Quote from Cutten:
a city in the North, Scotland, Wales or N Ireland where characteristics like friendliness, relaxation, a healthy work/life balance, and knowing how to have fun, are all present in the general population
You're kidding me, in comparison to London and the Home Counties any major town north of Watford Gap has extremely high unemployment, high crime rates, a lower spend on public amenities, highest statistics for drug and alcohol abuse among adults
and children, generally poorer diet and shorter life expectancy, highest cases of MRSA in hospitals, lower academic scores, highest suicide, highest cases of clinical depression, worse roads, the list goes on and on.....the North, the land that time and pretty much every elected government forgot, no-one in the south gives a shit about ex-miners and ex-shipworkers or the flat cap and whippet brigade!
That article is great but the author obviously doesn't realize how Londoners get around things like parking tickets and congestion charges. This is where those friendly, relaxed, healthy, and fun-loving Northerners come in handy, we just clone the registration number of some poor Northern sucker's car and they get the bill
The UK in general is in the shitter for the majority of honest tax-paying citizens who rely on the NHS for medical care and the police for protection. Anyone with any money has private medical insurance and lives in areas patrolled by a private security company and they probably don't pay any tax because they're non-doms! Most of the corporates are registered in some tax haven! As far as trading goes, I think we're the only country to have spread-betting, gains are totally tax free!
No wonder the government coffers are empty, they're spending all their (spare) cash on pointless wars in places like Iraq, second homes for MP's, and the rest goes on paying people not to work!