Maybe. My great grandparents escaped from Poland and Russia in the first decade of the twentieth century. I don't know what you'd call it as a geographic area.

I remember, with a small child's view, the seventies. It was really shite. Weak leaders, unions asking the physically impossible, wild inflation (25+% vs a kinda normal 5-7%), strikes and poverty. 'managed decline' was the way it was described in the civil service: the airplane is fucked but we're going for a soft landing. 2020 here is like the seventies writ small. The UK had no choice but to join the EU.

The UK contributes less than 2% to greenhouse gases but our idiots are pushing climate change costs onto us - or maybe it's labelled climate change but the taxes is just trying to keep us the country afloat. What we learned from Mrs T was that 70s style tax burdens don't work. The halving of the tax rates doubled the revenue and suddenly punk became synth and new romantics.

I think the real change was the second wave emancipation of women. House prices went wild because there were now two serious incomes per household to multiply by 4 or 5. People were buying houses on self- certification of income, never making a mortgage payment, and still selling the house at a huge profit. The thing exploded, like in the US, as you'd expect. The government didn't raise interest rates to combat the excess money now in the system and pop-goes-the- weasel.

Selling off the infrastructure was a dream to build wealth for small shareholders, mirroring the US - I have a SEC Series 7 Traders qualification for work - but the Brits are sadly a more disconnected lot. Every budget raids our pensions funds because we don't care about them until the day before we retire. I'm guessing small shareholders are a small minority now.

After the nineties We've had a succession of weak leaders, each tacitly claiming to be the new Mrs T. Boris filled his mates pockets with the cash meant for COVID and locked down the working man.

Now we've got a naive ex-chief prosecutor 'authoritarian' in who is as weak as fuck pandering to every liberal cause you can shake a stick at. Violent prisoners being released, people jailed for sending a tweet; serious honours given out for the mayor of London who has failed by any metric you care to name, but someone has elected him three times in a row. Mind you, the opposition candidate was particularly hopeless this time.

It's all very reminiscent of Neil Kinnock failing miserably to walk unaided on a beach, having being surprised by the presence of water, staging a election victory before the day and losing the general election as a result to a complete twat.

Meanwhile, if climate change was actually important to you all, you'd tackle the major polluters of this world. China also owns Africa for the minerals and large quantities of the US, India lives in abject poverty as the largest population in the world. Not a damn thing was said.

Lets start with your assumption that it's fine that a country with .87% of the global population being anywhere near 2% of greenhouse gasses is ok. Especially when first world countries like ours are responsible for the historical majority of them. But also by reducing our emissions we enter the ability to negotiate with other countries to reduce theirs and we have incentives to develop more ecological technology that we can then sell to other countries as China has famously been doing with solar panels and electric vehicles. But significantly, all we can impact outside treaties is our own countries, so when we demand carbon reduction at home it's because the alternatives are giving up or I suppose you could attempt to take back India and China.

Carbon taxes are more like vice taxes than say revenue taxes. The goal isn't to raise money to offset emissions, but to make more externally costly decisions less appealing. That way you don't fly instead of take the train in order to save a bit of time.

And yeah, I can't speak much for the UK, but in the US I associate the Reagan era with the severance of businesses from their responsibility and value to society. The rot that's killing my country both financially and socially was fostered and promoted by the Reagan era. We sold off our manufacturing capacity in the form of offshoring and created the conditions of the crack epidemic, government ignoring as more Americans died of aids than in the Vietnam War, and the formation of the religious right who would go on to cause a lot of today's problems. My part of my country is called the rust belt, and it was decimated by the consequencesof the 80s.

Also I'm pretty sure the UK had great benefits from EU membership. At least considering how bad leaving it has gone for yall.