Daily Mail (the pot) versus Phil Woolas (the kettle)

This post is an expansion of something I tweeted last night:

This is the front page of today’s Daily Mail:

The main story is about two Labour MPs whose behaviour the Mail claims is “shameful”, and indeed it is.

Paul Farrelly MP is targeted for assaulting someone after a drunken karaoke party and Phil Woolas MP, the former immigration minister, is targeted for “spreading racist smears”.

The part of the story about Mr Woolas is accompanied by, firstly, the following ‘Daily Mail Comment’:

As one Labour MP stands accused of a brutal assault at a drunken karaoke party, another is stripped of his seat for spreading vicious lies about his parliamentary opponent.

And to think that while he was stirring up racial ill-feeling against his rival, Phil Woolas was the minister in charge of immigration.

After the expenses scandal, we thought MPs could sink no lower. They’ve proved us wrong.

Also accompanying Mr Woolas’ half of the article is a section titled “Evil leaflets that set out to stir racial tensions” which explores in detail the genuinely shameful things that he was willing to stoop to.

The introduction to the section (which is worth reading in full, by the way) begins as follows:

The marginal seat of Oldham East and Saddleworth was a key battleground in the General Election.

Sitting Labour MP Phil Woolas faced Liberal Democrat Elwyn Watkins in a constituency deeply divided by racial tensions.

Here Rebecca Camber examines how Mr Woolas embarked on a toxic campaign of lies, smears and dirty tricks to ‘make the white folk angry’ enough to vote for him.

Now, does anyone smell at least a whiff of hypocrisy in all of this?

Could it not be argued that the whole of Britain is “a constituency deeply divided by racial tensions”?

Can it not be said that the Daily Mail embarks on “a toxic campaign of lies, smears and dirty tricks”?

Can it not further be stated that the Daily Mail seeks to “make the white folk angry”?

Can you see where I’m going with this? Just in case you can’t, I’ll give you a few examples.

A toxic campaign of smears

During the General Election, Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, received a great deal of coverage, especially from the right-wing press. Their agenda throughout this coverage was clear for all to see: they saw Nick Clegg as a possible threat to the Conservatives. Therefore they collectively embarked on something of a smear campaign against him.

Surprisingly(!) enough, the worst perpetrator of this was the Daily Mail.

At the time, the ever-diligent Tabloid Watch posted on one particularly nasty piece of coverage from the Mail:

But then the Mail gets really ugly:

Despite his Anglo-Saxon name, Nick Clegg is by blood the least British leader of a British political party, the son of a Dutch mother and a half-Russian merchant banker father.

Why does this matter? And what point are they really trying to make with that statement?

They upped the rhetoric in the Mail on Sunday the following day, with the headline:

His wife is Spanish, his mother Dutch, his father half-Russian and his spin doctor German. Is there ANYTHING British about LibDem leader?

Clegg was born, raised and educated in Britain – as the Mail on Sunday profile makes clear. So why are they asking if there is ‘anything’ British about him – and thereby implying there isn’t?

Tabloid Watch further added:

It’s hard to work out exactly what these comments about Clegg are meant to achieve, other than to suggest he’s not quite ‘one of us’ and therefore not to be trusted. But would they ever make this point about, for example, Prince Charles or Winston Churchill?

But it seems the Mail are setting their own arbitrary rules about what constitutes being British. They don’t use the word ‘indigenous’ – as favoured by the BNP – but they don’t seem too far away from that.

If the Mail wishes to attack Clegg and his party, it should do so on the basis of their beliefs, their policies, their ideas, their voting record.

But they should leave the snide remarks about race out of it.

And indeed they should.

Now do you think the Mail is any kind of position to denounce Woolas’ campaign of toxic smears as shameful?

Dirty tricks

Following the announcement of a proposed strike on Bonfire Night by the Fire Brigades Union, the Mail engaged in one particularly dirty trick that’s most definitely worth mentioning.

In a press release issued by the FBU, the union’s general secretary claimed that:

One reporter, a woman, visited my former wife on Wednesday and asked her to talk about me” he said. “The reporter said she was from the Daily Mail. My former wife shut the door on her. Another came to my student son’s flat when he was not there, asked the neighbours about him, showed them a picture of my son, and rooted about in the dustbins.

Rooting around in the rubbish for news is as dirty a trick as you’re likely to come across, but what makes this all the more “delicious” is that this shameful act was conducted in order to smear Matt Wrack.

Doesn’t this make the Mail’s criticism of Woolas’ “smears and dirty tricks” seem all the more hollow?

Make the white folk angry

Making the white folk angry is, perhaps, the primary aim of the Daily Mail. People of other races are deliberately and consistently reported negatively in the Mail’s pages.

To take just one example, back in August I blogged about the Mail’s truly shameful attempt at using the issue of race to infect the already thoroughly dirtied debate on immigration.

They reported the fact that certain maternity wards in the UK have seen only 1 in 10 white and British mothers as being bad news along with a lot of incendiary rhetoric about immigration.

Again, do you not think that this disqualifies the Mail from criticising anyone else for trying to exploit racial divisions?

Is that enough examples? I really could go on and go into much further detail too, but I don’t want to labour the point.

Myself and other bloggers have repeatedly demonstrated the Mail’s propensity to lie and smear those members of society with which it does not agree, and to stoop to exploiting racial divisions and prejudices. Surely the summit of hypocrisy has been reached when the Mail criticises others for practising the same things the Mail engages in on a daily basis.

The way in which Mr Woolas’ election campaign was conducted was truly shameful, but the Mail’s behaviour is surely more shameful in that it has been going on for years and is likely never to stop.

We shouldn’t let them get away with hypocrisy on such a grand scale as this.

(I’ve just noticed that the excellent Primly Stable has also blogged about the hypocrisy of today’s Mail. Go there and read it.)