I wish I shared Andy Beckett’s optimism that people will not tolerate becoming poorer indefinitely (Britain once rioted over the price of bread. What would it take for us to confront greedflation today?, 28 April). Instead, I fear that Aldous Huxley was spot-on in his vision of a brave new world in which the masses are kept passive and constantly distracted by cheap thrills, soft drugs and an endless diet of trivia. More recently, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death highlighted how the mass media has been used to provide constant puerile entertainment that distracts most of the population from serious matters of economics and politics.
Most of the British public is now kept in a political stupor by endless stories about celebrities, soaps, reality TV, the manufactured melodrama surrounding the royals and the blaming of “the other” for our myriad economic and social problems – whether that “other” be refugees and migrants, supposedly idle workers, single parents, “greedy” unions, welfare claimants or the so-called liberal elite.
