81% of young adults are furious, frustrated or angry about house prices

In 1980 50% of young adults aged between 18-34 owned their own homes.

Today only 20% of young adults live in their own homes. (1)

This is because of increasing house prices. In the 1980s the average house price was 4 times the average wage. Today the average house price is eight times the national wage.

It now takes 13 years on average to save for a deposit on a property. Assuming you start at 22, this would mean you’d be 35 before being able to afford a place.

This is a 100% increase in the cost of the most prized possession in British society: one’s house.

House ownership is part of the British dream. The idea is you work hard, save money, and are able to buy your own place. But house ownership is becoming increasingly unreachable for younger people.

This is especially true if you live in London, where the average house price is 30 times the average wage. There is no point someone on the average salary even trying to save for a house in London.

And even if you do live in London, saving for a deposit would be a struggle for most. If you want a social life, or family, and you have to pay rent, that doesn’t leave a lot left over.

Relevance to A-level Sociology

This makes me think of Merton’s Strain Theory. A crucial part of the British Dream – house ownership – is now unreachable for most through legitimate means.

So according to Merton’s Strain Theory we’ve probably got a lot of younger adults suffering anomie.

The problem is it’s VERY difficult to gain enough money to buy your own home through illegitimate means. So there’s possibly a lot of people who are responding through ritualism, retreatism or rebellion. In other words, there’s a lot of pent up misery and anger out there.

There is some evidence in this from of surveys on home ownership.

One survey in 2022 found that 66% of Millennials and 59% of Gen Zers saw home ownership as a mark of success. (Conducted in America, sample size 2500). Affordability was the main reason for not owning a home.

Another survey of of 1500 young adults in Britain conducted in 2023 adds further support. This survey found that 81% of young adults were either Furious, frustrated or angry about housing affordability. 44% had either completely given up or thought it unlikely they would ever buy a house.

All of this suggests there is a lot of pent up frustration out there amongst Young People. This can only be made worse by the increasing inequality in house ownership. The top 10-20% of 30 somethings are able to get significant parental support for a deposit. How can this not fuel a sense of resentment? It should do because this is people benefiting from wealth they have not earned.

What is interesting is how the political elite seem oblivious to all of this. Think about how they paid so much attention to the recent cost of living crisis. But this crisis was only a 20% increase and mainly offset by wage increases. In contrast, here we have an ENTIRE two generations facing a 100% increasing in house ownership. And what have to Tories done about this: absolutely nothing.

Sources

(1) The Week, 20th January 2024, page 12.

Is banning prayers in school discriminatory?

Michaela Secondary School and Sixth Form lead by Katherine Birbalsingh is openly secular. It is also the BEST school in the country. It has ranked number 1 for Progress 8 in the last two years. It gets better GCSE results than many private schools despite having 25% of its pupils on Free School Meals.

For eight years they had no prayers in school, and provided no prayer rooms for pupils, making this clear to the students and parents before they chose the school.

Now, one of the school’s pupils is suing the school on the basis that the prayer ban is discriminatory. Birbalsingh is fighting back against this and wants to maintain the prayer ban for the benefit of everyone else.

Historical Context to the prayer ban

When they opened in 2014 30% of the school population was Muslim, which the school has since grown to 50%.

Birbalsingh points out that it is not possible for the school to have prayer rooms and maintain its strict ethos of silent corridors and staff attending ‘family lunches’ where children eat together in assigned groups of six.

This is because they don’t have enough space to provide prayer rooms for 350 Muslim pupils, so would have to open up many of the classrooms instead, which would mean removing bags and books and other pupils carrying all of their stuff with them. It would have knock on effects, probably meaning corridors would not be silent.

Because of the lack of prayer rooms pupils were allowed to pray outside, but somehow word spread outside the school that were no prayer rooms and an online petition was created to encourage the school to get indoor prayer rooms (which wouldn’t work).

The petition escalated into threats against school staff from outside.

During Ramadan recently this started to have a knock on effect with some of the Muslim pupils, with some of them applying peer pressure on less devout pupils who didn’t fast during Ramadan to do so.

As a result of all of the above Birbalsingh banned all prayer because it had become a divisive issue. The school had previously been a happy place where everyone got along regardless of religion or ethnicity.

The prayer ban is entirely in line with pupils of most faiths making sacrifices so all students can get along. Some Christian parents, for example, don’t like Sunday revision sessions but they put up with it for the benefit of the collective.

Relevance to A-level Sociology

This is clearly relevant to both the sociology of religion and education.

You use this to criticise postmodern ideas about education. It seems that a good old functionalist ethos of schooling where the community comes first works to get the best results!

The school has succeeded so far because all individuals make certain sacrifices for the benefit of the whole.

Now we have one pupil hell-bent on changing everything so they can get their way.

It seems to me that there is no case of discrimination here, just one upset individual who needs to learn to sacrifice like everyone else. If they get their way, everyone else is going to suffer.

Of course if you think that people CHOOSE their religion, and their way of practicing it, then it’s impossible for this to be discriminatory.

This is a very interesting case of individual rights versus the collective good. It’s a good example of how individualism has gone too far in our postmodern age, maybe…?

Kweku Adoboli… From Rogue Trader to Critique of the Banking System…

Kweku Adoboli was convicted in 2013 of the largest fraud in British history. While working for UBC bank as a trader he disguised the amount of risk his trades were exposing the bank to by creating fake hedging trades which could have minimised losses.

He ended up losing the bank £2.3 billion, plead guilty to fraud and was sentenced to 7 years in prison in 2013.

He served 3.5 years, and then spent another couple of years unsuccessfully trying to avoid being deported to Ghana. This is despite the fact that he’d spent most of his life living in the U.K where his family and friends were also based. However he never bothered getting U.K. Citizenship and this meant it was easy for the U.K. government to deport him once he’d become a convicted criminal. He was eventually deported in 2018.

This TED video is worth a watch where he outlines his side of the story…

Was he a scapegoat…?

While Adoboli took responsibility for the the losses he incurred, he says this was because of his Quaker upbringing: you own responsibility as part of your duty to the community.

The problem is that UBS didn’t have the same sense of duty to him.

Adoboli says the bank was fine with his risk-taking when he was making the bank money, and much of the time sorting out other people’s problems. He says all that he was doing was working within the logic of the banking system to make them more money.

But as soon as this problem occurred they blamed him for the bank’s losses and put it all on him.

In reality, it was the culture of banking that was the problem. Adoboli’s job it turns out was sit between wealthy clients and the bank and make ETF trades to help clients avoid tax. That was his job, to basically shaft society for the sake of the rich, and he had to take risks to do that.

He now thinks banks encourage people to lose site of morality and just focus on making money without thinking about the consequences.

He maybe has a point, that it was the banking system that encouraged him to do what he did, even if he took responsibility.

Britain is a backward country…

Following his deportation he is also very critical of Britain. He sees it as a country in decline that is looking backwards. It is scared, closing its borders, and we see that today in the anti-immigration stance taken by the country.

Britain is also a country of blocked opportunities for young black men, which becomes obvious when you look at the ethnicity and crime statistics.

In contrast he thinks African countries such as Ghana have a chance to develop more inclusive democracies which empower young people.

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is just an update on the biggest white collar fraudster in British history. It’s interesting to hear his side of the story, rather than just the narrow media agenda.

To find out more you can see Kweku’s own website.

Should Trans People have Equal Rights?

Should Trans People have Equal Rights Purely on the basis of their self-declared gender?

This issue came up recently in January 2024 in the case of Rachel Meade versus Westminster Council.

Rachel Meade is a social worker who works for Westminster Council. She recently posted content on Facebook which criticised the idea that society should just accept trans’ people’s self-declarations of their own gender, irrespective of their biological sex.

Specifically, she was critical of the idea that individuals who are biologically male but declaring themselves female should be allowed the same rights as people whose sex is biologically females.

picture of Rachel Meade
Rachel Meade

Context: Criticising changes to the 2004 Gender Recognition Act

The 2004 Gender Recognition Act states that society only needs to recognises a transgender person’s self-declared gender if they have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and consulted with two medical professionals.

Recently, it was proposed to change this so that social institutions should recognise a transgender person’s self-declared gender purely on the basis of that self-declaration. That is, without any formal medical consultations.

Rachel Meade had been critical of these proposed changes, pointing out that social institutions had encouraged the following:

  • allowing trans women who are biologically male to enter female only public spaces such as changing rooms and toilets.
  • encouraging schools to support pupils transitioning without informing their parents.
  • some police forces had recorded crimes as being committed by women when the perpetrators were biologically male.

One of Meade’s Facebook ‘friends’ informed Westminster Council of the above, arguing her views were discriminatory against Trans people. Westminster Council responded by ‘bullying’ Meade into silence, but she fought back with the help of Social Work England.

Last week the courts found that Westminster Council had discriminated against Meade by not allowing her to express her gender critical beliefs. They also found that her specific content on Facebook had not discriminated against Trans people as it wasn’t demanding the removal of rights just on the basis of people being Trans. Rather her arguments were nuanced, referring to the belief that Trans people should only be granted equal rights if their gender-identity had been sanctioned by professionals.

Should there be some limits to Trans rights…?

Gender identity is a protected characteristic under the 2010 equality act, so on that basis Trans people have the right to freedom of expression and gender recognition based on their own interpretation of their gender.

However the problem is when we look at the rights of Trans women (who are biologically men) to enter female only spaces, especially those where women may be vulnerable.

Examples where this doesn’t seem to make sense would be domestic violence support groups for women, and medical settings where women may only want to be seen by a Doctor is biologically female.

If social institutions were to allow and support trans people to have full equal rights in their institutional settings this would deny vulnerable women the right to be seen by someone who is their own sex.

This is a tricky issue and an evolving one. At the very least I think professionals need to be allowed freedom of speech to contribute openly to the debate!

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Michelle Mone, and the PPE Rip-off: A Rare overt example of the extractivist attitude of the elite..?

During Lockdown in 2020 Baroness Mone used her contacts to help set up a contract to provide PPE equipment worth £220 million between the Department of Health and a newly founded company established by her husband, PPE Medpro.

The company provided gowns for the astronomical sum of £120 million, but they were unusable, and Mone and her husband, Douglas Barrowman, made a profit of £60 million.

The government is suing the company for that £120 million but Mone and her husband say they will defend themselves. As far as they are concerned, they have the right to keep that profit they made for providing substandard goods.

They effectively are going public saying they have right to keep £60 million of public money for effectively providing nothing.

They think they have the right to profit off the back of an unprecedented national crisis and essentially from the suffering of others.

A rare example of the elite admitting their extractivist logic…?

While the shameless attitude of these two multimillionaires may seem shocking, from a Marxist perspective, this is how the elite works all the time.

The only thing unusual about this case is that here we have two members of the elite openly saying how they operate in relation to the State and the general public.

This is the naked business of capitalism: exploit people to make a profit and this is precisely what Mone and her husband have done.

They have taken advantage of a crisis to make £60 million. They have taken advantage of her networks in politics, which is the point of politics for the elite.

Their existence is not to provide public goods, it is to extract as much as they can from the State and the general public, and that is what they have done.

According to Marxism this is what most members of the capitalist class do. This is simply capitalism as usual. What is unusual is the extremity of the case: to have made so much money for providing basically nothing, because the gowns they produced were unusable.

Maybe this explains why they are so brazen: because they are being singled out, whereas all their elite buddies are getting away with extracting and going under the radar.

They are annoyed, not because they feel guilty for profiting of other people’s suffering, but because they are the minority of the elite who have got singled out doing what for them is perfectly normal!

Relevance to A-level sociology

This is a great example to illustrate the problems of capitalism and the continued relevance of Marxism today.

It’s also an example which supports the Marxist theory of crime. As far as I can see, these two awful human beings haven’t done anything technically illegal. However they have caused huge harm to the public. Marxism suggests we should look at harms rather than crimes.

The Opioid Crisis in the United States: A Corporate Crime?

Drug overdose deaths in the US, notably opioid overdoses, skyrocketed from under 10,000 per year in the 1980s to 100,000 in 2021. The crisis began with the FDA’s approval of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin Painkiller in 1995, claimed as non-addictive without proper evidence. Subsequent aggressive marketing led to widespread addiction. Labeled as criminal acts of profit-driven corporations and a co-opted FDA, these actions resulted in significant damage with a reported 1 million deaths and cost of $2 trillion, prompting sanctions and funding to combat the crisis.

For most of the 1980s drug overdose deaths in the United States were fairly steady, well under 10 000 deaths per year. 

Then, in the 1990s, deaths rose sharply. By 2000 nearly 20 000 people were dying from overdoses annually. In 2021 the number peaked at 100, 000, a 500% increase over the decade. 

To put this in context, over the past 25 years more than a million people in the U.S. have died from drug overdoses. This is more people than died in both world wars combined. 

Most of these deaths are caused by opioid overdoses. These deaths are from both natural opiates such as morphine and heroin, and synthetic compounds which have similar properties. 

When did the opioid crisis begin?

The crisis began with the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approval of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin Painkiller drug in 1995. This drug was designed to be slow release. Purdue claimed that the slow release design would prevent it from being addictive. However, they made this claim without proper evidence. They conducted no clinical trials on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. 

Image of box of Oxycontin pills.
Oxycontin

Before the release of OxyContin opioids had been used only in limited cases. They were only administered to cancer patients, those undergoing more invasive surgery and for end-of-life pain relief. 

However Purdue engaged in aggressive direct marketing campaigns to doctors. The company encouraged Doctors to prescribe OxyContin for less serious conditions such as arthritis, back pain and sports injuries. 

What effect did OxyContin have?

Prescriptions peaked in 2012 at more than 255 million in the U.S. that year. OxyContin, and other similar opioids such as Vicodin create a huge new class of addicts. By 2011 OyxContin was the leading cause of drug-related deaths in the US. 

This is known as the first wave of the crises which also drove the second wage. Many addicts found prescription pain killers too expensive or too difficult to buy and so turned to heroin.  Interviews with injecting urban drug users Between 2008-09 found that 86% of them had used prescription painkillers first. The illegal heroine trade expanded greatly because of this, as did the number of heroin overdoses. 

In 2013 came the third crisis. This was caused by illegal, synthetic opioids such as Fentanyl which is 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. This led to a huge increase in overdose deaths as the strength of the final street product varied widely. 

Why did the crisis happen?

There are several causes, all of which seem fundamentally linked to the Marxist theory of crime…

The chief executives of Purdue Pharma were primarily concerned with making profit, rather than the safety of people. They didn’t do proper trials to check the risks of addiction and sold their product hard to doctors. 

The Food and Drug Administration had been co-opted by the pharmaceutical industry. The FDA regulatory who oversaw the approval of Oxy, Dr Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterwards and took a job at Purdue. 

The U.S. healthcare system prefers prescribing rather than other solutions. This is because it puts profits of corporations over the health and wellbeing of ordinary people. 

Many of these overdose deaths are deaths of despair. They are linked to social ills such as poverty, declining wages, and declining stability in social life. 

What is being done now?

The U.S. has tightened conditions for prescribing opioid Painkillers, but the levels are still high.

They have Sanctions on Chinese companies who make chemicals used to make Fentanyl, 

They have allocated $5 Billion for mental health care and treating addiction.

Analysis: supporting evidence for the Marxist perspective on crime…?

This seems to be a case study which strongly supports the Marxist theory of crime

It clearly shows that all classes commit crime. Here we have both the Corporate elite and the government working together. 

Marxism says the ‘crimes’ (or harms) the elite does are much greater than working class crime. With over 1 million dead as a result of Oxycontin this harmful act is extreme.  There were 100 000 overdose deaths in 2022 – 68% of them linked to Opiods, 2 million addicts, monetary cost $2 Trillion, misery can’t calculate. (According to the Stanford-Lancet Commission). 

The Sackler Family managed to get immunity from prosecution. They have to pay $8 billion in damages. However they have been given a number of years to pay this, and they will probably make that from returns on their investments.

Effectively they haven’t been punished for causing 1 million deaths.

Purdue Pharam and the Opioid crisis: find out more.

Netflix recently released an excellent series: Painkiller which covers this case study very well!

No Jail Time for a £400 Million Tax Fraud!

In October 2023, Bernie Ecclestone, who evolved Formula One into a global brand, was found guilty of tax evasion amounting to £400 million. Originating from a 2015 case, the 92-year-old was sentenced to 17 months jail, suspended due to his age, and fined over £650 million. Critics argue this punishment is lenient, underlining the £400 million impact on UK tax revenue and upholding the Marxist perspective that justice is softer on the affluent.

Bernie Ecclestone was found guilty of tax evasion in October 2023. The total amount of tax he evaded paying was around £400 million (1)

The case dates back to 2015 when he had a meeting with UK tax officers from the HMRC. He failed to declare that he was paying into one particular trust in Singapore, money which he should have been paying tax on.

image of headline: Ecclestone tax fraud October 2023

He must have paid in HUGE sums to this trust and made huge profits to have run up a £400M tax bill (which he evaded). The profits would have been at least double that amount!

He plead guilty to this charge and was given a 17th month jail sentence and a fine, meaning he will have to pay just over £650 million to the UK tax authority, and £74 000 in costs to the prosecution.

His sentence was suspended so he won’t spend any time in jail, the judge saying this is because of his age. He is 92.

A massive crime with a weak punishment

This is a clear case of tax evasion (2). Ecclestone knowingly concealed information about his finances from the HMRC to not pay tax. This is illegal and carries a maximum penalty of seven years in jail and a 200% max fine.

Bernie received 17 months suspended and his penalty seems to be around 60%.

I understand suspending the sentence because he is 92, kind of fair enough. But as a symbolic message this hardly seems an appropriate penalty.

The harm Ecclestone caused to British society is £400 million lost tax revenue. That is 1/10th of the entire annual tax gap for tax evasion in the UK (3).

You might remember that a number of schools closed because of crumbling concrete earlier this year. The total estimated cost of repairing all of them is £150 million. That’s just one of the things Bernie’s tax could have prevented, had he paid it.

But no, he preferred to squirrel it away in a trust fund so he could pass it on to his undeserving children. And received no real punishment.

Who is Bernie Ecclestone?

He ran Formula one from the late 1970s until 2017, during which time he grew it into a global brand. Ecclestone essentially made F1 into one of the most valuable global media assets. It sits between the motor industry and a global audience.

According to the The Forbes Billionaires rich list his net worth is around $3 billion. (2). So yes the £600 million fine will hurt, but he’ll still have over $2 billion left.

Sociological analysis

This case study is an excellent example which supports the Marxist perspective on crime. According to Marxists the criminal justice system punishes the rich less than the poor. This is precisely what is happening here.

There’s no real debate about it, it’s just very strong supporting evidence for the continued relevance of Marxism today!

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Sources

(1) The Guardian (October 2023) Bernie Ecclestone given suspended sentence after pleading guilty to fraud.

(2) Wikipedia: Bernie Ecclestone

(3) Patrick Canon: UK Tax Evasion statistics 2020.

Cruise Ships: the wrong kind of globalisation?

The Icon of the High seas is the largest cruise ship in the world. It is 1198 feet long and weighs 250 800 tons. The ship has berths for 5610 passengers and 2350 crew. It cost more than $2 billion to build.

Icon of the Seas.
The Icon of the Seas.

It is set to have its maiden voyage in January 2024 with tickets costing from $1000 to $75 000. It represents the size-pinnacle of the modern cruise industry. 31.5 million people are expected to go on a cruise in 2023.

The ship has 20 decks and eight ‘neighbourhoods’ aimed at different types of passenger: from families to older adults. It has 40 bars, mini golf, rock climbing and a water park with seven swimming pools.

Cruise ships can pose challenges to the areas they visit as thousands of passengers suddenly disembark for only a couple of hours at a time. Amsterdam recently closed its cruise ship terminal for just this reason. However this is less of an option the Caribbean which absorbs about a third of the cruise industry’s capacity. That area is more reliant on cruise ship income.

The wrong kind of globalisation?

Cruise ships are a mobile example of globalisation benefitting the very wealthiest. Those who can afford it, typically older middle class people, can afford to go on a week or month long jaunt to foreign countries on such vessels.

You could also argue these benefit locals in the places they visit because they bring money and jobs to local areas, often in poorer parts of the world.

However the downside is that locals have to put up with a massive influx of tourists all at once in a short space of time, which can’t be pleasant.

There is also something quite detestable about the fact that it’s only the very rich that can afford to go on a cruise.

Cruise ships are also polluting: passengers on a seven day Antarctic cruise can produce as much CO2 as the average European in a year!

They are also great for transmitting infectious diseases around the world!

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Hold Your Nerve – More Individualised Solutions to Structural Problems!

Millions of UK homeowners face huge increases to their mortgage repayments as interest rates continue to increase (1)

According to the Office for National Statistics, the average monthly repayment for a mortgage on a semi-detached house in the UK rose 61% to year ending December 2022.

This increase will be even greater now… the news over the last week has focused on how another 2 million people are coming off lower fixed rate mortgage deals between now and 2024, meaning their interest rates are going to increase from around 2% to 6%.

I’m one of these people, my current 2% rate ends in September this year, and I’ll have to switch onto a higher rate, which with my current provider is 6% or 5% on a two year fixed deal. I might of course switch, but that gives me a bench mark, I don’t imagine I’ll get much better than that.

Thankfully my current mortgage is so low that it’s not a big deal for me to manage the increase in repayments In fact if I just extend the mortgage by a few months I can keep my repayments level, which for me means pushing it back from 5 years of repayments to around 5 years and 3 months.

However, obviously I’d rather pay less than more over the next five years or so and it’s difficult to make a judgement as to whether I’m better of fixing now at say 5% for three years, or slightly higher at 5.5% for the full five years, or just going onto the 6% variable rate.

Obviously fixing for a longer period is the strategy IF interest rates are going to go up, while going on the variable rate is best IF interests rates are going to come down.

The problem is I don’t know what’s going to happen to interest rates, but it’s 100% on me to make a decision and 100% on me to bear the consequences of paying more in mortgage interest if I make the wrong the decision.

What’s causing inflation?

The bank of England keeps putting interest rates up because of high inflation, inflation being the rising cost of living.

The government put this down to a squeeze of food and energy because of the legacy of covid and the war in Ukraine putting a squeeze on supply chains, and all of this hasn’t been helped be Brexit making it more difficult to trade with the EU.

Personally I also think there’s a longer term trend of the rise in middle class consumers in countries such as India and China, which will increase demand for all goods and services

neoliberalism is also a problem – as increasing inequality means more wealth sits in tax havens not being used for innovation and more money gets sucked upwards, increasing inequality meaning a higher proportion of our resources go on meat and yachts for rich, which also pushes up prices.

Finally, the UK government has been printing money for years in response to various crises, which reduces the value of the pound. It’s printed almost £1 trillion since 2009 in Quantitative Easing Measures.

In short, there is no obvious immediate end to this inflation crisis because all of the causes are outside of the Government’s control, and many of its responses to global forces over the last decade have made matters worse.

Individualised solutions to Structural Problems (Again)

As to the solutions to the current mortgage crises, all that the current super-rich PrimeMinister Rishi Sunak has is to suggest people should ‘hold their nerve on interest rates‘.

In short, ‘just suck it up’, you’re on your own, deal with it, folks.

Signposting and Sources

This post is really just a general reminder of how damaging neoliberal economic policies are to ordinary people in the long run.

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(1) https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/jun/17/uk-homeowners-face-huge-rise-in-payments-when-fixed-rate-mortgages-expire

Why is Phillip Schofield Trending News…?

The scandal surrounding Phillip’s Schofield departure from This Morning has eclipsed many other news items over the past week.

The scandal is that several years ago Schofield had an affair with man 30 years his junior while at This Morning who he’d initially met when the younger man was just 15 years old, and then he had lied to This Morning bosses and everyone else about having had the affair when questioned.

So he held his hands up last week and quit, not only This Morning, but he says his TV career is now over.

This whole event has been headline news for a week. It’s a very popular news item, according the the BBC’s most read item list Philip Schofield’s career ending is more interesting than the government potentially losing its legal battle over breaching covid rules, for example.

The above screen capture was taken on Friday 3rd June, the same day Schofield did a brief interview with the BBC in which he was questioned about his relationship with the young man, it was emotional, but content thin.

Interestingly around the same time the BBC also did a similar style interview with the scumbag Andrew Tate, in which he is challeneged about his misogynist views, but that is nowhere in trending.

It seems people are much more interested in trivia compared to critical issues of power and politics.

Why is Schofield Trending?

I think probably the pluralist view is the most applicable here: Schofield has been a presenter on national British T.V. for decades, many people grew up with him, and here he is having his career ending early.

And it’s a tragic end in real life to a great career, brought down by one mistaken relationship and one little white lie, it’s a real tragedy, a real life drama.

People love this kind of thing, this is just pure demand for drama and entertainment and so the media provides.

I don’t think we can find any support here for the Marxist theories of the media which argue this is all about media manipulation of content and agenda setting to keep people stupid, this event just happened too quickly for that to be the case.

Of course maybe the public have been trained to need this kind of content over the longer term, so this could be a result of a long term drip-drip effect of trivia in the mainstream media, which may offer some support for Marxist theories, but this is very difficult to prove empirically!

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