Who are you calling a braindead Trot?

Press-FreedomRecent weeks have seen Jeremy Corbyn ridiculed as ‘the political equivalent of a child’s invisible friend’, ‘ugly, dispiriting, and out of touch’, ‘the bearded Messiah’, ‘dangerous’, ‘puerile’, ‘completely unfit for any kind of senior political office’, ‘a malevolent clown’, ‘an extremist who has spent a political career embracing nasty causes’, ‘a gormless Marxist’, and ‘a tinpot meddler’ prone to ‘engrained political pathologies’.

Those with the temerity to back him have been branded ‘Trumpton revolutionaries’,’pig ignorant lefty click activists’, ‘psychotically furious about everything’, ‘terribly well-orffff, doncha know’, infantile and possibly mentally impaired’, ‘petulant children’ and ‘gibbering perpetual adolescents’. Continue reading

Why the Left hates the Daily Mail

Daily Mail clock, image by Alex Muller http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daily_Mail_clock,_closeup.pngLoathe as I am to pounce upon yet another bandwagon by adding to the dacreage of comment on the Daily Mail‘s ill-judged bust up with Ed Miliband, I cannot refrain from doing so. You see, as a leftie, as someone who values reason, equality and the labour movement, I’m de factoobsessed with the paper – at least that’s what its beleaguered editor thinks. However, just as England very occasionally confounds expectations and turns in a decent performance befitting the paper value of the squad, Paul Dacre is broadly right. Why? Continue reading

Daily Mail refer to travellers as a “species”, and the PCC stand by

newspapers, pic by 123rf.comSome weeks ago, I noticed an article on the Daily Mail website which contained some particularly unpleasant language about members of the Traveller communities. The offending line was thus:

A Traveller and his family – that much-protected species in today’s human-rights-obsessed world – are now living in it.

I’m not a Traveller, and I certainly wouldn’t purport to speak for that community. But the idea that anyone can talk about a race of people as a ‘species’ – or somehow subhuman – is deeply worrying. The ability to dehumanise groups of people based on their race or other characteristics is an integral part of many of the most shameful episodes in world history, from allowing Irish people to starve to death during the potato Famine, to capturing and selling African families into slavery, through to gassing Jews at Auschwitz. Continue reading

The Daily Mail isn’t fit for purpose

I suppose we must thank the Mail for exposing so starkly and vividly just what a despicable purveyor of poison it is, so consumed by bigotry and hatred of all things progressive in British life that it can so grossly misrepresent Ed Miliband’s father who fought for Britain in the war when the Mail sided with the Nazis in the 1930s , and then sent reporters deliberately to disrupt a Miliband family memorial service to try to extract further mischievous comments.

Not only was this an appalling breach for anyone with a shred of common decency, it is also well-timed to inform the deliberations of the Privy Council as it decides in this next week which of the regulatory charters is to be put forward – the royal charter supported by all the political parties or the one concocted at the last moment by the right-wing press to maintain their stranglehold over the nation’s information and thought patterns. Continue reading

Mehdi Hasan and the Daily Mail

So what if Mehdi Hasan pitched himself to work for the Daily Mail three years ago? Journalists, especially those without a berth – as Mehdi was at the time – have got to work to live. And of course he’s going to emphasise how much a prospective employer’s values are congruent with his own. I’m sure if he’d gone for a job at The Morning Star, he would have burnished his peace and socialism credentials. Continue reading