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>As a Brit who's visited a few times, to me it seems that America is both the glittering future and a banana republic at the same time, overlaid on top of one a

• pjc50 5y ago
  There is a lot of material decay in Britain, and it tends to increase as you get further from the Shard, but the highly central government means there's little opportunity for places to achieve the banana republic status of autonomous, large, corrupt political units. Certain places have seediness and violence; I might call out Bradford and Nottingham. But ultimately we might be poor but at least we don't have mass shootings; the only two events which might register on the American scale are Dunblane and Bloody Sunday.