Time to depart...

[TimberWolf]

The UK would be a better place, and better placed, if 20 or 30 million people departed.

[Doggy Styles]

Australia is a bloody long way from everybody I know in the UK, and my football team, and you can't go anywhere without tripping over poisonous fauna.

[TheFaQQer]

Mrs BP wants to go abroad : has been desperate to avoid the chavs for years. But the kids are shared residence so I would have to hide for a year (after that Hague Convention does not apply). So I am stuck here.

Just pay her £50 million and be done with it, man.

[BrilloPad]

Just pay her £50 million and be done with it, man.

To my ex or Mrs BP?

[threaded]

I left many years ago. Most of Europe appears way richer. On my visits back to the UK the most shocking thing is the level of poverty I see. The place seems to be going backwards. Dirty, grimey. These plastic policemen look like a joke. Coppers walking around airport terminals with machine guns when some don't seem to have grapsed trigger discipline is worrying. So many video cameras, everywhere.

Although it's not as bad as the beggers in Quindong I met on a recent visit, who some scumbag had taught to do a 'high five' whilst shouting 'I suck cock' in return for money. Yet, I don't think it's that far in the future.

[gingerjedi]

How much do we get paid?

I was my thread so I'm PM, send me your CV and 2 references and I may consider you for a role. DA

[TimberWolf]

I'm off to Australia provided my visa application's successful. Can't wait to get out of here, it'll probably mean a pay cut but I don't care. Any luck this will be my last UK Xmas

How does emigration work, in easy steps. Like this?

Apply for some kind of working Visa?
Move out there and find a job?
Apply to be a citizen?

[Lockhouse]

If I was younger I'd have already gone. This country has nothing to offer. As it is I was hoping to retire to France in a few years time but with the current state of the £ that's looking even more unlikely.

[expat]

I left many years ago. Most of Europe appears way richer. On my visits back to the UK the most shocking thing is the level of poverty I see. The place seems to be going backwards. Dirty, grimey. ....

That's what strikes me too. People on here discuss whether the UK will become unfit to live in in the future, or not. Wrong, ask anyone who does spend time other places. It already is.

TheFaQQer and TimberWolf: again, people won't accept that the UK is way overcrowded (and doesn't know how to handle it; the Dutch do). Look at the good bits of the UK, they're all the lesser-populated bits.

In my own Scotland, the central overpopulated populated bits are to be avoided (the lower population density over Scotland than England makes the contrast even stronger). That's where I come from, but everybody I know has now left either for the emptier parts of Scotland or for abroad. A whole generation of my friends and family observed that, once the last of the parents died off, they would probably never set foot in Lanarkshire again.

[minestrone]

I would leave in a shot if I was allowed to.

Every where I look I can see signs that the standard of living is falling, when I was out for my lunch time walk I noticed how many shops were advertising 50% off sales and ironically the 2 shops beside the job centre were having closing down sales. I work mostly in Edinburgh and right now I am very concerned about the state of the Scottish Banks, with HBOS about to be nuked and RBS chucking money away I just don’t know where my future work will come from.

I am also becoming extremely concerned about how much control the state has over the public these days; it seems that you can be arrested for anything under anti terror laws. Scales on wheelie bins, litter police, charges for leaving your bin out a day early, MPs arrested for doing their jobs etc, this has become a police state.

I used to live in Australia and within 30 minutes of coming back I knew I had made the biggest mistake of my life.