10 Good Reasons to Live in Britain ;-)

[rapidone]

10 Good Reasons to live in Great Britain... Please read on, it starts boring buts gets better...

 

1) Avoid skin cancer, over heating and a healthy looking tan because GB has hardly any sunshine. There's hot

bouts of hot sunny weather in the summer but it never lasts, mostly it's windy, raining and cold. If you hate the

sun, you'll love the UK.

 

2) Love a simple livestyle... In the UK you are guaranteed to live simply because all the good things are

unaffordable. It's cheaper to go on a package holiday to Turkey than holiday in any UK resort. A week at Butlins in

Bognor will cost you a grand at least, two weeks in Turkey all expenses paid would also be a grand.

 

3) You can scrap your old cars for £2K... The government have introduced an old car scrappage scheme to help our

ailing car industry. Bless their cotton socks and thank you our MPs. Problem is the increase in sales is only pent

up demand from people who could already afford a new car and were going to buy a new car anyway, they were just waiting for the scrappage scheme to be introduced. Plus the dealers had already inflated the prices of their cars

during the months prior, in anticipation of the scheme, covering their £1k contibution, so there's in fact no

actual benefit, just £300m more into the pockets of those who don't need more money.

 

4) Best pretend democracy... The UK has the best pretend democracy in the world. Of all the great democracies

the UK is the best at hiding how bad it is. We elect our MPs and it seems that after about 8 years in power things

start to go horribly wrong for us and much much better for those at the top. In the space of 10 years the UK has had two unelected prime ministers in the shape of John Major and Gordon Brown. True democracies elect their leaders. When a prime minister steps down there should be an immediate general election and a fixed 4 year term, and like the Americans, only 2 terms per leader.

 

5) You can be famous without knowing it... The UK is the most watched and snooped nation in the developed world.

You can be on TV several times a day, have your data read, post opened and bank accounts checked with ease. The audience are a large number of watchers employed by government agencies of all types to keep tabs on you. So if you want to promote a good website, just wear a 'T' shirt with the name on it, you'd be surprised how many people will know about it before your mates do.

 

6) We hate shop keepers... The UK used to be a nation of shop keepers but after Margeret Thatcher was ousted as

Prime Minister the wheels of our corporate economy shifted into high gear, though to be fair many of the things

Maggy did fuelled the dash for even bigger corporations. Privatisation has very mixed blessings.

 

So what do we have in 2009... If you like to work for a corporation on minimum wage then you'll be as happy as Larry, because there's hundreds of thousands of unfilled jobs stacking shelves, operating checkouts and collecting trolleys. Also when you get your minimum wage you can spend it on inflated food prices, high energy bills and petrol, leaving you nothing left to have fun.

 

Now what were you thinking Maggy when you privatised the energy and utility industries? They've all merged now and charge even more for the basics of life. Now they want to privatise the Royal Mail... The Royal Mail is brilliant and actually making a profit... Leave it alone if it ain't broke, give the workers shares in the business they can't sell and must hand back if they leave. Co-operatives seem to the work well for large organisations.

 

7) Private dentists welcome... If you're a qualified dentist and have £100,000 to start your own small practice

then 'Grate' Britain is certainly the place for you. The people of GB struggle hard now to get free NHS dental care

and have done for the last 20 years, so their teeth are literally falling out themselves and oral health is the

worst in the developed world. Their only option is to pay for dental care, so the poor will have to stop eating

sweets which they cannot afford anyway and brush their teeth more with bicarbonate of soda and water as toothpaste is also too expensive.

 

The upper working classes and above can afford private dental care on the whole, so there's a golden opportunity to come here and make a mint. Your best bet is to buy a cheap terraced house in an area of good employment, probably an old corner shop that was closed and converted for living in the 80s. Get planning permission for "change of use" and hey presto another private dental practice.

 

8) Solicitors also most welcome... Because the United Klingon has been going through a long period of hyper

inflation and now enduring litigation-a-plenty, specifically due to massive debt, property and land inflation (caused by the failure to properly protect and regulate the pension system by the John Major and Tony Blair governments, thus forcing people to invest in property for their retirement instead of regular company pensions) the current Labour government, bless them, thought that everything was lovely, house prices would not stop going up and people kept borrowing against their houses with the thought maybe of downsizing later and paying off the debt.

 

Oh dear but we all forgot about what happens when there's too much inflation didn't we? That bubble always bursts and in the case of the UK that means property was about a third overpriced.

 

In America that same thing happened for different reasons, some clever financiers had the idea of packaging mortgage debt into a derivative so that it could be traded like coffee beans, then someone realised that they could sell debt derivatives over and over again making a small profit each time, round and round it went.

 

So that debt derivative kept getting more and more expensive to trade (inflation) and the poor saps who held the last trade (mostly the banks and funds) realised they'd paid well over the cash value of the matured debt. Whoops... Because there was no way of telling how risky it was on the box, and the box was made very pretty and attractive by those clever traders. So one year after Lehman collapsed they are at it again, without the regulation of derivatives... Remember Nick Leeson anyone?... Barings bank collapse?... No lessons learned or just ignored warning signs for profit?

 

More work for lawyers from now on then, sorting the fall out from millions of debtors for at least the next 5 to 10 years whilst the courts strangle the UK and US. Right, I'm going to train to be a solicitor ;-)

 

9) If you like violence you'll love our green and pleasant land... Knife crime is just the latest 2-year-long headline but a serious one of course and one which is long overdue for regulation, Britains prisons are now full, which means some lower level violence and knife possession goes unpunished without prison, with detection rates painfully low. Labour traditionally hate the Police, I'm not sure why because they've created the biggest impotent Police state you can imagine.

 

I've never seen so few Police Officers on the beat in my life before but so much back room 'control' in the shape of surveillance. I mentioned this earlier but watching people commit or plan crime is a brilliant development, provided the agencies involved can actually use the evidence and intelligence to secure convictions. The solution is an old one, and government after government are pillaried for neglecting it. When I was a kid we used to be scared of bobbies on the beat and you never knew when one would come around the corner and catch you doing something you shouldn't.

 

Community Police Officers are a great idea, lower cost, trained and look great. Labour should increase those by a

factor of 10 so that 24/7 there are at least 2 bobbies walking around every estate in Britain. With the intelligence used to fight serious crime and terrorism, combined with the authority of a bobby on the beat, you then have a way of tackling lower level violent crime that ruins the quality of life for ordinary people. Tackling crime is one thing, but preventing the causes is harder and it flows into our next good reason to stay in Blighty...

 

Britain has always been a land of opportunity, but in the last 15 years these opportunities have been erroded away by greed at the middle and top sucking away chances, at the expense of people at the bottom. Combine the lack of opportunity in Britain today, low family values, few beat Police Officers and a general propensity toward violence of Britains, you have a gauranteed cocktail to allow lower level, petty and more serious crime to thrive.

 

So what's the solution, firstly young people should be taught good family and work values from infant school up to the end of secondary school. A child leaving a British school should know all about money and how to handle it, they

should know all about families and how to create a great one over 3 generations, they should know how to create and run a small business or plan a successful career. These are not subjects for A level students... They are essential building blocks of life that Asian and Jewish families already teach their children from infants to adulthood.

 

Money, Families and Work are three subjects that should replace History, Religion and Art (sorry Art is fine, how about Geography? ) because these are of no use whatsoever to anyone. History is about how to build a planet badly over the last 2000 years and nothing has been learned (OK Mozart was talented), Religion is an old-fashioned way of teaching the masses what I'm going on about and needs wholesale modernisation and on Geography, if you want to travel, buy a map

 

So once the youth of today are taught solid moral values and have the skills to perform them, we then tackle Britains propensity to violence...

 

And don't get me started on the computer games culture... I don't think XBox games promote actual street violence, in fact I think they allow children to expell their natural violent tendancies into an electronic box with a screen and they keep gamers away from naughty children and adults dealing in drugs and petty violence. My kids also get to chat to their mates in other schools, where otherwise they would loose touch.

 

I think a serious problem is our national fixation on war and fighting generally, our joy at reciting historic wars and military solutions without talking about our military failures and more importantly our reasons for going to war. We marvel at the stories of "The Battle of Britain" (and always remember those that died for us) but did you know our navy was 10 times bigger than the German's during WW2? Maybe that made the biggest difference eh?

 

Our ethos is if the Americans are doing it, we should also be doing it. And why... Because the winners of conflict get the spoils and we want to be in on the action, how much did it cost to rebuild Germany and Japan and who did it? Having said that, in my opinion, WW2 was the only war that had major justification, I can't think of another.

 

For the sake of Karma we need to be phasing out war as a solution in the 21st Century and Britain especially needs to come up with better answers to killing people or allowing people to be killed. Once we are able to safely use alternative methods to military action, we will begin to create not only a better youth who see this happening, but better military services that in fact want to be used only for good reasons and not for greed or power as in the past.

 

So in summary, we increase the number of beat officers by a factor of 10, you teach Money, Family and Work as subjects way above History, Religion and Geography from infant school to the end of secondary school, you tackle Britains propensity to violence and finally you provide opportunity for those at the bottom, which brings me into my last good reason...

 

10) Roll up roll up to treasure island, the most expensive place on the planet... Britain is the most expensive

place to live on the planet, only here can you work for 30 years and still have nothing to show for it...

 

In 2007, at the property peak, my friend had been working in Britain for the last 10 years and could still not get a

mortgage for a flat which were about £200,000 then. She moved to Australia and within days got a similar job. Within 3 months she'd obtained a mortgage for a house! Not a flat, but a house within 3 months! She couldn't achieve that in Britain in 10 years but in Australia within 3 months. The reason... Britain is too bloody expensive...

 

But if you're a corporation or have a successful business already, you can use the poor British worker to make you even richer. The legal system in Britain isn't designed to protect those on the bottom, it's designed to help those at

the middle and top prevent abuses of the system, and the legal offshoot exploits the poor and keeps them fearful enough to pay their debts. Britains at the bottom have no pensions, they have no savings and huge debts, we are not poor, we're much worse, our debts make us the "under-poor" and the poor have no opportunity other than working for the local Tesco in a low skills, low wage job. In the past Britain was a land of opportunity and we need to bring that land of opportunity back, and here's how...

 

People at the bottom should be able to easily start a small business without cost or risk using a new "Business Centre" linked to Job Centres to combine benefits with the resources needed to allow people to start small businesses. Small businesses need equipment, they need premises and a steady market place, they need training, they need financial backing, they need help and the state is not providing it to all of those who want, need and deserve it.

 

Large shopping malls and retail parks should be made to create significant small business centres (retail and small scale manufacturing) for people who have been unemployed for 6 months, not existing traders, but those new to business, to expand considerably the numbers of self-employed. Would you believe Morrisons turns over £15bn and they're not even the biggest corporate shop? What if each store was made to give up 5% of it's indoor retail space for free to the self-emloyed who we're able to use the store's EPOS system too? You'd have an explosion of innovation and variety for consumers, plus increased footfall just because of that. Big business in retail parks and malls would thus win too.

 

Britain also needs more skilled and better paid jobs and that means more large manufacturing facilities producing new and high tech products and services. Not assembly plants for mostly export, but full added value manufacturing. We have the best brains and innovators in the world, but fail to realise our ideas because of a lack of regulation, local and state help and poor management with support. Britain is a nation of inventors and we could beat the world if only our powers that be got their collective fingers out... Out of the till and away from self-interest...

 

I often ask myself why the state has first call on a great invention and why it fails to protect it's innovators

against those who will steal our ideas, manufacture on the cheap abroad and re-import the product we thought of.

 

We all love X-Factor and marvel at some of the talents who rightly deserve fame and fortune, almost entirely through the efforts of Simon Cowell and his support (OK and Louis as well) so why don't we have an engineering, construction or computing Simon Cowell show (and other industries)? The Bolt-Factor, Brick-Factor and Nerd-Factor shows get the idea? Dragons Den is just 4 millionaires who are looking to make a fast return... Let's look at the bigger picture and take bolder, more expertly informed steps with innovators.

 

What we need in Britain is a national small business facility that everyone one who wants to, can use and get real practical help like money, equipment, premises, training and above all, comprehensive protection, whilst still obtaining benefits until the business pays enough to come off benefits, or allow working inventors to take time off using the inventors equivelent of paternity-leave. Corporations are wealthy and clever enough to allow the bottom to stop being their employees and start being their small competitors. There will always be enough low skilled workers available for corporations if the wages are decent and in most cases small business will only produce products and services that corporations cannot touch.

 

How about in each town and city build a huge IKEA-size retail market with small stalls and industrial units with no rent or rates but a cut of each business's profits to use the scheme, and using a single standard security and EPOS system, large car park, cafeteria, security staff, toilets and customer services, built to the same high standard as IKEA? Give up half the floor space to established small businesses (and I mean small) and half to the unemployed newbies. This would work and mark a shift change in small retail business on a large scale. We know traditional street markets are dead or dying, so do it right and do it right now!

 

Britain also has to reduce it's prices, houses, cars and other larger ticket items that are too expensive. I've

discussed above why houses are too expensive (lack of pension investment and moving into property instead for the

last 15 years) but there's no excuses on cars and other goods. Car manufacturers should produce basic vehicles for

under £3K so that many more people can save up and would not need credit. Tata can build the Nano for under £1500, surely Britain can build an EU compliant Nano for under £3K? Same for other goods...

 

There should be a focus on producing basic big ticket products at prices that do not require credit. For example no VAT on standard fridges under £100. No VAT on cars under £3K... The days of free and easy credit are over for a generation, and those with high debts, low savings and no pension will ensure they do not expose themselves to credit again without a very good reason, so the sooner manufacturers start making cheap high-tech, high end products in volume in Britain the better, and the sooner they will recover and create those higher paid skilled jobs we need.

 

Also, we need to make energy cheaper for the masses... Stop relying on oil, coal, gas and nuclear, encourage local people to build community wind and solar farms, create big tidal, wave, solar and wind facilities for the national grid, introduce hydrogen fuel nationally without delay and give the new EU Tata Nano under £3K a hydrogen power cell. People will only spend money now when they have it, they will in future be reluctant to spend what they do not have, so these measures will help put money into their pockets by reducing prices, improving opportunity and adding value to the task of living in Britain.

 

Thanks for listening

Edited September 24, 2009 by rapidone

[Conniff]

You need to edit your posts to include some paragraph spaces, they are very hard to read as they are and I would think you would get more to read it if it wasn't so hard to read because it is all crammed up.

 

I couldn't read it as it becomes teadious after a few lines.

 

The same goes for your other post.

[mightymouse_69]

Hmmm, seems like something straight out of the Daily Mail!!

 

I would disagree with some points, especialy about us being very undemocratic. Sure there are faults with our electoral system and the government, but that US system has plenty of flaws too, and is arguably just as (if not more) undemocratic as our system.