system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:What are the problems with the current UK government?

Everyone claims how bad the current state of the UK government is, but when I follow up and ask them what is actually so bad, I can never get a concise answer. Please help me understand!
gpt
To an extent, this depends on the political affiliations of the people you're talking to. But Britain is struggling to cope with a recession, and the current government's solution has been an austerity drive, cutting services that many people depend on. That's not going to make any government popular.

Some of the issues may be:

* It's a coalition government. Because none of the parties won an absolute majority at the last election, the Conservative Party was forced into a governing coalition with the Liberal Democrat Party as the junior party. Although this sort of thing is common in countries with a proportional representation system of voting (Germany, for example), it is extremely rare in the UK. Liberal Democrat voters in particular felt aggrieved that their party had to ditch a lot of their manifesto promises.
* Out of touch. The Cabinet is largely made up of very wealthy and highly educated people, most from the same exclusive private school (in Britain these are, confusingly, called "public schools"). The perception that the government has no idea how ordinary people live (and suffer in an austerity drive) was heightened by an ill-advised tweet by a senior politician that claimed that by cutting taxes on beer and bingo, the government was allowing "hard-working" people to do more of the things "they" enjoy. The fact that the party reacted by saying they didn't know what the fuss was about only made things worse.
* Siding with the bankers. The population as a whole puts the blame for the economic crises squarely on the banking and finance sector. That the government appears to have done little, if anything, to curb that industry's excesses and instead cutting down on essential services is making the government very unpopular.
* Allegations of corruption. In particular, the Conservative Party is closely linked with the Rupert Murdoch empire, the same Rupert Murdoch that owns Fox in the US: he also controls a very large slice of Britain's tabloid press. David Cameron has been too closely associated with high-ranking figures from that particular concern, including many who were involved in a high-level scandal -- and one or two were even imprisoned -- involving illegal methods of news gathering and other flagrant violations of the law. One newspaper even went out of business as a result.
* Also part of the whole corruption thing, the expenses scandal continues to rumble on. The current government took office after it was revealed (by a non-Murdoch newspaper) that politicians of all parties had been dishonestly claiming expenses at the taxpayers' expense -- in some cases, actually in breach of the law. The new government promised to get it sorted, but fresh allegations continue to surface. In the most recent case, a cabinet minister was found to have been claiming inflated mortgage repayments on a house she wasn't even entitled to be claiming expenses on. The newspaper that printed the story -- the same paper that broke the original scandal -- was indirectly threatened by the minister's advisor with government censorship.

So as you can probably gather, the current UK government isn't getting a very good press at the moment.