Daily Mail: it’s a scary place

by alexfoster

As a paid up member of the liberal élite that’s ruining our country, I do like to pop over to Daily Mail Island every now and again to see what’s exercising the minds of Britain’s tablerati.

This week had two eye-poppingly awful pieces that I just had to pick up on.

Firstly, Leo McKinstry’s sensitive, and thought provoking piece deftly picking at the complex moral issues surrounding the execution in China of Akmal Shaikh: HEROIN TRAFFICKERS DESERVE TO DIE.

No, wait, sensitive and thought provoking it is not. For a line-by-line demolition of the mountains of crud streaming forth from the piece, I leave you with a fisking by Sara Scarlett at Liberal Vision: Should we execute Kate Moss?

A civilised society also knows that the Law isn’t a science, it is an art and can get it badly, badly wrong. A civilised society does not risk executing innocent people either. And as for “maintain morality,” well, I think drug taking is a moral act. If it does not violate another individuals sovereignty and is the partake of consenting adults then the use of my tax pennies being used to stop it is immoral, quite frankly.

(The Daily Mail is, of course, a big fan of China. Just see this story praising the speed of construction of a new high speed train system. Massive transport projects must be so much easier when you don’t have to worry about the rights of those displaced by infrastructure or those employed to do the work. The Chinese road-builder principle – you can build roads quickly with the minimum of equipment if you throw enough labour at the problem)

Secondly, Liz Jones. If you’ve not encountered the woman before, as I hadn’t until someone sent me the link, you are in for a treat. Poor Ms Jones has maxed out her credit cards and was turned away from her usual boutique hotel in Shepherds Bush, meaning that she suffered the unimaginable indignity of not having her Prada suitcase taken by a bellboy or her BMW valet parked.

And this shocking fall from grace led Ms Jones to ponder the awfulness of homelessness in a self indulgent piece that defies any sort of sense. Ms Jones had options, you see. She could have plumped her pampered posterior back into her buffed BMW and driven herself back to her actual home. In the end, she phoned her agent who popped down and bailed her out. But those five minutes of being not-even-vaguely homeless weighed heavy on her conscious:

The wind whipped around my legs and it was suddenly very dark. I had been tossed on to life’s rubbish tip. For the first time, I felt what it must be like to be homeless, to have no money, no one to turn to. I realised that this was about the worst thing that can happen to you. Your humanity is stripped away and you become something to be moved along, stepped over, ignored.
I had reached my low spot through my own stupidity. I had spent too much money and was temporarily broke (my agent eventually turned up to bail me out). But while the plight of the homeless has gone out of fashion in recent years, it hasn’t gone away. Thousands of people still end up on the street because of mental illness, addiction, abuse or sheer bad luck.

Yes indeed, homelessness is bad. But her five minutes without a roof do not seem to have prompted Ms Jones to take any action. Just to redeem something out of this awful article, I’d like to ask you to make a donation to a homelessness charity, right now. Here are some links to national charities working in this area:

Drop us a note in the comments, or donate privately. But please – don’t let Liz Jones’s suffering have been in vain.