When IPPR analysis of the Tory budget revealed that once again the Tories are rigging the economy against women, the vast majority of mainstream media outlets refused to even mention the evidence that the misogynistic Tory "war on women" is continuing unabated. Only The Guardian covered the story in any detail.
Fast forward just a few days and there's a huge mainstream media frenzy going on about Margaret Thatcher being long-listed to be the 'scientist' to appear on the new £50 note because of her 'contributions to science'.
Her claimed contribution being a short stint between 1949 and 1951 working for the processed food company that introduced soft-serve ice cream to the UK. A fact that has gradually been inflated over the years to her being the sole and outright inventor of Mr Whippy type ice cream.
Nobody seems to care that soft-serve ice cream was actually invented the decade before in the United States, and that the company Thatcher worked for had teamed up with the US giant Mr Softee to bring it to the UK.
So Tories are openly celebrating that they've managed to game the system to get Margaret Thatcher long-listed as a "scientist" based on the absurdly-easy-to-disprove urban myth that she invented soft serve ice cream, and the mainstream media are pushing out as many articles on the Thatcher-£50-ice cream story as possible in order to hoover up all the clicks.
If sense prevails then Thatcher should get nowhere near the final shortlist because her contribution to science is trivial at best, if not entirely fanciful.
But the real issue here isn't that Tories have gamed the system in a pathetic effort to replace legitimate British scientific legends (Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, Edmund Halley, Alan Turing, Ada Lovelace, Peter Higgs ...) with their ridiculously divisive political idol, it's that the mainstream media have made such a huge frenzy over this trivial story, after steadfastly ignoring the ruinous impact of Tory austerity dogma on the hundreds of thousands of poor and ordinary women just a few days ago.
People are literally starving, low-income workers are relying on food bank charity in ever greater numbers, hundreds of thousands of struggling single mothers are struggling to feed and clothe their kids, children are turning up to school so hungry and malnourished they can't concentrate on their work, and the Tory government is actively making this situation worse ... but fuck that eh? Who would even read about that, even if we published it, so here are 20 virtually identical churnalised articles about Thatcher, and ice cream, and £50 notes.
They're doing it because they think this Thatcher-£50-ice cream idiot fodder is way more likely to generate clicks and advertising revenue than the evidence that the Tory party is continuing with their grotesque and profoundly misogynistic economic attacks on the poorest women in society.
They're doing it because they think you prefer being distracted with utterly trivial nonsense like this than being informed about reality.
So shut up, don't think about or research anything for yourself, and eat your delicious Tory ice-cream straight from the mainstream media churn.
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