Dick And A Smear To Order

While the arguments continue over the Government’s apparent adoption of workfare, the word has gone out from the legendarily foul mouthed editor of the Daily Mail that this scheme is A Very Good Thing. Pundits have clearly been ordered to trash anyone objecting. Thus Dacre’s unfunny and talentless dinosaur Richard Littlejohn has picked up the baton and waddled off with it.

Unemployment benefit, guv? Lap of luxury, innit?

“Fight for the right to lie in bed all day” tells Dick’s headline, setting the tone for a routine kicking of anyone not in agreement with the sage of the gated Florida compound. The Littlejohn one-two is set up as he first extols the virtues of the scheme, claiming that it gets 50% of those who take part into a permanent job, then smears the opposition to it as a “vicious internet campaign”.

This internet thing, it’s certainly vicious: for a start, it’s full of folks telling poor million-notes-a-year Dick that he does sweet Jack research, that he makes up stories to fit whatever he’s banging on about this week, and that he’s an unreconstructed, intolerant, dishonest, malicious, homophobic, Islamophobic, Europhobic, technophobic, sexist, climate change denying bigot.

I mean, look how harmless Dickie Windbag is. All he wants to do is to demonise the disabled, the Roma, travellers, the unemployed, anyone with a drug habit (except for those hooked on nicotine), students, lefties, Lib Dems, lawyers who defend anyone he doesn’t like, anyone talking foreign, the Guardian, Muslims, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and Harriet Harman. Especially Harriet Harman.

So the Right To Work campaign gets both barrels, as Dick says its “a Socialist Workers’ Party front” and a “Trotskyite rabble”. This may be because there is a photo of a protestor selling Socialist Worker, but that’s lame even for Littlejohn: the group’s website suggests it’s rather more broadly based. But that would have meant using the hated internet and doing some research, so he doesn’t bother.

But he does know that there is “a Left-wing law firm” involved. Lawyers aren’t allowed to choose their political stance, then? Ooh, worse than that: it’s “headed by a man last seen trawling Iraq for victims of alleged abuse at the hands of the British Army”. But Phil Shiner didn’t trawl Iraq – he met claimants in Istanbul. Well, what the heck eh Dickie, the 22 dead were only Muslims, weren’t they?

Whatever, Littlejohn is off on his “yuman rights” riff, whining about a “soppy bird” and trying to use the example of the USA to pretend that the scheme Tesco were caught out using to their advantage is “fair”, while trying to appeal to authority by telling readers that he was unemployed once. Pity it wasn’t more than once.

Dick, you’re a dick. Trouser the cheques while you can, because you’re out of time, as well as being out of order.