As 2017 draws to a close, time for the crystal ball.
What will the UK be like in 10yrs time? I’m thinking prosperity, lifestyle, transportation, leisure – how will our lives be changed?
A greener society? A more tolerant society? More cycling? Better railways? Demise of the BBC? More eating out? Are the nazis really back? Petrol, hybrid or the full Nikolai Tesla? Same old smartphones or some new tech revolution? Effect of Brexit (or not)? Or plodding on the same. Anything you like. Indulge yourself.

Darn it! Wrong forum

Broken up into three separate states.

Thanks km79. I hadn’t even thought of that, but I see what you mean. How do you think that would pan out? Good/bad? I’m Welsh – does that mean I’ll need to dig out the passport as well as the toll for the Severn crossing? 😉

Descent into fascism will have been temporarily halted due to a complete inability of the people to raise themselves from their financed sofa.

Your bank will own everything that you laughingly call ‘mine’.

The only sport left will be fox hunting.

Sorry Tinners, I meant Scotland independent and in the EU, a United Ireland in the EU and England and Wales all alone and isolated in the world together forever.

Yikes! I’d better not revert to Welsh when talking about the weather down the pub when there are English chums nearby then, in case they think I’m talking in a derogatory fashion about their house:car ratio or external house lights 😉

With a bit of luck, life expectancy will continue to drop and the UK population will reduce with a smaller proportion of pensioners. House prices will rise at less than the rate of inflation, while cars will become unaffordable for the masses, giving many a shock introduction to cycling short distances or using public transport.

Compulsory gender reassignment.

km79 +1

I am also going for a massive change in economy from debt based and south east biased to a new model – not from the population, but from politicians ever desperate to retain power.

We will all be poorer, watching China, India and Russia dominate, while the EU will be shrinking.

Sorry Tinners, I meant Scotland independent and in the EU, a United Ireland in the EU and England and Wales all alone and isolated in the world together forever.

LOL

We’ll be a curates egg just as we are now, lots of people still saying we are going down the pan, yet never quite getting there

while the EU will be shrinking.

Who is going next?

Everyone will have received their free owl.

The new forum will still be but a distant pipedream.

Not looking too optimistic so far (I’m looking at you, Montgomery).
Anyone foresee something way, way, better – a cause for excitement?

fairer? I doubt it.

The biggest change will be the number of active voters amongst Gen X, Y and the ‘millenians’ will over take the boomers which will make for a change of policy in Westminster and we should see the end of “protect ‘homeowners’ at all costs” policies and maybe the ‘triple lock’ state pension will be quietly forgotten and heaven forbid means tested state pensions.

Transport? knackered I’m afraid, HS2 might help a few hundred people, maybe a few thousand get North to South and vice versa a bit easier, but mostly we’ll have a greater population using the same over loaded rail network we have now, roads it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a petrol, diesel or battery it counts for nowt if you can’t get anywhere. We’ll have our ‘Concorde moment’ for national transport, not in the way the Clarksons of the world think – a backwards step, but as in the real sense, the realisation that we don’t need to be in the same room as someone to work with them. Less cars not newer ones that shift the polution the the most tax efficient place.

Like it is now but sh1ter.

The biggest change will be the number of active voters amongst Gen X, Y and the ‘millenians’ will over take the boomers

Gen z is coming. 😯 😀

Speshpaul – Do you work for Rab? #JustSayin

George orwell’s 1984

Baby boomers will have shuffled off and the next generation will have taken control of web wombles.
Life will carry on.

Actually, Macattack, I think there may be something in the 1984 analogy but it won’t necessarily be a state “big brother”, it’ll be under our noses with Nest cameras and offspring wandering around the house while FaceTiming their friends. Imagine going to get a cold beer out of the fridge in your underpants* on a hot day without realising that a hologram of your activities is being beamed to millions of living room walls via some sort of 3D GIF on social media?
*this is a theoretical scenario and not a habit, before you ask

George orwell’s 1984

This

or somehow people stop reading the daily mail/sun the tory party implodes and there is some hope

It will be full of people looking back at the fanciful predictions made 10yrs before

“Our country” says it all to me. It hasn’t been our country for a long time and I only see that as a good thing.

“Speshpaul – Do you work for Rab? #JustSayin “

Work…. yer sure..

You may be right, Wrightyson, but using the phrase to try to be inclusive, so that everyone pitches in. Please elaborate. Doesn’t have to be a fanciful prediction either. Maybe a fashion or trend.
My reason for asking is that a colleague said to me today that the BBC may not be here in any recognisable form in 10yrs time. Not sure I believe that, but it made me think more widely about changes in society and tech, however small

This next 10 years will be interesting. There are a lot of existing medium- and long-term issues that will become clearer in this time.

In general, I think the UK outside our doors will look and feel very similar. Things that actually make a day-to-day difference take quite some time to change and even the bigger stuff tends to compound rather than blast into ubiquity.

It goes without saying that economic, political and social issues will refer to and from Brexit. It’s difficult to evidence a prediction, but I suspect higher corporate interests and connections will prevail over any tendency to grossly stuff this up. Society will probably reflect in 10 years’ time, however, that the effort wasn’t really worth it: the more ardent Brexiters will be disappointed with the lack of true independence and Remainers will point out that things seem very similar, just with more paperwork and influence now decidedly from the sidelines. If it had been re-run in 2026, the Referendum would be won by Remain – due in no small part to demographic change.

London will remain Europe’s premier financial centre and some emerging specialist / niche industries will flourish. Economic inequalities, however, will deepen due to a backlog of infrastructure and educational underinvestment coupled with the strong emergence of automation. A small group of people will tell the computers what to do and live an ever richer life; the growing number of poor will specialise in roles that automation and AI can’t touch. I expect this will lead to more people in more part-time, caring, creative and arts roles – just ones that are less likely to pay well.

The short-lived Corbyn government of 2019-2023 will briefly ride a wave of changed attitudes, which turned eventually against austerity when it was clear that public debt had increased enormously, with very little to show for it. The electorate will warm to the idea that investment in “stuff” (rail, road, education) is better.

This change won’t have come soon enough to have had some effect on the metrics: armed forces capable in fewer circumstances, huge backlogs of public capital investment and lots of smaller things like overgrown parks, rubbish on the street etc. The Corbyn government will be as reforming as any before it, but will quickly become ungovernable due to a slim majority and unresolved tensions within Labour. However, it will lay foundations that – like in 1945 – are recognisable for generations. The Conservatives will have largely rejected austerity, but will be tainted for a generation by having the misfortune to enact Brexit. Resurgent Lib Dems will therefore support a minority Labour administration for the 2024-28 years.

Public finances will therefore be in mixed shape in 2028. The tax take will be up and the deficit quite possibly closed, but the overall debt level will be very high (most of it due to the “wasted years” of 2010-19, with very little to show for it).

Private finances will continue to drift negatively for some time, supported by ongoing low interest rates. The Bank of England and other Western central banks will have lost the ability to use interest rates as a tool and will instead focus efforts on controlling other aspects.

Shared ownership and “rental” (related to the above) will be commonplace. Demand for cars will have dropped as electric cars and semi-automation emerge more strongly, but they will not take off as fast as expected, nor replace the lost sales of conventional cars. In cities, companies like Uber will offer more comprehensive packages that replace the need for households to own cars. This will not be ubiquitous, however, meaning that some areas and groups will still need direct access to vehicles. Jobs in driving industries will be reducing, not because of robo-vehicles as expected, but because of better abilities to predict where demand will occur and for fleets to service this demand more efficiently (see 2017’s Amazon same-day model).

Cities themselves will continue to develop with central areas in high demand. Outlying and some suburban areas will become decidedly run-down in places, especially around former retail parks – many of which will be derelict within the next 10 years. The trend of golf course closures will also accelerate.

Social attitudes will generally continue to liberalise by most meaures and, in general, will recognise every greater diversity. While the Church of England will expectedly continue its decline, so too will Muslim denominations and other formal faiths. Extremism of all kinds will remain, but not take hold widely. King Charles will abdicate after a short, pensive and underappreciated reign – replaced by William earlier than expected.

Finally, cycling will be just fine. The basic human instincts to travel, have fun and be sociable will continue to underpin a reasonable level of popularity. MTB’ing may become less popular that at present, but will continue an overall hold and will adapt to emerging tastes.

So, overall I think it’s a mixed bag. We will still live in one of the world’s richest and most creative countries – and deal as ably as any other with the diversity and enormity of change.

In ten years the country will have separated into 3 Scotland independent, and Ireland United. We will all be poorer but politics and policies will be changing

Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns suggests unimaginable technical progress in the 21st century, with the technological singularity pencilled in for 2049 – a rupturing of the fabric of human history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_change

Whether you think Kurzweil is a colossal fantasist or not [have a guess who he currently works for – a faintly unsettling prospect], the geometrical increase in human endeavour with minds multiplicatively building on minds is not in question. So it is likely that 2028 will look as different to us as today looks to someone from the 1940s. Maybe even earlier.
At least, I’d say that was more likely than the alternative viewpoint of things-will-still-be-shit-because-of-the-Tories.

With shitter weather.

Ben & Garry – really interesting. Never heard of Kurzweil before. Possibly bigger changes ahead than I may have expected? I wonder what the next big “disrupter” will be? (Or maybe it’s already here but hasn’t taken off yet?)

All folks not in the top 5% will be poorer culturally at the topend financially at the bottom end.

Universal credit… under employment shite productivity

He hoh

Thanks sr0093193. You have to admit that Newport does look better with a bit of sunlight, though.

With the end of the civil war between Brexiteers and Remainers at the great battle of Watford Gap, the country finally settled into a truculent, resentful peace.

The last bands of armed remainers were quickly rounded up by Farage’s New Model Army, and following a short, but completely fair and unbiased trial by the Daily Mail, were machine-gunned in Wembley Stadium, while crowds of cheering onlookers waved their St George flags enthusiastically.

With London now lying in ruins, the financial services industry was barely able to survive – a few hardy hedge funds still clung grimly on, but with so many investors and financiers having been butchered in the purges of the early ’20s, it was a thin and difficult living.

However, while life in London was grim, elsewhere, with the country largely cut-off from the internet (and Facebook, Twitter and most social media now outlawed and punished savagely) the social life of the country once more blossomed, with people meeting in pubs and actually talking to each other, rather than obsessively swiping their phones and getting angry about things they couldn’t control. England won the Eurovision Song Contest 7 years in a row, once the rules were altered to allow Brass Bands and Morris Dancers.

Singletrackworld eventually updated their website, but only after stealing a hyper-advanced AI to do the coding while on an illegal smuggling trip to the Alps.

What time do the optimists get back from the pub? 😉

I’ll still be recycling the same twenty puns.

I’ll still be making sure I log out of the Perchy account before posting anything amusing.

….except the ones about shoes. Those are hilarious.

I thought I was being optimistic; I was gonna post a picture of Hiroshima post A bomb.