What's the big issue for you?

[ViolentPanda]

Anyway, issues -

Housing & mental health

Often interconnected, unfortunately.

 

[kyser_soze]

Representative democracy is a waste of time, the only democracy that works is out on the streets enforced by guns, clubs and cold steel.

OOOO, you're just so hard it makes me wet.

Funny to see you commenting on a homophobic post given the bigoted crap you came out with on the Sinn Fein thread...

 

[upsidedownwalrus]

Free tampons for all women and men if they want them

I mean why the fuck should someone capitalise on my misery, that i didnt ask for in the first place.......condoms are free ffs

OK, if you let us have free razors.

 

[treelover]

Agreed, you think they would have learnt something from the disasters of the sixties: the slum clearances, the uprooting of whole communities, etc.

The problem is that every area where this has happened has had a core of residents who've wanted to continue living in the community they may have often spent their life in. In some places whole generations of family history have taken place in the same house. That's why the whole "Pathfinder" scheme has received such opprobrium from communities: It destroys what it claims to be protecting.

 

[Sweaty Betty]

OK, if you let us have free razors.

only if i can as well

 

[Dissident Junk]

Really? Post-apocalyptic landscape?
What, compared with the height of the Thatcher years and recessions?
By "ungoverned" do you mean no police around, or what?
Giles..

It was the 70s - the death throes of textile manufactoring - that was the real killer in my home town and surrounding area. Weirdly, during the Thatcherite 80s, things improved a bit, due to 60s social mobility that delivered the sons and daughters of mill workers into semi-skilled and skilled professions (this feature explains why an old mill town was conservative until '92, a fact that has astonished more than a few leftwingers I've known in the South East).

Things might have been a bit "Mean Time" in the 80s, but my home town and area was still quite dynamic. It had a vibrancy to it, a life. In the early 90s, this developed into a real sense of place.

But now . . . . well, for a start, we seem to have lost a massive segment of the population. People have just 'disappeared', compared to what things were like in the early 90s. The pubs and bars on saturday nights are empty, I can walk around my local area for over an hour (down streets and streets of industrial terraces) and NOT SEE A SINGLE PERSON.

When I go into the nearest town centre, there are very few people around at 4-5pm and a lot of shops have gone. Even the out-of-town shopping centres are quiet. It is now bearable to shop in Sainsburys on a Saturday afternoon, fgs. We don't even get gangs of kids on local street corners anymore. And we've lost two local pubs in the last five months - god knows what will happen after the smoking ban. I reckon we will lose them all.

As regards government, we've no police presence in the smaller local towns now (there used to be a station in Elland, it closed a number of years ago) - the nearest police station is a 20 minute drive away in Halifax - and the only regular sense that we are part of a wider network in society is the fortnightly recycling collection. All the old council civic buildings are gone, the last due to close in a few months, and all the smaller local libraries have closed.

There is one factor that I have picked up on, however, that might explain this state of affairs. I've been looking at houses, and it is noticeable just how many owners have gone to Spain - it's more than half of the houses up for sale. Likewise, many of my parents' friends have downsized and now spend over half the year in the Med; such anecdotal evidence could explain the ghost town feeling, and why there is a lot of uninhabited housing that is not up for sale.

But it feels a bit desparate up where I am now. There is no sense of society or community, because there doesn't seem to be any people.

 

[Maggot]

Global warming - the loss of many densely populated areas and the environmental refugees it will create. Not to mention all the other effects: crop failures, freak weather conditions etc.

The End of Oil - the reduction in oil supplies, the inevitable huge price rises and our failure to find any alternatives.


These two issues dwarf anything else IMO.

 

[mk12]

Wage.

 

[becky p]

50,000 people dying of poverty every day. Not really knowing what or how to change that state of affairs.

 

[Giles]

Such a blithe assumption to make, that "no-one wants to live in it".

The problem is that every area where this has happened has had a core of residents who've wanted to continue living in the community they may have often spent their life in. In some places whole generations of family history have taken place in the same house. That's why the whole "Pathfinder" scheme has received such opprobrium from communities: It destroys what it claims to be protecting.

I thought that most of the housing being demolished in these "Pathfinder" schemes was in fact largely privately owned old terraces?

Which the local councils are using CPOs and claims of "unfit for human habitation" to force people to sell, so they can flog off the land for trendy new flats.

I am totally against Pathfinder, btw.

Giles..