Why I'm leaving

People like me are leaving in their thousands - the educated middle-classes that earn enough to pay a lot of tax, but not enough to be able to blag non-dom status and pay no tax.

I'm leaving because there is a massed class of self-obsessed consumptionist fuckwits taking over. It's not about working class/middle class/upper class anymore. It's chavscum vs everyone else - and it is not something I've seen in other countries. The US and Canada have white trash, but that white trash don't seem to make up the majority of the population.

Go out on a Friday or Saturday night in any town centre in the UK, you'll see the same scene. Drunken/drug-fucked arseholes of both sexes fighting and vomiting and inflicting themselves on the people around them. I go out once or twice a month on a clubbing night, and every time I see it - I'm not a Daily Mail reader being told this, I'm seeing it first hand.

When I lived in Gravesend I got attacked for "talking posh". My wife got sexually assaulted by a 14-year old boy whose family then tried to batter me outside the police station - it didn't matter what their son had done, I was responsible for him being at the police station. My daughter got her drink spiked at a party and was raped. My ex-girlfriend had her head smashed against a radiator after a guy tried to force her into having sex at a party (he followed her to the bathroom and grabbed her). At my youngest daughter's 5th birthday party, she saw her uncle get his teeth knocked out by one of the other parents (unprovoked, the guy was drunk) - my daughter goes to private school as I wanted to shield her from the standard scum of the town, it didn't work. I punched some guy when he was trying to break into my bedroom through the window in the middle of the night. My experience of this country is that it's full of scum - maybe I'm just more attuned to it now, because I see these kinds of people regularly. I know that I've had more than my fair share of "bad things", but our lives are subjective, so this is how I see it.

I travel around Europe a lot for work, and I don't see the same behaviour when I'm out on the town over there. There has always been a drinking culture in the UK, and maybe 15 years ago when I started going out it was the same on a Friday and Saturday as it is now - perhaps I'm just seeing it through more cynical eyes. 15 years ago I don't think we'd have been booing the national anthems of other countries at sporting events - I really believe something has changed in our national psyche, and that it is getting worse.

On top of the personal safety/comfort issues - there's the failing health system, the ever increasing cost of living (rising way way above the rate of inflation), the surveillance culture, the nannying freedom-encroaching legislation, the failing infrastructure, the 'hand out' gimme attitude of a lot of the people and the shite weather. When I flew back into Heathrow yesterday, my bags were delayed by an hour due to "congestion". Only in the UK do we have congestion in the airport itself.

Just to balance it out - I love the natural beauty of the UK, I adore the South Downs. I love hot summer days in the New Forest. I love the heritage and history of the country itself - I'm not ashamed of our past. I love the fact that you can go and see real Roman baths/roads. Places like Stonehenge are awe-inspiring. But all of these things are "nice to haves" - and all of them are things from our past. What is there now to be proud of? The thing that we are immersed in is the current culture - what is the zeitgeist of now?

I've spent the past few months living in two places at once (Montreal and here). I prefer it there, so that's where I'm going. It is by no means perfect, but it is preferable to me. Just little things - like the police are generally respected, the streets are clean, the subway is on time and cheap, healthcare is good, in summer it's hot in winter it's cold (I ski and mountain bike so perfect for me), quality of life is high, the natural beauty is both varied and impressive. Quebec is different to the rest of Canada though - it's more European and less banal. There's even interesting architecture :) I just like it.

If I didn't have to work and I was 20 years older, then I could gladly live in the UK in the sticks in a bubble and enjoy all the good things about the country without much of the bad. But I have to work and socialise, and the UK is not a pleasant place to do either in my experience. YMMV.