Fear and greed in ConDem Britain

Even back in 1999, when I visited Britain for the first time, I noticed the advertising everywhere, much more persistent and omnipresent than in the Netherlands. Coming back now, more than half a decade after the last time I visited, the differences are even more noticable. It’s not just the amount of advertising, in the streets and on the telly, but what’s being advertised: pensions, quick ways to borrow money, all sorts of dodgy insurance, including schemes to get back the money you’ve lost in a previous insurance scam, and so on.

What’s more –and this may be a Plymouth thing– is the huge number of security warnings I’ve seen on the streets here, warning you not to drink alcohol in public, not to jump off some wall, not to skateboard, to be aware that this pub or shop doesn’t take kindly to shoplifters or drug use, that police in this area may be using head cams, and so on. The culmulative effect is an aura of insecurity and fear hanging over the neighbourhoods these warnings appear in.

Finally there are the shop fronts, where outside the tourist areas and big shopping malls it seems everything is being taken over by the kind of shops thaqt prey solely on the desparate working and under classes: cash converters, quick loan fixers, ambulance chasers, pound shops, with only the charity shops and occasional Polish or other ethnic supermarket still holding on.

The end result is a country where fear rules the streets, the only refuge the shopping malls.