webofevil | (no subject)

From the front page of today’s Daily Mail
The draftsmanship of a bored 11 year-old. The deft wit of Jeremy Clarkson on heavy antihistamines. The astute political observation of, well, the Daily Mail. Basically, a triumph.

I don’t know if a hung parliament might be the disaster the right-wing rags want to paint it as, but I do know that even if we as voters wanted to actively avoid it, there’s no clear way to do so. We can only watch and wait and wince.

My job means that I’m not allowed to declare political allegiances, although I feel I can safely state that it’s worth remembering that, while whoever is in power after the election will be faced with making some savage cuts, two of the three main parties will do so reluctantly with an eye to mitigating their worst effects while the third positively relishes them and has no such plans for alleviation.

I’m also pretty sure that it steers clear of the no-stated-allegiance rule to say that whoever takes power is all but guaranteed in the short term to make a colossal shitbortion of the whole thing.

Anyway, none of this need trouble me. I fly out to Norway tomorrow, volcanoes permitting, so I leave you to your fates. So long, suckers!*

* Wait, says here I’m back on Tuesday. Damn!

I had a woman come in who was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She was talking about civil war and chaos, immigrants coming up the lanes of Sunderland with knives between their teeth to murder her. She was really in a terrible state. I said to her, “What paper do you read, love?” and, of course, it was the Daily Mail. I just said, “Stop reading it and you’ll find life gets better.”

- Chris Mullin MP