The thought that any of the inmates of the Baby Shard bunker possessed even the faintest trace of self-awareness vanished for good today as the Super Soaraway Currant Bun took time off from administering a punishment beating to singer Lily Allen to tell readers, in a suitably shocked tone, “Murder Probe: Six Held … KILLED BY TEEN MOB FOR BEING POLISH … ‘Attacked over foreign lingo’”.
This story is, for some reason, not prominently displayed on the paper’s website, but is not difficult to turn up. “Gang of 12 teens beat family man to death after hearing him chatting to pals … FACTORY worker Arek Jozwik, 40, was rushed to hospital after assault but died from serious head injuries … SIX boys aged 15 and 16 have been questioned over the killing of a Polish man - allegedly beaten to death after a gang heard him speak a foreign language”. And there is more - rather a lot more.
“Arek Jozwik, 40 was attacked by a teenage mob as he chatted to Polish pals outside a pizza takeaway in Harlow, Essex … The brother of the Polish man claims he was attacked by the teenagers because they heard him speaking in his mother tongue … Mr Jozwik died of head injuries after he and two Polish friends were beaten unconscious in what police believe may be a hate crime”. Who might have been behind that hatred?
At that point, the Sun tries to suggest the attack happened partly because Jozwik and his pals didn’t go and eat their pizza somewhere else, or that the Police should have been on the scene and weren’t. What they are not doing is to reflect on their own poisonous coverage of anything and everything concerning migrants from Poland.
Even it today’s paper, while Page 5 tells readers “Kids heard him talking Polish and in seconds 12 attacked”, on Page 2 we see “Employment Shambles … 800,000 HIDDEN MIGRANTS IN JOB … EU workers ‘significantly higher’ that stats”. And then there are all the pejorative stories run at the time of the referendum in June.
Earlier this month the Sun ran “EU RIGHTS ROW … Only 600,000 EU citizens may be at risk if we leave the EU in 2019 … IF BRITAIN LEAVES EU IN 2019 WE WON’T BE ABLE TO BOOT OUT 3M”. Wonder what effect that had on the bigots? Or what about the infamous March front page Exclusive: “EU Welfare Farce … POLE CHANCERS … Migrants’ guide to raking in UK benefits”?
Or what about the front page the day after the referendum, with its “SEE EU LATER” headline? And all the suggestions that there would no longer be people talking foreign on the high street, that all those Polish shops with their funny food and letters that were difficult to pronounce would magically vanish?
Small wonder the Sun isn’t shouting about this story on its website right now. It’s just a pity that the likes of Rebekah Brooks, probably too busy networking, Tony Gallagher, who may still be editor of the Sun if only in name, and PR Dylan Sharpe couldn’t see what was coming. You poison the minds of the public, the poison infects their pals, their friends, their children … and you get an innocent bloke kicked to death.
As Stanley Baldwin put it, the prerogative of the harlot through the ages - power without responsibility. The Sun and its hacks should hang their heads in shame - but they won’t.
4 comments:
I'm surprised Kelvin hasn't commented yet.
Good piece - no need for the dig at sex workers at the end though (Baldwin must have been terrified of women, eh?).
Takes me back to the Sophie Lancaster case.
A while before her murder, Richard Littlejohn commented on a pair of goths in the media, saying "give us a stick and I'll kill it" (ascribed of course to his fictional Geordie friend 'Black Mike'). Then, after her murder, when Manchester police decided to classify attacks on recognisable subcultures as hate crimes, Littlejohn revisited the piece:
"Yes, yes, terribly tragic what happened to her, nothing to do with me, Broken Britain and all that, but let's be honest, what do you expect if you go out dressed like that, and what about rockers, eh? In my day we called them Hell's Angels and they'd come at you with bike chains outside the Palais..." (I'm paraphrasing but not much).
How quickly Jo Cox has been forgotten. Yet Farage is still riding high, thanks also to the BBC, which has to bear its share of responsibility for the Brexit fiasco. All this will hit trade too and employment. Will young trendies in continental Europe want o drive around in Minis and Jukes, which say I am a xenophobe. But we'll be all right with good old fashioned Ausländerhaß and the imperial system of weights and measures.
Post a Comment