The Daily Mail and Theresa May – What Does This Alliance Say

Last Wednesday Wikipedia editors voted to ban the Daily Mail as a source for the website in all but exceptional circumstances after deeming the news group “generally unreliable”.

The Guardian reported that “The move is highly unusual for the online encyclopaedia, which rarely puts in place a blanket ban on publications and which still allows links to sources such as Kremlin backed news organisation Russia Today, and Fox News, both of which have raised concern among editors.”

As it turns out the editors of Wikipedia described the arguments for a ban as “centred on the Daily Mail’s reputation for poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication”.

I don’t think that “poor fact checking, sensationalism and flat-out fabrication” is anything new when it comes to the Daily Mail – after all this is what they are truly famed for.

Fake news stories abound and the list is long from the Daily Mail. JK Rowling successfully sued for libel won damages and forced an apology. The Mail had to apologise for defaming the mother of George Clooney’s fiance, Amal Alamuddin. Clooney rejected the apology and called the Mail “the worst kind of tabloid,” expressing concerns over the effect the British tabloid was having on the American media (if that’s possible). Then was the unfounded stories of ‘hordes of EU immigrants” that turned out to be false. From fake news about Israel flooding Gaza by opening the dams to seriously dodgy health and medical claims that the NHS has refuted, from false accusations of senior police officers private lives to uncorroborated stories of looting after America’s hurricane Sandy – wikipedia editors are bang on point to ban citing the Daily Mail.

Some of the more dangerous stories peddled by the Mail is on climate change. MediaMatter.Org wrote “Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with the nonprofit Berkeley Earth Institute, wrote on Twitter that the Daily Mail’s claims about climate data are “so wrong it’s hard to know where to start,” pointing out that data from satellites, buoys, and Argo floats “all agree” with the data.”

You would think that senior politicians would steer clear of directly employing such people and use better judgement, but no, PM Theresa May has hired the Daily Mail’s political editor as her chief spokesman or spin doctor.

James Slack will replace Helen Bower. According to one newspaper, Theresa May suffered a blow to her No10 operation after her highly-respected chief spokeswoman walked out following weeks of internal feuding with the PM’s argumentative aides. She has moved to work as Boris Johnson’s director of communications at the Foreign Office. So that should be fun.

Slack will be responsible for No 10’s twice daily briefings with political journalists in the Houses of Parliament. He will become the second political editor from the tabloid to work for the current Conservative Government.

James Chapman, also a political editor for the Mail left the paper in 2015 to work for former Chancellor George Osborne, as his chief of communications. That didn’t go too well did it, so Chapman is now director of communications for Brexit secretary David Davis.

With headlines from the Mail just a couple of weeks ago reading  “Right-wing people are better looking than those on the left” one might think that the Conservatives are losing the plot just a little by employing individuals from a factory producing so called ‘post-truth’ political nonsense.

In reality, what this shows is just how far to the right the Conservatives have moved in recent times. May said that after the “quiet revolution” of Brexit she would set out “towards the new centre ground of British politics”.

After floating a plan, that thankfully didn’t get much support to make business give out lists of their migrant workers, another just as scandalous idea from defence secretary Michael Fallon was pledged to give British soldiers a licence to kill and torture with immunity from human rights laws. Chancellor Philip Hammond is emphasising investment over austerity and threatening to turn Britain in to one ginormous tax haven, as if it wasn’t almost one already.

Masquerading as a centrist, Theresa May has even been labelled the most left-wing Conservative leader in decades but she has just emphatically demonstrated which way the Tories are leading Britain. As mentioned in a number of articles, Theresa May’s government is led by a secretive network of business lobbyists with tentacles reaching deeply into the Conservative party that are planning and plotting a Brexit that plays directly into their hands. This is a direction that the Daily mail have campaigned for for years.

The owner of the Daily Mail is Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere. Their family has a tradition of extreme right-wing views and the demonization of the poorest and most victimised members of society continues today. Its non-stop campaigns and vilification against asylum seekers and refugees has fuelled the anti-immigration debate in Britain. The disgusting attack on the unemployed and the disabled just as bad but perhaps not as bad as stooping so low as to claim those reduced to using food banks aren’t really starving, but are simply scroungers.

Even if this claim was right, which it isn’t, it is a piece of astonishing hypocrisy coming from the staggeringly wealthy Lord Rothermere. Private Eye revealed in 2009 that he was claiming non-dom status in order to avoid paying tax on his stately home, Ferne House. Private Eye also exposed the fact that the Daily Mail is owned through various tax companies in Bermuda.

Tax havens is Britain has led to hundreds of billions of taxes being diverted from the treasury that has led directly to another ideology – that of austerity. The wet dream of the Daily Mail is the destruction of social democracy. This same wet dream was that of Thatcher whose deregulation and privatisation project led directly to a banking implosion and the greatest sell-off  of state owned assets built up over generations. The current Conservative party would even embarrass her with their actions to so far.

The tie up between Britain’s Prime Minister and the Daily Mail is evidence of the corporate coup d’état Britain is about to experience and perhaps Wikipedia is far better informed that our Prime Minister is when it comes to some basic facts.

 

---