Italy

[WWHO]

"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.

Social mobility? The (Tory) Government's own Social Mobility Commission concluded in 2017 that the children of Thatcher (my generation) were the very first to begin their careers earning less than their parents' generation did.  As for social and economic inequality, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (an organisation that has close ties to the Tory Party) in May 1979 13.4 per cent of the population lived below 60 per cent of median incomes; by the time she was ousted by her own cabinet in 1992, this figure had climbed to 22.2 per cent.