I was born in England, live in London, have a Dutch partner, and also travel to the Netherlands often enough. I agree completely. They have their problems too (from the political to having to tap out on buses), but the overall level of quality and care seems rather higher. The sense of decline and disengagement is strong too. Difficult to say much objective about that (though keep an eye on the turnout in the upcoming general election), but I see it from all political persuasions.

Yeah I agree that it is hard to be entirely objective on something as subjective as sense of decline — lord knows I’ve spoken to Dutch natives whom hold an opinion that the country is ‘not what it used to be’. I do get a feel that people, generally, seem less embroiled in a race to the bottom than we do in the UK.

It feels that people in UK have been ground down to a point of ‘ah well, it’s all f*cked and always will be now’ and, as such, people accept things like a £5k bicycle failing multiple times within 2 years.

Why is tapping out on the bus a bad thing? It means you can pay for distance traveled instead of a flat fee.

It was sort of a joke, I’m mostly just not used to it - but also apparently it’s a pain if you forget to do it.

You have to log into a website and enter your point of exit. That way whatever was subtracted form your credit can be returned to you.

It’s the same for train travel. It is an honor system because there is no way to check if that really was your exit or not.

In London it is a slight benefit to poor people with lots of time, as you can travel a long way (sometimes) on a single bus.

But the Netherlands has a country-wide system (unlike Britain) so it has this compromise of tapping out.

> Further to that, it generally feels as though the UK is a country massively in decline

To a large extent it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. People expect decline so it happens. It has been happening for a long time - back to the 1960s or so when the UK became the only only country ever (still true) to have a space launch capability and lose it.

That said, IMO the causes of this are widespread across the west. It is evident in the US, and the drift away from competitive free markets, the rise of culture war politics, short termism is business and politics, naivety about the rest of the world (disastrously reflected in foreign policy - Russia being the obvious example) and so on seem to be spreading.

> drift away from competitive free markets, the rise of culture war politics, short termism is business and politics, naivety about the rest of the world (disastrously reflected in foreign policy - Russia being the obvious example) and so on seem to be spreading.

I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here. Especially the naivety about the rest of the world. As someone whom travels to India regularly (my family are there) I have to say, people have no clue about the rate of change happening over there.

In an extremely short space of time (I want to say at most a couple years) I’ve seen what used to be an all day journey from Delhi to Meerut be cut down to a couple hour bus trip through the building of the Delhi - Meerut expressway.

I’ve seen the Delhi metro continue to expand its reach and new expressways begging building (in our home city of Batala a new motorway was recently started to take us to Delhi directly)

Meanwhile the M25 continues to be a massive pothole with indefinite road works that never seem to complete

There is even more than that.

The west (admittedly this not only a flaw of the west) tends to think its cultural norms, identities and values are human universals.

There is also a tendency to think that the golden age of peace and prosperity the west enjoyed after the end of the cold war is the rather than the exception - it even lead to silly ideas like "the end of history".

Are you blaming our decline on negative attitudes?

What does that have to do with German-developed and Hungarian-made electric motors breaking down in the UK?

The Dutch trains (the rolling stock) are a joke for such a rich country but I love everything else about the Dutch railway

And yes overall everything in the NL seems better quality