The Daily Mail totally lost the plot over this Martin Rowson cartoon

The Daily Mail are well renowned for their bizarre front page tantrums (remember "enemies of the people" or "who will speak for Britain") but their latest bizarre editorial decrying the Guardian as the "fascist left" over the Martin Rowson Finsbury Park cartoon is absolutely ludicrous reality-denying nonsense that just shows how completely rattled the Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre must be to have allowed such ridiculous drivel to appear in his propaganda sheet.

There's so mach wrong with this humiliating toddler tantrum of an editorial it's going to have to be broken down into sections.

The Daily Mail's history of fascism

You would have thought that a publication with a shameful history of propagandising for Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany and Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists would be somewhat reticent about calling other people fascists, but no. 

They have no sense of shame at the extreme-right leanings of their publication, and assume their audience to be so staggeringly ill-informed that they won't spot the irony of a propaganda rag that has championed Nazism, fascism and other extreme-right ideologies for the best part of a Century accusing others of being divisive fascists.

The unspeakable woman

It's only a few weeks since the unspeakable woman published a Tweet calling for a "final solution" to the Muslim problem. 

She was sacked by LBC for her deliberate use of Nazi language that could obviously be interpreted as a call for a modern day Holocaust against Muslims, but somehow the Daily Mail decided to keep her as a columnist.

Any publication that considers it appropriate for their columnists to provoke anti-Muslim hatred by using Nazi Holocaust rhetoric against them is really skating on thin ice when they try to accuse others of having "fascist" tendencies.

The big lie

Amazingly a propaganda rag with a history of promoting fascism accusing others of having "fascist" tendencies isn't even the most ridiculous thing about this deranged Daily Mail editorial. 

The most ludicrous thing of all is the part where they openly lie that The Daily Mail newspaper and the Mail Online website are totally separate entities, even though everyone knows they share almost identical content, written by the same staff, and are operated by the same publisher Associated Newspapers. 

You can see that they are sister companies just by looking at the Associated Newspapers accounts.

Why lie?

The fact that the Daily Mail newspaper has resorted to concocting the most transparent of lies in order to distance themselves from the unspeakable woman is an absolutely clear demonstration that they know perfectly well that they're guilty of radicalising people with their extreme-right propaganda, because why else would they invent such a silly lie to cover their complicity if they didn't feel they had something to hide?

People with nothing to be ashamed of generally don't make up obvious lies in order to shield themselves from criticism.

Unintentional satire

"Fake news" blares Daily Mail headline for an article in which they blatantly lie to their own readers that the Daily Mail and Mail Online are totally separate entities!

You couldn't get a better example of unintentional satire than an article entitled "fake news" that blatantly and brazenly lies to the reader.

The disgusting track record

The absurd effort to create a fictional firewall between the Daily Mail and the Mail Online is a clear indicator of guilt, but even if this lie were true and the Daily Mail had nothing to do with Mail Online content, there's still absolutely mountains of evidence that the Daily Mail spreads hateful divisive extreme-right propaganda on the front page of their newspaper.

Just look at the absolute state of this and wonder how on earth the editor who published all of this divisive (and often downright misleading) anti-immigrant rhetoric on their front page could have the brass neck to complain that there isn't "a shred of evidence" that the Daily Mail fan the flames of Islamophobia and racism, let alone accuse anyone else of being "purveyors of hate".

Offensive cartoons

One of the most incredible things about this Daily Mail tantrum over the Martin Rowson cartoon in the Guardian is that the Daily Mail have a track record of printing absolutely outrageous cartoons that ape Nazi cartoons of the 1930s by depicting refugees as rats.

Imagine the sickening hypocrisy of an editor who sees fit to publish Nazi-style cartoons aimed at dehumanising refugees who then has a massive tantrum over a cartoon that highlights this kind of extreme-right Daily Mail fanaticism as a potential causal factor in the extreme-right terror attack in Finsbury Park.

The Guardian letter

Aside from spewing outrage at the Martin Rowson cartoon, the Daily Mail editorial also lambastes Owen Jones for calling the Daily Mail an open sewer and quotes from a letter from a Guardian reader that claims that "if any actual person stood in the street shouting the sort of bile this paper produces daily, they could be prosecuted for hate speech".

The funny thing is that they're so delusional that they actually think the majority of the population would disagree with the characterisation of the Daily Mail as the sewer press, or with the idea that ordinary people publicly inciting hatred in the way the Daily Mail do would likely be arrested.

How out of touch with reality must they be to actually publish such stingingly accurate criticism of the Daily Mail in their own newspaper?
  Austerity denialism

The Daily Mail editorial tries to claim that the only reason they continually whip up hatred against immigrants is that they want to "relieve pressure of numbers on school places, hospital beds, wages, housing, transport and infrastructure".

All but the most numbskulled amongst us know that the biggest pressure on all of these things isn't immigration, but actually Tory austerity dogma.

In seven years of Tory rule the Tories have shut down dozens of A&E departments, walk in centres and maternity wards, gutted social care, slashed mental health spending, and reduced the number of NHS beds by at least 12,000.

Since 2010 the Tory government have deliberately repressed the wages of millions of workers ensuring the most severe decline in the value of UK workers' wages since records began. Other countries with much higher levels of immigration, but less austerity madness, have seen the value of their workers' wages rise.

Between 2010 and 2017 the Tory government oversaw the lowest levels of house building since the early 1920s. The fact that the allowed the biggest influx of migrants in UK history at the same time obviously didn't help the situation, but the catastrophic housing policy failures of the Tory party are far more to blame for housing shortages than immigration.

Again, the main cause of problems with British transport and infrastructure are not caused by immigration but by Tory ideological extremism. The rail and bus networks are disgracefully over-priced shambles because of botched Tory privatisation scams, and since 2010 the Tories have been trashing the future economic potential of the UK and ensuring we get left behind in the global economic race by deliberately under-investing in infrastructure spending.

If the Daily Mail gave the slightest bit of genuine concern over any of these issues, then they wouldn't be blaming these issues exclusively on immigrants, they'd be supporting the Labour Party manifesto that proposes to take serious action to actually address these problems (as well as introducing a migrant impact fund to improve services and infrastructure in areas that have had high levels of immigration).

But no, the Daily Mail are nothing more than the propaganda arm of the Tory party that has caused all of this damage with their privatisation mania and their socially and economically ruinous fixation with hard-right austerity dogma.

The reason the Daily Mail continually blame immigrants for all of these problems is that it deflects the blame away from their beloved Tories.

Victim complexing

The extreme-right are increasingly reliant on the tactic of inflating people's senses of self-pity so that they end up walking around with victim complexes the size of hot air balloons.

This bizarre Daily Mail editorial tries to make out that it's not the people killed or injured in any of the four terrorist outrages over the last three months who are victims, but actually the poor maligned readers of the Daily Mail for the way the nasty lefties accuse them of reading a divisive extreme-right hate comic.

The Daily Mail have worked tirelessly to create massive victim complexes in their readers, and this attempt to portray Daily Mail readers as the poor delicate victims of society is their attempted payoff.

Forget the victims of terrorism; forget the victims of Tory austerity dogma; forget the disabled people who have been systematically abused in disability denial factories; forget the UK workforce who have seen their wages eroded away worse than any developed nation apart from crisis-stricken Greece; forget the 400,000+ extra kids growing up in poverty since 2010; forget all the people who have had their local services shut down; forget the millions stuck in ever-growing NHS queues; forget the victims of Grenfell tower; forget the victims of the post-Brexit spike in violent hate crime ...

Forget them all - because the true victims are the poor maligned Daily Mail readers who must be so terribly upset that other people would dare to suggest that they might possibly be horrible people because they choose to read such an undeniably horrible newspaper.

Conclusion

I've been very critical of the Guardian in recent years over their lazy recycling of pro-austerity dogma and their relentless editorial attacks on progressive politics, but their cartoonists (especially Martin Rowson and Steve Bell) have continued to do fantastic work. 

So in conclusion I think we should all say a big thank you and congratulations to the cartoonist Martin Rowson for triggering the Daily Mail into publishing such a blatantly unhinged diatribe.

Follow Martin Rowson on Twitter here

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Neo-Labour legacies

Occasional cartoon series
(Hit F11 to view in full screen)

 

Neo-Labour legacies           (11 Sept 2011)

Inspired by an accusation that I am a "partisan Labour supporter" on an internet forum. 

More reasons not to vote Labour and an article about  Gordon Brown's economic alchemy schemes.

More cartoons

Gideon's Folly

Occasional cartoon series
(Hit F11 to view in full screen)

Gideon's Folly           (10 Sept 2011)

Inspired by Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne 
describing his ideologically driven and irrational 
"Deficit Reduction Plan" as "a rock of stability upon which out economy is built". 

More about George Osborne's "rock of stability metaphor"

More cartoons

 If you enjoyed this cartoon, maybe you could buy me a beer? £1 would get me a can of cheap lager whilst £3 would get me a lovely pint of real ale.

George Osborne's "rock of stability"

On 9 September 2011 George Osborne, the man in charge of the UK economy, made a speech at Chatham House in London alongside the newly appointed IMF boss Christine Lagarde in which he made some astonishingly facile statements about the UK economy. The most notable of which was his absurd description of his ideologically driven "austerity agenda" as the foundation of Britain's economic stability. Here it is in his own words:

"We will stick to the deficit reduction plan we have set out. It is the rock of stability on which our economy is built."

It saddens me that anybody could consider using such a glib and inane metaphor in a serious discussion about economics (we must assume he wasn't joking) but that such a misguided economic sentiment could be uttered by the Chancellor of the Exchequer is quite astonishing, although perhaps explained by the fact that he is not an economist, his degree is in History!

I don't have a degree in Economics either but I've worked out for myself that the foundation of economic stability is something a little more fundamental to the system than some ideologically driven government "austerity" scheme.

If he'd read it out this absurd conflation of a fluid political process and an economic foundation, nonchalantly or absent mindedly whilst delivering a long and poorly written speech that he'd only had time to skim read before delivering, we could perhaps forgive him. However this crass and senseless metaphor is actually one of Osborne's carefully selected and oft repeated economic soundbytes, part of the simplistic economic narrative he uses to explain the economy to us "thickwits" in the general population. It seems as if the Tories believe that their economic rhetoric doesn't even have to make any kind of sense, even at the most basic level, it just needs to contain the right balance of reassuring words and economic jargon in order to placate the masses.

How on earth could the Tories have considered using such an incoherent metaphor which relies on the fundamental confusion of processes and a foundations to "explain" their harebrained economic methodology? It's just idiotic.

As a former construction worker I tend to think of processes (like economic policies) as things that take place within structures, which in turn are built upon foundations, not as the foundations themselves. Foundations would tend to be fundamental things without which the rest of the edifice could not even exist. So if we are going to use simplistic metaphors to explain complex economic ideas perhaps we could say that productivity is the foundation of the economy, trade is the structure, and the economic establishment  are the construction workers. This leaves short term ideologically driven government fiscal policies like "Osborne's Austerity" as the builders' tools. In fact it would be fair to say that "Osbourne's deficit reduction plan is a sledgehammer" is a much better metaphor than the fantasy that his ideologically driven plan is some kind of bedrock of economic stability.

I've chosen to use productivity as the foundation of my economic metaphor because without economic production there would be nothing to trade. Human society would soon degenerate back towards the kind of seasonal hunter-gatherer society it originated from if nobody produced any goods or services.

To make a crude distinction, there are two kinds of productivity; private productivity and state productivity. The problem with Mr Osborne's simplistic worldview is that he believes the militant neoliberal economic dogma that state productivity is basically "waste" until it is commodified via privatisation. The Deficit Reduction Plan he describes as a "rock of stability" is actually a mechanism for selling off or simply shutting down state productivity, a sledgehammer that he is using to smash lumps off the economic foundation of productivity, undermining the wider UK economy.

Some people have such a simplistic anti-public sector mentality that they don't even seem to understand that the state services that are under attack are intricately linked with private sector productivity. Without a fit and healthy workforce productivity falls, without adequate policing, crime and soaring insurance costs undermine productivity and without hefty investment in scientific research and higher education, the high-tech industries of the future will look elsewhere to set up production.

Osborne's "slash and burn" austerity policy is riddled with false economies and is reliant on the Great Neoliberal Lie (that immediate deficit reduction is the first and overriding economic priority). It is absolutely no surprise at all that Osborne's economic policies won praise from Christine Lagarde, the head of the IMF.

Many commentators have picked up on lagarde's comments about the need for ministers to retain "flexibility" and used them to claim that she was somehow contradicting Osborne's monetary policies, however as a Chicago school trained economist and the leader of the most powerful neoliberal organisation in the world, it seems much more likely that she is asking Osborne to consider another round of massive financial sector bailouts and more conjouring cash out of thin air through quantitative easing, than asking him to keep an open mind about a return to a stable Keynesian style mixed economy.

Returning to Osborne's idea that his "cuts agenda" is some kind of defence against the collapse of the UK economy, perhaps we should consider that this statement came about because Osborne and the Tories know something that they are refusing to share with us "dimwits" in the general public. Perhaps this "missing information" is that the bankers that provide more than 50% of Tory party political donations have made it absolutely clear to George that they intend to have their overleveraged banks recapitalised by the state, and that ordinary working taxpayers are the ones that are going to have to pay for it, through wage freezes, slashed services and economic deflation.

It seems obvious that Osborne has been warned by the financial sector that they will inflict severe economic sanctions (downgraded credit ratings, refusal to lend to British businesses, vulture capitalism) on the UK government if they let up on the policy of bleeding the real economy dry in order to recapitalise their financial institutions. The fact that most of these "austerity" policies fit snugly with George Osborne's personal faith in militant neoliberal dogma means that there is effectively no chance that these policies will be halted, no matter the scale of the damage they inflict on the UK economy.

Dreadful economic growth, borrowing and unemployment figures for 2011 show that the UK economy is slipping back into recession, which would create a shrinking tax take and immediately eliminate many of Osborne's "austerity savings" through reduced government income. None of this matters though, if Osborne continues refusing to even admit that there is an alternative to militant neoliberal economic vandalism.

It is quite clear that there are alternative methods for reducing government borrowing; we only have to look back a few decades to what preceded neoliberalism. The post war consensus mixed economy created 28 consecutive years of budget surpluses (1948-1975), reduced the national debt from 247% of GDP down to just 43% and improved standards of living across the nation. In the subsequent 31 years of unbroken neoliberal economic policy, governments returned budget deficits in 17 of them and the wealth gap has increased faster than ever before. Since the Neoliberal Economic Crisis really kicked in, government debt (including bailouts) has risen from 36% of GDP (2007) to 150% of GDP (2011).

Another more recent example of a nation state breaking with IMF approved neoliberal heterodoxy in order to power their way out of recession can be seen in Argentina. As the neoliberal economic crisis in Argentina preceded the wider Global Neoliberal Economic Crisis, a comprehensive understanding of Argentine Recovery Economics should be a staple for any government intent on using whatever means possible to drag their nation out of recesion.

With "Osborne's austerity recession" on the doorstep and a new round of economically destructive Quantitative Easing looming, these frighteningly poor government debt figures only look set to worsen, yet virtually nobody in mainsteam politics or economics is prepared to admit that militant neoliberal dogma has been shown up as little more than dysfunctional and amoral economic alchemy, least of all our Chancellor Geogre Osborne.

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