Mail Cartoon Racist Bigotry Exposed

Specialist cartoonists are a dying breed, and newspaper reluctance to pay for their services other than an ad hoc basis does not help. But a few survive, not least the Daily Mail’s Mac, more prosaically known as Stanley McMurtry, whose comment cartoons have of late attracted significant amounts of adverse comment because of perceived racism, and the recycling of anti-Semitic tropes made infamous by the Third Reich.

Stanley McMurtry aka Mac

Yesterday’s example was a case in point: showing variously armed and overwhelmingly male characters in what was presumably Islamic dress “crossing into the EU”, variously armed, provoked campaigner Ian Pace to post “Mac’s cartoon in the Mail, the symbolism of the rat, and Der Ewige Jude (1940)”. The addition of rats to the cartoon turned it from the Islamophobic to something that incorporated Nazi anti-Semitism.

That this comes from a paper that made no secret either of forthright anti-Semitism, nor its proprietor’s undying support for Adolf Hitler, will surprise few, despite recent attempts to persuade the world outside the Northcliffe House bunker that it is not anti-Semitic, nor Islamophobic. Nor is it the first of McMurtry’s recent efforts that someone might have been best advised talking him aside and asking him to try again.

Take, for instance, this effort showing a man at the altar with a sheep, and the caption “I’ve voted Labour all my life, vicar, and fully support their quest for a multicultural society”. Yes, multiculturalism means more than just shearing those sheep. The comparison of “other cultures = animals” is also clear. And, as the man said, there’s more.

In response to the headline, shown at the right-hand side of this cartoon, claiming “Government advertises for foreign doctors”, we see a spear-wielding and dark skinned witchdoctor and a nurse telling “Answer the doctor, Mrs Wilberforce. Have you drunk your warm cockerel’s blood this morning?” Foreign means black. It means they do strange things. It’s something to be frightened of.

After it was revealed that some refugees are being temporarily housed in hotel accommodation, there was Mac again, showing a couple being led into a room where the bed was already full of several dark-skinned people, and being told “Here we are, folks. If you ring reception they’ll tell you the Sudanese for ‘shove over’”. Lots and lots of black people are coming here and taking your hotel rooms off you, Daily Mail readers.

Even that was not the end of it: after singer Tom Jones wondered if he might have black ancestry, there was Mac again, clearly suggesting that black people live in the jungle, they are cannibals, and that it’s fine to patronise them. The crude racism would not have got past any editing process at most other papers. Why does it get past that at the Daily Mail? Because it is clearly an approved part of Paul Dacre’s “conversation” with his readers.

It is sad to see that less and less papers are willing to keep a full-time cartoonist on the books. It is yet sadder that Stanley McMurtry is one of them.