AIBU to think we are edging worryingly close to anarchy?

[Noras]

Am I unreasonable to believe that we are 2 or 3 steps away from anarchy?

Just that really. We see endless footage of quite aggressive and in the open. Shop lifting. People seem to have no shame eg driving over parkland or chucking rubbish out of car windows. Kids ran amok in Cornwall. People decide to live in caravans anywhere and just poo in parkland. Fly tipping is rife.
People freely wal: around the streets under the influence of drugs. People go to upmarket gyms with ankle tags and no sense of shame. People are more abusive and rude.

No not me, someone else brought up khans security, I replied saying MPs should have security where needed. You then replied asking if Farage had security and I said yes when needed and you replied telling me chat GPT told you khan has it 24/7.

I’m still none the wiser to the point of telling me that?

God knows. It was ages ago.

Right…

The things that have very noticeably got worse are the epidemic of shoplifting and the huge rise in the numbers of people living in tents and vans.

Where I live, several little parks where office workers used to eat their sandwiches have been taken over by people living in tents, leaving their detritus all over the place and presumably using the parks as a toilet. Dozens of van dwellers parked alongside a cemetery near where I live are also using the cemetery as a toilet.

Stuff like this is really corosive for society and the government needs to get a grip.

don’t be fucking ridiculous! Honestly the absolute NERVE!

Exactly this! Just completely deluded.
Some people just don’t seem to have critical thinking skills at all. It’s bloody scary.

Where does “nerve” come into it? Are people not allowed to dislike the Labour government?

We do seem to have a tendency to see the past through rose tinted glasses. Is anyone else watching the BBC documentary about Barlinnie prison in Glasgow? Lots of lifetime Weegie cons getting misty eyed about how you don't get slashings now like they did in the 80s (to say nothing of slopping out, full scale riots, prisoners taking to the roof for days, bloody hell).

I'm always fuming about pavement parking, convinced it's getting worse, people today having no respect for pavement users, etc etc etc. Imagine my surprise to discover a public information campaign about pavement parking from the 80s! So it must have gone on then too. And dogs used to shit everywhere, and it would never get picked up.

I do reckon we could do with some more 80s style public information films. Really scary ones, with flytippers being swallowed up by the earth and tailgaters having horrible accidents etc etc. I'm sure that would have a beneficial effect on antisocial behaviour!

You mean poverty. Yes, many more people are living in poverty thanks to 14 years of the Tories. That's not going to get turned around in 5 minutes.

Erm, what period are you talking about, because the dole has been a thing (in various guises) since the 1930s. And back in the day there was none of this requirement to search for a job- people used to just coast for years. Also, even when jobsearch requirements started to come in, mums had no requirement to even think about getting a job until their youngest turned 12.

Some schools were absolutely brutal, and bullying was rife. Working class kids were routinely written off as factory fodder.

I promise you that London was dirtier and more run down in the Eighties!! That's a classic case of rose tinted glasses if ever I saw one! 😆 And don't you remember the massive homeless encampments in places like the Bullring nr Waterloo in the late 80s/ 90s?? Again, coinciding with a long run of Tory government. It improved a lot under New Labour, and it went to shit again over the last 14 years of the Tories.

Actually, I worked at Camborne School around 2009 and there were still kids with visible signs of malnutrition who never went to the sea even then.

I lived in Hackney in the 90s. It's changed beyond recognition. There's now a row of upmarket tapas bars under the bridge where the kids used to torch the cars they'd stolen. And there were shootings between drug dealers/ at dancehall and garage clubs all the time.

This. I don’t remember cheese and butter being in cages 20 yeara ago.

Sick of the constant “oh it’s a Russian/reform bot” when posters raise totally valid points of the decline in living standards in the UK.

This has nothing to do with Reform and I most certianky won’t vote for them. It’s led by fear and quiet upset. I am in my 60s and the World has changed for the worse. I was use to crime and even did work in some of the cells but it was different then. Even the crooks had some honour, Now we have people walking the streets in day light out of their heads. People actually drop their trousers and poo in front of humans. We have boy racers driving all over our parks doing doughnuts. My daughter is too scared to use her phone in public in London.

Nope. We in the UK are ultimately too indolent for anarchy. We have a couple of riots every now and then but other than that, nothing.

The majority of people have always been cunts, it’s just that we are more aware of it through social media etc.

One thing which is very different now from, say, thirty years ago is the importance of safeguarding, DBS checks, school security, and so on. Threads about the 1980s and earlier (and even 90s) will talk of pervy teachers, randoms (a favourite mumsnet word) being able to go into schools, pupils sleeping with teachers, etc. It’s much harder for adults to get away with things like that now. Granted, it’s not impossible, and when it happens, it makes big news, but in the 80s, people shrugged, and said “it’s what men do”, while said men operated in plain sight. There’s much more awareness of this sort of thing now. Is our children’s safety a good thing? (Other threads will say this is not so good: men not daring to work in schools, mumsnetters ready to log it with 101 when they see a lone man outside a school, etc)

It really is scary. I question if they're willfully obtuse, or just complete morons. It does worry me, because we seem to be on the same trajectory as the US for polarisation. We used to share common ground, but we don't seem to even share common facts or history. Yes, Labour aren't doing a great job, but it hasn't even been two years. The Tories had fourteen years to fuck this country up (destroying the NHS, cuts to police, cuts to council budgets, cuts to the armed forces, student fees, the mini budget fiasco) and left this country up shit creek financially. Yet, somehow it's all Starmer's fault that he can't be wave a magic wand to resolve it. And the same people who think this don't seem to realise that Farage will only accelerate the decline, and probably won't even get a handle on immigration. Protest votes rarely go well, look at Brexit and how much poorer we are now because of it and have immigration issues to boot. There would be no need to stop the boats if it weren't for Brexit, because prior to that we returned them to France as per the Dublin agreement. And the majority of immigrants were from Europe, rather than us having to open up immigration to the rest of the world.

The police have moved the protesters on and afaik the trucks will now be able to get in and out of the oil refinery @EvangelicalAboutButteredToast
The schools are shut in Ireland until tomorrow.
🤞crossed the ongoing talks with representative of the farmers, truckers and agricultural contractors will end the blockades.
Dublin’s main street was cleared of the protesters in the early hours of the morning.
There’s a thread on this in the Craicnet section of Mumsnet.

Do you reckon it’s cos people were sick of the hash of things the conservative government made in the intervening years?

Agree. I saw a post started the other day bemoaning the “bureaucracy” nowadays and how you have to have checks to start jobs.

id have thought even with the best will in the world no one could find an issue with vetting staff correctly 🤦🏻‍♀️

although I disagree that sexual assaults are taken much more seriously now than they ever have been, having not long been through a court case involving my daughter.

i agree the right noises are made now, but in practice we aren’t really doing anything different. Her abuser didn’t go to prison because he was the family breadwinner with a good salary - direct quote from the judge 👍

Indeed, I haven't forgotten how Labour seemed like "a breath of fresh air" in 1997, after eighteen years of Tory rule; and probably how that criminal Tony Blair operated in plain sight. Similarly, I've heard people describing Thatcher as "a breath of fresh air" after the discontent of the 1970s.

One of my favourite sayings (not necessarily true) is "politicians are like nappies: they should be changed regularly, and for the same reason". While we don't want a revolving door of government changing, we see again and again that governments become useless and gain the God complex if they stay in power for too long.

Yes Hackney has changed - it’s very expensive. Normal people can’t afford to live in London now. That’s part of the problem.

The Social contract is breaking down. Partly because of the growing gap between wealthy and the rest of us / partly because society has lost trust in authority - the police etc / partly because lockdown and the weirdness of the Covid years changed us . Partly because we can’t agree on a shared set of values for our country.
Lots of other contributing factors I’m sure ..

Yes of course it’s all down to the government that’s been in power for less then two years and inherited a complete sh1tshow from the Tories which surprisingly they haven’t managed to fix overnight.