Frances Ryan’s opinion piece made me weep with despair at the attitudes revealed in the YouGov poll (Britons have become so mean that many of us think poor people don’t deserve leisure time, 8 August). She asks: “How did we get here?” The answer lies in decades of peddling the myth that wealth and success flow from personal endeavour and skill, and that poverty and failure are due to personal shortcomings.
No political party (with the possible short-lived exception of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell) has dared draw attention to the reality that most wealth and success stems from a mix of good fortune and the appropriation of other people’s resources and labour over centuries.
