A broken country?

Gabriella at least remainers are not Lemmings willing to jump of a cliff into the unknown, if they were on their own that would be no problem but they are taking about 50 million non leavers with them

It was Margsret Thatcher's action in removing naval protection from the Falkland Islands that led to the invasion by Argentina.

Those remainers who want answers as to why leavers think leaving a good idea are never going to change their minds, nor are they willing to be persuaded.
It's merely a ploy to shoot leavers down in flames.
We don't have to give you our reasons or justify our silence ?
It's enought to know what we know and if remainers want info they can look online.
If there is one thing we are not, it's daft.
You might be pretending to be sheep but we can smell wolf a mile away.

Yes, that came in handy for her.

Thatcher would never have been re-elected had it not been for ths Falklands War

I think there was some sense of collective responsibility and moving forward pre Thatcher. She promoted the cult of the individual.

Lilyflower, we're not talking about the rights and wrongs of the Thatcher government and preceding ones. The OP was about how the country appeared to have common goals and values for a few decades but the consensus seems to have broken down and we no longer have them. A change in the mood of the country. All some of us are saying is that the mood change can be traced back to the Thatcher era when she worked to 'roll back' the state and to privatise much of what had previously been run by the state, for the benefit of its citizens.

This was when the narrative of 'scroungers' on benefits, and 'wasteful' public services and 'greedy' workers began to take hold and the divide between the thinking of 'left' and 'right' became wider. IMO

The problem with Mrs Thatcher Lilyflower is that here in the North East we have always relied on heavy industry, shipbuilding and the mines . She decimated all of these during her time in power . People here have long memories .

I'm looking at it as a global, financial world war at this point-

Crystal no not £350m a week that is the gross cost the Brexiteers forgot to deduct the money we get back, the real cost is about £170m.

And I can't believe that people are still blaming Margaret Thatcher for the country's ills! I can well remember the terrible state the country was in when she came to power. I'd had a sixth form job in a greetings card shop and we had to have candles burning as the power was off. No TV, bodies unburied, rubbish piling up in the streets, thousands of man hours lost due to strikes, senior figures in unions and in government working for or with the Communists, rampant inflation, country on the verge of bankrupcy being refused money by the IMF. Good grief.

Well leave means all the foreigners have to leave innit? ( yes I have heard this one) , it’s £350m a week for the NHS innit? We survived the war etc ....

Well I am not expert in Politics or Europe but I have tried to come up with a couple of reasons.....over to you.

The present polarisation reminds me of other periods in history where an almost hysterical, tribal stand off between opposing views caused chaos and extreme measures:

-Protestants versus Catholics
-Royalists and Parliamentarians

These periods of opposing views saw rule by force, wars and individual state executions to name a few of the horrible consequences. The rise of a hard line Marxist in the present climate reveals quite how far things have gone.

I hear and read the most extremist views from people who, in all other respects, seem to have the same interests, concerns and lives as the neighbours with whom they disagree.

It is all very worrying and who knows where it will lead? The constant political agitation outside of the House of Commons, the increasingly violent protests by 'militant vegans' and the current mayhem and disruption caused by Extinction Rebellion are symptomatic of something very wrong. There seems to be a very small tail wagging a very big dog at the moment.

I am really disappointed I would have thought that at least one on Gransnet would be able to identify a few tangible benefits to leaving to EU. This is exactly the reaction I get face to face
We simply cannot run the U.K. purely on emotions, there has to be logic and reality, no wonder we cannot get any agreement and are in such a mess.

Staying in......We are part of something bigger than our own little island..
Security is better if we can share rescources with our neighbours

Give me a list of tangible gains from staying in the EU?

I despair either way!

Yes, Elegran! I think it's important to identify and address the where and why of so much unrest. It's unwise to allow tyranny to escalate beyond hope because the alternative is civil revolt, terrorism and even more migration.

As unworthy as it may seem politically, such is the task that mankind is now burdened with. What our world leaders have failed to see is that our collective survival as a species will depend on how well we can resolve these issues on a global scale. For that to happen, they all need to put politics aside, to get along and work together. Yes.....I know that's a very tall order!

willa years ago I read one f thosec think-tank predictions about the effects of climate change. One of the things they imagined was that the changes would contribute to unrest in places where life had become more difficult (or even impossible) and to mass migration from those areas to those that had not been so badly effected, followed by uprisings in the luckier areas against the influx of refugees, and the possibility of terrorist attacks by angry and/or desperate displaced persons and the breakout of civil wars.

Perhaps from a more 'Darwinian' perspective the root cause is population explosion. I read some years ago that our planet has enough resources to sustain 6 billion people. It appears we've already reached and even exceeded that number.

Climate change is exacerbating the population crisis by changing, (i.e. worsening) our weather patterns. Hurricanes, excessive heat and cold, droughts, flooding etc. threaten food supplies, habitats and other species. As advanced as our cyber Technology has become, it often stirs the pot further instead of providing solutions.

By nature man is territorial. Where resources become scarce, migrations increase and so does war. To varying degrees, turmoil is increasing all over the world and if we look at the bigger picture, we may be able to understand why.

The difference was that back in the 60s we felt that gradually, one issue at a time, progress was being made towards something better. It was slow and not always steady.

No those who think we had the good old days really should think about the 20s/30s and view some of the old film of gaunt, half starved, poor and hungry people. I don't know what your 50's childhoods were like but unless you had a lot of money it was pretty tough going. However, you could tell people, if you wanted to, how you voted and most of the time just a simple discussion and perhaps a bit of persuasion took place to try and make you change your mind not the horrendous B.....t discussion that divides some families today. The HOC ave shown their true colours.

Oh Paperbackwriter that Leave.eu post yesterday was truly disgusting! I reported it to FB when it appeared on my feed, as did many others, but it made me feel ill. Shameful.

Anniebach I think racism is even worse now than in the 60s. There is so much anti-Muslim (and migrant in general) feeling encouraged by the worst of the tabloids (especially that vile Katie Hopkins) and then when I see something like that which was posted yesterday, by the Leave.UK party, referring to Angela Merkel as 'a Kraut', I really despair that such a statement should even be thought, let alone shared on social media. I was shocked and horrified but mostly, very very sad.

It was about the rich and powerful protecting what they'd got - much the same as 2019

The above sums it up as far as I am concerned. The big difference is that we now know what the rich and powerful are doing, we know that they avoid taxes, and some of us have realised that this is what Brexit is all about ( EU Tax directive coming in Jan 2020). The problem is that instead of demanding that these people, these companies pay their share, or demanding that our government makes them pay their share, we have allowed this country to become divided, to have broken into two camps, and as we do so, the fund managers, the tax dodgers, the Crispin Odeys, of this world, sit back and laugh as the mainly right wing press pumps out the propaganda about 'benefit cheats' and the undeserving poor, about illegal immigrants, all of which are believed by many, if yesterday's appalling thread about the state of the economy was anything to go by. So, as far as the thread goes, I don't think that we had the 'good old days' and many things have improved, but the nastiness, the division, as seen in the HoC, is a recent development, and it is, to my mind, a state that has been deliberately fostered.