Tell me….based on recent events, whose judgement would you trust? Of course old Rasputin would say that, but look at the facts: Greece a failed State, Italy on the brink, Spain breaking up, France and Germany arguing about Fiskalunion, Poland refusing to take the euro, Hungary refusing to obey the migrant share-out, and Britain close to baling out from the 5-humped Sopwith Camel as it plunges towards the trenches below. All this and Recep Erdogan too. Mmmmm, yummy.
On behalf of all betrayed 1950s female State pensioners in the UK, I very sincerely hope so.
We all know there’s only only newspaper with a neck so brass, face so bare and brain so empty as to print this gem, and yes of course it’s the Daily Telegraph. In 1785 France, the Telegraph would’ve gone with ‘Cake supplies for peasants plentiful, research shows’ had the King asked them to. Even the Madness of King George isn’t profound enough to run this the day after his disastrous budget: I include it tonight because it has come to my attention that – having given things time to calm down – the Chancellor has hired some advisers (none of them Sir Humphreys) to relaunch him….and this is the beginning of the Mission from Hell.
The content is supremely silly, but a little deconstruction of it won’t do any harm:
The reasons for this are very simple: either people have no job, or a short-hours job paying crappy rates. Far from being good news for working people (whose real PDI has dropped 30% in just over twenty years) its bad news for the Exchequer: 47% of people paying no tax, half of whom claim benefits, is the Treasury’s worst nightmare. It helps explain, apart from anything else, the £36bn hole in Squeaky’s budget last year.
The Telegraph’s definition of “rich” is the top 1%. By anyone’s standards, the ‘rich’ are at least 4.5%: the 1% one might better describe as “so rich they buy vulgar vodka palaces and bankrupt innocent company pensioners’. They’re paying about 30% more in tax, but then they are earning almost 55% more than they were in 2009.
One can sum up the lie in this poppycock very quickly: while the poor are paying a lower percentage in tax, 17% of nothing is still nothing; and while the rich are paying a higher percentage in tax, their PDI is 37% higher than it was when George ‘Sums’ Osborne got to work.
A lower mass PDI alongside a few people earning shedloads simply cannot support a modern economy on an island with 57 million people sharing it. Exactly the same is true in the US. It explains the jobless recovery, the pensionless WASPIs, and the insolvent BHS. The problem is the other thing it explains – the Green yacht.
Another lifelong chancer trying hard to Show He Cares is the man in charge of the demolition of the NHS, Jeremy Hunt. This is an excerpt from Jezzer’s consituency website:
It’s self-interest again, I’m afraid: poor Hunt’s own dementia is so advanced, he’s forgotten how to spell his name. So he’s been committed…and is running a desperate campaign to raise awareness of his incarceration. The bloke doing all this bad stuff to the Junior Doctors is actually his twin sister Gemma. Straight up. Barman at The Hub & Platform told me.
Here’s another Torygraph curio working hard to show that white is black and the cheque’s in the post:
The only useful role Barclay bumboy and Space Cadet Captain James T. Kirkup plays in my life is as the hack equivalent of antimatter: I read his more outlandish stuff purely for confirmation of what obviously isn’t happening. He’s the contemporary equivalent of Izvestia Agricultural correspondent Sergei Rimlickovitch, that fine early 1950s beacon of Truth whose stories always began ‘Comrade Stalin’s 5-Year Plan for tractors completed by Heroic Suvyet Workers in six months’.
Note the Twins’ technique of putting nonsense into inverted commas, as if it might be a widely held belief capable of holding water. In fact, this is just Kockup’s own opinion. In a previous existence, I was married into a medical family. On the whole, they’re Right Wing: but not one of them thinks the Junior Doctors don’t know what they’re striking about.
However, although you might think my Izvestia parallel a tad fanciful, I would beg to differ. I’m indebted to long-term Slog loyalist Val for drawing my attention some weeks ago to the fact that the Maily Torygraph has now stopped allowing comments on their delusional columns. I suppose it’s bad for one’s image to get 350 comments, 347 of which suggest you are mad, and the other three are from the columnist’s Aunti Vi.
Val was suggesting that this ‘editorial’ hahaha decision had coincided with the start of the Brexit campaign, and thus is it in fact a coincidence? It’s an interesting thought, as the vast majority of the Barclaygraph’s readers are (I would’ve thought) pro-Brexit.
But what’s fascinating about this new ‘Have Your Say’ wheeze is that it really does have the mark of Nazi-Soviet dictatorship ‘reporting’ about it….whereby free expression has been replaced by let’s give free expression to everyone who agrees with us. This makes sense surely – they must by a process of elimination be NVEs: and the sooner we can eliminate all these disagreeable NVEs, the better.
It’d be reassuring to dismiss my feelings about this as vaguely surreal satire, but the track record facts suggest otherwise. The Daily Telegraph has been a thinly veiled PR vehicle and weapon of mass distraction for years: it went nap on MPs’ expenses, but flatly refuses to print a word about the Whitehall unfunded pensions heist; it was caught red-handed charging HSBC for favourable coverage; it prints ‘special features’, the donors of which are at best highly questionable; and only last month I heard of a wheeze whereby one’s survivors can buy a sanitised obituary for the lost loved one. Think Leon Brittan, and you’ll be close.
Peter Oborne is an open-minded and fine man. Last year he resigned from the Seismograph because he could no longer close his eyes to the whoring. I rest my case.
And finally (as they used to say on News at Ten) a brief selection of recent media desperation in the face of nothing muuch to write about….
Give this lot to a Daily Mail subed, and what you’d get is ‘Workshy Murderer stabbed absconding State pension fraudster at Hippie anger class because ISIS prediction about end of world proved false’.
The Slog 