The attitude is: We will ask the white-collar types and ‘hard-working families’ to join in with us but we will happily criminalise the poor and the working class.

Can’t take it any more.

Absolutely 100% agreed. Although I’m sure someone will describe you as pathetic and intellectually lazy for raising the comparison.

I didn’t really know why I felt that way. Now you’ve said it it’s obvious.

Cheers.

No, the wilful refusal of people to see that it’s problematic to scapegoat an elite of financiers for a crisis that’s in fact nobody’s fault is what’s pathetic and intellectually lazy.

I’ve said before, the connotations with witch hunting and, indeed, Germans giving up their neighbours as Jews, is too prevalent in my mind for those benefit cheat adverts to be anything less than disgusting.

No, you are not alone. I detest the whole idea of a nation of snoopers. As I don’t have a car it is probably safe for me to say that the ones that show your motor being squashed are also a vile example of an out of control state.

I agree with Douglas. I’d go further and say if you wait long enough there will be a thread on Harry’s Place proffering cast-iron proof that muslims are to blame; and Israel is man enough to deal with it.

By the way, how the heck did anti-semitism enter this thread?

On the issue in question, am I the only one who despises the ‘benefit cheats’ adverts that keep popping up? I could live with it if we also had similar adverts showing bankers surrepticiously pushing their bonus-laden wheelbarrows.

Bloody hell, that was some comment, so it was. Perhaps the best comment ever?

That ‘hook-nose’ comment is truly pathetic and intellectually lazy to the nth degree.

How many banks not propped up by being a multi-national organisation are there in this country that would have survived without government intervention?

Seeing echoes of antisemitism in one of these things is insane; seeing echoes of antisemitism in the other is pretty much inevitable unless you’re trying very hard not to.

@ thomas, yeah, I don’t think we’ve been destroyed either, was reacting to the OP’s rhetoric.

If you gamble for long enough eventually you’ll lose your shirt. And if you haven’t yet, it’s because someone else has. Gambling is a game of how long it is possible to defer failure. And finance becomes a gamble when it loses connection with real world values.

A couple of years ago the banks were making as much in profit as they’ve lost this year and the asset price write downs aren’t so bad because they are tax-deductable. So whatever anyone says the banks aren’t in as bad a state as they are claiming, but they are probably in a much worse state than any government politician says.

Isn’t Northern Rock still paying out bonuses?

I mean, company failure isn’t market failure – it was the uninterrupted boom which was the period when the market failed. The economy is readjusting more sharply because it had been allowed to get further and further out of alignment with the real world.

Any overreaction to our pain will prolong the discomfort. There has been no permanent shift because we haven’t been destroyed despite our cupidity. No need for hyperbole here, thank you.

In future, asquith, just restrict yourself to calling him a cock and an arsehole.

(sorry, couldn’t resist)

In the trolls mind this could never have been carried out by greedy, private business men because that just does not compute to everything they have been told about the genius of the private business model. Self regulation would work because hugely paid geniuses would never mess up their very own golden goose.

And now their whole economic theory has gone down in flames, the blame has to rest with left wing politicians because nothing else makes any sense to them.