Sun UKIP Backing BUSTED

While the Murdoch mafiosi are running into another of those Little Local Difficulties across the North Atlantic, as I told earlier today, their UK shock troops at the Super Soaraway Currant Bun are, as so often, attempting to bend the democratic process to their will, which means trying to swing next week’s Parliamentary by-election in Stoke on Trent Central so that Labour, the incumbent party, loses. This poses a difficulty for them.

One for the dartboard

The problem is that the Tories, usually the Murdoch goons’ preferred party, are about as likely to score a victory in the Potteries as the Marie Celeste is to turn up in Liverpool. What to do? Well, desperate times call for desperate measures, and to enact those measures the Sun has an equally desperate presence, the pretend journalist Master Harry Cole, who is alleged to be the paper’s “Westminster Correspondent”.

Master Cole has enacted the two-pronged attack of bashing Labour candidate Gareth Snell, while, implicitly at least, backing UKIP leader Paul Nuttall, who was considered to have the best chance of causing an electoral upset. Sadly, though, Master Cole had done as much due diligence on the “Bad Bootle Meff” as the rest of the tabloid pack, which means he hadn’t cottoned on to the inconvenient fact that Nuttall is a fraud and a liar.

So it is that Nuttall gets a free pass, while Master Cole tells readers “STOKING HATRED Stoke Central’s Muslim voters warned they will go to hell if they do not vote Labour in anti-Ukip text … AN anonymous text, as well as messages posted by a party activist, brand the anti-Europe party 'racist' and the 'enemies of Islam’”.

Meanwhile, the real Nuttall story, “Paul Nuttall’s website taken offline after Ukip leader criticised over posts wrongly claiming he lost ‘close personal friends’ in the Hillsborough disaster”, has belatedly been released by the Sun under the rather lesser by-line of “Staff reporter”. Priorities, priorities. And there is more.

The problem with the Sun’s line of attack on Labour is that, unless Gareth Snell or his campaign solicited or encouraged the text messages in Master Cole’s piss-poor article, there is no possible charge for them to answer. It is the usual “guilt by association” which the Murdoch press does so well - especially when those Scary Muslims (tm) are concerned. Ask anyone involved in Sadiq Khan’s Mayoral election team.

To show Snell and Jeremy Corbyn with one of those who originated the texts is just a variation on the “Look, he’s SHARING A PLATFORM with someone bad” schtick. As the Sun admits, the Labour team in Stoke have told them “We were not aware of these text messages and we don’t condone the content … The campaign did not sanction the sending of these messages”. So it’s nothing more than guilt by association.

What Master Cole is not taking issue with is the assertion on one of the texts that UKIP is “a racist party, who … hate Muslims and Islam and want to privatise the NHS”. That, of course, is totally unconnected with the NHS bashing and private medicine-supporting agenda of the Murdoch press. Perish the thought, eh?

But good to see that Master Cole and his paymasters are so desperate that they will shill for an unprincipled liar and fantasist like Paul Nuttall. No surprise there, then.