The real British values will be delivered during the next ad-break

Jenny McCartney letting rip in the Telegraph:

It is time to face the truth that Britain’s startling economic boom didn’t make it a nicer place in which to live. In the last decade it has become a rougher, ruder country, with round-the-clock boozing, vomiting and fighting and frequent spates of stabbing. We have become ever more terrified of our teenagers, and contemptuous of our elderly.

We still have a world-class army, but one which has been dispatched to far-flung hell-holes for little public thanks or reward, while at home British citizens occupied themselves with endless television reality shows about how to look younger and buy and sell houses for profit. The state has extended its prying reach ever further into our personal lives, with intrusive plans for identity cards and enormous databases.

I’m always a bit wary of this implicit harkening back to a Golden Age which, in reality, could be just as rough and dangerous as it was now, although admittedly the main excesses were kept out of sight and mind of nayce journalists and novelists. But the intellectual vegetisation of a large part of the population, slumped in front of inane rubbish being pumped out 24/7 by the goggle-box in the corner, has certainly got worse and was predicted by the Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy well over a decade ago:

Television, the drug of the nation
Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation
T.V., it satellite links
our united states of unconsciousness
apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive
the methadone metronome pumping out
150 channels 24 hours a day

And making the population’s brains just the right kind of malleable mush that will accept unthinkingly the state’s attempt to control every aspect of our lives- in reality the biggest problem pointed out by Ms McCartney.

Although her solution is a bit of a mush intellectually itself as it happens:

Perhaps there could be a national project, while we’re all cooped up in the country together, to struggle back to the best values that foreigners once believed that Britain represented. If I recall, they actually used to think of us as a polite, respectful and free people. The funny thing is, if we could get just a few of those qualities back, it might feel even better than being rich.

How exactly do you make us all more "polite" and "respectful"?

Back to 7-11 pm opening hours down the pub?
Lock all snotty teenagers up in their bedroom?
Blow up the television?

I know how we can be more free and that’s by fighting the constant PR and manipulation spin being fed to us by both the government and the media establishment, re-discovering the ability and right to question and challenge the “givens”. But I also know, as I said before, the vast majority of the population quite simply no longer could give an arse...as long as the telly’s still performing its stupefying hypnosis anyway.