What Jesus Wouldn't Do

The Daily Mail sent one of their "journalists" to lie to a foodbank and get a free food parcel. Wow. That's amazing journalism. Have a slow hand clap.

In The Daily Mail's view of things, everyone who's not you is a disgusting bag of human pus who should not be allowed to live. Gas chambers on every corner! Give a kid a packet of crisps, that'll lure them right in. Then we can all live this bizarre white Anglo-Saxon Christian idyll that never existed in the first place.

Why are Daily Mail readers so scared? They're scared of everything. Gay people, immigrants, riff-raff. As if a non-white person might burst their bubble and they'll have to live in the 21st century, and God knows that's a hideous place to be. Whenever I picture a Daily Mail reader I see an upper-middle class white man, probably ex-army when the army didn't exist just to beat up brown people and secure oil supplies, with a big red face and a nostalgic view of people who aren't like him Knowing Their Place. His nervous, belittled wife serves him breakfast tea in a china cup and cuts his bread into soldiers with a ruler lest he get volcanically angry again. He's never physically beaten her, but he might one day. He has two children who loathe him and won't bring friends round in case he starts using demeaning racial epithets again. They're difficult, of course. Liberal arses. Nothing to do with him. He has no more relevance to current British society than a Georgian dandy, yet he clings to the idea that he's the important moral majority of this country.

What a way to live.

Sadly, there are plenty of politicians of all colours willing to indulge this man's fantasy. I'm getting increasingly sick of it. He's a dinosaur, a throwback, a hypocrite. He benefited hugely from his roots and school and upbringing, yet would happily throw a working class kid up a chimney because they're all useless with no work ethic, and the kid's mum's on her own because the dad fucked off at the first available opportuninty but she should have kept her legs shut. A man can't be expected to go without. He wasn't even a soldier - he pushed paper and almost spilled port on his map of the Falklands during a braying dinner party while other young men and women, the cannon fodder, cemented his position by dying in a worthless fight about nothing.

Why do we want to protect or coddle these people? What good have they ever done? If I could ever do anything in my life to offend someone's sensibilities it would be theirs. They have no right to my life or anyone else's. They can long for the days when their postman wasn't black and the local Post Office wasn't run by Asians all they want, but I am not their enabler. Our Britain is not the same, and I have no desire whatsoever to inhabit their Victorian snow globe.

I hope that "journalist" chokes on his Tesco Value cereal - I have no doubt he will keep and eat it - and I hope he can consider for one moment that children might be going hungry tonight because he stole their food parcel. I hope he can go and meet the family that were last in the queue that day and went home hungry because he took their only hope of a decent meal away, look them in the eye, and sincerely apologise. I hope he can reconsider what he does for a living and go to them with two weeks' worth of groceries. Will he do that? No. Because that would make desperate poor people real. That would mean that government policy is to actually starve people to death. That would mean facing evil, and that's not The Daily Mail's agenda. The Daily Mail's agenda is to dehumanise people who need foodbanks. Starvation is not a worthy cause. A worthy cause is getting more red-faced blowhards with not one single idea of what people in Britain have to do to survive to castigate poor people and maybe spit an aneurysm out over breakfast. Hurrah for the Blackshirts is not too far from their psyche, ever.

Any government that tries to put a positive spin on starving its citizens has no moral right to power. Any media organisation that would try to help them out with that has no moral right to exist. It's Easter Sunday, and if God exists and has a spare lightning bolt or two, I have a west London address for him. In the meantime I'll just seethe.