The Mail - Politics’ Malignant Cancer

As the dust settles on the bad jobs news from South Wales, with between 2,500 and 3,000 due to lose their livelihoods this year as the Port Talbot steelworks makes the transition from coal-fired to electric arc furnaces, there is our free and fearless press telling the electorate what to think about the news, with the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker in the vanguard.

Who might have caused vaccine uptake to fall?

And the Mail hacks are carrying out their orders despite their having called this one wrong. It is the Mail way: call it wrong, be called out, double down, smear those doing the calling out, demonise anyone of inconvenient thought, then at a convenient distance down the track, play the other side of the field, coming over all righteous over something they advocated in the first place.

So what’s caused the job losses at Port Talbot, owned nowadays by Indian company Tata Steel? Mail pundit and former Murdoch editor Andrew Neil was in no doubt. “Port Talbot is the latest victim of the Tory Government's headlong rush towards Net Zero carbon emissions which has pushed up British energy prices and made what's left of our heavy industry uneconomic”.

This evidence-free claim has been taken up by the Mail on Sunday’s political editor Glen Owen: “Critics have argued that the Net Zero target of eliminating additional greenhouse emissions by 2050 was helping to cripple the UK's industrial base. The job losses at Port Talbot, Britain's biggest steelworks, follow the replacement of its blast furnaces with an electric arc furnace that will emit less CO2”. What did former First Minister Carwyn Jones think?

It was put to him that Tory MPs and the likes of former Brexit Party Oberscheissenführer Nigel “Thirsty” Farage had blamed the job losses on “Net Zero hysteria or climate policy”. His response? “Why is it that the Netherlands’ plant at IJmuiden, and Tata’s operations elsewhere in the EU, are not being affected … it’s the UK’s operations that are talking the brunt”.

There was more. “We’ve seen what’s happened in the EU, we’ve seen what’s happened in the UK, why the difference? Brexit has created all this uncertainty … When you leave one of the world’s biggest markets, it is inevitable that you will not have the same ability to export unless you put in place … arrangements to enable you to do as you did before”.

Which had not happened. But for the Mail titles, this could not be admitted, as the Daily Mail had shilled for Brexit. Therefore it could not be Brexit’s fault. Worse, had the Government not bunged Tata £500 million to make the electric arc transition, Port Talbot would most likely have closed completely.

And what happened last time there was a Lawson Boom?

That would have been 8,000 jobs down the pan. And the previous day, the Mail was bemoaning “UK GRIPPED BY MEASLES CRISIS … ‘National incident’ declared over disease we wiped out in 2016’”. Not a shred of self-awareness: the Mail spent years demonising the MMR jab. So take-up fell.

Then Mail pundit Melanie “not just Barking but halfway to Upminster” Phillips churned out article after article. “MMR safe? Baloney” she told, on the back of no medical qualifications whatever. No matter: the Mail declared her to be a “top writer”. Now, people are contracting measles and some will die from it. The Mail does not care. Nor does it care about its backing of dud leaders.

It backed Liz Truss. I’ll type that one again: IT BACKED LIZ TRUSS. It launched a virulently anti-Semitic attack on then Labour leader Ed Miliband - then came over all righteous when Miliband’s successor was smeared as an anti-Semite. It backs the most inept, corrupt and malign Government the UK has known. And today it is openly backing another political wrong turn.

“HUNT: TAX CUTS WILL SPARK NEW LAWSON BOOM” it today’s headline. Except, as Jonathan Portes has observed, “The ‘Lawson Boom’ was a catastrophic episode of macroeconomic mismanagement that ended in economic and political disaster”. Which preceded a painful recession. Only after Black Wednesday and the ignominy of another Sterling devaluation did the economy begin to recover. The Mail wants a bit more of that.

Whatever the Mail wants, the UK suffers when it happens. This is not a newspaper. It is a malignant cancer on the body politic. That is all.

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