What a load of bollocks some people are spouting. The problem with the UK can be summed up with two words, greed and arrogance. Forgien workers taking all the jobs ? again bollocks, if the great british populace had not become so arrogant that work such as fruit picking and cleaning were below them and the manual trades brickkies, chippies etc hadn't become so greedy and charged through the roof for a days work and the larger companies had not said 'bloody hell you'll work for half of what we pay the other blokes' and cut their labour bills by 50% without cutting their prices then there would have not been the work there for them to be tempted by.
Arrogance, people some will say 'I'm desperate for a job' but if you said ok then off you go 65 quid a day to work out in the pissing rain or boiling sun picking fruit & veg or sitting on your arse on a production line, then they'll say but I'm a qualified market analyst I won't do that.
Greed, the fact that people have to work so many hours to pay for their credit card buy now pay later life style that it a has an adverse effect on the job market. If the larger industries hadn't been privatised stripped bare by succesive governments then sold to global corporations who immediately outsourced anything they could, this goes for councils and tendering too.
If the banks had not got so greedy and lent huge sums of money to the american banking institutions who the lent it to greedy people who wanted a house much larger than they could afford and then couldn't repay the debt and the housing market crashed in the states. That is the main cause behind the global recession.
Thing is there is all this ranting and bitching about Great Britain, it's a fantastic country, here we are on a forum where a lot of money is spent on recreating cycling marvels from a very short period in the history of cycling, how lucky or possibly greedy are you to be able to do that? If you told some poor sod living on llama turds in the Attacama that you've just blown his equivalent of 8 months wages on a frame because it was made by so a nd so on a the last Tuesday in February on the day of a full moon, he'd think you were insane, get a sense of perspective it's a bike for christ's sake. How many on here have more than one bike ? You can only ride one at a time...greed again.
Would you rather live in the states where cash is king and not even working hard is a guarantee of a good lifestyle or in Burundi where people will kill you for a pair of trousers and your family for a pair of shoes.
Britain could be great again, all it would take is a bit of dedication to put community before consumerism, of course it would mean a bit of sacrifice and hard work........