To think Margaret Thatcher was right?

[Lauriefairycake]

when she said 'divide and rule'.

The new Tory policies have caused what feels like the whole of mumsnet to turn on each other.

Her words have been successful - get everyone; poor, working poor, working class and middle class to turn on each other.

Much easier to rule then.

I'm sorry for starting yet another thread but since the Con-Libs entered government this place has got harder and harder to be around.

There is this horrible air of 'those benefit claimants will get what's coming to them' pervading the board.

It's increasingly harder to look at what is really going on in people's lives and instead just categorising them.

How about we stop turning on each other?

YANBU

agree about the bitching but it's not just against those claiming benefits.

Resentments have been simmering across our society down various fault-lines for years. Some groups have been resentful of migrants that they think get unfair advantages. Other groups have been resentful seeing their disposable income gradually eroded through stealth taxes and which they think has been wasted. It's never amounted to anything up to now because there's been enough public money and enough easy credit available to keep us all dumb, fat and happy.

Cut the money supply a little and of course the suspicions start that someone somewhere's getting a better deal or having an easier time of it than we are.

I'm not as cynical as the OP to think that this is a deliberate divide and conquer strategy. All kinds of people seem to be squealing equally loudly at the moment.

Even though deregulation took place during the Clinton years (aka 'Gramm-Leach-Bliley' - all Republicans, sponsors of the legislation) it might not have been the catalyst it was if the Bush administration had not persistently and purposefully (and for ideological reasons) gutted the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission), thus preventing it from effectively carrying out its mission, and also the policies of the Federal Reserve, whose role in the mortgage industry/price of money was central in the crisis, alongside the Bush administration's tax cuts combined with the pursuit of a very expensive war.

Those institutions who did what the GLB deregulation envisioned (diversifying their financial services businesses) came out relatively ok during the crisis.

I agree that there has been a lot of ugly triumphalism on MN about the cuts, and a disheartening lack of compassion, even some (I hope) premature dancing on the grave of the BBC ('The BBC has finally been punished' thread was quite a jolt to me as I had thought there was freedom of speech in Britain).

There's a very British tendency to see a limited amount in the pot, a 'whack a mole' idea where if one person has a certain amount then nobody else can have it, and a concomitant tendency to grab or to take away and to believe that in taking away, progress is being made -- whereas sustained progress, the raising of all boats, can only come from growth and policies that foster growth.