Paul Dacre…rum (and rich) sort of cove
I realise that Daily Mail bashing is a somewhat overdone thing, but this site is supposed to be about bollocks deconstruction, and as the paper’s latest piece on UK welfare is bollocks from start to finish, I’m afraid the misleading nature of it needs to be pointed out:
1. Hidden away quietly in para 8 in reference to another country, the authors Doughty and McTag quietly show the very careful reader that the figures are nearly three years old. Up front, however, is the misleading ‘details of which have been published by the Office for National Statistics‘. One might ask oneself why the ONS has suddenly decided to publish them now.
2. Even at that time (early 2012) the UK was the lowest per head spender of all the major Western “developed” EU States….and only fractionally more than austerity-hammered Greece.
3. Since then our spend per head has fallen further….although the actual amount in total has gone up because, um, more people are poor….under the long term economic plan which, as we all know, is working. We’re just unclear about who for.
4. The Mail uses the word ‘handouts’ in the headline, a description that is totally misleading. Three quarters of all social protection goes on the State pension, sickness pay and NHS provision. There are undoubtedly some slackers on sickness benefit (although ATOS seems to regard a pulse as the only criterion in fitness for work assessment) but pensions and healthcare are paid for by all citizens over their lives. That’s a twisted definition of a handout.
Last year, Dacre earned almost £1.8 million with a 5% salary increase as well as a bonus of £500,000 which he has earned for each year he has worked past his contractual retirement age of 60. So clearly, poor old Paul is feeling the pinch a bit, and thus understandably pissed off about billions of Romanians about to pour in and get ‘handouts’….which, by the way, under the new Camerlot legislation, they won’t be able to get immediately anyway.
It’s a hard life being Paul, especially as he contributes so much to the culture he clearly despises:
Yes, we can always rely on those who want double helpings to have double standards.
Dacre is an arrogant little man who poured overt scorn on his accusers during the Leveson farce, but somehow managed to emerge without being asked a single substantive question about phone hacking. Given the later exploits of his one-time editor Tony Gallagher, one might reasonably ask why this was.
“We invest, at Associated, in quality journalism. It’s our philosophy,” he remarked recently, and it’s easy to see on the left here exactly what he means.
Despite the near-obscene dominance of neoliberal thought on the Nation’s finances, Mr Dacre insists that “no day is too busy or too short not to find time to tweak the noses of the liberalocracy”. But as an employer himself, he appears to be a bit of a millowner:
“He never thinks of logistics and he has no idea of what’s an unreasonable request,” says one former sub-editor.
But this is the corker we might all want to have a good guffaw at:
“The beauty of the Mail Online is that it doesn’t have to carry many apologies because it corrects things instantly. It gets the complaint and changes it immediately…”
Well, these are my complaints Mr Dacre: what say you, sirrah?
Last night at The Slog: Shock as bankers start eating themselves
The Slog 