[1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/uk-beaches-sewage-eng...
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62813573
[1] https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uks-most-polluted-beac...
[1] https://news.sky.com/story/huge-increase-in-raw-sewage-relea...
[1] https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/sewage-britains-rivers-...
Source: I live in the UK and still eat fresh veggies.
Perhaps so. But from my perspective of Australia the UK looks as if it's on the slide (I'm not smug when saying that as I reckon things here aren't much better, we've always been a mob of ostriches).
My family/cultural heritage is mostly UK so I have no pleasure in watching the decline. I've also relatives in the US and France and I've lived and worked in both Europe including the UK and the US so I view what's happening from a broad Western perspective and I'm very gloomy about what I see.
It's too complicated to give a quick summary of the problems but if forced to do so in a sentence then I'd say it's cultural. The West is being driven apart by widening ideological views, there's less cohesion, fewer common values and aspirations now than there once was.
On the other hand, the exact opposite is happening in Asia, people there know their time has come and that confidence and optimism drives cohesion and common values.
BTW, I worked in Asia for a while so I've some feeling for what's happening there.
The Economist avoids "shit news" as well as news about sports (What Six Nations?) and is not so negative as The Guardian but doesn't paint a picture too different about the general disorder or Brexit being a disaster.
I look at a lot of articles from The Guardian and I'd say the UK seems to be in full on disaster mode, whether it is the government trying to criminalize dissent because everyone from labor unions to schoolchildren to right wing anti-immigrant folks are protesting. Inflation is really out of control, fresh veggies are missing from the supermarket, the "small boats" situation makes any concern people have about the border in the US seem like nothing.