Italy

[fuzzbox]

"It was first coined by the UK press and Conservative MPs during the three-day week; then used more widely during the Winter of Discontent ..."

I've only heard it from a German, but I'm sure you're right. A love of self-flagellation is another of our 'traits'. Thinking about it, I remember a french girl saying exactly that, but not in this context!

I'm not sure the demonisation of the trade union movement in the early 1970s was a form of "self-flagellation", more the Tories and their friends in the right-wing press warming up for the subsequent all out war on the working-classes under Thatcher.

The same working classes that were given the first ever opportunity to become property owners by Thatcher, the same working classes offered true social mobility?

Or the work shy fuckers who ‘don’t want that kind of work’ - the kind of work thankfully taken up by the Eastern European arrivals who contribute a damn site more to society and the economy than an awful lot of traditional British ‘working’ class.

You both might or might not be right. I wasn't specifically referring to the rights or wrongs of the event. I was referring to the labelling of the disease - that we as a country are far more likely to label our faults as a national failing. Sort of an inverse patriotism. For instance, the French wouldn't call it a 'French disease'. If an American newspaper called it an American disease, they'd be lynched.