There's nothing wrong with housing estates. The problems affecting Britain today are virtually unique in Europe in tems of their scale. Basically the country is being overun by antisocial oiks. I firmly believe the rot set in during the Thatcher era when she set the seeds of social breakdown. The changes were quite subtle in many ways.
The UK has always had a large proportion of poorly educated but basically decent people, who were happy buying their cigarettes and drinking their beer and doing lots of physical jobs and that's about it. What Thatcher did was to destroy the industries, which employed many of the working classes and without the cohesion afforded by employment, families broke up because of the incredible stress and tension brought about by losing jobs, particularly in the coal mining industry. The next generation, i.e people born around 1984, grew up in a new Britain, which was one of every man for himself, but unlike the affluent Yuppies in the south had no resources and turned to crime. In the late 80's and 90's, with no father figures in many cases and increasingly fragmented family units, the now teenage lost generation were further damaged by a lack of public morality driven by greed. It was at this point around 1995, that a wholesale reform in social welfare might just about have turned things round. Unfortunately an inept labour government was so far up its own arse it didn't care and oversaw the current degredation in morals, drug abuse, crime and general breakdown.
Unfortunately, without a radical change in governemt (zero-tolerance policing, harsh, if not Draconian prison sentences and a massive increase in tax to pay for the necessary social reforms, which Oldspice calls for) we're in for a rough ride.
