Britain Has Worst Quality of Life in Europe?
October 12th, 2009Throw another CCTV at it, and send out some more idiots from the councils to look through people’s trash. That will sort it out for sure.
Via: Telegraph:
British people have the worst quality of life in Europe, according to a report which highlights the long hours, bad weather, low life expectancy and high price of many consumer goods.
In a study of ten of the largest European countries, Britain comes last followed by Ireland, with France and Spain topping the table.
Though British households enjoy the highest income, at £35,730 a year, £10,325 higher than the European average, British families have to contend with a high cost of living, with fuel, food and alcohol all costing more than the European average.
With a litre of unleaded petrol at £1.08 a litre, the UK is the second most expensive country in Europe. However, diesel is more expensive in the UK than anywhere else in Europe – £1.13 a litre, which is 19p or 20 per cent above the European average of £0.94.
The report by price comparison website uSwitch analyses 10 European countries against 17 different benchmarks, from the price of gas, electricity, fuel, food and drink to the amount each country spends on education, health to working conditions and the weather.
The top three countries are France, Spain and Denmark, with Sweden, Ireland and Britain coming eighth, ninth and tenth respectively.
The study comes less than a week after the United Nations moved Britain out of the top 20 list of most desirable countries to live in for the first time.
That basically summarises all the things I whinge about every day living in the UK. That and the strangulation of every tenet of liberty… It’s getting to “Do you have a license for that gnome, sir?”
In my late grandparents’ youth, if you wanted a gun you just bought one. If you wanted to build a house on your own piece of ground, you just did it without having to ask the taste police for permission to do what you liked on your own piece of ground. Now it seems that everything I want to do requires Big Brother’s permission – upon pain of all manner of menaces. Liberty after liberty has been surrendered to bureaucracy because nobody drew a line in the sand and said “enough!” and now we are at a stage where what should be an utterly intolerable level of restriction on our freedoms is bizarrely still not being properly appreciated and lamented. The people have been so institutionalised by state schooling, by an endless media campaign of state propaganda, by addiction to zombie consumerism and celebrity culture that they are effectively lobotomised. I can’t see a finger being lifted in the UK for liberty until / unless the day dawns when people are literally starving. What else will rouse them from this lotus-eater-like slumber?