BLESS THE DAILY MAIL

How many Guardian readers does it take to change a light bulb?

None, they just form a support group called ‘Coping with Darkness’ - boom, boom!

THE DAILY MAIL IS the party-pooper of liberal Britain. Unashamedly right-wing and populist, it causes the liberalarte to reach for the cloves of garlic at the mere mention of Littlejohn, Hitchens or Phillips. To say that the Mail is disliked by liberal Britain is something of an understatement. The poor old ‘Guardianistas’ (a Littlejohn creation) are reduced to displays of intolerance, the very thing they most despise in life, when talking about its journalism.

For 24 years I was an avid reader of the Guardian. Almost every day without fail I bought a copy and became fond. But most of the writers who wrote for it then have long since departed and a new politically correct sub-species of liberal has taken control of the tiller. I also, over the same period bought its sister paper the Observer along with the Sunday Times; the latter being the finest of British journalistic creations during the 1960s and the 1970s.

Today my home is the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, and yes, (I have now really gone over to the dark side) to the Daily Mail, as well as the occasional copy of the Spectator. At one time I also bought the occasional copy of the New Statesman.

So, in my time, I have covered all colours of the political spectrum as far as my political preferences are concerned - which, by the way, included the Morning Star when it was kept going by the Soviet Union buying up all of the unsold copies.

I spent many years on the leftward end of the political spectrum of British politics, and having done so I knew how I thought then and how those I left behind think now.

THOSE ON THE LEFT WHO CRITICISE the Daily Mail, do so out of prejudice (or dare I mention the word bigotry) rather than the facts the paper presents them with. Take for instance what the liberals would describe as a typical Daily Mail headline in today’s copy. The headline to the piece reads, ‘Number of immigrants living in the UK long-term SOARS by 20% in one year as England is named most crowded country in the EU’.

As the headline refers to immigrants, it is enough to infuriate many a liberal. Knowing, as they have convinced themselves they do, that the Daily Mail is the anti-Christ; they will read no further than the headline.

Even those who take the trouble to read the article can only offer multicultural platitudes. The facts of the piece go unchallenged, they hope against hope that the Guardian will provide the antidote to this latest Daily Mail virus.

If the liberals challenge the statistics or their interpretation by the Daily Mail, then do so. But to dismiss this paper out of hand in such an infantile manner as they often do because of their characterisation of it as The Great Satan, does very little to enhance democratic debate.

THE LEFT IS AT THE MOMENT in the ascendency throughout the media. The Right has outposts such as the Daily Mail and the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, coupled with their house magazine, The Spectator. The Left on the other hand have not only the monopoly of the written media but also the visual media. The BBC is a liberal concoction supreme. But all the other independent channels to a greater or lesser extent follow the same path.

Fox News on the other hand are unashamedly right of centre, and have been criticised for so being. Fox News and Sky television are both owned by the same owner, Rupert Murdock. But Fox News is the only news broadcaster that gives a right of centre perspective on the news. It does so because it operates in the USA where such a perspective is commercially viable. While, also for commercial reasons, Murdock’s Sky channel in the UK has a liberal taint.

It was a business concept which was something both the union leaders and their Grunwick printers could never have understood in the 1980s because of their class prejudices. Unions will always be the stumbling block to technological advancement because it invariably leads to a depletion in their membership.

The Daily Mail undermines the liberal agenda, and can therefore be attacked at will without any kind of rational attached by its accusers’ accusations. Because we live in a socially liberal society overseen of course by, at every level a liberal elite; any conservative input into the country’s future is traduced by the liberal Left and left barren.

Since the 1960s liberalism has been allowed to dominate every aspect of our cultural advancement. It has been able to do so without complaint. Well not quite; but those who tried to oppose such a direction (especially in the 1960s) where satirised and ridiculed as Victorian reactionaries.

What the Daily Mail does is to strike a chord with its constituency, known as Middle England. This constituency has worked and contributed to their retirement. They are indeed the backbone of the country; and very few of them rely on state benefits. They have managed their financial income to such an extent that they deserve the rewards that the Left seem to begrudge them.

The Daily Mail speaks for these people as well as a sizable portion of the ambitious working class, who want the generation they produce to do better than they did in life; and in doing so they make sacrifices on behalf of their children. If they can afford it they would prefer a private education to a state one. Not because they are snobs, but because they want the best for their children; if their is anything wrong with this view, it has passed me by. While there are many good state comprehensives about, parents are taking pot-luck on finding the right one, and in some cases have had to move house into a catchment area for the best state schools.

It is the outlook of such people that the Daily Mail speaks up for. If the Mail gets a story wrong (and even the Guardian, I suspect has done so), then it deserves criticism. But such criticism must be factually based, and not ideologically based.

I CAN UNDERSTAND AS a one time socialist and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, how our social liberals must feel toward the Daily Mail’s journalism. But they must ask themselves why they hate it so. Is it really because you believe they publish a compendium of half truths and downright lies based upon your knowledge of the facts; or is because your own politics run contrary to those of the majority of the country.

The liberal agenda is supreme in every sphere of what Marx tagged the social superstructure. In all walks of the visual and written media; coupled with the educational, legal, and of course political establishment; every department, in other words, of our social and cultural superstructure is in the hands of a small ‘l’ liberal consensus – even the current coalition is dominated by the ‘middle ground’; a euphemism for liberalism.

The Daily Mail offers people an alternative to the awful nanny and politically correct state. It may not win any newspaper of the year awards because of its conservative ambitions, but those ambitions have the same legitimacy within a democracy as any other part of the political spectrum.

I hope the Daily Mail continues to upset the liberalarte, for its conservative values have stood the test of centuries, and if in a 100 years’ time this paper has to be printed in some cave in the wilderness – then the liberal left will have won, and become as intolerant as those they accuse of being today.