There are very few things that are seriously wrong with
Britain at the moment. OK, so the weather might be crap, the food
nowhere near as refined, or varied, as continental cooking, and
our standing on the world stage after the war in Iraq might be
lower than an earwig’s jockstrap. However there is hardly
anything that is seriously, grievously, and disturbingly wrong
with this country. In fact, the only thing that gives me serious
cause for concern is a newspaper. The Daily Mail’s reputation is well known. To anyone who
knows anything about the press, the mere name of the paper will
conjure up images of full-page, attention-grabbing headlines, of
lurid tales of celebrity “scandals”, of clumsy
“lifestyle” articles, and, most distressingly, of the
neverending stream of articles telling the reader why immigrants
are a bunch of sweaty, ignorant, thieving, disease-ridden
freeloaders. Barely a day goes past without an article of this
sort wriggling its noxious way into the Mail. If you go into a
newsagent’s today and pick up a copy – don’t buy
it, you’ll only encourage them – I’d be willing to
bet that somewhere inside its pages, either as a news piece, an
editorial, or a column, is an article attacking immigrants.
It’s as inevitable as finding maggots in a dead body, or
finding tossers in the Union. You just can’t get away from
it. What came as a surprise to me was to find out that attitudes
that would clearly offend modern morality, not to mention the
Race Relations Act, were prevalent in the Daily Mail quite some
time ago. Go back to the 20 August 1938, when the Mail declared
“the way stateless Jews from Germany are pouring in through
every port of this country is becoming an outrage…a problem
to which the Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.” Or perhaps
3 February 1900, when the Mail described Jewish immigrants thus:
“When the Relief Committee passed by they hid their gold and
fawned and whined in broken English asking for money for their
train fare.” Or how about the headline they ran just before
the Second World War, “Hoorah for the Blackshirts”, in
praise of Mosley, Mussolini, and Nazi Germany? Today, such reporting would come nowhere near the presses, and
to judge attitudes from the early part of the last century by
modern standards is perhaps not entirely fair. Yet given those
modern sensibilties, which we are entitled to see respected, the
paper’s current stance is clearly unacceptable. When presented with a wave of immigrants that they think pose
a threat to “the British way of life” (even though
British history is itself a history of immigration, rather than
the ancient, staid, traditional history that they would like it
to be) the Mail has always placed itself firmly on the side of
the average, self-respecting, middle class homeowner – the
classic “Middle England” stereotype – and has
attacked the immigrants, whether they be Jewish, Caribbean,
Indian or, more recently, asylum seekers, with a ferocity that is
simultaneously astounding and alarming. Barely controlling their
rage, barely managing to swallow the bile that is oozing between
their lips and onto the page, Mail writers tear into their chosen
target like a famished tiger tearing into a goat. It’s not
pretty to see. So why is this piece about “Phobia”? What’s the
link? Simply this: by constantly attacking foreign immigrants in
this way, the Daily Mail is tapping into the fear of outsiders
that is so powerful in an island nation. The image of foreigners
arriving on this island, a crafty smile on their lips, eager to
make a fast buck for themselves either by begging money for their
train fare from the Relief Committee or by milking the benefits
system, is a powerful one, and it hasn’t changed since the
Mail started using it. People who live on an island are bound to
be wary of outsiders, since foreigners who come from overseas
seem somehow more outlandish than someone simply trotting over a
land boundary. The Daily Mailtaps into this fear and milks it for
all its worth. One way they do this is by setting up basic stereotypes of the
people they tend to deal with. Asylum seekers, for example, are
all devious, grasping, cheats. Tax-paying single mothers are all
hard-working heroes, nobly refusing to bow to reality, stoically
struggling on. Young people all wear baseball caps, hang around
on street corners, steal cars, and mug grannies to raise funds to
pay for their drug habit. Princess Diana was a saintly, flawless
Princess of the People, who was treated horribly by the
stiff-lipped, inbred, fools of the Royal Family. And so on, and
so forth. By constantly referring to this wellthumbed album of one
dimensional, grotesque, stereotypes, the Daily Mail ensures that
their articles can be understood by absolutely everyone because
their aims are so blatantly obvious. The Mail lives in a
pantomime world of heroes, villains and good and evil, except
their world isn’t as funny as a pantomime, nor as logical. As I said at the beginning, the Mail’s reputation is well
known. What concerns me is that it is one of the most popular
newspapers in the country. Its circulation figures for March this
year are disturbing: almost 2.4 million copies a day. That’s
2.4 million people being spoon-fed a one-dimensional, misleading
and poisonous diet of middle- class, knee-jerk xenophobia every
single day. What concerns me even more is that there are 2.4
million people in the country who are willing to believe this
sort of tripe, and willing to pay for the privilege of reading
it. The Daily Mail, clearly, is immensely successful at what it
does: targeting its audience and tapping into the fear that they
feel, which is, after all, one of the most powerful emotions
humans can feel. And unless Middle England has a freakish
collective change of heart and decides that foreigners are
alright after all, we’ll be seeing a lot more of Lynda
Lee-Potter and her poisonous ilk for some time yet.ARCHIVE: 2nd week TT 2004
The Pride of Britain?
