The Daily Mail has today utterly discredited itself with a grotesque story about Nick Clegg and some confused Nazi allusions- the sort of thing one normally gets to hear from very old people suffering from mental failure. The paper is quite clearly beyond contempt, vicious, and intellectually bankrupt.
Now, there is of course a long history of Daily Mail-baiting in this country. I've always thought that if you just wanted to make a few easy friends in the pub, all you need to do is spout something how terrible the Daily Fail is and everybody will nod sagely and buy you a pint. (Well, a half-pint.) I really think it is the ticket to prove that you're quite the intellectual in this country. But that doesn't mean much, does it?
Nick Clegg has recently become popular and therefore had to be slammed down. Hard. Makes sense, innit. But it isn't just Nick Clegg, it isn't just the Daily Mail. This country is awash with hatred and aggression.
I've never heard such frequent wishes of death or grave illness onto somebody who has a different (mostly political) viewpoint. On twitter, you get little old ladies blithely re-tweeting thuggish sentiments about what a shame it is the egg didn't actually hit David Cameron in his smug face. You get women wearing a T-shirt with huge anti-Tory lettering "Step outside, Posh Boy"- just to make a point and really sock it to them. But why in this brutalised, violent way? And the aforementioned old lady? Her frustrated sense of entitlement makes her hate, and I mean hate anybody who's got it better, who has more money, who is "posh".
It's a sociological fact that the more deprived a society is, the more brutal it gets - and that's precisely what's happened to Britain. With its breath-taking level of poverty and deprivation (I've seen quite a few European countries but have never ever come across such levels of abject poverty and decay) there is plenty of scope for class hatred, envy, resentment and bitterness. The callous stupidity of the Thatcher-years together with ten years of Labour mismanagement have seen to it. Now chippyness, inverted snobbery ("I'm from the North, all the best people are", "I'm a university-of lifer, got a problem wiffat you over-educated twit"?) and pride in being bottom are forming a dangerous alliance with pure, unadulterated hatred. Violence is so near, you can smell it.
This is a country where G.Brown's (or J.Prescott's) thuggish and intimidating macho behaviour is preferred to other politicians' - because, well, at least they're not posh, eh? Honest, salt-of-the-earth people like us. Thock. Smack. Hit.
Where mens' fashion ideal is a shaven head, combat trousers and a camouflage top. Nice. Where women's style icon is Katie Price (Source:Press Association, 31 March 2010) And indeed, where a sexually aggressive, ultra-obscene way of dressing (just look around you on the streets of any British town) is deemed accceptable and desirable. There are many forms of aggression, this is one of them. Again, I can assure you that, no - you don't find this everywhere - this is uniquely British.
Another form is the aggressive way people drive, hunched over the wheel of their souped-up cars, they drive straight at pedestrians - why? Because their cars, often cheap, clapped-out ones, make them feel superior and in command. The car as weapon. The "Get-out-of my-way" culture pervades everything. It is in the supermarkets where deprived and frustrated pensioners deliberately ram their trolleys into your thigh, it's in buses where drivers shout at people for the slightest reason, it's everywhere.
Poverty breeds aggression, and it also breeds a grotesque hierarchy. The pathetic driver of a crappy car, the deprived pensioner, the under-paid, irate bus-driver - they are not actually in command, they just use the brief moment of power to let out all their frustrations, hatred,and aggression onto the person who at this moment in time is in the weaker position.
These are not "facts of modern life" - these are the results of an impoverished, deprived society where everybody resents everybody else. Covered by a thin veneer of wry humour and lashings of alcohol (another source of aggression of course).
This is not a country at ease with itself, this is a social war-zone. Dog-eat-dog, and everybody hates everybody else. The clenched fist in the pocket.
2 Addenda:
1. No, this is not "a rant"- the easy label slapped on every uncomfortable truth in this country. These are my considered opinions which I will (in a more linguistically elaborate form) publish elsewhere.
2. Just because I've lived abroad (oooh!) and my name is not spelt M-a-r-g-a-r-e-t, doesn't mean I'm a foreigner - so easily dismissed and patronized.
