal sites?
I don't think many people object to blacklisting known sources of child pornography etc.
The fact is you now have to verify your identity (name and photo id) in the UK to access an adult subreddit.
What kind of photo ID does the UK have? I didn't think there was any kind of national ID if you didn't drive?
Passport
You need to be able to shut down websites and apps which do not implement age verification.
So, wikipedia?
Yes... and for clarity, perhaps I should have instead said for the implementation of this law to actually make any moral sense, which is like saying for this chocolate tea pot to be functional on a daily basis, one would have to provision a way of shutting down sites which refuse to participate in the age-verification laws of the UK.
Right, anything that doesn't cooperate with the ID verification is defacto illegal in the UK's eyes?
not de facto illegal, but actually, de jure, illegal
"All VPN services must also perform age verification." Done.
There’s also P2P VPN services which pretty much make it impossible to block
>For at least the last ten years Netflix et al have been well aware of which AS numbers / IP netblocks correspond to people sat at home in front of the TV, and which correspond to servers in a rack somewhere (including those hosting VPN endpoints.)
If the vpn endpoint is in Rome or New York City, how will the UK government force that non-British vpn service and that non-British porn site to verify the age of anyone using it?
It's easy enough to get a list of IP addresses from those vpn services and just block them if you're Netflix, but to force compliance on anyone traversing the tunnel is another thing entirely. The UK government would have an easier time banning vpns outright.
is TOR an answer to this ?
>is TOR an answer to this ?
I've found Tor is mostly useful for reading, not participating. Exit nodes get blocked from registering on most sites. One workaround is to register at a café or library then use the account over Tor, but sometimes even if you're being civil (see my comment history for a a pretty good picture of the style of discussions I have anonymously) sometimes you'll wake up to find the account nuked.
I heard on here I think (but can't confirm) that renting a cheap server in a data centre and sticking your own tailscale on it is the best way to go.
Tor exit nodes are the _first_ thing they ban! If your origin is not from within one of the top residential ISPs then you can expect to be selected for enhanced screening.
It is incredibly easy to tell if someone is using TOR. It would be banned before VPNs
Not if you are using bridges
Bridges don't change your exit node.
It is only a matter of time before they attempt to regulate VPN usage. Here is an article written by a British MP hinting at that:
https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opinion/columnists/onli...
It definitely seems like she’s conflating two issues: access to pornography and child grooming. I don’t see why she thinks regulating VPNs would reduce the latter.
Everyone always does this. Then they conflate mention of LGBT topics with porn so they can equate it with "grooming". Not helped by the UK's anti-trans panic of the last few years (self-ID was such a mainstream idea that it was in the 2018 Tory manifesto)
It does not. As I have said before, pedophilia is rampant on Roblox and Discord. Go monitor those platforms, and hold these platforms responsible, not VPNs. Regulating VPNs will not reduce child grooming, and I am sure they are not stupid enough to actually think it does.
Or, to put it another way, in order to protect the most children, focus your efforts on where the most children actually are, not where you're afraid they might end up.
Pretty much.
She doesnt, she just wants to put in Putin-like levels of control and surveillance for the same reasons Putin does.
Jinping is probably a better comparison.
Jinping would be a better comparison if you wanted to downplay all of this - he's less of a persona non grata.
All 3 like to crack down on free speech and monitor internet traffic for identical reasons though.
Xi is fairly popular in China tho, unlike this "labour" govt.
How would you know? In countries without free speech where anti-government speech is illegal, the only legal speech is pro-government or neutral.
I would know cuz there are independent polls made by western NGOs: https://allianceofdemocracies.org/democracy-perception-index
Immaterial how independent they are because it's completely impossible to get honest opinions of repressive regimes. The people within the regime have no real way to know whether a poll response will make it back to the government or not, so they must assume that it will. When the repercussions for having the wrong opinion are that you disappear or find yourself "volunteered" for the front line, it's best to either lie or say you think the leader is a top bloke.
You can watch Youtube videos of citizens refusing to answer contentious questions quite easily. I believe William Spaniel has produced videos (relating to the Russian General Election) where he points this out, too.
When asked in a way where the opinion can't be identified, the support numbers do drop significantly, but the approval is still estimated to be about 50-70%. In western countries governments with clear minority support start to be almost the norm.
UK government approval has surpassed 50% in a handful of polls in over 10 years, and approval peaks are typically immediately after elections before the government starts to implement its policies. The approval is currently 14%.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/government-app...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/china-quarterly/arti...
How can you tell it is a repressive regime? They have elections, a press and they are pretty satisfied about their form of governance, actually much more than their western counterparts.
So let me sum this up. We cannot ask the people. We cannot base ourselves on how their institutions function and how well they perform.
This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs), and everything outside of their little group of friends is a masquerade. The issue with that is that westerners disconnect themselves from reality. They are losing ground and it shows.
"Elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Direct elections, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, occur only at the local level people's congresses and village committees, with all candidate nominations preapproved by the CCP. By law, all elections at all levels must adhere to the leadership of the CCP."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_China
> This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs)
There is democracy in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.
Just say, "I'm a tankie and I support Russia's invasion of Ukraine."
> Elections in the People's Republic of China occur under a one-party authoritarian political system controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Direct elections, except in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, occur only at the local level people's congresses and village committees, with all candidate nominations preapproved by the CCP. By law, all elections at all levels must adhere to the leadership of the CCP.
I personally see nothing wrong with this. The word "authoritarian" is virtually meaningless. And those local elections are paramount; Locally elected representatives end up electing MPs on the provincial level, then they chose MPs of the National People's Congress. The rest is common sense: just because we are used to "elect" pedophiles, racists and parasites doesn't mean all other countries should do the same.
LOL, who ran against Xi in his last "election"?
Which "free press" runs stories against Xi?
Where is the other half of the bell curve of public opinion that's critical of the CCP?
Yeah they have elections alright, you can vote for any Xi Jingping you want to.
In Switzerland we don't elect our Federal Council, which is our executive branch. A bit like in the UK too. Would you say its what matters in a democracy?
if people refuse to answer contentious questions about their regime... it's probably repressive.
Germans and Americans refuse to answer contentious questions about the genocide of Palestinian... They also probably live in a repressive regime, right?
(Also I agree with you, Russia is a capitalist dictatorship)
Organisations try to measure this: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu
> This discussion highlights how westerners suffer from some serious superiority complex where only THEY can experience genuine freedom and democracy(probably due to their superior phenotype or some inane bs)
You are quite literally commenting on a topic where Brits are complaining about our democracy. You will find reams of articles about the problems with western democracies.
However, you're also commenting about countries that quite literally changed our governments in the last year. USA voted in Trump, the UK voted in Labour. Germany just voted in a new party.
China and Russia, the main comparison points, have not changed government since the 90s. This is nothing to do with phenotypes, it's 100% just looking at the facts.
Russia is very similar to the rest of western democracies, so I won't comment further on that.
Regarding China, their leading party hasn't switched in 80 years, but their policies have and have plenty actually. Changing parties matters only a little bit in the grand scheme of things. I'd argue, for example, that Japan, that has been ruled by a single party for all of his modern existence, is still considered by many in the west as a functioning democracy.
> Russia is very similar to the rest of western democracies, so I won't comment further on that.
Ah yes, I recall that famous incident where Keir Starmer had his political opponents thrown out of a window. Oh, wait: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_Russia-related_deat...
> Changing parties matters only a little bit in the grand scheme of things.
It's part of the package but clearly not all, as many organisations focused on improving democracy and governance will clearly point out.
> Japan, that has been ruled by a single party for all of his modern existence
Whoops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Japan#Result_in_h...
---
In any case, I think all the replies have made my point for me that your dismissal of our rhetoric as based on "western arrogance" are simply nonsense. It's in fact you who's displayed a lack of understanding of those you argue against.
Which is the aim of restricting every information channel and starting the brainwashing in primary school? I'm sure Kim Jong Un is very popular in North Korea, too!
This is an insane take. You'd know this if you had ever talked with a Chinese person before instead of believing the silly propaganda they spread in your "free" press.
It's a fair take and I expect that Kim Jong Un truly is very popular in North Korea.
Do they regularly poll British political parties for popularity in China?
It was obvious to everyone that i was talking about the popularity of these govts in their respective countries.
What’s your source for the labour government’s unpopularity? Not that I necessarily think you’re wrong, it’s just more indifference towards them that I see, more of the same etc.
Here's a couple of recent Yougov polls:
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52187-political-favou...
"Keir Starmer falls to lowest net favourability rating on record"
"Labour’s popularity hit isn’t merely limited to Keir Starmer, with worst-ever net favourability scores also recorded this month by deputy prime minister Angela Rayner (-31) and home secretary Yvette Cooper (-25), while Rachel Reeves has equalled her -48 net favourability rating recorded in mid-April."
"65% of Britons dislike the Labour Party, the most in the eight years YouGov has been asking the question"
> Sarah Champion is Labour MP for Rotherham.
Seriously? You can't make this up: she represents the town that did nothing about a massive (and completely offline) child grooming and molestation network for years and she has the gall to say, "think of the children on the Internet"?
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is a classic YooKay 2025 moment
Destroy cultural integrity, national identity, create a low-trust society, become more authoritarian to manage low-trust society, import more immigrants at an exponential rate while house costs rise along with unemployment. The list keeps going. This is why far-right is surging on the polls. The country has completely lost all sense.
UK needs immigrants to increase stagnating productivity. this has been the case for decades and it's why no government has done, or will do anything serious to curb it.
Only a small minority of immigrants to the UK come through the skilled visa pathway, even if the health & social care visa numbers were added.
See figure 1.3a - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/migration-advisor...
Note that to the best of my knowledge, these numbers don't include the Afghan resettlement scheme which would further lower the proportion of employment driven visas.
what about nurses and cleaners
I always find funny how the new, supposedly progressive, arguments in favor of mass immigration run so close to the ones given against when slavery was abolished, that society can only exist with cheap,exploitative, labor.
Who indeed will pick the cotton.
Also it seems a teensy bit unfair to rob the developing world of its skilled workers so that we don't have to bother training them ourselves (plus they'll accept lower pay than natives).
Aren't those nurses needed back home?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehignett/2023/06/07/uk-...
Unironically no because most of these countries have extremely young populations.
Why do they have a young population? What happens to the old people who live in those countries? Why would that not happen in the receiving countries if enough people are imported?
Its because both the left and right argue for extremes which are just the same energy with different wording.
I do not distinguish the far-left from far-right as they equally polarizing and extreme, and only seeks to pull people in the center towards them through violence, censorship and intimidation.
People in the center seeks a balance between the extremes. Some industries require immigration of labor force but it can't come with delusional ideologies that seek to manipulate the wages.
This is a far-right talking point that ignores the other concerns of progressives that are bundled up in the argument.
Progressives (in the US at least) generally support immigration with protections and fair wages. They also recognize, rightfully, that systems built for decades upon exploitative practices (low wages, no protections) if removed overnight will cause mass disruption of those systems.
Neither of these is in any way supportive of slavery, modern or otherwise. The first - suggesting that immigrants be treated civilly and paid a living wage - has been fought tooth and nail by 'free market' literalists. The second - that there will be disruptions in social and economic systems when an entire workforce is suddenly removed from the systems that it has propped up for decades - is common sense and historically founded.
You're conflating these things to try to justify a talking point that was just created three months ago.
It's because the arguments ultimately originate from the same place as they did back then: the elites who benefit greatly from the existence of said cheap, exploitative labor.
The sorts of "progressives" who unconditionally support mass immigration are just useful idiots being used as tools by said elites to enforce their narrative. Just have to push the idea that "disagreeing with this is racist" and they'll all support it without question.
I mean I support what could be termed "mass immigration" and hold no biases as to what kinds of work they would do. I see no reason they wouldn't find work in all sorts of fields. But one of the most common talking points against this kind of immigration is that because they're "unskilled" they won't find work and be a burden on our welfare programs and social services or whatever. So then you start to list jobs that are positive value to society and don't require specialized training—that even if I accept the (admittedly racist premise) that immigrants won't seek education and skilled positions that we will still be fine.
Canada has legal immigration pathways for nurses, I don't see why any other country couldn't if there was strong demand. Gambling on illegal (and dangerous) border crossings to fill those sort of roles seems deeply irresponsible.
The UK unemployment rate is 5%. That's around ~2 million people who are already here but can't find work.
Do you really mean to tell me that none of those people can work as cleaners?
Of course they CAN but no one with better prospects and good command of English even if you pay a great salary.
If they have "better prospects", why are they unemployed?
lol have you seen those people? Yes, the bottom 5% of people are completely retarded. Especially in the UK.
The only employment related categories on that report are the skilled worker visa and the health & care worker visa. I presume nurses would come under the latter.
For cleaners it's a little less clear which employment visa they'd have been more likely to use. Potentially either depending on the specifics of their job, their income and the precise definition of skilled worker.
How does immigration boost productivity? It's labor-saving automation and machinery investments that boost productivity. I would expect these to be driven mainly by labour scarcity. Growing the labour pool seems like it would drive exactly the opposite. As two examples, Japan has low immigration and an aging population and despite that its productivity has never been higher. By contrast Canada has had extremely high immigration and rapid population growth, and its productivity has flatlined since 2019.
At the end of the day, you still have to have humans to both carry out certain labor tasks and consume the outputs of that labor. For example, having the ability to manufacture a car with minimal human intervention doesn't mean that you can ship steel to the stamping plant without human intervention, and it doesn't mean that the robot used to weld the car will buy one after it's built. And since "real" Americans/Canadians/Brits/etc. haven't made the babies to do the labor and consumption demanded by capital for almost 60 years now, the labor and consumption must be brought in some other way.
Ultimately you have to balance the incoming immigration with the demands that produces, and that's where a lot of countries fall short. For being as similar as they are, Americans and Canadians have radically different experiences and opinions on immigration from India, for example. Why? Americans mainly think of them as either business owners providing needed services (even if it's just as the stereotypical convenience store owner) or people working in cutting-edge and important industries, because that's who American immigration policy allows in from India. Canadians have far less charitable views, because over the last decade or so, Canadian immigration policy has been far less discriminatory. Whether it should or not, this produces social friction with people who have roots in the society that receives the immigration.
Increasing the input labor results in more production.
You're aware of the concept of "diminishing returns", right?
Yes, but we're discussing productivity not production. Production is the numerator, but productivity also puts labour hours worked in the denominator.
Then why has productivity never been more stagnant even though immigration has never been higher?
Here are some pointers:
https://niesr.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/JC760-NIESR-O...
I don't think that should be the be-all and end-all overriding the natives qualms but regardless.....Is it increasing productivity? In nearby mainland European countries that doesn't appear the case.
We've had the highest levels of immigration ever in the last five years and productivity hasn't increased proportionally or much at all.
maybe it's not working, also maybe it is working but there are other confounding factors.
This is the trojan horse as nothing has improved.
Yes, but only total GDP goes up. GDP per person goes down.
GDP per capita in the UK is still lower than it was in 2008.
Gen Z have never experienced economic growth. They don't know what it means to get richer.
I remember when Gordon Brown promised "An end to boom and bust economics." I didn't that meant realise no more booms.
In the 90s in the UK, skilled working class tradesmen making huge amounts of money was such a stereotype that there was even a comedy character about it. I can't imagine seeing that happen again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadsamoney
Not true in isolation. It depends on the productivity difference between the existing average and those being added.
So if you add more people, and gdp per capita goes down, you think it isn't due to the people being added?
Welcome to the sticking plaster economy. This may be the economic orthodoxy, but it completely ignores the root causes of poor productivity - and ultimately leads to the state of xenophobia you're seeing today in Britain.
I don't disagree
Sad thing as that the good times are very likely never coming back, and the far-right in power will only make everything worse by bolstering even more tribalism and mistrust among the public.
Very sad to see this from the country that produced some of the most influential pro freedom of speech philosophy the world has ever seen.
Well they also produced pre-totalitarian authors, such as Thomas Hobbes and his advocacy of authoritarian states.
I think this is the most uncharitable reading and understand of Hobbes that exists. The main argument (and context) is that men is evil and can only live in "civilization" by being forced into it by an absolutely powerful state. The fact this state is a monarchy, a dictatroship or a democracy is not the issue. The fact (in which he is right) a state needs absolute power and monopoly of that power. Modern democracies are a good example, they have the absolute power and thus are more stable and peaceful that warlord controlled pseudo-countries in Africa.
You've confused the concept of an absolute sovereign with this which is control over the private lives of the individual and the family.
Freedom of speech is not the same as age restrictions on porn.
Incredible that you’ve managed to bring this conversation to immigration. In fact, it sounds like you’re saying the root cause of this crappy policy is somehow immigrants.
Far fetched and not cool.
It's a valid topic for discussion. Even as a foreigner who was in UK on a visa and eventually got ilr I'm still concerned about it.
The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable, particularly when it's proven that the majority are not fleeing persecution but are economic migrants. They're taking advantage of a system designed to help people in trouble, how could you defend that?
And when does it end? Will the UK always accept small boats ad infinitum?
I played by the (harsh) rules and got here legitimately. Why should I have bothered.
> It's a valid topic for discussion
not on a thread about vpn useage
> The current situation regarding small boats is not sustainable
the current situation regarding small boats is the inevitable conclusion to a badly implemented brexit policy and a negligent tory party rule over 13 years. Startmer took 5 months in power to talk to France and have them agree to tackle it on their side of the water. Also no brexit, no boats. The anti immigration chest thumpers caused the problem and then scurried like rats. Farage was impossible to be found the year after brexit won, dude aws the face and suddenly wanted to part of the "glory"
None of these problems live in isolation. It all feeds back to the same system that is driving itself into the ground.
The refusal to accept these problems is what is creating a surge in far-right popularity. The very people that oppose them have inadvertently become their biggest cheerleaders.
Immigration is becoming the #1 political issue in the UK for a reason.
If they didn't want this, they could have just restricted it and it would have largely gone away as a topic of discussion, but current levels makes it inevitable it will become the main thing people think about
One of the reasons they want to make discourse on the internet as painful as possible is because immigration has become an mainstream concern in the UK. Many of the things that are being soft censored is clips about from the British parliament where this and related issues are being discussed.
Just because people like yourself happen to think it is uncouth to discuss, doesn't mean that it isn't part of the equation.
Everyone always wants to bring it back to immigration, because they've seen US ICE snatch squads and internment camps and decide that they want some of that here.
It's very difficult to build a growing economy when you have mass unskilled immigration combined with free healthcare and a generous welfare system.
Growth is much easier with mass immigration than mass emigration, regardless of if those crossing either direction are skilled or unskilled.
And the UK welfare system isn't all that good. I'm a landlord, and at one point a letting agency told me they refuse to deal with anyone on the welfare system because it's simply too difficult to actually get the council, who are supposed to pay, to actually pay. The necessity for food banks is another big hint that the government system isn't covering basics.
And the UK healthcare system has for a while now only been free to UK permanent lawful residents and a handful of others: https://www.nhs.uk/nhs-services/visiting-or-moving-to-englan...
(As in: migrants will be asked to prove entitlement, it won't be assumed).
If you moved to the UK for work, you're paying twice for the NHS, because not only is it supposed to be covered by national insurance contributions, but there's also an NHS immigrant surcharge: https://www.gov.uk/healthcare-immigration-application/how-mu...
Immigrants can't claim welfare, beyond the tiny asylum seeker payment, and the healthcare system is dependent on immigration for staff.
States such as California were allowing them access to Medi-cal, their version of medicaid. Many get free housing- NYC entered into a $980 million dollar contract to house people in hotels.
Federally, no, they aren't getting assistance, but it's all a slush fund as money flows back and forth between local and the federal governments anyway.
The US guarantees ER health services regardless of citizenship or ability to pay. They also get free public education (with all the burdens of being non-english speaking).
They pay taxes (in Texas) through gas, property and sales taxes which fund much of the state.
Yes, immigrants are a critical component of several industries like healthcare.
Legal permanent residency/work visas should be easier for skilled workers who want to work in high demand jobs. And all wealthy nations should be more wary of unlimited, unchecked economic migration by poorer populations.
(IOW it's complicated)
I think social media is at least as big a cultural weapon against us, and if I had to choose between deport/imprison a small number of business and political leaders who abuse that weapon or four million undocumented US residents, I would choose the former.
I'm confused, I thought this was about the UK, and the US only got brought up in the sense of people wanting to copy them?
> The country has completely lost all sense. This is why far-right is surging on the polls.
Fixed that for you.
I don't think your modification really changes anything from the original comment.
The safety rules are also being used to block content about protests in the UK. How convenient for them.
https://freespeechunion.org/protest-footage-blocked-as-onlin...
The fact X flags protest videos as adult content is not entirely the fault of the UK government.
> “West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content.”
I’m not involved with X or with its chatbot. Is its chatbot ordinarily an authoritative source for facts about assumptions like this one, that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
It’s a bad look either way, but I feel like there are important differences between the law leading to overly conservative automated filtering, vs political actors using it deliberately in specific cases. Bad symptom either way, but different medicines, right?
> that the law “was used to take down” politically sensitive video?
You've misquoted the chatbot, which is a new one.
The video wasn't "taken down" and Grok never said that. It was blocked for some users in the UK due to the new authoritarian age verification laws which everyone should be concerned about if access to newsworthy content requires "papers please".
Of course LLMs are a rubbish source for facts, one should always verify. Not possible in this case so I would assume it just made it up
In this case, Grok is stating the obvious. I'm not sure how you can arrive at any other conclusion. The clip is inaccessible to some users in the UK on the day the act comes online, replaced with a message about local laws and age verification.
If you need to use a VPN in your country, maybe your government and elected officials have failed you, are not representing you, and need to be voted out.
This sort of thing is why the US has turned into a governance-averse society in some pretty bothersome ways.
People suggest some sort of regulation for something, or some social service, often ones that are similar to those in the UK, and people who oppose it will point to things like this and use them to illustrate the slippery slope fallacy.
I mean, it quite literally is a slippery slope. Its only a fallacy if the causal indicators aren't so obvious.
Well, if you look at the US, similar laws are being enacted at the state level as those you see in the UK, often by the same people who would reject the other features of governance you see in the UK (the NHS, stricter firearms regulations, etc.) because of them being "overbearing".
They are overbearing, this UK-esque "do you have a loisence for that" governance, is exactly why we have a permitting crisis in SF.
Aye, but the one thing you very likely won't have in SF is the need to have your government ID stored in a system in order to view NSFW material.
>the slippery slope fallacy
I see the slippery slope fallacy-fallacy more than the base fallacy.
British VPN users right now:
https://x.com/NoContextBrits/status/1949181229791592887
or
https://xcancel.com/NoContextBrits/status/194918122979159288...
I really don't understand why it wasn't just a requirement for Apple and Google to include a client side filter. Parent sets up the phone and it's enabled by default. Much simpler option for everyone involved.
It's because this law isn't about protecting children, but about control of the Internet. They want online activity tied to real identity as a power grab.
Yea, it's all about a permanent Digital ID and the end of any independent forums. It's the first essential steps before you get to great firewalls and social credit scores.
Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
> Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US
Interesting, since when? I'm curious about how it's turned out in practise. For web services I mean. An for anyone hosting a message board or comment section.
The US states are just targeting the big porn sites like Pornhub to add ID checks AFAIK, I haven't heard of them going after random forums like in the UK. But obviously that sort of power always expands, just like how the UK went from arresting a couple people for offensive tweets back in 2010 to doing 12k arrests/yr in 2025
The UK law was designed to be all encompassing. Why block just the 'porn sites' when you can see porn on forums?
The UK law is actually a good implementation if you put child 'safety' as your number one priority, with any other considerations as, in practise, moot.
Unfortunately I think free civil discourse between adults, privacy, etc. are just as important as child safety which makes the current law a bit crap.
This is similar to the video game and MasterCard/VISA issue - you can buy games that promote sexual violence and incest. Nothing stops children downloading them for free, or using their under-18s debit card from purchasing the non-free versions. In this instance it was private companies leveraging their freedom of association rather than an all encompassing law from a sovereign state, but the intent is the same.
As a collective society we do really need to come to grips with what it is that we want. Allowing kids to freely access gang torture/execution videos and playing pro-rape entertainment should probably be tackled. I'm not sure I agree with the implementations though.
At least in the US the Supreme Court ruled that these sorts of laws are only kosher because they target porn, which is afforded a lower degree of legal protection (albeit not no protection at all). Trying to restrict access to protected political speech or the like the way the UK and Australia did would likely be a very different court case.
What political speech is the UK blocking?
If the 'political speech' is not adult in nature, which is true 99.9% of the time, then it can't/won't be blocked under this rule.
Unless of course this political speech is happening on a porn site, or a subreddit that has been deemed 18+. Which I can't see a legitimate reason for.
It seems like videos of violence are also getting blocked, and I expect eventually stuff about LGBT relationships etc will fall under it. Lots of things are adult that aren't porn.
'videos of violence' is quite wide: children shouldn't be watching videos of people being executed by gangs for example.
A lot of LGBT content is aimed at adults. I think we should always be clear when we are making statements like this because it causes great stress, a worked example:
People will claim that LGBT is under attack because this law potentially affects some LGBT spaces. These spaces will clearly be meant for 18+ audiences and so fall correctly under the law. Then other people see the first group of people, and from their point of view that group is complaining that their 18+ spaces are blocked from children. "Think of the children" drama ensues.
It is similar to Steam taking down incest/rape games and people claiming it was an action against LGBT creators. I don't think that's an argument that should ever be made for obvious reasons.
I don't think the government, even if it were under the Conservatives, have banning gay spaces on their current agenda.
One possibly significant difference is that the cultural attitudes in the US tend to lean more rebellious and distrustful of the government, and "it's legal if you don't get caught" is a somewhat popular sentiment.
> Remember, Tennessee, Mississippi and Texas already have similar laws in place in the US, so even a nation with better speech and gun laws is still not immune from the slow descent into technocracy.
I’m not sure what gun laws have to do with anything but guns are not unreasonably difficult to legally purchase in the UK or EU if you have a specific need for one. It’s a tool and treated as such
>It's because this law isn't about protecting children, but about control of the Internet.
Also in an overpopulated world it's not a given that children should be protected if it comes at the expense of basic freedoms. We need to move away from this narrative that "think of the children" is a persuasive argument. Little Timmy needs to avoid danger or the ghost of Darwin will work his magic.
Probably based on long term concerns that escalating inequality will lead to widespread unrest and violence. Which it will, if unaddressed.
Interesting that decades of government leaves half the country to rot, and their solution is to try to stop that half from rioting about it, rather than - perhaps - making society fairer?
Adding a browser header field would be sufficient, could be easily integrated into the OS and browser, and would let developers handle this issue in a few hours worth of effort.
ID verification is such an invasive measure and prone to the exact same failures as the simplest solutions.
I like this solution, integrated with whatever existing parental controls are in the OS.
That would empower parents to keep their kids from accidentally or casually accessing porn. Of course, an intelligent and determined teenager will probably find a way around it, which is also good; then they've learned a bit about computers.
While I'd agree, the issue with that solution is that validating against government issued identity solutions aren't always free. I don't know if this is the case with the UK digital ID, but the Danish version certainly isn't free to query. The Danish one has, to my knowledge, a solution that would allow you to do an age for a person, without getting any other information, so yes, the browser could do that, but there cryptographic bits ensure that now body messed with the header data is still missing. And again, who's suppose to pay for the API calls if the browser does it, Mozilla, Google, Microsoft... Ladybird?
Because reinforcing a natural monopoly is bad? The law is specifically written to allow a range of different business models etc.
Also, because desktops/different browsers are a thing?
> Also, because desktops/different browsers are a thing?
I mean, i'd think primarily this. They may hold a significant marketshare, but they dont hold all of it.
> it wasn't just a requirement for Apple and Google to include a client side filter
I am old enough to remember when Apple proposed client side filtering and everyone absolutely lost their shit.
That was client side content scanning, unless there’s another incident you’re referring to.
I need to prove my age to buy a lottery ticket or purchase alcohol. The merchant typically doesn't save my id info.
What if I could purchase a unique QR code, good for maybe a month, that I could use online to prove my age?
There'd still be problems in the US with 1st amendment issues, but I'd at least remain anonymous.
This is the exact system I suggested to a friend. I don't mind having to 'prove' my age, but I do not really want a third party to have my identifiable information nor do I really want the Government knowing what fetishes I may or may not have.
For a digital only solution, I think the best system would be some form of public-private key attestation:
The government advertises their public keys for 18+ verification.
A website generates a unique token - this token is then taken by the user and submitted to the government receiving a signed attestation. This can then be given back to the website to prove the user is 18. It only has to be done once per profile and no information is shared between the Government and the website on who is who.
Unless of course the token is saved by both the website and government in some forever database and then a lookup is done.
Another solution could be a timed/signed token produced by the government that has no input from the website. But this still has the downside that this could just be saved by both parties and in future you could identified if both sides compare data.
Why not just parental control software?
I don't really understand why every adult should need to jump through hoops because parents won't spend 5 minutes enabling it on their kid's devices.
Hell, modern parental control software with an image classifier is arguably better than these online age verification systems since it works with anything that appears onscreen.
> that I could use online to prove my age
This is just moving personal data responsibilities from service providers (e.g. porn sites) to the central authority (QR code maker and verifier). Unless there is a semi-anonymous way of purchasing age proofs, e.g. over the counter.
> what if i could purchase a unique qr code, good for maybe a month, that I could use online to probe my age?
I can already smell a business opportunity to start illegally reselling/dealing age-verification qr codes.
That also happens with alcohol and tobacco. Cops can run sting operations to catch illegal dealers. But IRL id verification removes easy access for most children while preserving the privacy of adults.
It's called selling a fake ID, which is already illegal.
This reminds me that when payment processors cut off an adult site in Japan, they were able to fall back on users paying for points in cash at convenience stores instead or something like that.
Not a bad system really? Pseudo anonymity and avoids some third party tech firm getting involved?
[delayed]
Because it’s none of your or anybody else’s business what I do online. Don’t negotiate with terrorists.
I don't think anyone has a problem with verifying their age.
What many people do have a problem with is requiring disclosure of unmodifiable biometric data and government documents that once "hacked"/sold into the data collection pipeline becomes forever tainted and easily stolen.
You can't "reset my password" with biometric data once a malicious actor has it
[delayed]
I’m sure it’s only the adults using VPNs so don’t worry, this is still a fantastic law that is definitely helping children not watch porn and absolutely not just a massive attack on civil liberties in disguise.
I wonder which company is gonna be the first one to leak all of the ID and Selfies. After that, I'm expecting these laws to be lifted off.
My Reddit selfie was a bit rubbish looking. I think they'll have to abolish the law if that gets out.
If anything they will double down to "track cyber-bullying" or some other load of horsecrap.
its already happened that tea app got all its ID verification photos stolen and published online and yet were still going full steam ahead
> After that, I'm expecting these laws to be lifted off.
Bollocks (nicely). A shit-load of 'the 1%', just got a free pass. If anything, after that!, 'I'm expecting these laws to be doubled-down on.'
There are a lot of comments and thinking along the demo and gloom lines.
On the "silver lining" side, could be a eye-opener for the population of the UK, that things they take for granted cant get summarily yanked away if they don't actually do something.
And with any luck it will pull up the technical competency of every person using these services (pretty much every adult).
With any luck parents might even be forced to gain the skill their kids already live and breathe and don't think twice about.
:)
I used to be optimistic that way, but if you look somewhere similar developments happened before like China: yes, people adapted to circumvent their regime's oppression, but the laws never changed.
Since surveillance is only a 2nd tier issue in terms of mind share (at best), it's untouched by electoral democracy. And because rulers automatically support more surveillance, there are no mechanisms for positive developments on that side, both in the UK and in China.
But we did, I've been protesting against laws like this for 17 years now! Genuinely, they've always been trying to implement these laws, and simply relied on us missing the ship one time.
Everyone with any ability to open their eyes migrated to the US from the UK ages ago. The civilization that exists today is what happens when people too scared to get on a boat live in the dregs of a dying empire.
Any suggestions?
If COVID policies and mandates including the vaccine passports which absolutely paved the way for digital IDs for any action in society, didn't wake up populations around the world, nothing will.
You just need to scare them when there's an appearance of dissent and that's that.
Few people can combat them effectively from a tech and legal framework, for sure, but don't expect magic from nowhere.
Every time this comes up, an accusation with some label becomes sufficient to dismiss any arguments from a person.
What message does it send when your government tries to impose costs on your preferred behavior while at the same time being unable to do it when you download a single app?
The words that come to mind are malicious and incompetent. The only 'achievement' is to increase contempt towards the government. And the times aren't exactly stable to begin with.
The obvious stage two being the UK targeting VPNs as technology to get around think-of-the-children laws
I doubt they would bother - it's practically impossible without the investment of the level of China.
They will probably pass a law that says you have to be 18+ to purchase a VPN however.
Or target it under the same law. All you need to do is shift the blame for providing adult content onto the vpn provider and suddenly they'll stop providing services to the UK. Might be a little more tricky to enforce globally but perfect enforcement isn't necessary to be a deterrent
Since it's about VPNs - what are good VPNs for someone looking for safety/privacy but not anonymity or even IP hiding?
Not even for streaming. But for general "safety while on the Internet" when the devices (Mac, iPhone) are mostly on public or not-so-secure WiFi (at the residence or on the go). Plan is to keep it always ON or almost always ON.
Not necessarily for the UK.
(Other than Mullvad)
The best VPN is to host your own. I used Digital Ocean. They have preconfigured droplet images for OpenVPN access server. The droplet even serves a client pre-configured with the connection settings.
It took me all of 10 minutes to set up.
Oh god. I should have said "other than self-hosted". I swear to god I thought about it but forgot and added only Mullvad. I can't edit it now.
And thank you for saying this but I have tried. Both on DigitalOcean and on a VPS bought from a deal on LET - didn't do it for me. It was a pain unless I left it literally untouched, un-updated, un-upgraded forever and ever. I know, I know - I must have done something wrong or I need more patience or both. But sadly it didn't cut it for me. It made it hate the entire thing.
Other self-hosted option could be one of those sites where you can use one service and pay for it like pikapods or so but then if I am doing that then why not just use a VPN because anyway I would have to sign up for different services and then pay for it too while not having the control a droplet or vps will offer (talked about above)
A personal cloud VM is very bad VPN for some purposes.
The static IP address, recorded by every site you visit, is directly linked back to you personally, and only you.
You can recreate the instance every 60 minutes, I've tried such approach once. But such setup is useless anyway, most services block datacenter traffic by default.
In the year of our lord 2025, don't use OpenVPN. Use wireguard.
Please give a bit more detail and justification when you give opinions like this.
Otherwise it sounds like you’re saying everybody already knows which one is good and which one is bad -- but if everybody knew, you wouldn’t need to say anything, right?
I am not the original poster, but there are a few reasons to pick Wireguard.
Performance is better due to the in-kernel drivers, UDP design and crypto choices. If you're simply looking for the fastest option wireguard is it.
Openvpn's protocol is somewhat more janky than wireguard. It looks tls-like but then does its own transport thing. It has a lot of flexible options and ciphersuite choices meaning you could very well pick something less than ideal. The complexity of the code makes an undiscovered bug slightly more likely.
The downside of wireguard, mitigated by some VPN providers, is that it is UDP-only. You may find environments where you cannot tunnel out this way, even if you try to impersonate QUIC by running the remote port on 443. Mullvad has a udp-to-tcp proxy as part of their client and server to work around this.
This sounds more like a task for NextDNS than a VPN, tbh. Or are you worried about no TLS?
I have tried NextDNS and I think I should try it again but the last few experiences ended in a lot of sites breaking. Maybe this time I will try someone from country who has written a tutorial about it.
But a VPN would have been more appropriate for this task and if ever I needed to use a different IP from a different country (that would be rare and mostly to access websites for a short period) I could just do it easily.
Can I ask - why not Mullvad?
Connectivity and IP blockage (I assumed) issues last time I tried it.
But the main reason is — it’s the default recommendation on HN. So I would prefer to know what else good there that people are using. Because it would be really sad if it’s the only one. I kind of refuse to believe that.
That’s all.
if you're on apple... iCloud Private Relay.
though you may need to be more clear on the safety / privacy benefits you expect to gain
Yes that Safari only? Has that changed? Though I don't think it offers much - esp if you compare it to a VPN or even NextDNS or so.
iCloud Private Relay has the benefit of more accepted by payment processors etc, but the downside is that because it doesn't mask your country of origin the UK censorship rules still apply whilst using it.
I've found that Mullvad generally has the best privacy reputation, but I've also been blocked by a lot of sites whilst using it.
The mainstream consumer VPNs like Nord, Proton etc aren't as great for privacy but I suspect they're less likely to be blocked. I'd love to have more data to justify this though.
Classic Streisand effect - attempts to restrict content access inevitably lead to widespread adoption of circumvention technologies.
seems to be working in China. While many Chinese use VPN software, many don't bother with the friction and are fine just using rednote and friends.
Leaving the complexity of attempting to circumvent the great firewall aside, VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year just to avoid identifying yourself on PH. Easier to find a website that doesn't enforce it.
In the UK case, TOR seems to happily get around these restrictions for free (I gave it a quick check yesterday). I'd imagine that there might be some kind of crackdown on TOR exit nodes in the future though
People in the UK generally believe that the only people who use Tor are those looking for child pornography, even though it's an anti-censorship tool.
I'd be careful if I were you. The police could use that as an excuse to raid you.
Tor is not an ideal browsing experience.
nor is submitting your ID to a third party agency to allow you to go to a website
> VPN isn't free. Not many are willing to drop £60+/year
Yes it is, well, the shady ones that make you part of a botnet are. Those are the ones people are going to predominantly use.
VPNs barely work in China IME. NordVPN didn't work, for example, and my self hosted VPN would often get disconnected.
For a self-hosted VPN, you'll need to use a protocol that is specifically designed to be resilient to censorship. VLESS, for example. Things like WireGuard and OpenVPN are very easily detected.
Ah ok, that makes sense as I just hosted openvpn.
Maybe it's changed recently, but I knew a lot of locals just using the VPN stuff to use the outside internet (though, like a couple other countries, they have a big enough homegrown market to where for most people not having fb or whatever is a no-op)
My experiences in the country using VPN stuff was pretty interesting though... it _really_ felt like depending on where you were physically in the country that you were going through completely different censorship pipes. And things like Apple push notifications would just get through no problem so you could at least receive stuff via push from banned apps.
I wonder what kind of detailed explanations of the mechanics there are, because I don't have a mental model of it that works beyond "censors just tell each regional office of national operaors to do stuff and they all do it slightly differently"
They work but you have to put in some effort to find the right ones.
"Seems to be working in China." Yeah, let's follow the example of the authoritarian countries just to prove how liberal "democracies" have nothing to do with freedom.
The parent comment is not about following examples, but rather that the impact Streisand effect is going to be very limited, and the common folk will not bother to circumvent.
This is how it worked out in Russia. First, around 10 years ago, they adopted very limited laws that required ISPs to block websites. Things like drugs and suicide, with the classic rationale "won't someone please think of the children". Then piracy websites were added to that. Fast forward to now, ISPs were mandated to install black-box "ТСПУ" devices on their networks, "to protect against threats", so now Roskomnadzor doesn't even pretend to care about the law. Half the internet is broken. More if you're on mobile data. Everyone knows what a VPN is. I personally have set up DPI bypass tools for many of my relatives.
In other words, if you censor enough of the internet that your population knows ways around that, your censorship simply ceases being effective.
At least in Russia and in china, the governments don't pretend that what they are doing is to save the children(TM) whereas in the west we like to drape our authoritarian tendencies under such false pretenses.
In Russia, access to websites was restricted initially "to prevent the spread of information that might harm children", it's in the names of the first censorship laws.
Did you miss there part where OP said that was how it started in Russia? The same is happening in the west.
I think the UK govt is a bit more chilled about it all than Putin.
> Then piracy websites were added to that.
Really? I thought it was de facto no care for piracy from the gov side. Maybe that is just how it looks from the outside.
The government does care somewhat and does some token gestures, at least because Russia is a WTO member. The people mostly don't care.
Just a reminder “Brexit” happened just a few years ago. Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”. You can’t even move to Switzerland and setup a company.
Yes technically it’s possible but I was told my a Swiss accountant “just don’t bother trying unless you can get a European passport - if you can”
This is from personal experience. As odd as it sounds Brexit really affected business ( always thought it was posturing) I can’t imagine what it did to mega corps etc
Just thought I’d share my xp
> As odd as it sounds Brexit really affected business
With all due respect, this was never odd. It was immediately predicted from the day the UK voted for Brexit, along with many of the other very obvious side effects of leaving the EU, like free movement & ability to work, logistical challenges etc.
Unironically, people thought it would end free movement for other people and not them.
When Brits go to another Country, they are expats, bringing their wealth and culture with them. When people come to the UK they are immigrants or economic migrants refusing to get jobs, learn the language or integrate while taking all the jobs.
Is that unexpected? You'd have the same issues immigrating to any country, right?
It seems like British people got very used to being able to move to the continent but how long was that state of affairs around for, I wonder.
> Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”
That’s how visas work in most of the world.
I’m curious now, did you vote for it and not expect this? It doesn’t sound odd at all, it is exactly what everyone said would happen other than people promoting Brexit as some form of nationalism/pride movement.
As a Brit that was too young to vote in the referendum I feel like I’m stuck in a venus fly trap and the jaws are closing. I would have liked to live in Europe for a while, but welp, now that option’s gone. An image of a frog boiling in a pot also comes to mind.
> Suddenly no British man can be more than 3 months in another European country before being “banned”
People finding out that voting against free movement means movement will no longer be free remains my favorite Brexit trope.
I am surprised that the housing markets in Spain and Portugal haven’t declined due to Brexit.
If anything I would have expected the market to explode in Portugal. The digital nomad visa they offer is one of the easiest for us to get and after living there for five years you regain the right to live in the EU. I’ve considered moving there but their immigration system is dysfunctional apparently.
Switzerland isn't in the EU either.
But it's in the Schengen Area, which is relevant here.
I uh, surely you knew about visas before this?
The new online safety rules are already being used to shut down government criticism. How it works is their new elite protection squad, if someone is deigned an influential critic of government policy, trawls through your social media posts until they find something against the laws. A lot of government critique is coming from the working class here now, who have virtually no political representation in the UK. As you can imagine, some of these social media posters don't mince their words, and end up getting caught out and arrested.
Do you have any examples of people being arrested for criticising a law?
Most of the time these dystopian descriptions of the UK turn out to be completely overblown nonsense when you look into them properly.
Yup, along the same lines as the “sharia no go zones” and “get stabbed six ways to Sunday every time you go outside” myths
Our town has been abandoned by police and is overrun with violent criminals on unlicensed motorbikes. So make of that what you will.
Which town? I’d be interested in reading about this if you could share some sources please
Myths not without an element of truth. Have you spent any serious amount of time in Bradford, for example?
I suppose the most recent example are the people from Palestine Action being arrested en masse at protests.
They're not really being arrested for criticising a law though.
They're arrested for supporting a group that's been banned for causing around £30 million's worth of damage to our national defences at a time of hightened national security.
There's the implication that Palastinian Action are going to continue attacking us.
If they just stuck to protesting they would have been fine.
And at the same time, while people burning down hotels have been arrested, other people who have been egging them on and causing "stochastic terrorism" have been left alone.
What gets classed as "support for" and "terrorism" is not evenly enforced.
I think this is an inaccurate description of what has been happening: people have criticised the government heavily for being extremely harsh on people "just making tweets". A woman was sentenced to nearly three years in jail for posting a message online that said "set fire to the hotels for all I care" (paraphrased).
These riots are spontaneous and "organised" via people getting riled up online. There isn't a central organisation that people see as leading these anti-migrant riots/attacks. They seem to be an emergent property of the protests. If there is a named group organising criminal action and it includes things that threaten/damage national security then that group should be banned.
Palestine Action was conducting organised criminal raids with the specific intent to cause damage to anything it felt was Israeli, Israel related, or somehow benefited Israel. A lot of the time the link was tenuous at best. They also attacked national security assets. Honestly this group's actions has done more harm than good for the Palestinian cause.
Look up the videos "blackbeltbarrister" on YouTube. He's doing a good job of explaining the law as it is and how it's really being applied in the UK.
There are discussions in parliament about grooming gangs on X. These are soft-censored (you can't see it without passing the the age verification). Few people will be bothered to make an account to see a post and pass age verification. Therefore it slows the sharing of information.
It isn't about outright banning the discussion, because that will cause considerable push-back by the public. So you dress up a policy as doing one thing knowing that the effect will be another. I don't take anything the British State says at face value. If you do, you are simply being naive.
https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/05/15/britains-police...
Tons of people are arrested and charged every day for thought crimes in Britain.
Paywalled. Might be better: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/parents-arre...
It sounds like there was harrasment involved, but it is scant on details.
Whenever one of these stories come up, we find there is a side missing. In this case, it's a school, so for safeguarding reasons they're not going to say anything at all about the children. Quite often "arrested for saying X" turns out to be "arrested for a lengthy campaign of targeted harrasment, culminating in X"
Headline should be edited to put safety in quotes
Slightly related question. How Matrix, Mastodon, Bsky and Nostr handling this? More specifically the small and personal instances.
Bluesky asked for a picture or a credit card auth.
That’s the main instance right? I am curious about the small and individual instances.
When will governments and people learn prohibition doesn't work?
This alternative approach is fine. When people use extra money to pay for such services, it boosts economic activity and creates a market-driven filter. If you are economically advanced, you can afford this workaround. If you are not, well you are surrendering to govt safety rules. And thus everything works.
Any advice of which country I should set my VPN to for the best experience of freedom?
Albania works pretty well. I think Youtube doesn't show ads either.
I don't care for the framing: users evading the law.
First, this is a law limiting the actions of service providers not users.
But by using a VPN, I'm making my own safety choices. I wish there was an easier opt-out (like an ISP account-level flag), but it I want to present to service providers as (eg) Swedish, so what? I'm an adult, the "safety" laws do nothing for my safety.
The truth is service providers and ISPs have done next to nothing to stop children signing up for (eg) Snapchat, despite a plethora of laws. Of course the parents are to blame, but fixing shitty parenting is hard.
The "VPN use surges in UK" articles are bought and paid for by the VPN industry.
I don't believe it is possible to convince me that VPN's as sold and marketed are anything but a massive scam. Yes, that includes the company that you say is honest.
What do you mean by "scam"? That you pay and that they don't work at all? That they don't bypass the geo restrictions? Because they do.
Perhaps you mean that they are bad value(ripoff vs scam)? Then sure, probably they are. But you're basically paying to not get flagged by cloudfare. Back in the day, you bought a cheap server from OVH or some other lowcost provider, stuck openvpn on it (nowdays wireguard) and you were golden. But now that Cloudfare middle-mans half the internet, it doesn't really work anymore.
You pay the VPN providers for "clean"(ish) IPs so you don't get stuck behind Cloudfare captcha-loops.
They do what they say on the tin (i.e. not a "massive scam").
If people think they do other things, that's not a "scam", that's people being misinformed about what a VPN is and does. That's on them.
I want to believe Mullvad is legit but I'm too old, have read too much and I'm way too cynical
...that's a really wild take and I seriously wonder what it means.
Turns out the Great Firewall was ahead of its time and it will soon become the standard in the so called "free" world too.
So, is internet freedom still a thing in any countries? And what's their immigration policy like?
This might be a dumb question, but is it possible for the UK government to ban VPN usage within the UK?
They banned porn with choking in it. They banned toy advertising in the evening. They tried to ban client side encryption for iCloud. Make no mistake they will go for vpns too.
100%.
Funnily enough. They just need to claim it's "protecting the children" and people fall for it.
The funniest part is that high profile criminal cases go unpunished very visibly. Even if they have minors in their context, because the elite figures in question must be protected from the enforcement of rules.
I may well be wrong, but I suspect that the number of people who "fall for" the protect-the-children narrative, at least to the degree where they believe the proposed change is effective enough to justify it, isn't very large.
I'd argue it works because it's a rhetorical tactic that's highly effective at suppressing dissent. Anybody sticking their head above the parapet is going to get painted as somebody who favours pornography over the safety of children, even though this legislation and opposition to it has very little to do with either.
In my experience, people in real life do absolutely parrot the talking points that are deemed to be good (TM). Whether they do it out of fear or not, ends up being a moot point since they create an environment of apparent cohesion.
Banning porn depicting choking "to protect women from violence" is so funny. You could not ask for a better example of moral panic from people that didn't do their research. Choking is a strongly women preferred kink.
There's also a reported epidemic of women being choked during sex unprovoked, and who certainly don't want it. Unfortunately these laws are being made from things happening in the real world that get traction.
Is the law a good way to stop this? I don't know. The main tool of governance for our elected leaders are laws, and so that's what they do.
No they can't. Myself, and quite a few other people, need it for work.
They could force you to provide ID in order to use it though.
Encryption with the only private key allowed being your SSN equivalent. :)
Do you think that will stop them? They tried to ban encryption for petes sake.
I mean, it's a sovereign state. The government can legislate for the sky to be purple if it wants to (though obviously that won't affect actual reality).
Sandford Police are on the scene
Australia is set to adopt these rules in December, it's going to be another boom for VPN providers.
UK and Australia are slowly going the way of China in their blocking, and the eventual end effect could be that they will get their citizens cut off from the internet.
I run a website that provides English articles to trending topics from Chinese social media. It’s kinda funny that topics discussed there are sometimes “too sensitive” for western LLMs who will straight up refuse to write about them.
Take from that what you will re: China vs western censorship
Like what?
And several states in America.
The EU too. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
It's just that Australia and UK tend to lead the way when it comes to authoritarianism and then it becomes "this has always been like this, you conspiracy theorist".
They're coming for AI tools next. Here in Australia they're rolling out the academic socialist activists on the public broadcaster. These experts know how to keep us safe apparently.
This morning it was all about "think of the children" in the context of banning AI tools that could potentially be used to make AI generated CSAM. Even adult nudity is in the firing line. Ban the lot was the advice from the expert. Not just banning access, but making it a crime to even possess the tools.
What next? Ban paint brushes because someone might use them to paint offensive images?
Some countries (like the UK) make it illegal to draw things.
Hell, the UK are currently criminally investigating anime artwork websites.
Predictable own goal. If a lot of UK users end up routing their traffic through a foreign VPN then GCHQ's backbone taps become far less useful.
Now they will ban VPNs
This was an entirely predictable outcome.
As is the next step: a slow but steady expansion of what's considered "unsafe" or "harmful" used to justify ever-increasing restrictions and censorship.
As a student of 1930s and 1940s history, I can say for sure that the most terrifying aspect of what took place wasn't the "Gestapo" and all the open terror, it was the propaganda that fooled so many people and the censorship that kept the lies alive. Humanity still has not fully come to terms with the layers upon layers of lies that took place before and during WWII.
And VPNs will probably end up in that category too :(
It baffles me that some people vote for socialists and are then surprised to have soviet-style laws.
The Online Safety Bill was introduced by the previous Conservative government.
And criticised by the current party in power for not going far enough. Then passed by them
It baffles me that some people blame "the other side" for the things "their side" gleefully ushered in.
socialism is when you have to provide ID to download porn
I went on a weekend vacation with three guys. I was asked what I thought a good VPN was. They all have VPNs on their phones apparently. Here I am thinking they are technologically adept, maybe a little bit security conscious. Or maybe misled by advertisements.
It wasn't until after I got home I realized it was because of adult content.
> They all have VPNs on their phones apparently
They listen to podcasts and watch youtube. They know that a good VPN will stop their internet banking details being stolen, protect their family in their home and add 2-4 inches to their manhood.
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Whatever it is for, let freedom ring. These puritanical laws do nothing but empower government with the end goal of totally controlling online speech.
Until like a week ago there was no age checking system for porn and no reason to use a VPN really. Although your friends could have been into some very strange stuff.
There has been a good reason to use a VPN for 25 years now (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000)
I see many are focusing on the aspect of VPN itself and not enough as to why this is occurring in UK in particular and we should expect it in countries like Canada, and other EU countries as well in the near future.
The fact of the matter is conservative movements are surging not only in UK, EU, US but in Asia as well (ex. Recent surprise seat gains by moderate right parties).
The reason there is a common reaction across borders is the decoupling from globalism which pushed the overton window so far left that its brought a yo-yo effect to the right.
Globalism isn't a conspiracy theory its real established and demonstrable political movement to dilute all cultures by attacking their national identity, heritage through mass immigration which ultimately leads to a low trust social dynamic via crime (proven by statistics) or incompatibility (belligerence against their host counry and refusal to integrate and pushing imported foreign culture and values).
It's no wonder that such reckless push to gaslight its own ethnic/religious incumbents have swung polls in the opposite direction, and in a desperate attempt to hold on to the power that globalism has given to those that preach it, ironically turn to fascist tactics such as censorship, criminalization of speech and increased surveillance that only emboldens more overton window shift to the right.
You kept calling people "far right" yesterday for slightest disagreements to progressive policies in order to censor and intimidate them and today you have huge number of people who no longer care for that label as they find safety in size and number.
At this rate, given the way things are going in UK and EU and many other countries, its going to manifest in extremely far right wing policies being normalized and coming to power as majority of the population becomes "far right" and the new normal center, and those that called themselves "liberal progressive left" will find themselves outside the Overton window.
We've probably seen these ebbs and flows in politics countless times throughout human history and I understand better as to why things like Bolsheviks, Nazis, Communists came to rise.
The demand to bypass political censorship and surveillance increasing in the West, the so called bastion of democracy and freedom, will backfire into wide scale civil unrest. We've already seen a preview of it in Spain recently, where a group of Moroccan migrant gangs have attacked locals and in turn locals fought back and burned down a large mosque.
I've been to UK, France and Ireland recently and there is deep deep resentment from the locals towards the Muslim and North African population, and it reminded me of my childhood growing up in Lebanon, witnessing the arrival of Muslim refugees, neighborhood demographics changing, ppl being jailed and labeled racist for complaining, then came civil war between the new majority group and the incumbents, political concession by virtue signaling equity and harmony which lead to even more corruption within those demographics that did not respect agreements and its ultimate demise today.
I cannot see a future without the same events unfolding in Lebanon playing out in UK. All it takes is one major event (for us in Lebanon, it was Muslim militant group attacking a church) to ignite the flame, and as you saw Torres, Spain it finally took an elderly Spain man being victim of attack by 3rd gen Moroccan youth to explode into violence.
Remigration unfortunately is the only way that can peacefully diffuse smoe of the tensions and to avoid the same fate as Lebanon but I can see this will be a difficult path especially innocent individuals of that demographic caught in the middle during this rapid Overton Window shift accelerated by an increasingly sophisticated users and dystopian surveillance apparatus....
Gee, maybe Trump isnt so bad
We all know how people in position of power, governments like kids. Trump also likes kids. They do it for kids, sure.
If not for kids, then why they introduce data-gathering solutions? I wonder why...
pornography does not harm children.
I must be honest with you, as far as I am pro net-neutrality, I can observe people using internet irresponsibly. As the internet stood up to allow sharing of science publications, now mostly shared is the pornographic type of content. When Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about people sending themselves a book he probably (we still may ask him) haven't predicted people sending boob/dick pics. As the content technical level lowers, amount of people sharing their stupidity increases. Meanwhile other irresponsible people give phones to their children (I am amongst them) hoping the children won't go into the bad places and trusting in freedom.
Currently my kids got already out of my hand, and I really wonder how could I filter the content that goes to them. Internet became something else, so maybe I won't install a VPN to their phones and they won't be able to see the most horrible things anymore.
You can just configure their DNS to use 1.1.1.3. No need for the government to step in and manage your child's internet access.
> now mostly shared is the pornographic type of content
What is your source? I believe you are incredibly biased. Netflix is one of the biggest user of bandwidth worldwide, and if we're talking about the percentage of "pornographic" IP packets, I think it's even less than the former.
> and I really wonder how could I filter the content that goes to them
Parental control on device and DNS-level blocker (think AdGuard, PiHole, ...). Hosts file could also work as long as they're not admin on their PC. If they're skilled enough to circumvent all of that, then I think your kids will be fine.
I must admit the amount of pornography in different forms is now apparently everywhere on social media. Including social media I thought was "safe":
I see videos that I think are overtly sexual in nature on YouTube, even if the video is something supposedly "innocent". If you click through to their profiles there is an inevitable link to 18+ content most of the time. I am subscribed to only tech/film/gaming channels on youtube and this content is now always put into my feed. I probably have cursed myself by checking these people's profiles after the fact.
You are right though that by bandwidth, streaming services including Netflix make up the majority of data over the Internet and it is not pornographic/dangerous for children at all.
> I probably have cursed myself by checking these people's profiles after the fact
I think you really did. I don't watch much YouTube and don't use social media beside Instagram—which I mostly use for messaging friends and not exchanging photos—but I don't see a lot of erotic content on the mainstream platforms.
I wouldn't call it Erotic. It's hard to describe but you just know that it's somehow sexualised. I would think that somehow maybe I am a crazy prude but these profiles then do link to adult content (from their youtube via link aggregators, which is definitely not an 'adult content' platform). I think it's some form of cross platform advertising while skirting around the 'no adult content' rules of youtube.
>When Tim Berners-Lee was thinking about people sending themselves a book he probably (we still may ask him) haven't predicted people sending boob/dick pics.
You are asking tech to solve people problems. That is a recipe for disaster.