I hope you enjoyed this video! You may have noticed that making it was *a lot* more complicated than usual! It involved a four-day trip around England, arranging interviews, buying in extra kit, and a much more complicated edit process as we attempted to tie the various threads of the video together. I'm really keen to keep pushing the boundaries of what we do with these videos over the coming year. I want to use the opportunity of the platform I've got on UA-cam and Nebula to tell important stories in the most engaging ways possible. If you'd like to support me and my team in that, there are a couple of ways you can do so. Firstly, by signing up to Nebula using my personal link go.nebula.tv/tomnicholas Or, by signing up to support the channel on Patreon at patreon.com/tomnicholas Thanks so much for considering it!
.... Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today Holy Spirit Can give you peace guidance and purpose and the Lord will John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
The rich do. That’s why they’re so dead set against anyone in the msm talking about it! It’s all “culture”, “identity”, “race”, “traditional values”, “woke” this, “trans” that, “pedophile” moral panics, “BLM”, “migrants” etc. etc. all of it generating massive profits for the rich who’s giant media companies host the entire discussion no matter what you’re side in the “culture war” and mold and shape the form of the discussion by their control of the private algorithms that mediate who we see, what we see, and slowly moderate the terms of the debate to their satisfaction. That is why you’ll NEVER see any radical anti-capitalist revolutionary promoters of working class solidarity on MSM or gaining any significant influence via the main media platforms. A divided working class more or less fully in support of capitalism, and without the ability to form a coherent critique of it, nor the ability to see past culture war categories and form a working class class consciousness suits the needs of the rich ruling class who owns all the significant gathering places on the internet now. When there’s anywhere that the rich Western Capitalists don’t fully own or control … like TikTok for example, the rich lose their minds and start shouting about espionage and privacy concerns (they have no such privacy concerns when their own citizens are subjected to ever more unconstitutional surveillance by the state, or by anyone who will reliably hand over data about US citizens to law enforcement in the US, legally or not. TikTok has them losing their minds because it is NOT owned by a reliable US / western capitalist company who will supply ONLY pro-rich, pro-US oligarchy messages on the platform. And of course the bold, outspoken working class former bank trader and economist, Gary Stevenson, he does too! On his channel “Gary’s Economics” he.l explains it all quite powerfully and convincingly, and explains equally powerfully and convincingly why a massive wealth tax on the richest 1% or 2% or 3% or so of the wealth holders in the world’s capitalist democracies will recreate a healthy and functioning middle class-based society, by redistributing the massive quantities of wealth and assets accumulated and hoarded by the super rich over the last several decades. He implies the current social pathology among the working class, the poor, and the increasingly frustrated and dispossessed former middle class is a result of this massive shift in the economic priorities in our capitalist democracies over the last several decades. The economic interests of the super rich have been favored over those of the middle class and the poor, as well as even the interest of a government possessed of enough wealth and assets to provide the services people need to live in the 20th and 21st century. Gary argues like Tom does here that the bankruptcy of cities is but one symptom of a wider pathological “privatization” of the nation and selling so much of the resources, and even infrastructure already paid for by the taxpayers to the rich so that they may profit from selling access to these services back to the very people who already paid to build the schools, roads, transit, communication, economic system, and many other basic infrastructure elements. These services are forced into artificial “bankruptcy” by the rich taxpayers who refuse to pay into the tax system at all … then instantly have the duly DDS to buy these services they wouldn’t pay to use before, in order to charge criminal rates to use the same systems weeks or months before they had been crying to poor to pay taxes to utilize the service. The scheme is obscene. It’s an invention of the criminal “supply-side” “trickle down” economists favored by Reagan and Thatcher and Mulroney and every other neoliberal crook who saught to destroy the working class by bankrupting it by refusing to pay taxes they claimed they couldn’t afford, only to turn around, use loans from their own banks underwritten by taxpayer guarantees to buy the exact same resources and assets from the government they’d just refuse to pay tax in order to use. Their argument? They were all trustworthy selfless men who could run these services better than the people’s government could. What a scam. To this day we live under the increasing economic strain of this scheme, and are still being encouraged to blame each other; our fellow working class neighbors for either our idiotic retrograde “conservative” traditional values, or our ridiculous, elitist, ideological, doctrinaire “liberal woke” values. The rich don’t care about any of this; they’re laughing giddily as we fight amongst ourselves ignoring the ongoing economic thievery they are perpetrating against ALL of us the whole time. If you want to scare the crap outta yourself to understand what the driving philosophy and the “social values” of the ruling rich oligarchy is today (because they sure don’t care about “patriotiism”, “Christianity”, “traditional values”, “woke values” “social justice”, any of the stuff they sell to us as culture war products. Nope. Try and go search the internet for “Right Accelerationism (R/ACC) and Elon Musk” or Peter Thiel or Jeff Bezos. Or try looking up the Political Philosophy of The Koch Brothers AND “A Treatise on Government” by John C. Calhoun or The Koch Brothers AND James M. Buchanan (economist) and his “The Limits of Liberty” or his “The Calculus of Consent” . . as well as Peter Thiel (again) AND Calhoun’s book or either of Buchanan’s books. These rich men love these theoretical books which elaborate upon a theoretical rationale for destroying democracy as a fundamentally unfair “tyranny of the majority against the “natural” rights of the rich and successful to rule. It’s frightening to think what stuff the rich are planning if only they could remove the pesky impediment of democracy. That’s why they quietly support Trump and the MAGA GOP with millions of dollars. regardless of the ugliness and hypocrisy in some of their cases to do so. Democracy is so “unfair” and a waste of energy that could be better spent making them more rich, if only it could be eliminated for good, and let the natural rights of the rich and successful rule forever uninterrupted.
And that IS the cause of this. Stagnant or falling wages, increasing prices, reductions in services, but increasing taxes. It's all in service of extracting everything from regular people, and transporting it to the very top.
There is also the massive elephant in the room which is Amazon. They take a huge proportion of the population's money that would otherwise be spent locally and then pay no corporation tax on the profits. Billions are simply disappearing into the ether
Wealth inequality is a serious detriment to consumer based economies like the uk’s as consumer spending accounts for 60% of gdp. The state should help consumers as the economy wouldn’t be able to function and would completely collapse.
The fact that public toilets aren’t a statutory service is outrageous. Most older people and a lot of younger people with medical conditions have to use the toilet a lot, and not having working public loos really makes it hard for them to go out.
@@keighlancoe5933 Fine, but that is really down to the lack of maintenance, another part of the service that the councils are able to cut from their budgets.
They should come back. But also be heavily policed . People like the ones another commenter mentioned will just mess them up for everyone. The saying "this is why we can't have nice things" come to mind. I see why people want gated communities with parks and recreational things where people agree to keep things clean and safe. Sadly we always have people who just don't care that will make it hard for the bulk of us who don't have the money or power to create separate gated communities.
Romans 6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
I was a Norwegian student in Brum university 20 years ago. It was the exact same talk back then. Every municipal building in the city centre has a blue plaque on them saying "partly sponsored by the European Union" because British cities were getting development help. Crisis-funds from the EU. Money predominantly meant for the exact purpose of keeping EU cities from going bankrupt. I remember they were talking about there being 4-500 000 people in poverty in greater Birmingham back then. I wrote a thing for university back then where I blamed it on... The UK economy being focused almost entirely around London.
As the second largest net-contributor to the EU (in a fiscal sense) after Germany, that was just us getting SOME of the money back which we paid in the first place!
@@juliantheapostate8295 Britain has been getting money back since Thatcher negotiated a rebate. Has done wonders indeed in funnelling the money back where Britain needs it eh? The NHS is flourishing, the towns are coming to life with brilliant projects.
The UK donated 100s of billions to the EU and took in 6 million EU citizens costing yet even more 100s of billions!!! Now we have a housing crisis and crisis here and there, we can't cope with the influx
You should do a video on why it is that a single person with a camera is able to produce far superior "content" than anything the BBC puts out these days.
There's at least one more persons working on these. But the answer is that small teams, with minimal restrictions are a lot more efficient than a bureaucratic megalith.
Probably for the same reason why ABC (aussie version of bbc) is pretty crap at political pieces like this, since their funding is determined by the government it discourages journos to be super critical of the government for fear of losing funding or having the story cut entirely. In our case we also had many abc journos getting their jobs through nepotism with their friends & family being tories, thereby affecting their reporting. Not sure if that's the case in the uk but that's happened down here, could be the same.
@@artemisiakyrell7727 Not that I've heard of and I've investigated BBC as part of media studies at GCSE and A-Level, in theory they're supposed to be unbiased and funded by the people of the UK, not the government but there has been some execs who apparently did get their jobs at the BBC through government but not journalists or anyone working with television or radio. In recent years though the BBC and many TV news channels have gone downhill within the UK with a lot lower quality productions, the last good documentary thing I remember watching wasn't on BBC it was ITV's Alan Gates vs The Post Office which was a really high quality dramatisation of real life events relating to the whole Post Office scandal in the UK a few years ago and they seem to be the only channel in the last few years that has been releasing consistently good content but it makes sense when they want to launch their own paid streaming service whilst the BBC is busy trying to reinforce its TV License fees whilst more and more people stop paying it but I still believe their reporting is pretty unbiased and has remained unaffected. Their news, okay, their TV, absolute garbage and not worth the yearly fee which is why people stop paying it.
@AlJay0032 Brits in the City and Home Counties certainly. Mancunians, Liverpudlians and Geordies, not so much. In fact much of the UK really sucks. Whether Foote, in her place, would have been better for Britain is questionable. Losing the Empire, the rise of the US and Japan and multitudinous externalities, including mass immigration, have broken Britain.
OF COURSE IT WAS FUCKIN ORACLE. As an Australian IT worker, I've been leery of oracle for over a decade now, and it is so saddeningly unsurprising that they've showed up to screw up yet again here. I am a little surprised they've upgraded from company grifts to entire cities now. That must be a nice pay increase for their C-suite.
Oracle, SAP, whatever ERP is initially selected, will be promoted as a very cost neutral option. The client buys in to the proposal, and then the finessing process starts. Every little "enhancement" adds cost, changes the scope, requires more time and resources, adds complexity. And nekminute you are thousands/millions higher in costs, delays and under delivered deployments. So called client 'experts' are revealed to be thicker than two planks, and sometimes caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Incentives abound for those with signing authority. You can guarantee that a new ERP is going to cost at least 200% initial quote, and delivery will be twice as long as proposed. NZ has had its fair share of failed and wildly over budget systems. Incis, Swift, AT, Kiosk, Novopay Over promised, under delivered, poor deployment, wild scope changes. IT Project Management seems to suck everywhere.
Same applies with SAP. Pay a huge amount for a new SAP system, it cost double what the old system did in support costs and delivers half the capability of the old system. SAP then send in sales reps to try and sell you more SAP software to solve the problem that the original SAP installation caused.
Not much has changed over the last 25 years it appears. Oracle, SAP or any other ERP software always causes major cost increases and disruption of the operations. Was that way at the end of the 20th century, and still is it seems.
... Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell Come to Jesus Christ today Jesus Christ is only way to heaven Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today Romans 6.23 For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. John 3:16-21 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. Mark 1.15 15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel. 2 Peter 3:9 The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. Hebrews 11:6 6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. Jesus
@@jo2lovid it's not project management to blame. it is deliberate fleecing. the software is designed to be so bad that it requires additional deployment time and people to make it even work in the first place. most of the software errors I encounter when working with oracle ERP are so simple to fix, some literally one line of code, that there is no possible way that it is anything but deliberate
My home town of Woking went bust last year - total corruption, mostly speculating on property development rather than providing services for it's rate payers. If councils were companies criminal charges would be laid. Instead councils just refinance and kick the problem down the street, meaning we have even more suffering to come.
@yayaya... No. Those "companies" would simply close their "Limited Liability" doors, paying NO debts or taxes, and reopen under a new name the next day....
A lot of councils are involved with dodgy speculation schemes. Weirdly enough, the same people cutting off their money and making them raise their own are the ones who also destroyed the restrictions on council investments, making it easier to get involved in or taken advantage of by dodgy deals.
So private or public, unless the spirit of the people is against corruption then the only game worth playing is screwing everybody over? I need to leave this terrible country and move to the moon.
You too, seems to be a thing. Here in the US also. The chance of buying a home no way. billionaires are running out of things to invest in. More play things for our betters, come after all they wouldn't have All This Money if they hadn't earned it far and square never calling sick for work - running their expire like us lazy good for nothing's Millionaires are scum to a billionaire.
Liverpool is actually a great example of why this is happening, in the last 10 years the conservative government have reduced the amount they give the Liverpool city council by over 90%, forcing them to massively hike up council tax. This video touches on some of the issues but isn't really making any inferences into how we have somehow increased tax to the highest point that it has been for nearly a hundred years on both national and regional levels, and massively reduced the amount of spending going towards public services. And yet, supposedly, we have no money and the government are struggling. We, the fifth richest nation in the world with a relatively small population to support, have no money despite spending less and taxing more. Where the fuck has the money gone? People are getting too bogged down in specific and small scale economic changes and not really questioning how, on a national scale, we are giving the government more and getting less back only for the government to claim that they are struggling. There are only really three possible ways for this to occur: 1) The government are so fundamentally inept that they are simply losing or wasting all of the money by accident in an almost comedic fashion. 2) The government are intentionally throwing money in a huge bottomless pit to the benefit of nobody for seemingly no reason to appease the bottomless pit. 3) The government are weaponising an air of false incompetence to distract from the fact that they are quite literally pocketing the money themselves in huge quantities. Edit: I am loving the response this is getting, calling out corruption and inefficiency across the board. But the take away is that this is based in a broad range of factors that represent institutional failures at every level due to both greed and the inherent problems with capitalism, mainly the blatant inefficiencies and the fact that the end goal is explicitly to funnel money into the hands of the rich for personal enjoyment, and not into public hands for the good of the people. All 3 I pointed out are happening to varying degrees, as well as everything you guys have pointed out, some of which may be a combination of fall into one of the categories, but they're all interconnected regardless and I hope we can all agree that the solution is not minor reform, it's a complete economic overhaul.
That's been the trajectory since Thatcher. The sinkhole the British dug by privatizing public services, and subsidizing and bailing them out instead of having them public, along with the Monarchy sapping wealth from the government and you have a recipe for a 3rd world country in the making
4) the money all gets sent over to the private sector and funnelled upwards to near no benefit. The neoliberal decline in government capacity means everything must be contracted to the private sector, which can subcontract etc with massive profit margins taken at every step. This would show outwardly as increases in inequality, housing crisis, increasing stocks with declining real wages, etc
'O' level economics taught me that the way to improve a community was to put money into the hands of people that would spend it in their community. This is how money goes around - or back and forth as businesses trade with each other. This is why corporate business removing money from the circulating cash, and giving it to share holders can stall a trading economy.
Yes. That is the equity market. What's happening is that, those money entered into the media world. I.e. social media and the media.... It goes outside of the country. Then reblackmailed, back into the country etc. There are ways to persue those individuals but you will find that the next thing that happens is that you will be targeted and taken down.
But don't corporations pay employees to then spend their money. And then don't shareholders sell their shares and spend money? The high street is dead. Put things there that people will use. I spent 2 hrs today trying to find a phone case for pixel 5. Not one single shop had one because it was all apple and Samsung. Wasted 2 hrs in my local community where I could have bought one on eBay.
I have a 3 and a half hour drive tomorrow and I am not even leaving my state of Texas nor even driving from one side to the other that would be near 10 hours. You could basically fit the entire UK in Texas with room to spare.
Seeing Birmingham declare bankruptcy is a reminder how deep financial mismanagement runs. I worked 30 years for a fortune 500 firm, was able to retire at 54 and live in a gated community where I can enjoy my last years. SAVE MONEY so it is there when it is needed. You can travel, relocate or whatever you might want, some things are always going to be beyond our control but not everything. As someone else said, it can be cool to be a minimalist and poor when young, but it really sucks when you are old. So work for your future self.
I enjoyed my job and didn't view it as "a daily grind." I also had a lot of freedom and flexibility. Retirement for me has been all losses and no gains, I'm afraid. Each withdrawal has only made it difficult for my savings to recover through compounding. It feels like etf's and bonds might just be limiting my returns instead of managing risk
I'm approaching retirement and having a financial advisor has been helpful. I started investing later than most, so relying on compound interest from index funds or bonds wasn’t enough for me. Despite that, I’ve managed to do well and am on track to retire with around $6 million
I usually avoid making specific recommendations because everyone’s situation is unique. However, my experience with Emily Ava Milligan has been quite positive. You might find it helpful to see if her approach fits your needs
@@brianh9358Every US video talking about the US's problems. "So all this started when Reagan..." Every UK video talking about UK's problem's 'All this started when Thatcher..."
@@Medusas_Barber Yeah he is a good business man when it's for his own personal gain but when it comes to the country those skills magically disappear and the outcomes for the UK are worse than any other time in history - how many times have cities actually gone bankrupt? We have sewage in our water again; we've gone full circle back to the 19th century. Where is he even getting the time to make so much money for himself while the country he's “serving” implodes? The optics are horrendous, I refuse to believe that there is no conflict of interests when making vast sums of money like that
@@Obez45 people who are European will always care more about their own people then your people that is human nature to care more about your own people before others it's like people have forgotten that we are different peoples fighting each other for resources that is what life is all about the western world has forgotten what life is about we have been in peace for 80 years that vast majority of the whole time or recorded history we have always been at war with each other welcome back to reality the boomer era is over it was a once in a lifetime thing that will not happen again until we decide to conquer other countries and take their resources.
I live in Birmingham, have all my life. There's always been dodgy deals going on, cuts cuts cuts, but council tax skyrocketing. Amenities, public transport, libraries, schools are all being ignored and left to go to ruin. Building a new hospital with less beds than what it's replacing, building a new library that nobody wanted or needed, which has a leaking roof and again less space for all the books. My city council has been a joke since I was a kid. it's getting better in some ways, but so much worse in others.
There's hardly space for books in libraries built in the past 20 years. Shelves are only four feet high. Cardiff Central library opened in 2009 is the pits. There huge gaps in the floors so you can see down to the ground or first floor.
The IT system costs are like everywhere. Lack of knowledge by managers. Full of people with business admin, law and accountant degrees. But no senior managers who understand the systems. So big IT companies can run rings around them
The model is this: Charge out "consultants" at £1000 per day. Hire fresh out of uni students. Pay them the minimum salary you can get away with. Pocket the profit. Meanwhile, they fleece the decent permanent staff at their victim organisation for knowledge. Making them useful to the IT consultancy at the council's expense. Once council has to cut costs, offer to take over at a quarter of the salary. Then shaft them on support costs. Seen it SO many times.
Brilliant work, Tom, the extra effort really paid off here. A little addition to your description of privatizing waste removal: I live in Chicago, which, contrary to conservatives' depictions of the city, LOVES to privatize city services, including waste removal; it has contracts with a couple different companies, including the creatively named Waste Management. Now, for several years studies showed that Chicago had one of the worst recycling rates of major US cities. The narrative was that we Chicagoans were too dumb or lazy to properly separate garbage from recyclables, so we kept hopelessly contaminating our bins of recyclables, which had to be dumped instead. TURNS OUT that the aforementioned Waste Management was contracted to deal with recycling as well as garbage. So they'd get paid once when they went to retrieve a recycling bin... and if that bin happened to be marked (by them) as contaminated, they'd get paid a second time to haul that bin to the dump. So there was a direct financial incentive for them to falsely mark recycling as contaminated. Just another example of companies' environmental destruction being falsely blamed on individual consumers.
Much of private capital is dodgy. When your sole aim as a business is to make profit (often for distant shareholders), then such dodgy practices can be expected. In the meantime, the central government cuts its overseeing. For the effects of that, we have recent examples with Boeing.
I studied urban planning and finished both my Bachelors and Masters outside of the UK, which I don't particularly want to return to, at least partly because of the frankly dire state of local authority investment in public sector planning. You captured my sense of local economic depression so effectively in this. Every Christmas, when I go back, it seems my local authority has sold off another childhood memory or abandoned another treasured social space. Certainly my experience of speaking with urban planners who both work and have worked in my local authorities is one of desperation; there is such a sense of hopelessness. I think you could even be more explicit in tying Government's neglect of its local funding obligations to the disenfranchisement of the public and the decay of daily life throughout the country- the grime, the mess... It's really cool to see you briefly touch on the Preston example at the end there, because I think that the LA there also has some unique socioeconomic (and political) characteristics which empower the council to be a little more bold than others. While I've never been, from some further reading it does seem to have had a not insignificant effect- you can see that in the Indices of Deprivation data. If you happen to be in Vienna any time soon, then let me know and I'll very gladly try my best to explain how the post-War generation here was instrumental in the creation of the world's first true still-operating socialised housing system! And also complain about the hell that are town council economic assessment forms in the South of England.
It's a bit sad you can't see that we need fewer 'urban planners', and that 'local authorities' could not sell off what was instead private property, or if the 'authority' was vested in the local electorate.
@@DP-tf7qb Almost every modern malaise is due to 'planners' being empowered and set to work instead of credit-power being at the disposal of individuals to avail themselves of what technology makes possible.
Tonight on Top Gear: Hammond finds out the local city council is bankrupt, May sees an old building 'That's it right there' and I move all my financial assets off-shore.
Uncanny how similar this situation is to the Netherlands. Specifically in 2015 something called the Wet Maatschappelijke Ondersteuning (WMO, Law Societal Support) transferred a lot of power regarding subsidies for things like wheel chairs, cleaning help, pedagogical services, etc. from the central government to the municipalities. Officially to "bring it closer to the people". But with it came of course massive budget cuts. And it also meant there are massive differences between municipalities now between levels of support. In the bigger cities it is usually okay, but in smaller ones a Scrooge-y "they don't need help; they should go work" alderman can make people's life hell.
It's almost a three tier world. If the municipality is big enough you've got the means to build the bureaucracy to do it good, but if you're between 20k-150k it's too small to do that. The 10k almost know all their pappenheimers, and the help also gets mostly where it's needed...
I like the attempt to step up the content quality and not just do the classic backseat UA-camr gig where you just see what's available on the Internet. Happy to be supporting via nebula and UA-cam. Don't be discouraged by smaller numbers! The viewers notice the effort.
I think that all big IT contractors (Fujitsu, Oracle, IBM etc) should be unable to win contracts in the UK, they have proven time and time again that they are unable to deliver on-time, on-budget, or with quality.
Whoever runs the .gov and HMRC websites are really on it though. Find another country where you can do a cash basis self assessment tax return in like half an hour online, or get divorced, or renew a driving licence, with such ease.
@@Jonathan_Doe_ That'd be GDS and I think HMRC in-house. They developed a set of really decent guidelines for making public facing government websites, when they are followed it's consistent and generally good. For non-public facing it's a minefield.
They should have to prove there are no local/national options before going with international companies. It's not just an issue of competence, but extraction of resources, security, and investment in industry workers.
Computer projects are complicated. A humanities major like this YT guy are unlikely to understand the complexities. These things fail when boutique requests and bizarre requirements are thrown into the project halfway through. You want an out of the box solution, that goes smooth as silk.
@@CentristDad155 Of course computer projects are complicated. But when you have contracts that aren't a fixed price (whether it is software or the F-35), you run into cost overruns.
Next time a customer asks me why the library I work at is closing next month, I'll just point them towards this video... (As someone who works in council public services, yes, things are just as awful right now as this video suggests)
Just tell them landlords are struggling so they need more flats for immigrants. It's funny to watch people realise they've been shafted when they thought they were shafting you.
@@richardwills-woodwardonce I would have agreed with you but I’ve been working with a council as a contractor for a few months. They are very focused on reducing costs, everything is up for review, nothing is untouchable. One problem is my team were working to a plan set out by the minister as it’s a government lead project. Then there was a reshuffle, new minister told everyone to stop, he took 6 weeks to get up to date, and has now completely changed direction. I’ve found this frustrating but was told by colleagues who have been there for some time that in the last 5 years this is how it’s been. They’ve never seen such chaos in government, ministers are on a revolving door, and there’s no clear direction. All local councillors wanted to do these last few months is spend money on things which could help them get reelected. All ministers want to do is blow budgets before the general election. All whilst we got an email saying that the council wasn’t going to supply washing up liquid to the kitchen anymore, could we bring in our own! Yes the pension liability is big but they pay less. If you take away benefits then you are either going to get no one or people who can’t get jobs elsewhere. I think many councils can find efficiencies but there are bigger problems at the top
@@PhysicsGamer Where did I state such a thing? It is of itself unproductive regardless, but it has a social use that should the individual engage with, could end inn a £42,000 salary which means that person has used the library to obtain knowledge to earn a salary that means they pay in more than they take out. Now, you could also argue it has a social good in that it provides knowledge, but this is just theory and has no proof. The ignorance of young people today and the disgusting views they hold of the country through brainwashing tells me they have never read a book. These libraries don't stop anyone from becoming another useful idiot for communist causes. Therefore, their purpose is in question. Book-reading is dead it seems, and only propaganda from social media seems to hold sway. A library is also only useful if it covers ALL subjects and does not engage in propaganda, as most public former educational establishments do. At best, libraries provide a local focal point for tea/coffee and computers for 'job-searching' by people with zero chance of achieving anything productive at all. They should not be in this position, but they have been hijacked by ideology and the third world. They should be places of learning. They are not. What is a library for if not learning?
It is not just the cities, it is the entire country that is collapsing. I know that because I saw that happen to my country in the early 2000's. All institutions managed by the government start to fail partially, taxes rise, but they can't keep up with expenses, people move away, companies shut down, there is a generalized sense of gloom. Decay becomes physically visible, in the facades of buildings, on the potholes in the pavement, the poorly patched infrastructure, in the lack of implementation of new technologies. It is not just the cities...
Just wanted to add @ 4:21 you were driving under the Six Ways roundabout in Aston, Birmingham, the fancy colours on the walls were painted on as this was the same road that led to Alexander Stadium from the centre. However, the areas surrounding this are low income neighborhoods with high crime rates (I lived there) and before the starting ceremonies there was a murder of a young boy who was shot as a mistaken identity by gangs. The council, instead of increasing policing or helping local communities, decided to ‘streamline’ the visitors experience by redecorating the one road that led to and from the stadium this even included the Newtown Swimming Baths which has been underfunded for so long it looked like it was literally about to crumble. They added a false wall to the front facing parts of the building and added some colour and paintings whilst not even touching the inside of the building. The plan was similar to what Brazil done with their Rio olympics by blocking out the poorer parts of the city from view by enacting walls on motorways so people travelling don’t have to see the surrounding squalor. The local residents could not even afford the tickets to the games let alone actively participate in what would have otherwise been a great moment in Birmingham’s history. I, myself, really wanted to go but couldn’t afford to bring my friends and family along.
I rented a car in Newcastle and it did not have a spare tire. This was appalling to me as an American, when tire had an issue. Is this normal in the UK? I was told it was to save on the mass of the car or some nonsense
@@CentristDad155 Neither of the last 2 cars I've owned have had a spare, just a tin of puncture repair goo. I'm reasonably sure it's just a cost saving measure
@@DjDolHaus86 cool... And, in rental cars, just go ahead and throw a spare in the trunk. Are you certain the issue here is not a 'scarcity mentality'? ( That is the 4th term I settled on as the first 3 were more pejorative.)
@@CentristDad155 No, I'm fairly sure it's down to squeezing maximum profits from the product. I'm not saying I'm a fan, I'd much rather have a spare tyre than a useless tin of goo, I just think it's basic capitalism rather than any kind of mindset.
@@DjDolHaus86 Perhaps but I've gotten a spare tire in every other country I've rented a car in. I'm asking for your opinion here. I don't just make up stuff and pretend that it's facts. That's with the far left and far right in America do. I'm just saying I've noticed in the UK there's this mentality of we can have this or we can have that but not both. Hey how about we all just work an extra 10 or 15 minutes a day and then we can have both.
Hey Tom! Been a fan for quite a while off and on, but I gotta say, this video is an exceptional piece of work and you should be super proud of yourself and the team. This discussion of the long-term costs of corporate privatization vs. traditional job creation vs. explicit wealth reinvestment is an extremely important one and telling this story is quite hard and often horribly depressing. I'm proud of you! Keep at it, brother!
Not if you import the Third World. what do you expect? Hardly the calibre of culture that built the industrial revolution, created the scientific method and invented most of the world's modernity. Why import people from cultures thousands of years behind our own and bankrupt yourself?
sort of? It does play a somewhat useful role of (in theory) protecting anyone the city employs or contracts with, so the city doesn't just keep hiring people to do work only to have it then turn out they never get paid. I mean, I'm generally very much against the fiscal responsibility / austerity perspective on government, but I do think you need at least some of that. It is possible (although very far from the reality right now) to go too far the other direction from austerity, and bankruptcy provides a back stop for irresponsible spending by a city. I'm not saying this to disagree with all the points made in the video or claiming that these particular bankruptcies are the fault of irresponsibility on the part of the cities involved, just to say that eliminating the possibility of a city going bankrupt is not really a safe solution.
It makes people responsible, or it should do. Policies matter. It is political. Almost all councils that goes bankrupt are socialist councils. This is statistically noteworthy and significant.
@@richardwills-woodward it's because, instead of a publicly owned company, private companies are contracted for the social service, benefiting private shareholders. If public company handled it, then local government would be the shareholder, making the service self-benefiting.
I was going to watch this video, but then realized I don't need more gloom in life. Instead, I'm off to watch a Warhammer 40k Lore video. That won't be so grim and dark.
honestly it is not as grim as you would think - it teaches a lot of interesting stuff about how british govt works and also talks about one instance of a council doing a much better job at avoiding the decline
@@ringsaphireu real? Back in the days the concept of the Emperor coming back was both a possibility and a desirable outcome. Now is more possible, but also pretty much the final nail in the galaxy's coffin (if Tyranids or Necrons wont do it first). And Primarchs so far aint helping much either.
Community wealth building is probably the most important economic development of our times. It gives locals power even when larger levels of government don't support them, and has both left-wing objectives of working-class control and conservative principles of decentralization and efficient use of resources. If larger levels of government ever do support it, it could really change the game. Thanks for this awesome coverage.
At least there was one hint of bright opportunism in this piece! We need to do the same nationally with all the essential utilities we privatised. Bring them back into public ownership, they've all failed. Owned by the people, for the people, not profit and asset stripping.
@@aries6776 It's not even privatization that is the main issue. Switzerland, and the Nordic Countries actually also "privatized" a lot. But always kept a majority stake in the new companies, therefore ensuring that are in control. Many, also are operating like independent businesses, still fully owned by the cities and states and if they make a profit, it supported they cities budget. E.g. my cities public transport company, was in the deep red and needed support during covid, but before and since, it generally delivers a nice profit to the city. It bids for the contract , as do the fully private companies. Key is: You need to deliver on the contract. Seems to me, in the UK, if you fail to deliver as a private company, you get away with it and can pocket the money. This corruption is the main problem.
@@beyondEV You are correct in your distinction. More accurately I would say the way the British have done privatisation is completely flawed. But that's how privatisation was sold to us and the only way we know it. It was the state not being involved at ALL in any aspect of the privatised company. So the way we do privatisation needs to be redefined.
I'm not a Brit, and I'm not certain how much of this applies to my local government's budgets, but it's a solidly made video and good food for thought.
Back after watching the nebula bonus video - as someone who graduated from Falmouth uni last year, from south Warwickshire, your drive up the m5 has me nostalgic lol. Btw the fanciest service station in the south west is Gloucester services (Cornwall services also pretty fancy, but obviously not on your way) Gloucester uses local produce and stuff like it’s practically a farm shop. It’s expensive but satisfies my inappropriately snobbish brummie father’s bougie tastes 😂
The equivalent of £16k per adult in the UK was given to private corporations after the 2008 recession. Because they were "too big to fail". Socialism for the rich. That was the largest transference of public money to the private sector in history. And that money, is still with those people, who are buying up assets and increasing prices across the board. And it will not stop until the mega rich, those with more than 10 million or so, are tax far, far more aggressively to get it back. Your council operations and make-up and the way it works have nothing to do with this. It's all about the rich buying assets including government assets and putting up prices. It's actually very simple. Tax is the only solution, not the poor, not the middle classes, (like they want to) not even those with a couple of million pounds in the back. But the 1% of the country that has 20% of the countries entire wealth. If we had even 50% of that wealth back this entire country would enter a new golden age. Tell your councillors to pressure the government to massively increase tax to the 1% of earners and wealth holders.
Exactly the solution and also the secret to how the massive post WW2 economic boom in the US was fueled. Not losing to the Nazis or suffering direct bombing certainly helped but the top tax in the nineties percent forced the rich to allow money to fall to the working class and be circulated in unprecedented quantities leading to the unprecedented growth. And since that rate was literally keyed to those making more than twenty times the average income it literally meant that the elites had to allow the average to increase to get richer themselves where they freely get richer at everyone else's expense today.
Exactly the solution and also the secret to how the massive post WW2 economic boom in the US was fueled. Not losing to the Axis or suffering direct bombing certainly helped but the top tax in the nineties percent forced the rich to allow money to fall to the working class and be circulated in unprecedented quantities leading to the unprecedented growth. And since that rate was literally keyed to those making more than twenty times the average income it literally meant that the elites had to allow the average to increase to get richer themselves where they freely get richer at everyone else's expense today.
Exactly right. The solution and also the secret to how the massive economic boom in the US from the 1940s-60s was fueled. Not losing WW2 or suffering directly certainly helped but it was the top tax in the ninety percent range that forced the rich to allow money to fall to the working class and be circulated in unprecedented quantities leading to the unparalleled growth. And since that rate was literally keyed to those making more than twenty times the average income it literally meant that the elites had to allow the average to increase to in order to get richer themselves where they freely get richer at everyone else's expense today.
Yes. Same thins has happened in the USA. If we'd had Bernie Sanders as President instead of Trump in 2016 we might be on the way to getting that money back, he's the only politician who is always looking out fore the "little man"
I'm so impressed with the videos on this channel that I've subscribed. Very refreshing views, without the clickbait and hyperbole symbolic in so many other youtubers. Lastly, the section about the Preston Model was deeply refreshing. And great closure to the video, showing that there are viable options out there that can benefit local communities and stem the wealth drain and inequality so endemic in the UK.
Wasn't sure whether to comment this or not 😅 Tom looked so happy in the behind the scenes video about it being a Simpsons-like nuclear power plant, I feel a bit sad to burst his bubble! It's actually one of the (or the?) last coal power stations in the country. And closing this year, apparently. I think Tom Scott did a video with it in not that long ago, too.
The premise of localism is that local authorities have the legal right to do loads of things, but also the legal obligation to do many of things, and the inability to raise money to actually do those things. And of course, people will blame their Labour council for cuts which are effectively passed on from central Government. What's interesting is that councils have cut staff over the last decade, but central government headcount has actually increased.
Councils charge more than ever before. We are taxed the second highest amount in history, yet services decline (in mostly Labour councils). it is a lack of competence not money. They are happy to spend on rainbows, diversity officers and anti-white racist policy, yet can't seem to find the money for the basics.
and the central government could be doing a lot more to fund these localities without raising taxes. Taxes don't actually fund anything the central government does
@@inphowatcher9748 Every penny the government spends is created by the government. It simply extends its overdraft with the bank of England. So why does it tax at all? To create demand for the currency, and to control inflation by reducing our spending power. That's it. Taxes can't pay for spending because the spending comes first (or else we wouldn't have the money to pay the tax) and then some of that money is deleted via tax. I highly recommend checking out a book called The Deficit Myth, it mainly covers the US but it applies here as well
Im from nottingham and our local council has sold huge amounts of its land and assets to developers who only build student housing meanwhile hiking taxes up to the highest in the country. Its beyond a joke. Even increasing parking charges making sure noone wants to come into town and soend money
This was Jeremy Corbyn's program. Like usual, the "Left" were 100% correct, as even Militant was, but Centrists and "Moderates" and their media lackies would rather have their teeth pulled than do anything but bend over for the Tories and Tory narratives, because "Centrists" will always view the left as a bigger threat to their positions.
He also runs open mic nights at my pub as well as others, and organises lots of local events and always offers opportunities to the local businesses - incredibly active in the community too. Great fella.
It can be surprising how often a single person makes most of the difference. Curiously, this becomes an argument in favor of aristocracy. Perhaps not everywhere should be ruled by a mob - especially a far away mob.
That's what happens when a poor country tries to play rich instead of coming out honestly. They should have come out by 1975, five years after nationwide wage stagnation. They are forced to come out in 2024 through bankruptcy half a century later. Trying to build Las vegas strip, Manhattan, chicago, miami, wall street, los Angeles all and all into one city - London when they should have not tried to play rich in the first place at all. So London must be really great, isn't it because Brits have wasted every penny into it trying to say they too have it in their country? Nope, it's nowhere anywhere close to any of the cities above. London was a case for Brits to save their faces in the rapidly changing 21 century. They just put everything in London instead of spreading out because it requires money to spread out. It's a way for Brits to say, "Oh, great we too have our financial city our entertainment, our resorts, hotel & casino city.. etc in the UK." So they did everything just for name sake and not to be a world leader. Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool, Birmingham, nottingham, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Newcastle. Every major city outside of London, not one of them can afford to lay Asphalt or widen their 5 feet cities streets. There are millions & millions of potholes everywhere. In 2024, when even 80% of urban population in cambodia lives in title flooring. 90% of the families in the UK still live in an uneven and at least a 100 year old wooden flooring. The generations today or that are to inherit the homes do not have the money to lay new flooring once the flooring catches mold or decay. Most of them will be forced to street or forced to sell their homes to Indians, Jews, Arabs, Chinese, Americans or Russians. This group owns more homes in the UK than the natives and the data shows that more and more British homes will be owned by the groups of investors from these countries. The scene is bad with 70% of the families owning just one single small hatchback for the entire family as a means to transport and go to work. The good side of the statistics is that even though the majority of British families can finance the max of €38k for an automobile by their banks. 35% of all buyers opts for the cheapest models of BMW and Mercedes. After all they can say which car they drive and at least win in one area against Americans unless and until they do not tell it's a small hatchback BMW or Mercedes that costs a freaking €24k. Cheers mate. I have a range. Brits are welcome. You can always come and go back to the grass diet. I love my cattle and livestock. You'll be well taken care of.
Also a single small hatchback for the entire family, seriously? And the cheapest models of BMW and Mercedes all below €28k are in the top 10 most sold automobiles in the UK for the last decade. It's sad to see British families Really hungering down to afford the basic needs but also not wanting to split from their posh lifestyle. Why even buy a €24k BMW with their last penny just to stay in debt to the bank for the next 10 years? It's all a malady of collective and repetitive actions by a group of poor citizens going broke to appear rich and catch up with the rest of the world. Nothing more. Had they not tried to compete with the Americans and lived like a below middle class. They won't have had the problems. It's a case of a poor neighbour (UK) who got envious of their millionaire neighbour (USA) and tried to match them by taking on more and more debts until their entire salary could no longer service even the minimum payments of the debts and courts declared them bankrupt and sold their assets to the millionaire neighbour. The rich neighbour knew all alone, the hatred and envy his neighbour had for him beneath that smile during their occasional pump in while leaving for work and while coming back from work. So the millionaire neighbour played dumb and started hatching a plan that will teach his envious neighbour a lesson he will never forget nor recover from. Afterall, revenge is best served cold 🥶❄️.
When are you and Gary Stevenson going to speak to each other in a video on a topic like this, for example; how the “bankruptcy” of a major UK city is an example of the hollowing out and dispossession of government by the rich ruling class? One of Mr. Stevenson’s favorite subjects, the phenomenon of the dispossession of the middle class at the same time as the self-destructive “government” lead “privatizing” efforts to impoverish the government and the state itself at all levels is a worthy topic for you both to share your viewership with. I look forward to seeing anything that might result from your collaboration. Thanks for this video. Unbelievable really for someone born in the 1960s; all-too-believable however for someone who reached adulthood in the Reagan-Thatcher-Mulroney (I grew up in Canada, and Mulroney was an ideological neoliberal privatizer and a close manly best buddy of Reagan … and formed a close friendship of regularly expressed mutual admiration with the Iron Lady too) and I have grown increasingly dismayed to see the nonstop massive accumulation of upper class wealth at the same time as an adoption of an unquestioned identification of the economic and ideological interests of the wealthiest members of our democracies with those of the average citizen, even as the life of the average citizen has gotten progressively measurably worse while the lives of the wealthiest get clearly objectively visibly different, better, and measurably so by orders of magnitude as every decade has passed since the 1980s. Well … let us know if there’s any work with anyone ready to provoke some fiery organization, resistance and efforts to make change that might recapture and redistribute some of the vast wealth and power hoarded among the wage earning, hard working voting supporters of democracy in our countries. Cheers!
The exact same thought was on mind as I watched this, especially where Tom talked about the 'Preston model'. Keeping money circulating between regular people rather than being syphoned off to the very richest fits right in with Gary Stevenson's arguments about the tragic consequences of spiralling wealth inequality. If Gary is correct, local government bankruptcy is an inescapable consequence of an ever greater proportion of the money supply being captured by the super rich. As households have less money, the tax base shrinks while costs continue to rise due to asset price inflation. No matter how prudent they are, no council can remain solvent when budgets are continually falling and prices constantly rising.
@@TimmakesmusicVery keenly observed and explained. I was hoping a little of Gary’s seeming revolutionary spirit and theoretical explanatory power might be suitably combined with some actual people’s experience and testimony like Tom did here. We shall see; and can only hope to look forward to such a combined energy in the near future !
Councils charge more than ever before. We are taxed the second highest amount in history, yet services decline (in mostly Labour councils). it is a lack of competence not money. They are happy to spend on rainbows, diversity officers and anti-white racist policy, yet can't seem to find the money for the basics.
The best work going on to address the failures of the government in London is to breakup the British state int it's component parts. Scotland and Wales can run their own affairs thank you very much. The mess the English have gotten us into is entirely due to their ex colonial hubris where they imagine they are 'special' because they had an empire, of which my friend your ancestors and mine were part the creation of as well as the victims of. They, the Anglo's, believe they won ww2 single handed, forgetting about the millions of Russians, Indians , Canadians, etc who also fought the axis And dont forget they won the world cup in 196?. Free my people
@@therealrobertbirchall Without the British the english speaking world would have likely become history. Russians were on the same side as Germany - they were communists. They were not trying to eradicate the tyranny of communism. English speaking culture is unique on earth and in human history. It created the modern world and I am tired of being attacked for our success like Israel. The Canadians are of english stock (or were before the Third World arrived). The same as the US. Its entire Constitution is the expression of the Bill of Rights 1688/9. Its legal system is English in nature - the common law. Everyone had empires, but the British were the best at it and did it in a way that made its ex-colonies want to stay connected to Britain in some way, achieved by no other empire. It ended peacefully, like no other empire. British history is why you eat the way you do, tell the time, turn the lights on, have modern healthcare, universities, museums, tv and an endless list of things. It is also why the world has any concept of rights and has contract law. If you are in Britain then it is England you owe your own liberty to. So get back in your box and close the lid....tightly.
That's good, Auckland, NZ forced everyone to have a bucket sized plastic bin for food scraps instead of allowing those with compost heaps to opt out. 440,000 were sent out to homes and around 40% max of the city actually use them so over 260,000 wasted bins made, paid for and taking up space in people's homes. The 'service' isn't free either, every household is charged the equivalent of £40 a year and given that the city had met its quota for food scrap collection it knew the majority of the city wasn't going to participate and the scheme was just a tax hike.
Warrington has been charging for garden waste collection for years. In our case, green bins must have an appropriate sticker for the year, or they won't be emptied. The buying a sticker idea is a little better than a blanket charge on everyone, though, because people without gardens don't have to pay. The stickers have serial numbers to attempt to detect forgeries. 👀
That's what happens when a poor country tries to play rich instead of coming out honestly. They should have come out by 1975, five years after nationwide wage stagnation. They are forced to come out in 2024 through bankruptcy half a century later. Trying to build Las vegas strip, Manhattan, chicago, miami, wall street, los Angeles all and all into one city - London when they should have not tried to play rich in the first place at all. So London must be really great, isn't it because Brits have wasted every penny into it trying to say they too have it in their country? Nope, it's nowhere anywhere close to any of the cities above. London was a case for Brits to save their faces in the rapidly changing 21 century. They just put everything in London instead of spreading out because it requires money to spread out. It's a way for Brits to say, "Oh, great we too have our financial city our entertainment, our resorts, hotel & casino city.. etc in the UK." So they did everything just for name sake and not to be a world leader. Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool, Birmingham, nottingham, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Newcastle. Every major city outside of London, not one of them can afford to lay Asphalt or widen their 5 feet cities streets. There are millions & millions of potholes everywhere. In 2024, when even 80% of urban population in cambodia lives in title flooring. 90% of the families in the UK still live in an uneven and at least a 100 year old wooden flooring. The generations today or that are to inherit the homes do not have the money to lay new flooring once the flooring catches mold or decay. Most of them will be forced to street or forced to sell their homes to Indians, Jews, Arabs, Chinese, Americans or Russians. This group owns more homes in the UK than the natives and the data shows that more and more British homes will be owned by the groups of investors from these countries. The scene is bad with 70% of the families owning just one single small hatchback for the entire family as a means to transport and go to work. The good side of the statistics is that even though the majority of British families can finance the max of €38k for an automobile by their banks. 35% of all buyers opts for the cheapest models of BMW and Mercedes. After all they can say which car they drive and at least win in one area against Americans unless and until they do not tell it's a small hatchback BMW or Mercedes that costs a freaking €24k. Cheers mate. I have a range. Brits are welcome. You can always come and go back to the grass diet. I love my cattle and livestock. You'll be well taken care of.
Great video Tom. However I found the near-continuous music rather distracting at times. Short bits of incidental music are fine, but I feel it's better not to leave it running in the background constantly, especially when it's often quite raucous rather than gentle ambient! Keep up the good work anyway!
"Drive an inadvisable distance", bro I live in the US. We had to put turns in the roads of Missouri because the endless miles of identical corn on both sides of the road kept hypnotizing people into thinking they were not moving. They would go made and pass out from driving through too much corn.
Non-US people really don't know how ridiculous it is to live in the US sometimes. Try living somewhere with no place to buy food or drink without having to drive 20 miles (32.19 km) one way (40 miles [64.37 km] altogether), and then it's even further for the closest job opportunities. It's unfortunately very normal over here, and we don't have the luxury of having decent public transportation in the majority of the country.
@@MugenHeadNinja my family keep asking me if I'd like to move to America and I have to keep explaining that this exactly is simply not bearable living conditions
Nice documentary, i like this new direction you're going. The sound, when filming, is a bit down compared to the background sound. We like to enjoy your fabulous British accent 😅 Keep up this type of production Cheers
Fujitsu (post office) and Oracle (local councils) were forced upon the Tories for outsourcing to private companies. The Tories foist upon local government all manner of things that Westminster should fund. Westminster would have a lot more income to distribute, if they taxed "The City" and income in Tax Havens. Only the rich and the landed gentry get away with that. The property owners should be assessed to pay a yearly land tax, on investment properties.
Great video! Coincidentally, I grew up in Northamptonshire and went to university in Preston, so I appreciated seeing some coverage of both places here! Even back in 2010 when I was a part-time library assistant with Northamptonshire county council, things were bleak for us - most libraries were closed in 2005-2010, and I watched my colleagues go through horrendous cuts to jobs that left us battling to keep the libraries open to our service users with so few of us left. The few people I know still living there have few jobs prospects unless they can drive a long commute/find remote work, and the town centre of Northampton is depressing to say the least. Preston is an underrated little city and if it wasn't for my career choices, I would have been there a lot longer!
@@henrydemonfreid1985Yes in the eighties the health authority in Northampton closed St Crispin Hospital tefing the patients out in the community and promptly built a new office block for themselves at Northampton General Hospital
Housing crisis caused by mass immigration. We're importing more people every year than houses we have built in record years of house building. It's not possible or desireable that Britain build a million homes every year indefinitely. Closing the borders and sending millions home would be great for the housing crisis and benefit the British massively.
@@Patrick-y4d1z It's almost exclusively caused by that. Blair opened the border and the Tories kicked it wide open. We went from an average of 25k immigrants a year before Blair to 250k a year under him and now 1 million a year under the Tories. This is not sustainable. Almost all of them need to be sent home.
Tom, I've been watching your videos for a while now and I gotta say these last few videos you've made are absolutely _excellent_. You're clearly putting your funding to good use and the planning and creative execution of the subjects you end up covering is absolutely on point. Good job :) (i haven't finished the video yet, currently wondering if the situation is any different in Scotland, but never mind if you end up talking about it :p)
I represent a ward in a unitary authority in the West of England. Mercifully we got the budget through although there were cuts to the third sector sadly but increased investment in social care and children’s services. We are responsible for around 800 statutory and discretionary services - the latter are what makes a council unique and defines a place and how it engages with its communities. Excellent video! 👏
I apologize for commenting before the video is done. these traveling segments and interviews with experts and common folk are so NICE; I like Tom's general content with explanations and one man show, but this is aldo such a nice addition. Despite this being a sad topic, i am having a really nice audiovisual experience. Thank you for your hard work, Tom and anybody else who collaborates on this channel.
I used to live in croydon. I remember when i was little walking around Whitgift shopping centre and it being full of life and people. Now its almost empty and just feels very wrong and sad. I only go to croydon to go to the arcade now.
UK government is much more centralized than the US. Central governments meddling with local councils is where the fundamental problem lies. They mandate certain things, while also making it increasingly hard to raise the funds. The most badly run councils are going bankrupt now, but it will extend to the better run ones as time goes on.
It is radically different than the way it works in the United States. In the US, states have the power to raise additional funds to fund whatever they want. They can raise taxes, they can sell bonds, they can sell land. They aren’t obligated to do most services and when they are the federal government requires them to do such a service the the federal government has to provide the funding. States have way more autonomy in the US Than the UK (10th amendment).
@@rachelnotluf4585the comparison is apt for this conversation. The point of the conversation is that in the UK, the federal government dictates things to cities and towns with little flexibility at the local level. In Canada and the US, both have middle tier governments (states/provinces) that have constitutional authority to raise taxes without federal government involvement and it's that middle tier that is responsible for cities, towns, counties. The focus of a state/province is necessarily more focused within the border of that state/province. In the UK, central government dollars for cities are competing with requirements for the Navy, the Foreign Service, etc. Middle Tier government with a focus INWARD, provides SOME insulation to this central competition of dollars.
They go 'bankrupt' because central government throttles financial resources. As a matter of policy; the one they adopted in the very late seventies: monetarism. It's a policy choice since it is impossible for the UK government to 'go bankrupt', it is a sovereign currency issuer, i.e: is the only legal source of the currency it uses. Even though the original principle of this foolish theory was money supply control, this was already abandoned as a reality while Thatcher was in government. The same notion of restricted spending (and use of unemployment as a deliberate inflation tempering tool) is still in operation and also is the core methodology of EU economic policy baked into its treaty.
excellent video, the extra effort was well worth it! not typically something I would care to watch but you make it very interesting and understandable. Also, big up Preston, doing the work for the people!
I moved to the UK three years ago, and there’s always so much to learn about a country’s government. You laid it out in a more accessible way that also explains why our neighbourhood trash never gets picked up in time. (lol.) thank you for dedicating so much time to this project!
41:28 It’s not a nuclear power station Tom. That’s Ratcliffe on Soar Power Station, and it’s the only coal fired power station left in the UK. I’ve driven past it numerous times heading into Nottingham and you can see the mountains of stockpiled imported coal. I agree though that nuclear power makes me excited and we should build some reactors.
I know that in the grand scheme this will look irrelevant but I'm so very sad about the Library of Birmingham! It was a wonderful place and building, it had the second largest Shakespeare collection in the world, a rooftop garden, and really comfortable study units. Even small offices you could book if you needed to. The book collection had everything from rarities to new books. It had a music collection and instruments to play with if you so wished. Even the children's area was great! And now they've closed several floors and had to shut services... They might have to close down altogether. And what happens to everything that was in there? It was such a wonderful place, and so many great resources!
We still have clashes between levels, but the main issues actually happen between state and federal rather than at local levels. Local government is effectively fully funded by rates as the local council rate system is designed in such a way that they cannot fail to meet budget - rates simply go up. However, many of the more expensive matters that the UK is struggling with (and to be frank, us too) are at the state level here.
It's really weird choice to blame the people you chose to discriminate against for your financial issues. If you hadn't broken the law, the settlements wouldn't exist. Blaming the victims is actually continued discrimination.
@@krzysztofkolodziejczyk4335 the amount paid would be the amount they failed to pay in the past, plus interest, plus lawyer costs. There's no penalty here, and both public and private organisations will continue this theft that isn't criminal indefinitely until it is criminalised.
First of all - fantastic video; I think this style suits you quite well. I hope it wasn't too stressful overall to produce, though! I went to UCLan back in the late 00s-early 10s; while I enjoyed my time at the Uni itself, I really didn't enjoy Preston as a town. My friends and I joked about how sad and unloved it was, nicknaming it 'Depress-ton". Over the last few years, however, I've been hearing more and more positive news coming out of Preston - whether about the Preston Model, or some other initiatives they seem to have - and it all sounds very hopeful. I hope Preston flourishes; that it does well and does indeed become a model for other places to follow. More power to you, Preston.
I watch a lot of random stuff on youtube. This has been the most interesting and watchable video I've seen for a very long time, a dry topic excellently explained and presented. Well done, you have a new subscriber.
As soon as you went into local government finances my reaction was "oh this is gonna be about decentralization, isn't it?". This is happening in lots of places. In general it is a good idea to give more responsibilities to local governments, as they are more in touch with local demands and sensibilities. However, what ends up happening a lot of the time is that decentralization becomes a scheme where local goverments get more responsibilites, but don't get the means necessary to properly fulfill those responsibilities. Essentially the central governments gets to offload one of their expenses partially or even entirely. Another side effect is that peripheral regions are denied central funding to help them compete, leading to a strong decline in those economies.
I did a little something similar on small hospitals going bankrupt in the USA for my few youtube followers for our local hospital. Nice work! Very informative!
It's late stage capitalism in action. Tory "austerity" (while the deficit has grown) followed by a failing economy = no heavily reduced money from central government, increased costs due to inflation and an ever increased need for the local authority to support it's citizens. Saved you 45 mins of waffle
British mail is privatized? Holy hell. I tend to hate conservatism for many of the reasons pointed out in this video. Exellent upload, Tom. Thanks for sharing with us.
It had been publicly owned since 1660 in the reign of Charles II. Even throughout the 18th and 19th centuries when the government thought welfare was evil and taxing the rich was tantamount to robbery they still didn't sell it off. Neoliberalism is ideologically capitalist in a way that would baffle the very people they claim descent from, lacking even a glimmer of pragmatism.
Also privatized in my country, because "private is more efficient". Service declined so quick there are discussions going on to buy it again to public sector - but EU blocks that.
As a resident of Preston, I had no idea the local government had this kind of autonomy. It isn't really well advertised here. The roads are a mess, roadworks everywhere, loads of drains are clogged, recycling schemes are none existent and paths are overgrown... But at least the local government is trying to do something different. Thanks for informing me of that!
I hope you enjoyed this video!
You may have noticed that making it was *a lot* more complicated than usual! It involved a four-day trip around England, arranging interviews, buying in extra kit, and a much more complicated edit process as we attempted to tie the various threads of the video together.
I'm really keen to keep pushing the boundaries of what we do with these videos over the coming year. I want to use the opportunity of the platform I've got on UA-cam and Nebula to tell important stories in the most engaging ways possible.
If you'd like to support me and my team in that, there are a couple of ways you can do so.
Firstly, by signing up to Nebula using my personal link go.nebula.tv/tomnicholas
Or, by signing up to support the channel on Patreon at patreon.com/tomnicholas
Thanks so much for considering it!
it's ok, gj 👍
Heck yeah, go wild! It’s usually great to swing for the fences, even if it doesn’t work out every time (and I’m willing to bet this one’s a winner 😆)
Microphone on screen?
Please consider doing a video on the lifeboat foundation and lifeboat ethics
is this video part of Vapeonomics series?
This is the weirdest Top Gear special I've seen in years.
....
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven
There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today
Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Holy Spirit Can give you peace guidance and purpose and the Lord will
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
It’s top gayer
And thus gooder. @@miscellaneousz2681
Hahahaha
Yup
Nobody seems to see much connection to the wealth of the Rich and the private corporations going through the roof while everything else is failing.
It's not a bug it's a feature
The rich do. That’s why they’re so dead set against anyone in the msm talking about it! It’s all “culture”, “identity”, “race”, “traditional values”, “woke” this, “trans” that, “pedophile” moral panics, “BLM”, “migrants” etc. etc. all of it generating massive profits for the rich who’s giant media companies host the entire discussion no matter what you’re side in the “culture war” and mold and shape the form of the discussion by their control of the private algorithms that mediate who we see, what we see, and slowly moderate the terms of the debate to their satisfaction. That is why you’ll NEVER see any radical anti-capitalist revolutionary promoters of working class solidarity on MSM or gaining any significant influence via the main media platforms. A divided working class more or less fully in support of capitalism, and without the ability to form a coherent critique of it, nor the ability to see past culture war categories and form a working class class consciousness suits the needs of the rich ruling class who owns all the significant gathering places on the internet now. When there’s anywhere that the rich Western Capitalists don’t fully own or control … like TikTok for example, the rich lose their minds and start shouting about espionage and privacy concerns (they have no such privacy concerns when their own citizens are subjected to ever more unconstitutional surveillance by the state, or by anyone who will reliably hand over data about US citizens to law enforcement in the US, legally or not. TikTok has them losing their minds because it is NOT owned by a reliable US / western capitalist company who will supply ONLY pro-rich, pro-US oligarchy messages on the platform.
And of course the bold, outspoken working class former bank trader and economist, Gary Stevenson, he does too! On his channel “Gary’s Economics” he.l explains it all quite powerfully and convincingly, and explains equally powerfully and convincingly why a massive wealth tax on the richest 1% or 2% or 3% or so of the wealth holders in the world’s capitalist democracies will recreate a healthy and functioning middle class-based society, by redistributing the massive quantities of wealth and assets accumulated and hoarded by the super rich over the last several decades. He implies the current social pathology among the working class, the poor, and the increasingly frustrated and dispossessed former middle class is a result of this massive shift in the economic priorities in our capitalist democracies over the last several decades. The economic interests of the super rich have been favored over those of the middle class and the poor, as well as even the interest of a government possessed of enough wealth and assets to provide the services people need to live in the 20th and 21st century. Gary argues like Tom does here that the bankruptcy of cities is but one symptom of a wider pathological “privatization” of the nation and selling so much of the resources, and even infrastructure already paid for by the taxpayers to the rich so that they may profit from selling access to these services back to the very people who already paid to build the schools, roads, transit, communication, economic system, and many other basic infrastructure elements. These services are forced into artificial “bankruptcy” by the rich taxpayers who refuse to pay into the tax system at all … then instantly have the duly DDS to buy these services they wouldn’t pay to use before, in order to charge criminal rates to use the same systems weeks or months before they had been crying to poor to pay taxes to utilize the service. The scheme is obscene. It’s an invention of the criminal “supply-side” “trickle down” economists favored by Reagan and Thatcher and Mulroney and every other neoliberal crook who saught to destroy the working class by bankrupting it by refusing to pay taxes they claimed they couldn’t afford, only to turn around, use loans from their own banks underwritten by taxpayer guarantees to buy the exact same resources and assets from the government they’d just refuse to pay tax in order to use. Their argument? They were all trustworthy selfless men who could run these services better than the people’s government could. What a scam.
To this day we live under the increasing economic strain of this scheme, and are still being encouraged to blame each other; our fellow working class neighbors for either our idiotic retrograde “conservative” traditional values, or our ridiculous, elitist, ideological, doctrinaire “liberal woke” values. The rich don’t care about any of this; they’re laughing giddily as we fight amongst ourselves ignoring the ongoing economic thievery they are perpetrating against ALL of us the whole time.
If you want to scare the crap outta yourself to understand what the driving philosophy and the “social values” of the ruling rich oligarchy is today (because they sure don’t care about “patriotiism”, “Christianity”, “traditional values”, “woke values” “social justice”, any of the stuff they sell to us as culture war products. Nope. Try and go search the internet for “Right Accelerationism (R/ACC) and Elon Musk” or Peter Thiel or Jeff Bezos. Or try looking up the Political Philosophy of The Koch Brothers AND “A Treatise on Government” by John C. Calhoun or The Koch Brothers AND James M. Buchanan (economist) and his “The Limits of Liberty” or his “The Calculus of Consent” . . as well as Peter Thiel (again) AND Calhoun’s book or either of Buchanan’s books. These rich men love these theoretical books which elaborate upon a theoretical rationale for destroying democracy as a fundamentally unfair “tyranny of the majority against the “natural” rights of the rich and successful to rule. It’s frightening to think what stuff the rich are planning if only they could remove the pesky impediment of democracy. That’s why they quietly support Trump and the MAGA GOP with millions of dollars. regardless of the ugliness and hypocrisy in some of their cases to do so. Democracy is so “unfair” and a waste of energy that could be better spent making them more rich, if only it could be eliminated for good, and let the natural rights of the rich and successful rule forever uninterrupted.
And that IS the cause of this. Stagnant or falling wages, increasing prices, reductions in services, but increasing taxes. It's all in service of extracting everything from regular people, and transporting it to the very top.
There is also the massive elephant in the room which is Amazon. They take a huge proportion of the population's money that would otherwise be spent locally and then pay no corporation tax on the profits. Billions are simply disappearing into the ether
Wealth inequality is a serious detriment to consumer based economies like the uk’s as consumer spending accounts for 60% of gdp.
The state should help consumers as the economy wouldn’t be able to function and would completely collapse.
The fact that public toilets aren’t a statutory service is outrageous. Most older people and a lot of younger people with medical conditions have to use the toilet a lot, and not having working public loos really makes it hard for them to go out.
@@keighlancoe5933 Fine, but that is really down to the lack of maintenance, another part of the service that the councils are able to cut from their budgets.
Weatherspooons is a public toilet
McDonalds has taken up the slack on that issue, worry not.
They should come back. But also be heavily policed . People like the ones another commenter mentioned will just mess them up for everyone. The saying "this is why we can't have nice things" come to mind. I see why people want gated communities with parks and recreational things where people agree to keep things clean and safe. Sadly we always have people who just don't care that will make it hard for the bulk of us who don't have the money or power to create separate gated communities.
I wet myself a couple of fines around 2020-2021. So many places were shut down, it was very difficult to hold it in. No loos anywhere.
'I'm in Liverpool..... and it's incredibly windy' 😱
Truly a staggering turn of events
Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
Joe Anderson
God bless all you kites in Scouserland.
Yup
Chemical engineering
I was a Norwegian student in Brum university 20 years ago. It was the exact same talk back then. Every municipal building in the city centre has a blue plaque on them saying "partly sponsored by the European Union" because British cities were getting development help. Crisis-funds from the EU. Money predominantly meant for the exact purpose of keeping EU cities from going bankrupt. I remember they were talking about there being 4-500 000 people in poverty in greater Birmingham back then.
I wrote a thing for university back then where I blamed it on... The UK economy being focused almost entirely around London.
As the second largest net-contributor to the EU (in a fiscal sense) after Germany, that was just us getting SOME of the money back which we paid in the first place!
@@juliantheapostate8295 Right, which is clearly why everything as been going incredibly well since we left. Oh wait
@@juliantheapostate8295we got the money back but now it's funneled up to the torys and their mates
@@juliantheapostate8295 Britain has been getting money back since Thatcher negotiated a rebate. Has done wonders indeed in funnelling the money back where Britain needs it eh? The NHS is flourishing, the towns are coming to life with brilliant projects.
The UK donated 100s of billions to the EU and took in 6 million EU citizens costing yet even more 100s of billions!!! Now we have a housing crisis and crisis here and there, we can't cope with the influx
You should do a video on why it is that a single person with a camera is able to produce far superior "content" than anything the BBC puts out these days.
State-owned networks don't want to bite the hand that feeds them.
There's at least one more persons working on these. But the answer is that small teams, with minimal restrictions are a lot more efficient than a bureaucratic megalith.
You should support Tom if you haven't already.
He needs our support
Probably for the same reason why ABC (aussie version of bbc) is pretty crap at political pieces like this, since their funding is determined by the government it discourages journos to be super critical of the government for fear of losing funding or having the story cut entirely.
In our case we also had many abc journos getting their jobs through nepotism with their friends & family being tories, thereby affecting their reporting. Not sure if that's the case in the uk but that's happened down here, could be the same.
@@artemisiakyrell7727 Not that I've heard of and I've investigated BBC as part of media studies at GCSE and A-Level, in theory they're supposed to be unbiased and funded by the people of the UK, not the government but there has been some execs who apparently did get their jobs at the BBC through government but not journalists or anyone working with television or radio. In recent years though the BBC and many TV news channels have gone downhill within the UK with a lot lower quality productions, the last good documentary thing I remember watching wasn't on BBC it was ITV's Alan Gates vs The Post Office which was a really high quality dramatisation of real life events relating to the whole Post Office scandal in the UK a few years ago and they seem to be the only channel in the last few years that has been releasing consistently good content but it makes sense when they want to launch their own paid streaming service whilst the BBC is busy trying to reinforce its TV License fees whilst more and more people stop paying it but I still believe their reporting is pretty unbiased and has remained unaffected.
Their news, okay, their TV, absolute garbage and not worth the yearly fee which is why people stop paying it.
If I had a £1 for everytime some modern issue was linked back to Thatcher I'd have enough money that the conservatives would give me a PPE contract...
Yep.
It has a lot to do with mass immigration and the decline of North Sea oil and gas.
Brexit hasn't helped.
Many Brits don't understand what Thatcher has done for them and how they are still profiting from her work to this day.
Or Reagan
@AlJay0032 Brits in the City and Home Counties certainly.
Mancunians, Liverpudlians and Geordies, not so much. In fact much of the UK really sucks.
Whether Foote, in her place, would have been better for Britain is questionable.
Losing the Empire, the rise of the US and Japan and multitudinous externalities, including mass immigration, have broken Britain.
OF COURSE IT WAS FUCKIN ORACLE. As an Australian IT worker, I've been leery of oracle for over a decade now, and it is so saddeningly unsurprising that they've showed up to screw up yet again here. I am a little surprised they've upgraded from company grifts to entire cities now. That must be a nice pay increase for their C-suite.
Oracle, SAP, whatever ERP is initially selected, will be promoted as a very cost neutral option. The client buys in to the proposal, and then the finessing process starts. Every little "enhancement" adds cost, changes the scope, requires more time and resources, adds complexity.
And nekminute you are thousands/millions higher in costs, delays and under delivered deployments.
So called client 'experts' are revealed to be thicker than two planks, and sometimes caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
Incentives abound for those with signing authority.
You can guarantee that a new ERP is going to cost at least 200% initial quote, and delivery will be twice as long as proposed.
NZ has had its fair share of failed and wildly over budget systems.
Incis, Swift, AT, Kiosk, Novopay
Over promised, under delivered, poor deployment, wild scope changes.
IT Project Management seems to suck everywhere.
Same applies with SAP. Pay a huge amount for a new SAP system, it cost double what the old system did in support costs and delivers half the capability of the old system. SAP then send in sales reps to try and sell you more SAP software to solve the problem that the original SAP installation caused.
Not much has changed over the last 25 years it appears. Oracle, SAP or any other ERP software always causes major cost increases and disruption of the operations. Was that way at the end of the 20th century, and still is it seems.
...
Do you know Jesus Christ can set you free from sins and save you from hell today
Jesus Christ is the only hope in this world no other gods will lead you to heaven
There is no security or hope with out Jesus Christ in this world come and repent of all sins today
Today is the day of salvation come to the loving savior Today repent and do not go to hell
Come to Jesus Christ today
Jesus Christ is only way to heaven
Repent and follow him today seek his heart Jesus Christ can fill the emptiness he can fill the void
Heaven and hell is real cone to the loving savior today
Today is the day of salvation tomorrow might be to late come to the loving savior today
Romans 6.23
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
John 3:16-21
16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. 19 And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. 20 For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. 21 But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God.
Mark 1.15
15 And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.
2 Peter 3:9
The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
Hebrews 11:6
6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.
Jesus
@@jo2lovid it's not project management to blame. it is deliberate fleecing. the software is designed to be so bad that it requires additional deployment time and people to make it even work in the first place. most of the software errors I encounter when working with oracle ERP are so simple to fix, some literally one line of code, that there is no possible way that it is anything but deliberate
My home town of Woking went bust last year - total corruption, mostly speculating on property development rather than providing services for it's rate payers. If councils were companies criminal charges would be laid. Instead councils just refinance and kick the problem down the street, meaning we have even more suffering to come.
@yayaya...
No. Those "companies" would simply close their "Limited Liability" doors, paying NO debts or taxes, and reopen under a new name the next day....
A lot of councils are involved with dodgy speculation schemes. Weirdly enough, the same people cutting off their money and making them raise their own are the ones who also destroyed the restrictions on council investments, making it easier to get involved in or taken advantage of by dodgy deals.
So private or public, unless the spirit of the people is against corruption then the only game worth playing is screwing everybody over?
I need to leave this terrible country and move to the moon.
I went there for a pizza once, will never forget it..
You too, seems to be a thing.
Here in the US also.
The chance of buying a home no way.
billionaires are running out of things to invest in. More play things for our betters, come after all they wouldn't have All This Money if they hadn't earned it far and square never calling sick for work - running their expire like us lazy good for nothing's
Millionaires are scum to a billionaire.
Liverpool is actually a great example of why this is happening, in the last 10 years the conservative government have reduced the amount they give the Liverpool city council by over 90%, forcing them to massively hike up council tax.
This video touches on some of the issues but isn't really making any inferences into how we have somehow increased tax to the highest point that it has been for nearly a hundred years on both national and regional levels, and massively reduced the amount of spending going towards public services. And yet, supposedly, we have no money and the government are struggling.
We, the fifth richest nation in the world with a relatively small population to support, have no money despite spending less and taxing more. Where the fuck has the money gone?
People are getting too bogged down in specific and small scale economic changes and not really questioning how, on a national scale, we are giving the government more and getting less back only for the government to claim that they are struggling. There are only really three possible ways for this to occur:
1) The government are so fundamentally inept that they are simply losing or wasting all of the money by accident in an almost comedic fashion.
2) The government are intentionally throwing money in a huge bottomless pit to the benefit of nobody for seemingly no reason to appease the bottomless pit.
3) The government are weaponising an air of false incompetence to distract from the fact that they are quite literally pocketing the money themselves in huge quantities.
Edit:
I am loving the response this is getting, calling out corruption and inefficiency across the board. But the take away is that this is based in a broad range of factors that represent institutional failures at every level due to both greed and the inherent problems with capitalism, mainly the blatant inefficiencies and the fact that the end goal is explicitly to funnel money into the hands of the rich for personal enjoyment, and not into public hands for the good of the people.
All 3 I pointed out are happening to varying degrees, as well as everything you guys have pointed out, some of which may be a combination of fall into one of the categories, but they're all interconnected regardless and I hope we can all agree that the solution is not minor reform, it's a complete economic overhaul.
That's been the trajectory since Thatcher. The sinkhole the British dug by privatizing public services, and subsidizing and bailing them out instead of having them public, along with the Monarchy sapping wealth from the government and you have a recipe for a 3rd world country in the making
Possibly all 3 are happening at the same time
look into the teesside freeport, an utter s***show of naked corruption. The private eye have done a lot of reporting on it.
4) the money all gets sent over to the private sector and funnelled upwards to near no benefit. The neoliberal decline in government capacity means everything must be contracted to the private sector, which can subcontract etc with massive profit margins taken at every step. This would show outwardly as increases in inequality, housing crisis, increasing stocks with declining real wages, etc
@@OncleSpenny DING DING DING! Sounds suspiciously like the politicians and their mates doing some laundry
Any tech person could have told Birmingham to not employ Oracle.
Yeah, as soon as he said Oracle I thought "they're fucked" and sure they were!
But whoever was in charge of the decision probably got a nice gift from Oracle.
Go for the cheapest quote, they're cheap for a reason
Some probably did.
Buy you can t beat corruption with sound advices...
Yup
'O' level economics taught me that the way to improve a community was to put money into the hands of people that would spend it in their community. This is how money goes around - or back and forth as businesses trade with each other. This is why corporate business removing money from the circulating cash, and giving it to share holders can stall a trading economy.
Yes. That is the equity market. What's happening is that, those money entered into the media world. I.e. social media and the media.... It goes outside of the country. Then reblackmailed, back into the country etc. There are ways to persue those individuals but you will find that the next thing that happens is that you will be targeted and taken down.
@@MeiinUK TeknoFeudalism.
It's economic rent that gets sucked out
But don't corporations pay employees to then spend their money. And then don't shareholders sell their shares and spend money? The high street is dead. Put things there that people will use. I spent 2 hrs today trying to find a phone case for pixel 5. Not one single shop had one because it was all apple and Samsung. Wasted 2 hrs in my local community where I could have bought one on eBay.
I'm in america now
As a Brit currently in America, hearing about 'inadvisably' long distances to drive in England is beginning to sound quite quaint to me haha
As an American who's driven the length of Britain I felt the same.
I have a 3 and a half hour drive tomorrow and I am not even leaving my state of Texas nor even driving from one side to the other that would be near 10 hours. You could basically fit the entire UK in Texas with room to spare.
America is a country where 100 years is a long time, and England is a country where 100 miles is a long way
Your a traitor
@@howmanybeansmakefiveand did the east India empire control the colonies or did the working class sharing piss Potts?
"...and a genuinely interesting pen museum." confirmed brit.
😄
I live in Birmingham and didn’t know it existed lmao
Yup
@@kipzonderkop1994
Write it down before you forget.
Lived there for 5 years. Haven't gone back for the next 10 or so, but genuinely considering going for the pen museum. 🖋️
Seeing Birmingham declare bankruptcy is a reminder how deep financial mismanagement runs. I worked 30 years for a fortune 500 firm, was able to retire at 54 and live in a gated community where I can enjoy my last years. SAVE MONEY so it is there when it is needed. You can travel, relocate or whatever you might want, some things are always going to be beyond our control but not everything. As someone else said, it can be cool to be a minimalist and poor when young, but it really sucks when you are old. So work for your future self.
I enjoyed my job and didn't view it as "a daily grind." I also had a lot of freedom and flexibility. Retirement for me has been all losses and no gains, I'm afraid. Each withdrawal has only made it difficult for my savings to recover through compounding. It feels like etf's and bonds might just be limiting my returns instead of managing risk
I'm approaching retirement and having a financial advisor has been helpful. I started investing later than most, so relying on compound interest from index funds or bonds wasn’t enough for me. Despite that, I’ve managed to do well and am on track to retire with around $6 million
I'm currently reassessing my retirement portfolio and could use some guidance. How can I get in touch with your advisor?
I usually avoid making specific recommendations because everyone’s situation is unique. However, my experience with Emily Ava Milligan has been quite positive. You might find it helpful to see if her approach fits your needs
I looked for her name online and found her page. I emailed and made enquiries. Thanks for the help
My thought before clicking on this video. "I bet Thatcher is somehow involved".
Kind of like how a lot of the problems in the states started with Reagan.
The milk snatcher's legacy
She has been dead for a while gotta search for a new scarecrow
@@mrroger-t6mshe represents, and is now shorthand for, a particular ethos. Which is why she’ll remain a useful scarecrow for many years to come.
@@brianh9358Every US video talking about the US's problems. "So all this started when Reagan..."
Every UK video talking about UK's problem's 'All this started when Thatcher..."
But Rishi somehow made 100 million pounds within the last year
@@Medusas_Barber Yeah he is a good business man when it's for his own personal gain but when it comes to the country those skills magically disappear and the outcomes for the UK are worse than any other time in history - how many times have cities actually gone bankrupt? We have sewage in our water again; we've gone full circle back to the 19th century. Where is he even getting the time to make so much money for himself while the country he's “serving” implodes? The optics are horrendous, I refuse to believe that there is no conflict of interests when making vast sums of money like that
@@Medusas_Barber I hate it when parasites get called business man. Parasites suck real business men and trades people dry.
@@Obez45 people who are European will always care more about their own people then your people that is human nature to care more about your own people before others it's like people have forgotten that we are different peoples fighting each other for resources that is what life is all about the western world has forgotten what life is about we have been in peace for 80 years that vast majority of the whole time or recorded history we have always been at war with each other welcome back to reality the boomer era is over it was a once in a lifetime thing that will not happen again until we decide to conquer other countries and take their resources.
@Medusas_Barber successful at giving his wife's company exclusive drilling contracts
@@Medusas_BarberHow does that one statistic contradict anything they said?
I live in Birmingham, have all my life. There's always been dodgy deals going on, cuts cuts cuts, but council tax skyrocketing. Amenities, public transport, libraries, schools are all being ignored and left to go to ruin. Building a new hospital with less beds than what it's replacing, building a new library that nobody wanted or needed, which has a leaking roof and again less space for all the books. My city council has been a joke since I was a kid. it's getting better in some ways, but so much worse in others.
There's hardly space for books in libraries built in the past 20 years. Shelves are only four feet high. Cardiff Central library opened in 2009 is the pits. There huge gaps in the floors so you can see down to the ground or first floor.
The IT system costs are like everywhere. Lack of knowledge by managers. Full of people with business admin, law and accountant degrees. But no senior managers who understand the systems. So big IT companies can run rings around them
not just ££££ costs - peoples' lives: see the Post Office scandal.
Which is why the German economy is so stable. post ww2
@@therealrobertbirchall Yup. Engineers are running everything over there.
@@AUniqueHandleName444 and look what a fantastic job they do
The model is this:
Charge out "consultants" at £1000 per day.
Hire fresh out of uni students.
Pay them the minimum salary you can get away with.
Pocket the profit.
Meanwhile, they fleece the decent permanent staff at their victim organisation for knowledge.
Making them useful to the IT consultancy at the council's expense.
Once council has to cut costs, offer to take over at a quarter of the salary.
Then shaft them on support costs.
Seen it SO many times.
Brilliant work, Tom, the extra effort really paid off here.
A little addition to your description of privatizing waste removal: I live in Chicago, which, contrary to conservatives' depictions of the city, LOVES to privatize city services, including waste removal; it has contracts with a couple different companies, including the creatively named Waste Management.
Now, for several years studies showed that Chicago had one of the worst recycling rates of major US cities. The narrative was that we Chicagoans were too dumb or lazy to properly separate garbage from recyclables, so we kept hopelessly contaminating our bins of recyclables, which had to be dumped instead.
TURNS OUT that the aforementioned Waste Management was contracted to deal with recycling as well as garbage. So they'd get paid once when they went to retrieve a recycling bin... and if that bin happened to be marked (by them) as contaminated, they'd get paid a second time to haul that bin to the dump. So there was a direct financial incentive for them to falsely mark recycling as contaminated.
Just another example of companies' environmental destruction being falsely blamed on individual consumers.
Much of private capital is dodgy. When your sole aim as a business is to make profit (often for distant shareholders), then such dodgy practices can be expected. In the meantime, the central government cuts its overseeing. For the effects of that, we have recent examples with Boeing.
I studied urban planning and finished both my Bachelors and Masters outside of the UK, which I don't particularly want to return to, at least partly because of the frankly dire state of local authority investment in public sector planning. You captured my sense of local economic depression so effectively in this. Every Christmas, when I go back, it seems my local authority has sold off another childhood memory or abandoned another treasured social space. Certainly my experience of speaking with urban planners who both work and have worked in my local authorities is one of desperation; there is such a sense of hopelessness. I think you could even be more explicit in tying Government's neglect of its local funding obligations to the disenfranchisement of the public and the decay of daily life throughout the country- the grime, the mess...
It's really cool to see you briefly touch on the Preston example at the end there, because I think that the LA there also has some unique socioeconomic (and political) characteristics which empower the council to be a little more bold than others. While I've never been, from some further reading it does seem to have had a not insignificant effect- you can see that in the Indices of Deprivation data.
If you happen to be in Vienna any time soon, then let me know and I'll very gladly try my best to explain how the post-War generation here was instrumental in the creation of the world's first true still-operating socialised housing system! And also complain about the hell that are town council economic assessment forms in the South of England.
You never know, Labour have the chance to improve it!
It's a bit sad you can't see that we need fewer 'urban planners', and that 'local authorities' could not sell off what was instead private property, or if the 'authority' was vested in the local electorate.
@@Pinkdam Where did you get the idea that we need fewer urban planners?
@@DP-tf7qb Almost every modern malaise is due to 'planners' being empowered and set to work instead of credit-power being at the disposal of individuals to avail themselves of what technology makes possible.
@@PinkdamLibertarian nonsense. Did you even watch the video?
This feels like a Top Gear special
Tonight on Top Gear: Hammond finds out the local city council is bankrupt, May sees an old building 'That's it right there' and I move all my financial assets off-shore.
@@Slug99 jeremy clarkson would do that, wouldnt he
Presented by Ian Hislop
So I went to the worst city... in the woorrld.
more depressing and less racist, but yes
Uncanny how similar this situation is to the Netherlands. Specifically in 2015 something called the Wet Maatschappelijke Ondersteuning (WMO, Law Societal Support) transferred a lot of power regarding subsidies for things like wheel chairs, cleaning help, pedagogical services, etc. from the central government to the municipalities. Officially to "bring it closer to the people". But with it came of course massive budget cuts. And it also meant there are massive differences between municipalities now between levels of support. In the bigger cities it is usually okay, but in smaller ones a Scrooge-y "they don't need help; they should go work" alderman can make people's life hell.
It's almost a three tier world. If the municipality is big enough you've got the means to build the bureaucracy to do it good, but if you're between 20k-150k it's too small to do that. The 10k almost know all their pappenheimers, and the help also gets mostly where it's needed...
Damn, it's happening everywhere then. I thought it was too clever of the UK Conservative party to think of by themselves.
Yanquiland, here we come! Isn't capitalism so glorious?
Welcome to neoliberal capitalism.
I like the attempt to step up the content quality and not just do the classic backseat UA-camr gig where you just see what's available on the Internet. Happy to be supporting via nebula and UA-cam. Don't be discouraged by smaller numbers! The viewers notice the effort.
I think that all big IT contractors (Fujitsu, Oracle, IBM etc) should be unable to win contracts in the UK, they have proven time and time again that they are unable to deliver on-time, on-budget, or with quality.
Whoever runs the .gov and HMRC websites are really on it though. Find another country where you can do a cash basis self assessment tax return in like half an hour online, or get divorced, or renew a driving licence, with such ease.
@@Jonathan_Doe_ That'd be GDS and I think HMRC in-house. They developed a set of really decent guidelines for making public facing government websites, when they are followed it's consistent and generally good. For non-public facing it's a minefield.
What are some good companies for public systems internal and externally facing? Just to orient myself. @Antinumeric
Same with the privitisation of our armed forces catering, you should see the state of what we are feeding them!
They should have to prove there are no local/national options before going with international companies. It's not just an issue of competence, but extraction of resources, security, and investment in industry workers.
I hate that just the mentioned Oracle has me immediately think "ahhh, yup there it is. That tracks."
lmao i had the same reaction. still salty over how they destroyed sun
IDK what you mean, Oracle DBMS has everything!
Wait, you want the parts to work together?
No no, that's not how anything works in Oracle.
Computer projects are complicated. A humanities major like this YT guy are unlikely to understand the complexities. These things fail when boutique requests and bizarre requirements are thrown into the project halfway through. You want an out of the box solution, that goes smooth as silk.
@@CentristDad155 This isn't Sun that we're talking about, its Oracle. Have you ever used Oracle? Of course you haven't. Its God-Awful
@@CentristDad155 Of course computer projects are complicated. But when you have contracts that aren't a fixed price (whether it is software or the F-35), you run into cost overruns.
>British "inadvisable distance to drive"
>look at distances on a map
>day trip
I know Two over night stops or was it three? I’m from OZ and those distances can be done in a day, or only one night stop. Because of interviews😂
The entirety of the UK can fit inside Texas several times over
I giggled at that one from Canada.
Try driving across Los Angeles during rush hour (which is all day.)
Next time a customer asks me why the library I work at is closing next month, I'll just point them towards this video...
(As someone who works in council public services, yes, things are just as awful right now as this video suggests)
Because they're unproductive, over-paid and have far too large a pension for the wealth generated in the country. The public sector is 18% too large.
Just tell them landlords are struggling so they need more flats for immigrants. It's funny to watch people realise they've been shafted when they thought they were shafting you.
@@richardwills-woodwardonce I would have agreed with you but I’ve been working with a council as a contractor for a few months. They are very focused on reducing costs, everything is up for review, nothing is untouchable. One problem is my team were working to a plan set out by the minister as it’s a government lead project. Then there was a reshuffle, new minister told everyone to stop, he took 6 weeks to get up to date, and has now completely changed direction. I’ve found this frustrating but was told by colleagues who have been there for some time that in the last 5 years this is how it’s been. They’ve never seen such chaos in government, ministers are on a revolving door, and there’s no clear direction. All local councillors wanted to do these last few months is spend money on things which could help them get reelected. All ministers want to do is blow budgets before the general election. All whilst we got an email saying that the council wasn’t going to supply washing up liquid to the kitchen anymore, could we bring in our own! Yes the pension liability is big but they pay less. If you take away benefits then you are either going to get no one or people who can’t get jobs elsewhere. I think many councils can find efficiencies but there are bigger problems at the top
@@richardwills-woodward I see you failed to watch the video.
Or think, for that matter. How is calling a library "unproductive" at all sane?
@@PhysicsGamer Where did I state such a thing? It is of itself unproductive regardless, but it has a social use that should the individual engage with, could end inn a £42,000 salary which means that person has used the library to obtain knowledge to earn a salary that means they pay in more than they take out. Now, you could also argue it has a social good in that it provides knowledge, but this is just theory and has no proof. The ignorance of young people today and the disgusting views they hold of the country through brainwashing tells me they have never read a book. These libraries don't stop anyone from becoming another useful idiot for communist causes. Therefore, their purpose is in question. Book-reading is dead it seems, and only propaganda from social media seems to hold sway. A library is also only useful if it covers ALL subjects and does not engage in propaganda, as most public former educational establishments do. At best, libraries provide a local focal point for tea/coffee and computers for 'job-searching' by people with zero chance of achieving anything productive at all. They should not be in this position, but they have been hijacked by ideology and the third world. They should be places of learning. They are not. What is a library for if not learning?
It is not just the cities, it is the entire country that is collapsing. I know that because I saw that happen to my country in the early 2000's.
All institutions managed by the government start to fail partially, taxes rise, but they can't keep up with expenses, people move away, companies shut down, there is a generalized sense of gloom. Decay becomes physically visible, in the facades of buildings, on the potholes in the pavement, the poorly patched infrastructure, in the lack of implementation of new technologies.
It is not just the cities...
Which country? I live in Britain & would love to do some research
Which country is this?
Also interested
@@liverbot4854Greece or Venezuela i think, add the UK next 😢
It's like that up and down the UK, money is being directed elsewhere for other situations 😠
Just wanted to add @ 4:21 you were driving under the Six Ways roundabout in Aston, Birmingham, the fancy colours on the walls were painted on as this was the same road that led to Alexander Stadium from the centre. However, the areas surrounding this are low income neighborhoods with high crime rates (I lived there) and before the starting ceremonies there was a murder of a young boy who was shot as a mistaken identity by gangs. The council, instead of increasing policing or helping local communities, decided to ‘streamline’ the visitors experience by redecorating the one road that led to and from the stadium this even included the Newtown Swimming Baths which has been underfunded for so long it looked like it was literally about to crumble. They added a false wall to the front facing parts of the building and added some colour and paintings whilst not even touching the inside of the building. The plan was similar to what Brazil done with their Rio olympics by blocking out the poorer parts of the city from view by enacting walls on motorways so people travelling don’t have to see the surrounding squalor.
The local residents could not even afford the tickets to the games let alone actively participate in what would have otherwise been a great moment in Birmingham’s history. I, myself, really wanted to go but couldn’t afford to bring my friends and family along.
It's actually really damn useful to have an accessible, well-researched, source for this stuff. You're doing a service, Tom!
SO KIND OF YOU
Tom: It's got 5 wheels...
me: 5 wheels!? Oh right, got to have a spare tyre.
Tom: One for steering
me: oh...
I rented a car in Newcastle and it did not have a spare tire. This was appalling to me as an American, when tire had an issue. Is this normal in the UK? I was told it was to save on the mass of the car or some nonsense
@@CentristDad155 Neither of the last 2 cars I've owned have had a spare, just a tin of puncture repair goo. I'm reasonably sure it's just a cost saving measure
@@DjDolHaus86 cool... And, in rental cars, just go ahead and throw a spare in the trunk. Are you certain the issue here is not a 'scarcity mentality'? ( That is the 4th term I settled on as the first 3 were more pejorative.)
@@CentristDad155 No, I'm fairly sure it's down to squeezing maximum profits from the product. I'm not saying I'm a fan, I'd much rather have a spare tyre than a useless tin of goo, I just think it's basic capitalism rather than any kind of mindset.
@@DjDolHaus86 Perhaps but I've gotten a spare tire in every other country I've rented a car in. I'm asking for your opinion here. I don't just make up stuff and pretend that it's facts. That's with the far left and far right in America do. I'm just saying I've noticed in the UK there's this mentality of we can have this or we can have that but not both. Hey how about we all just work an extra 10 or 15 minutes a day and then we can have both.
Hey Tom! Been a fan for quite a while off and on, but I gotta say, this video is an exceptional piece of work and you should be super proud of yourself and the team. This discussion of the long-term costs of corporate privatization vs. traditional job creation vs. explicit wealth reinvestment is an extremely important one and telling this story is quite hard and often horribly depressing. I'm proud of you! Keep at it, brother!
isn't it kind of fucked up that a city can even go bankrupt in the first place?
Not if you import the Third World. what do you expect? Hardly the calibre of culture that built the industrial revolution, created the scientific method and invented most of the world's modernity. Why import people from cultures thousands of years behind our own and bankrupt yourself?
sort of? It does play a somewhat useful role of (in theory) protecting anyone the city employs or contracts with, so the city doesn't just keep hiring people to do work only to have it then turn out they never get paid. I mean, I'm generally very much against the fiscal responsibility / austerity perspective on government, but I do think you need at least some of that. It is possible (although very far from the reality right now) to go too far the other direction from austerity, and bankruptcy provides a back stop for irresponsible spending by a city.
I'm not saying this to disagree with all the points made in the video or claiming that these particular bankruptcies are the fault of irresponsibility on the part of the cities involved, just to say that eliminating the possibility of a city going bankrupt is not really a safe solution.
It makes people responsible, or it should do. Policies matter. It is political. Almost all councils that goes bankrupt are socialist councils. This is statistically noteworthy and significant.
@@richardwills-woodward it's because, instead of a publicly owned company, private companies are contracted for the social service, benefiting private shareholders. If public company handled it, then local government would be the shareholder, making the service self-benefiting.
I worked for the council for a little while around 2010, the money they would throw at the wall at the end of the financial year was silly.
I was going to watch this video, but then realized I don't need more gloom in life. Instead, I'm off to watch a Warhammer 40k Lore video. That won't be so grim and dark.
honestly it is not as grim as you would think - it teaches a lot of interesting stuff about how british govt works and also talks about one instance of a council doing a much better job at avoiding the decline
@@disasterarea9341 Thank you 👍
Thats a bit ironic, considering how grim and dark Warhammer 40ks world is supposed to be compared to the real world😂😂 UK cant be that bad yet
you are right, since it's all rainbows now in 40k :p
Hopefully, maybe in 50k we'll have the Empress of Mankind coming to take over 😂 😂
@@ringsaphireu real? Back in the days the concept of the Emperor coming back was both a possibility and a desirable outcome. Now is more possible, but also pretty much the final nail in the galaxy's coffin (if Tyranids or Necrons wont do it first). And Primarchs so far aint helping much either.
That upbeat music while talking about the downfall of your country is just pure gold
Community wealth building is probably the most important economic development of our times. It gives locals power even when larger levels of government don't support them, and has both left-wing objectives of working-class control and conservative principles of decentralization and efficient use of resources. If larger levels of government ever do support it, it could really change the game. Thanks for this awesome coverage.
At least there was one hint of bright opportunism in this piece! We need to do the same nationally with all the essential utilities we privatised. Bring them back into public ownership, they've all failed. Owned by the people, for the people, not profit and asset stripping.
I is also an illustration of the downside locally to centralized profit, via multi-national corps. A vampire business model.
And it's not a new idea at all, but nice to see someone implementing it with (according to this video....) some degree of success.
@@aries6776 It's not even privatization that is the main issue. Switzerland, and the Nordic Countries actually also "privatized" a lot. But always kept a majority stake in the new companies, therefore ensuring that are in control. Many, also are operating like independent businesses, still fully owned by the cities and states and if they make a profit, it supported they cities budget. E.g. my cities public transport company, was in the deep red and needed support during covid, but before and since, it generally delivers a nice profit to the city. It bids for the contract , as do the fully private companies. Key is: You need to deliver on the contract.
Seems to me, in the UK, if you fail to deliver as a private company, you get away with it and can pocket the money. This corruption is the main problem.
@@beyondEV You are correct in your distinction. More accurately I would say the way the British have done privatisation is completely flawed. But that's how privatisation was sold to us and the only way we know it. It was the state not being involved at ALL in any aspect of the privatised company. So the way we do privatisation needs to be redefined.
I'm not a Brit, and I'm not certain how much of this applies to my local government's budgets, but it's a solidly made video and good food for thought.
It applies to every council in the UK. The gov't has been shafting ALL of us.
Interestingly the story in Ontario, Canada is almost identical. Except Thatcher's name here was Harris.
Back after watching the nebula bonus video - as someone who graduated from Falmouth uni last year, from south Warwickshire, your drive up the m5 has me nostalgic lol. Btw the fanciest service station in the south west is Gloucester services (Cornwall services also pretty fancy, but obviously not on your way) Gloucester uses local produce and stuff like it’s practically a farm shop. It’s expensive but satisfies my inappropriately snobbish brummie father’s bougie tastes 😂
Production value quadrupled! Keep up your great work Tom.
The equivalent of £16k per adult in the UK was given to private corporations after the 2008 recession. Because they were "too big to fail". Socialism for the rich. That was the largest transference of public money to the private sector in history. And that money, is still with those people, who are buying up assets and increasing prices across the board. And it will not stop until the mega rich, those with more than 10 million or so, are tax far, far more aggressively to get it back. Your council operations and make-up and the way it works have nothing to do with this. It's all about the rich buying assets including government assets and putting up prices. It's actually very simple. Tax is the only solution, not the poor, not the middle classes, (like they want to) not even those with a couple of million pounds in the back. But the 1% of the country that has 20% of the countries entire wealth. If we had even 50% of that wealth back this entire country would enter a new golden age. Tell your councillors to pressure the government to massively increase tax to the 1% of earners and wealth holders.
Massive transfer of wealth during covid as well.
Exactly the solution and also the secret to how the massive post WW2 economic boom in the US was fueled. Not losing to the Nazis or suffering direct bombing certainly helped but the top tax in the nineties percent forced the rich to allow money to fall to the working class and be circulated in unprecedented quantities leading to the unprecedented growth.
And since that rate was literally keyed to those making more than twenty times the average income it literally meant that the elites had to allow the average to increase to get richer themselves where they freely get richer at everyone else's expense today.
Exactly the solution and also the secret to how the massive post WW2 economic boom in the US was fueled. Not losing to the Axis or suffering direct bombing certainly helped but the top tax in the nineties percent forced the rich to allow money to fall to the working class and be circulated in unprecedented quantities leading to the unprecedented growth.
And since that rate was literally keyed to those making more than twenty times the average income it literally meant that the elites had to allow the average to increase to get richer themselves where they freely get richer at everyone else's expense today.
Exactly right. The solution and also the secret to how the massive economic boom in the US from the 1940s-60s was fueled. Not losing WW2 or suffering directly certainly helped but it was the top tax in the ninety percent range that forced the rich to allow money to fall to the working class and be circulated in unprecedented quantities leading to the unparalleled growth.
And since that rate was literally keyed to those making more than twenty times the average income it literally meant that the elites had to allow the average to increase to in order to get richer themselves where they freely get richer at everyone else's expense today.
Yes. Same thins has happened in the USA. If we'd had Bernie Sanders as President instead of Trump in 2016 we might be on the way to getting that money back, he's the only politician who is always looking out fore the "little man"
I'm so impressed with the videos on this channel that I've subscribed. Very refreshing views, without the clickbait and hyperbole symbolic in so many other youtubers. Lastly, the section about the Preston Model was deeply refreshing. And great closure to the video, showing that there are viable options out there that can benefit local communities and stem the wealth drain and inequality so endemic in the UK.
As a Nottingham local, Ratcliffe-on-Soar isn't a Nuclear power station; it's a coal-fired one, and they're in the process of winding it down 😅
Wasn't sure whether to comment this or not 😅 Tom looked so happy in the behind the scenes video about it being a Simpsons-like nuclear power plant, I feel a bit sad to burst his bubble!
It's actually one of the (or the?) last coal power stations in the country. And closing this year, apparently. I think Tom Scott did a video with it in not that long ago, too.
Yeah, people always assume that cooling towers = nuclear power when all they do is cool the steam.
The premise of localism is that local authorities have the legal right to do loads of things, but also the legal obligation to do many of things, and the inability to raise money to actually do those things. And of course, people will blame their Labour council for cuts which are effectively passed on from central Government. What's interesting is that councils have cut staff over the last decade, but central government headcount has actually increased.
Councils charge more than ever before. We are taxed the second highest amount in history, yet services decline (in mostly Labour councils). it is a lack of competence not money. They are happy to spend on rainbows, diversity officers and anti-white racist policy, yet can't seem to find the money for the basics.
of course you blame labour they are still the same government entities as every other party that exists
and the central government could be doing a lot more to fund these localities without raising taxes. Taxes don't actually fund anything the central government does
And how is the central government funded?
@@inphowatcher9748 Every penny the government spends is created by the government. It simply extends its overdraft with the bank of England. So why does it tax at all? To create demand for the currency, and to control inflation by reducing our spending power. That's it. Taxes can't pay for spending because the spending comes first (or else we wouldn't have the money to pay the tax) and then some of that money is deleted via tax.
I highly recommend checking out a book called The Deficit Myth, it mainly covers the US but it applies here as well
Im from nottingham and our local council has sold huge amounts of its land and assets to developers who only build student housing meanwhile hiking taxes up to the highest in the country. Its beyond a joke. Even increasing parking charges making sure noone wants to come into town and soend money
Me going ‘wait for it, wait for it” when you started breaking down LA income and the government grant. Something so many people just don’t understand.
That guy from Preston is needed everywhere
This was Jeremy Corbyn's program. Like usual, the "Left" were 100% correct, as even Militant was, but Centrists and "Moderates" and their media lackies would rather have their teeth pulled than do anything but bend over for the Tories and Tory narratives, because "Centrists" will always view the left as a bigger threat to their positions.
He also runs open mic nights at my pub as well as others, and organises lots of local events and always offers opportunities to the local businesses - incredibly active in the community too. Great fella.
I've read his book.
It can be surprising how often a single person makes most of the difference. Curiously, this becomes an argument in favor of aristocracy. Perhaps not everywhere should be ruled by a mob - especially a far away mob.
Councils around Britain: "Where is all our money going??"
London: *eats a gilded Fabergé egg* You exist to serve ME!
That's what happens when a poor country tries to play rich instead of coming out honestly. They should have come out by 1975, five years after nationwide wage stagnation. They are forced to come out in 2024 through bankruptcy half a century later.
Trying to build Las vegas strip, Manhattan, chicago, miami, wall street, los Angeles all and all into one city - London when they should have not tried to play rich in the first place at all.
So London must be really great, isn't it because Brits have wasted every penny into it trying to say they too have it in their country?
Nope, it's nowhere anywhere close to any of the cities above. London was a case for Brits to save their faces in the rapidly changing 21 century. They just put everything in London instead of spreading out because it requires money to spread out. It's a way for Brits to say, "Oh, great we too have our financial city our entertainment, our resorts, hotel & casino city.. etc in the UK." So they did everything just for name sake and not to be a world leader.
Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool, Birmingham, nottingham, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Newcastle. Every major city outside of London, not one of them can afford to lay Asphalt or widen their 5 feet cities streets. There are millions & millions of potholes everywhere. In 2024, when even 80% of urban population in cambodia lives in title flooring. 90% of the families in the UK still live in an uneven and at least a 100 year old wooden flooring. The generations today or that are to inherit the homes do not have the money to lay new flooring once the flooring catches mold or decay. Most of them will be forced to street or forced to sell their homes to Indians, Jews, Arabs, Chinese, Americans or Russians. This group owns more homes in the UK than the natives and the data shows that more and more British homes will be owned by the groups of investors from these countries. The scene is bad with 70% of the families owning just one single small hatchback for the entire family as a means to transport and go to work. The good side of the statistics is that even though the majority of British families can finance the max of €38k for an automobile by their banks. 35% of all buyers opts for the cheapest models of BMW and Mercedes. After all they can say which car they drive and at least win in one area against Americans unless and until they do not tell it's a small hatchback BMW or Mercedes that costs a freaking €24k. Cheers mate. I have a range. Brits are welcome. You can always come and go back to the grass diet. I love my cattle and livestock. You'll be well taken care of.
Also a single small hatchback for the entire family, seriously? And the cheapest models of BMW and Mercedes all below €28k are in the top 10 most sold automobiles in the UK for the last decade. It's sad to see British families Really hungering down to afford the basic needs but also not wanting to split from their posh lifestyle. Why even buy a €24k BMW with their last penny just to stay in debt to the bank for the next 10 years? It's all a malady of collective and repetitive actions by a group of poor citizens going broke to appear rich and catch up with the rest of the world. Nothing more. Had they not tried to compete with the Americans and lived like a below middle class. They won't have had the problems.
It's a case of a poor neighbour (UK) who got envious of their millionaire neighbour (USA) and tried to match them by taking on more and more debts until their entire salary could no longer service even the minimum payments of the debts and courts declared them bankrupt and sold their assets to the millionaire neighbour. The rich neighbour knew all alone, the hatred and envy his neighbour had for him beneath that smile during their occasional pump in while leaving for work and while coming back from work. So the millionaire neighbour played dumb and started hatching a plan that will teach his envious neighbour a lesson he will never forget nor recover from. Afterall, revenge is best served cold 🥶❄️.
When are you and Gary Stevenson going to speak to each other in a video on a topic like this, for example; how the “bankruptcy” of a major UK city is an example of the hollowing out and dispossession of government by the rich ruling class? One of Mr. Stevenson’s favorite subjects, the phenomenon of the dispossession of the middle class at the same time as the self-destructive “government” lead “privatizing” efforts to impoverish the government and the state itself at all levels is a worthy topic for you both to share your viewership with.
I look forward to seeing anything that might result from your collaboration.
Thanks for this video. Unbelievable really for someone born in the 1960s; all-too-believable however for someone who reached adulthood in the Reagan-Thatcher-Mulroney (I grew up in Canada, and Mulroney was an ideological neoliberal privatizer and a close manly best buddy of Reagan … and formed a close friendship of regularly expressed mutual admiration with the Iron Lady too) and I have grown increasingly dismayed to see the nonstop massive accumulation of upper class wealth at the same time as an adoption of an unquestioned identification of the economic and ideological interests of the wealthiest members of our democracies with those of the average citizen, even as the life of the average citizen has gotten progressively measurably worse while the lives of the wealthiest get clearly objectively visibly different, better, and measurably so by orders of magnitude as every decade has passed since the 1980s.
Well … let us know if there’s any work with anyone ready to provoke some fiery organization, resistance and efforts to make change that might recapture and redistribute some of the vast wealth and power hoarded among the wage earning, hard working voting supporters of democracy in our countries.
Cheers!
The exact same thought was on mind as I watched this, especially where Tom talked about the 'Preston model'. Keeping money circulating between regular people rather than being syphoned off to the very richest fits right in with Gary Stevenson's arguments about the tragic consequences of spiralling wealth inequality.
If Gary is correct, local government bankruptcy is an inescapable consequence of an ever greater proportion of the money supply being captured by the super rich. As households have less money, the tax base shrinks while costs continue to rise due to asset price inflation. No matter how prudent they are, no council can remain solvent when budgets are continually falling and prices constantly rising.
@@TimmakesmusicVery keenly observed and explained.
I was hoping a little of Gary’s seeming revolutionary spirit and theoretical explanatory power might be suitably combined with some actual people’s experience and testimony like Tom did here.
We shall see; and can only hope to look forward to such a combined energy in the near future !
Councils charge more than ever before. We are taxed the second highest amount in history, yet services decline (in mostly Labour councils). it is a lack of competence not money. They are happy to spend on rainbows, diversity officers and anti-white racist policy, yet can't seem to find the money for the basics.
The best work going on to address the failures of the government in London is to breakup the British state int it's component parts. Scotland and Wales can run their own affairs thank you very much. The mess the English have gotten us into is entirely due to their ex colonial hubris where they imagine they are 'special' because they had an empire, of which my friend your ancestors and mine were part the creation of as well as the victims of. They, the Anglo's, believe they won ww2 single handed, forgetting about the millions of Russians, Indians , Canadians, etc who also fought the axis And dont forget they won the world cup in 196?. Free my people
@@therealrobertbirchall Without the British the english speaking world would have likely become history. Russians were on the same side as Germany - they were communists. They were not trying to eradicate the tyranny of communism. English speaking culture is unique on earth and in human history. It created the modern world and I am tired of being attacked for our success like Israel. The Canadians are of english stock (or were before the Third World arrived). The same as the US. Its entire Constitution is the expression of the Bill of Rights 1688/9. Its legal system is English in nature - the common law. Everyone had empires, but the British were the best at it and did it in a way that made its ex-colonies want to stay connected to Britain in some way, achieved by no other empire. It ended peacefully, like no other empire. British history is why you eat the way you do, tell the time, turn the lights on, have modern healthcare, universities, museums, tv and an endless list of things. It is also why the world has any concept of rights and has contract law. If you are in Britain then it is England you owe your own liberty to. So get back in your box and close the lid....tightly.
My council, Stoke, has just put garden waste collection behind a paywall. You have to pay a annual subscription for the brown bin to be collected.
Been like that for over a year in many places, you've been lucky to have free garden collection as long as you have.
Been like that in Sweden since forever - AND we have the highest incomtaxes in the world...
That's good, Auckland, NZ forced everyone to have a bucket sized plastic bin for food scraps instead of allowing those with compost heaps to opt out. 440,000 were sent out to homes and around 40% max of the city actually use them so over 260,000 wasted bins made, paid for and taking up space in people's homes. The 'service' isn't free either, every household is charged the equivalent of £40 a year and given that the city had met its quota for food scrap collection it knew the majority of the city wasn't going to participate and the scheme was just a tax hike.
Warrington has been charging for garden waste collection for years. In our case, green bins must have an appropriate sticker for the year, or they won't be emptied. The buying a sticker idea is a little better than a blanket charge on everyone, though, because people without gardens don't have to pay. The stickers have serial numbers to attempt to detect forgeries. 👀
That's what happens when a poor country tries to play rich instead of coming out honestly. They should have come out by 1975, five years after nationwide wage stagnation. They are forced to come out in 2024 through bankruptcy half a century later.
Trying to build Las vegas strip, Manhattan, chicago, miami, wall street, los Angeles all and all into one city - London when they should have not tried to play rich in the first place at all.
So London must be really great, isn't it because Brits have wasted every penny into it trying to say they too have it in their country?
Nope, it's nowhere anywhere close to any of the cities above. London was a case for Brits to save their faces in the rapidly changing 21 century. They just put everything in London instead of spreading out because it requires money to spread out. It's a way for Brits to say, "Oh, great we too have our financial city our entertainment, our resorts, hotel & casino city.. etc in the UK." So they did everything just for name sake and not to be a world leader.
Liverpool, Manchester, Blackpool, Birmingham, nottingham, Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Newcastle. Every major city outside of London, not one of them can afford to lay Asphalt or widen their 5 feet cities streets. There are millions & millions of potholes everywhere. In 2024, when even 80% of urban population in cambodia lives in title flooring. 90% of the families in the UK still live in an uneven and at least a 100 year old wooden flooring. The generations today or that are to inherit the homes do not have the money to lay new flooring once the flooring catches mold or decay. Most of them will be forced to street or forced to sell their homes to Indians, Jews, Arabs, Chinese, Americans or Russians. This group owns more homes in the UK than the natives and the data shows that more and more British homes will be owned by the groups of investors from these countries. The scene is bad with 70% of the families owning just one single small hatchback for the entire family as a means to transport and go to work. The good side of the statistics is that even though the majority of British families can finance the max of €38k for an automobile by their banks. 35% of all buyers opts for the cheapest models of BMW and Mercedes. After all they can say which car they drive and at least win in one area against Americans unless and until they do not tell it's a small hatchback BMW or Mercedes that costs a freaking €24k. Cheers mate. I have a range. Brits are welcome. You can always come and go back to the grass diet. I love my cattle and livestock. You'll be well taken care of.
Great video Tom. However I found the near-continuous music rather distracting at times. Short bits of incidental music are fine, but I feel it's better not to leave it running in the background constantly, especially when it's often quite raucous rather than gentle ambient! Keep up the good work anyway!
Why? Nearly two decades of neo-liberalism.
We have had more like 27 years of neoliberal Blairite globalism. It has fucked this land indeed.
No solutions left within the liberal paradigm.
Why 2 decades and not 4?Do you think Tony Blair’s new labour, Margret thatchers “proudest achievement” is a break in neo liberal economics?
@@mattysav4627Maybe dude is only two decades old, so he didn't experience the previous two.
"Drive an inadvisable distance", bro I live in the US. We had to put turns in the roads of Missouri because the endless miles of identical corn on both sides of the road kept hypnotizing people into thinking they were not moving. They would go made and pass out from driving through too much corn.
Haha sounds fun
Non-US people really don't know how ridiculous it is to live in the US sometimes.
Try living somewhere with no place to buy food or drink without having to drive 20 miles (32.19 km) one way (40 miles [64.37 km] altogether), and then it's even further for the closest job opportunities. It's unfortunately very normal over here, and we don't have the luxury of having decent public transportation in the majority of the country.
As an Iowan I feel obligated to point out that however bad the endless miles of corn are, at least it’s not Nebraska 😁
@@MugenHeadNinja I think being killed by unending, unchanging, mind melting scenery is pretty ridiculous.
@@MugenHeadNinja my family keep asking me if I'd like to move to America and I have to keep explaining that this exactly is simply not bearable living conditions
I love how despite living in a modern technological world we will still find the chiming of big bells mesmerizing.
Nice documentary, i like this new direction you're going.
The sound, when filming, is a bit down compared to the background sound.
We like to enjoy your fabulous British accent 😅
Keep up this type of production
Cheers
Fujitsu (post office) and Oracle (local councils) were forced upon the Tories for outsourcing to private companies. The Tories foist upon local government all manner of things that Westminster should fund. Westminster would have a lot more income to distribute, if they taxed "The City" and income in Tax Havens. Only the rich and the landed gentry get away with that. The property owners should be assessed to pay a yearly land tax, on investment properties.
This is an excellent video. Well done man!
Great video! Coincidentally, I grew up in Northamptonshire and went to university in Preston, so I appreciated seeing some coverage of both places here! Even back in 2010 when I was a part-time library assistant with Northamptonshire county council, things were bleak for us - most libraries were closed in 2005-2010, and I watched my colleagues go through horrendous cuts to jobs that left us battling to keep the libraries open to our service users with so few of us left. The few people I know still living there have few jobs prospects unless they can drive a long commute/find remote work, and the town centre of Northampton is depressing to say the least. Preston is an underrated little city and if it wasn't for my career choices, I would have been there a lot longer!
Northamptonshire County Council went bankrupt twice in 2018. The council also got a lovely new block of offices in 2018. Go figure...!?
@@henrydemonfreid1985Yes in the eighties the health authority in Northampton closed St Crispin Hospital tefing the patients out in the community and promptly built a new office block for themselves at Northampton General Hospital
Preston and it's people are awesome
*Came here faster than the housing crisis did💀*
Jokes on you, we've always been in a housing crisis :)
Yup
Housing crisis caused by mass immigration. We're importing more people every year than houses we have built in record years of house building. It's not possible or desireable that Britain build a million homes every year indefinitely. Closing the borders and sending millions home would be great for the housing crisis and benefit the British massively.
@@danke1150
Not solely caused by that, but yea, made it like 100 times worse.
@@Patrick-y4d1z It's almost exclusively caused by that. Blair opened the border and the Tories kicked it wide open.
We went from an average of 25k immigrants a year before Blair to 250k a year under him and now 1 million a year under the Tories. This is not sustainable.
Almost all of them need to be sent home.
Tom, I've been watching your videos for a while now and I gotta say these last few videos you've made are absolutely _excellent_. You're clearly putting your funding to good use and the planning and creative execution of the subjects you end up covering is absolutely on point. Good job :)
(i haven't finished the video yet, currently wondering if the situation is any different in Scotland, but never mind if you end up talking about it :p)
I represent a ward in a unitary authority in the West of England. Mercifully we got the budget through although there were cuts to the third sector sadly but increased investment in social care and children’s services. We are responsible for around 800 statutory and discretionary services - the latter are what makes a council unique and defines a place and how it engages with its communities.
Excellent video! 👏
Just wanted to say that your additional effort was evident in this video. It seems like each video that you make is better than the previous ones 👏
Wow this went deep! Thanks for going to such efforts and having the courage to put your hand in your pocket to make it 🙏
I apologize for commenting before the video is done. these traveling segments and interviews with experts and common folk are so NICE; I like Tom's general content with explanations and one man show, but this is aldo such a nice addition. Despite this being a sad topic, i am having a really nice audiovisual experience. Thank you for your hard work, Tom and anybody else who collaborates on this channel.
Community wealth and wealth redistribution? What a marvellous nobel idea, if only we had a word for it
It's called theft.
Good to see the paperboy has a youtube channel
Oops 0:55 Thurrock has not only gone bankrupt it moved. Still great work. First time watching something produced by this channel
I thought I was crazy, I knew Thurrock was in Essex but assumed the video was just right and I was wrong.
what a Thurrock hockup
@@Gr0nal Just a glitch in the Matrix. The other maps it is located in the correct location.
The system is working exactly as designed
You are absolutely right. I wish more people would wake up to what's happening.
Yup sadly
I used to live in croydon. I remember when i was little walking around Whitgift shopping centre and it being full of life and people. Now its almost empty and just feels very wrong and sad. I only go to croydon to go to the arcade now.
What an interesting video. As an American, I didn't know how UK local government works. Its not too dissimilar to what we have in the US.
UK government is much more centralized than the US. Central governments meddling with local councils is where the fundamental problem lies. They mandate certain things, while also making it increasingly hard to raise the funds. The most badly run councils are going bankrupt now, but it will extend to the better run ones as time goes on.
It is radically different than the way it works in the United States. In the US, states have the power to raise additional funds to fund whatever they want. They can raise taxes, they can sell bonds, they can sell land. They aren’t obligated to do most services and when they are the federal government requires them to do such a service the the federal government has to provide the funding. States have way more autonomy in the US Than the UK (10th amendment).
@@mharley3791 This video is about local governance, though (not state/regional).
@@rachelnotluf4585the comparison is apt for this conversation. The point of the conversation is that in the UK, the federal government dictates things to cities and towns with little flexibility at the local level. In Canada and the US, both have middle tier governments (states/provinces) that have constitutional authority to raise taxes without federal government involvement and it's that middle tier that is responsible for cities, towns, counties. The focus of a state/province is necessarily more focused within the border of that state/province. In the UK, central government dollars for cities are competing with requirements for the Navy, the Foreign Service, etc. Middle Tier government with a focus INWARD, provides SOME insulation to this central competition of dollars.
@@quantummotion exactly this
They go 'bankrupt' because central government throttles financial resources. As a matter of policy; the one they adopted in the very late seventies: monetarism. It's a policy choice since it is impossible for the UK government to 'go bankrupt', it is a sovereign currency issuer, i.e: is the only legal source of the currency it uses. Even though the original principle of this foolish theory was money supply control, this was already abandoned as a reality while Thatcher was in government. The same notion of restricted spending (and use of unemployment as a deliberate inflation tempering tool) is still in operation and also is the core methodology of EU economic policy baked into its treaty.
Thurrock council went bankrupt all by themselves from sheer stupidity and incompetence.
excellent video, the extra effort was well worth it! not typically something I would care to watch but you make it very interesting and understandable.
Also, big up Preston, doing the work for the people!
I moved to the UK three years ago, and there’s always so much to learn about a country’s government. You laid it out in a more accessible way that also explains why our neighbourhood trash never gets picked up in time. (lol.) thank you for dedicating so much time to this project!
41:28
It’s not a nuclear power station Tom.
That’s Ratcliffe on Soar Power Station, and it’s the only coal fired power station left in the UK.
I’ve driven past it numerous times heading into Nottingham and you can see the mountains of stockpiled imported coal.
I agree though that nuclear power makes me excited and we should build some reactors.
Ok, but the production value, script (in the captions) and overall vibe - not to mention all the background research in this vid are incredible.
I know that in the grand scheme this will look irrelevant but I'm so very sad about the Library of Birmingham! It was a wonderful place and building, it had the second largest Shakespeare collection in the world, a rooftop garden, and really comfortable study units. Even small offices you could book if you needed to. The book collection had everything from rarities to new books. It had a music collection and instruments to play with if you so wished. Even the children's area was great! And now they've closed several floors and had to shut services... They might have to close down altogether. And what happens to everything that was in there? It was such a wonderful place, and so many great resources!
The central library is being ring fenced, it's not going to be sold off, It'll remain the Cites property.
This is alarming.
This might be your best ever video, I was fascinated (and frustrated, in a productive way) throughout.
This is crazy high quality
it would be interesting to see photos of the soon to be bankrupt cities from 2010
The trip format is a pleasant novelty, cheers!
In Australia the system is more simple, you have one council, under one state government, whos under the federal government
We still have clashes between levels, but the main issues actually happen between state and federal rather than at local levels. Local government is effectively fully funded by rates as the local council rate system is designed in such a way that they cannot fail to meet budget - rates simply go up. However, many of the more expensive matters that the UK is struggling with (and to be frank, us too) are at the state level here.
It's really weird choice to blame the people you chose to discriminate against for your financial issues. If you hadn't broken the law, the settlements wouldn't exist. Blaming the victims is actually continued discrimination.
i hear you, but the amount of money payed feels monstrously out of proportion, no?
@@krzysztofkolodziejczyk4335 the amount paid would be the amount they failed to pay in the past, plus interest, plus lawyer costs. There's no penalty here, and both public and private organisations will continue this theft that isn't criminal indefinitely until it is criminalised.
First of all - fantastic video; I think this style suits you quite well. I hope it wasn't too stressful overall to produce, though!
I went to UCLan back in the late 00s-early 10s; while I enjoyed my time at the Uni itself, I really didn't enjoy Preston as a town. My friends and I joked about how sad and unloved it was, nicknaming it 'Depress-ton".
Over the last few years, however, I've been hearing more and more positive news coming out of Preston - whether about the Preston Model, or some other initiatives they seem to have - and it all sounds very hopeful. I hope Preston flourishes; that it does well and does indeed become a model for other places to follow.
More power to you, Preston.
I watch a lot of random stuff on youtube. This has been the most interesting and watchable video I've seen for a very long time, a dry topic excellently explained and presented. Well done, you have a new subscriber.
Im thrilled you came to Preston, hope you enjoyed it. Interesting to learn about whats going on here to.
As soon as you went into local government finances my reaction was "oh this is gonna be about decentralization, isn't it?". This is happening in lots of places. In general it is a good idea to give more responsibilities to local governments, as they are more in touch with local demands and sensibilities. However, what ends up happening a lot of the time is that decentralization becomes a scheme where local goverments get more responsibilites, but don't get the means necessary to properly fulfill those responsibilities. Essentially the central governments gets to offload one of their expenses partially or even entirely.
Another side effect is that peripheral regions are denied central funding to help them compete, leading to a strong decline in those economies.
They should have gone with Salesforce; this is how every Oracle project goes.
This felt really professional, great documentary! Also a really articulate argument against privatisation 👍
Fantastic explanations for the layman. Thank you for your hard work in producing this video. 10/10
Fancy meeting you here 😊 i live in that city with the biggest bankruptcy situation, Labour run cease pit
I did a little something similar on small hospitals going bankrupt in the USA for my few youtube followers for our local hospital. Nice work! Very informative!
Ehhyy Preston!! They are also currently rebuilding a historic pedestrian bridge which has been sorely missed for the past half a decade
It's late stage capitalism in action. Tory "austerity" (while the deficit has grown) followed by a failing economy = no heavily reduced money from central government, increased costs due to inflation and an ever increased need for the local authority to support it's citizens.
Saved you 45 mins of waffle
Seriously, this could have been a four minute video.
Late stage social democracy you mean.
@@lony5823 No no, this is an intrinsic part of capitalism.
This is such a quintessentially British travel vlog. Some British humour, politics, gray skies, rain, road traffic, local affairs... it has it all.
British mail is privatized? Holy hell. I tend to hate conservatism for many of the reasons pointed out in this video. Exellent upload, Tom. Thanks for sharing with us.
It had been publicly owned since 1660 in the reign of Charles II. Even throughout the 18th and 19th centuries when the government thought welfare was evil and taxing the rich was tantamount to robbery they still didn't sell it off.
Neoliberalism is ideologically capitalist in a way that would baffle the very people they claim descent from, lacking even a glimmer of pragmatism.
That's neoliberalism
As matey said, conflating conservatism with neoliberalism shows you probably don't know what you're talking about.
Also privatized in my country, because "private is more efficient". Service declined so quick there are discussions going on to buy it again to public sector - but EU blocks that.
@@wisentropy they don't care. They will always twist to suit biases rather than adapt their ideology and worldview.
Honestly starting in Plymouth I'm surprised you didn't come over to Dorset, BCP council here recently went into a massive sum of defecit
Love the style and storytelling
From US but lived in England a couple years, early 00s. I miss thinking of your island as an obv escape to sanity! Excellent video, as always.
This story of Oracle software ripping off Birmingham Council sounds a bit like the UK Post Office Horizon IT scandal of incompetence.
As a resident of Preston, I had no idea the local government had this kind of autonomy. It isn't really well advertised here.
The roads are a mess, roadworks everywhere, loads of drains are clogged, recycling schemes are none existent and paths are overgrown... But at least the local government is trying to do something different. Thanks for informing me of that!