Spiked Maitlis Moan MORONIC

While the Coronavirus pandemic continues to wash over the economy, an increasing number of previously well-paid individuals find it has washed them out, not least those who depend on our free and fearless press to enhance their pay-packets. The press, as was clear when even the Murdoch goons were passing round the begging bowl earlier this week, are also feeling the punch. So there are fewer opportunities for freelancers.

That means the aspiring freelancers have to shout even louder to get attention, and judging by the latest efforts of Brendan O’Neill from the planet Spiked, so called because it should have been many years ago, it ain’t working. Bren has used a Piece To Camera by BBC Newsnight host Emily Maitlis as his stepping stone to another commission. Or not.

Ms Maitlis had put her audience straight about those who really suffer as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, telling “the disease is not a great leveller - the consequences of which everyone, rich or poor, suffers the same. This is a myth that needs debunking. Those on the frontline right now - bus drivers, shelf-stackers, nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shopkeepers - are disproportionately the lower paid members of our workforce”.

There was more. “They are more likely to catch the disease because they are more exposed. Those in tower blocks and small flats will find the lockdown tougher. Those in manual jobs won't be able to work from home. This is a health issue with huge ramifications for social welfare and it's a welfare issue with huge ramifications for public health”. She then set the scene for the issues the programme would be discussing.

“Tonight as France goes into recession and the World Trade Organization warns the pandemic could provoke the deepest economic downturn of our lifetimes, we ask what kind of social settlement might need to be put in place to stop the economy becoming even more stark”. O’Neill was aghast. Or perhaps he just saw a Sun column on the horizon.

Emily Maitlis

“The staggering hypocrisy of the BBC … Emily Maitlis’s patrician lecture on last night’s Newsnight was nauseating” wibbles the headline, before Bren blusters “last night’s Newsnight, and in particular Emily Maitlis’s staggeringly hypocritical and deeply patrician mini-lecture to the nation about life in lockdown Britain, took the biscuit. Reader, the elites are straight-up taking the piss out of us now”. You ARE the elites, Bren.

And then quote generator autopilot is duly engaged. “The chattering classes and the regressive left … the Princess Diana of Covid Britain … objectivity-challenged BBC [hark who’s talking, Kid] … the media elite [talking about himself again] … Maitlis’s soppy sermon … moral glee of those socially switched-on people in big houses [as opposed to clever people like Bren who talk loudly in restaurants] … media elites …surreal”.

What is his point? Ah well. He takes aim at “Echo-chamber inhabiting well-off columnists”, which is a dead giveaway: he was one of them, and now he ain’t. This is just a jealousy tantrum. The further giveaway comes as he froths “It isn’t the pandemic that is causing the looming economic disaster … It is the media-demanded, politician-delivered economic shutdown and freeze on social life that will cause economic crisis”. Bullshit.

The lockdown was ordered not by the media, but by Government on the basis of good scientific advice. O’Neill got his beer money cut off? Stop whining and deal with it.

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