It's the Mail wot done it

One trouble with Murdoch-gate is that it can distract us from just how fucking horrific the rest of our tabloid press is. Whether it is the opiate cocktail  of celebrities and tits - or just downright reactionary lies that fuel racial hatred and division. A special place  is held by  the small minded spitefulness of middle class middle England that is personified by the Mail

Getting wound up by that hateful rag is an exercise in futility.  So I don't usually bother. But the Mail is given out as freebie in quite  a number of places - including my gym. And sitting in the sauna I am something of a captive audience.

So on Saturday morning I sat there relaxing after my workout reading how the horrific attacks in Norway were the work of an Islamo-mentalist group called the 'Friends Of Islamic Jihad'. There were several pages of authoritative commentary from various historians and sociologists about how the overly-liberal multicultural societies of Scandinavia were doomed to tragedy as  deranged immigrants were bound to bite the hand that fed them. And this - it was implied - should serve as a warning to all of us.

Of course roughly by lunchtime it was clear that this was all complete bollocks. 

The perpetrator of this atrocity was not some swarthy incomer, but an extremely Aryan-looking conservative patriot. And a fundamentalist Christian too - who fancied linking up with our own homegrown EDL. 

So against my better judgement, the following morning  I had to look at the Mail On Sunday: I scoured it for a retraction or apology - but found none. Only that Anders Behring Breivik was being reported as a lone nutter with a background that was unfortunately 'arch-conservative'. And no mention of course that his hate-fueled agenda bore more than a passing resemblance to the kind of reactionary shit the Mail has been pumping out for years.