Littlejohn Redefines Welfare

Despite residing behind the protection of a gated compound in Vero Beach, FL., the Daily Mail’s unfunny and talentless churnalist Richard Littlejohn knows that, to keep on trousering the obscene sums of money to which he has become accustomed, he must jump whenever his legendarily foul mouthed editor says so. This includes some pretence of how ordinary residents of the UK actually live.

Welfare, Guv? They're all scrahngers, innit?!?

Sadly, Dick’s geographical separation from the action, together with his terminal inability to indulge in the mystical practice known as “five minutes’ Googling”, means that howlers slip through the net, and today’s routinely piss-poor offering rewards attention by offering up some prime ones. That offering, “It’s not reckless to impose cuts on the feckless”, is typical of the genre.

Here, the young woman who appeared on Monday morning’s Today programme, presented to the audience as Rebecca, whom the Mail has still not identified – and you can be sure that Dacre will have at least one private investigator on the case – goes from “sounding African” to being an “immigrant living on benefits”. And her accent gets ridiculed into the bargain, not that Dick’s a bigot, you understand.

“People rightly get riled” about Rebecca, Littlejohn asserts, but fails to tell readers that those people are his editor and all the others who have so far failed to find her – and when they do, boy, will she get smeared big time. But while the Mail works out its frustration at their identification failure, there is always the disabled to kick, and Dick, veteran of the Motability smear campaign, knows how to do that.

“The halt and the lame will be dragged across our BBC TV screens like modern-day Bob Cratchits. Political activists in wheelchairs will chain themselves to the railings for the benefit of the cameras, even though no one who is genuinely disabled is suffering any cuts in their income or support”. Not much, they aren’t: the Spartacus Report campaign didn’t start up for nothing.

And, as the man said, there’s more: “But their faux outrage has been proved to be a damp squib”. Of course it has, Dick. Shall I book you a meeting with Sue Marsh when you next bother to fetch up in the UK, or will you be washing your barnet several times instead? But nothing puts him off his stride: “The Tories should now feel emboldened to cut welfare further and faster”.

Why so? “It’s a vote-winner, especially with older people who have played by the rules and paid taxes all their lives”. You mean like those who receive a state pension, which makes up almost half of all welfare spending, Dicky boy? Or does it stop being “welfare” when there are too many Daily Mail readers in the target group? This “welfare” thing is the most flexible and convenient of concepts for some.

Still, the ranting convinces some readers and pays the bills. No change there, then.