Why I hate the Daily Mail, as distilled into one edition

That's what a lot of people thought in 1983.

What after the Falklands War you mean?

Yes, optimism was high then for a Labour victory, Michael Foot was virtually a shoo-in for Prime Minister

And in 1987.

And in 1997. The tories aren't omnipotent, it isn't complacency to recognise that they have serious problems themselves. Start from where you are, not where you'd like to be. And not from where your enemy would like to be either.

er, Grasshopper

No, in 1997 they wasted too much time wooing the floating voters and lazily assumed their heartland would still be there. They weren't.

In 1997 they did not have a GOOD STORY.

Labour had a better one. The "time for a change" meme which is too early to work again in 2015.

good story bro

It's probable that, even if people voted for John Major in '97, they still felt that if/when Blair got in, it was a chance for Britain and for themselves to start over, to make something of themselves, a new beginning. It may even be why Blair won the election, before the war and everything else came along and made things complicated. I don't think there's a politician today in Britain who could inspire the same feeling. It's all make do and mend government now. Except they're ripping things apart as opposed to mending them.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-22024264

I am listening to this, literally aghast.

it was horrific, wasn't it?

Yes Ms Nash, a Milliband government would be doing it entirely differently, wouldn't they?

I've written to the Labour Party to ask which of the policies introduced this week they plan to reverse. It would be nice to have a sense that they stand for something.

Given what's going on at the moment, they just seem too meek, too quiet.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-22083032

Yeah, didn't think that would take too long..

last week, the first "Youth / Police Commissioner", a 17yrold girl, gets hired.

DMail decides this is outrageous

Then they track down her twitter account

This week, girl resigns.

Um. She tweeted racist and homophobic shit. Of course she should resign.

(Though working for the police, it's hardly a surprise that she's a bigot.)

Mail more vexed about her tweeting about (obv. made up) drinking and sexual exploits tbf

i think it's important to know what public figures were tweeting when they were 15 and i look forward to the Daily Mail's ongoing investigation

quite.

She sounds like an ideal Daily Mail columnist, tbh. Paul Dacre should give her a job.

a) None of the news reports I've seen say that she was 15 at the time of posting, they just say "before she took the position" - this would imply shortly before to me. Where is your information coming from?
b) If she was 15, this would still only be two years ago. I would say being racist two years ago is probably relevant for someone who has to work with disenfranchised youth.
c) Was her twitter feed protected? No? Then it's not exactly phone-hacking.
d) The Daily Mail are horrible scumbags, but I have no problem with a racist and homophobe being removed from a position of power.

Police are investigating her over tweets she posted between the ages of 14 and 16 which could be considered racist and anti-gay.

yeah this is bad and stupid. she's still a child. i think maybe if the point of the post was to have somebody representative of young people they might be struggling to find anybody who hasn't said anything stupid and offensive in a public sphere.

Ms Sandys, the South Thanet Conservative MP, said on Twitter: "Paris Brown should step down as youth crime Tsar for Kent... Gimmicks always backfire."

Mr Collins, the Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe, said he did not think the role should have been created in the first place, and called on Ms Barnes to admit that it had been "a mistake".

i wd describe this as "subtext"

I don't think the police should be investigating anyone for going "lol fags", but I don't think someone who says "lol fags" should be given a position like this.

Don't really care about the subtext when the main body of the text is fucking bigotry.

emil.y OTM

whose daughter is she anyway?

Mrs Brown.

Yeah, it was more the usual "we disapprove of this person, and we'll get some evidence against her tomorrow" thing.

it's a little bit thoughtcrime this

Emil.y otm - ppl are treating this like she got caught out doing something every teen does. not all of them are racist/homophobic, surely

Mrs Brown

Never watched it myself, but I believe she only has sons

They get top billing, but.

not all teens get their background checked by journalists either, i don't think many people would disagree with the fact that this young lady had been quite a dick with those twitter posts. but twitter is just a fucking horrible thing that i wish never existed.

she learned a lesson in life, anyway - and tbh £15000 a year wasn't worth the hassle anyway

the lesson in life being "don't go on twitter"

and i congratulate everybody whose worldview is perfectly well formed at the age of 15 16 17 whatever.

If you think not being a racist or a homophobe is enough to qualify for a perfectly well formed worldview then, yeah, thanks for those congratulations.

it isn't, that's the whole point

depends on if you want them to represent the majority or not i spose

i don't want that i suppose.

but more strongly i don't want random retrospective search on twitter account being the basis of this judgement of one's character, i suppose.

I haven't been 17 for a very long time, but most teenagers weren't bigots when I was growing up and most teenagers aren't bigots now.

How the Kent police managed to put a bunch of teenage applicants on a shortlist without vetting their social media presences, I just don't know. But since it's the police, I'll guess incompetence and stupidity, especially when 'public engagement' is at stake.

I don't get why the emphasis is that she was bigoted "on twitter". Unless the thinking is it was a terribly formed joek then she was bigoted, enough to be so publicly.

am obvs suspicious as to why the mail is suddenly concerned abt racist homophobes on the police force, but am more perplexed by the amount of people who are like 'yeah i was a racist homophobe when i was 14, its just a phase yeah.' her 'defence' of said tweets is pretty weak, and the police bod who employed her was equally woeful on radio 4 at the weekend, all 'hey at least she's better than the politicians and media types who would just hide behind a press release, at least she had the guts to stand in front of reporters and cry.'

I wish a lot of teenagers didn't use certain slurs in an unthinking way but I don't think anyone that does is a hateful bigot. Calling her "a racist and a homophobe" on this evidence seems way OTT to me.

Sorry, that should be I don't think everyone who does is a hateful bigot.

A certain amount of 'sea change' wrt the Stephen Lawrence case, happened at the DM

nothin stronger than a past sinner that repents

Or maybe they dislike racist bullyboys more than respectable black people, thesedays..

But her "racism" consists of remarks about an "illegal" at her local takeaway who can't speak English, which is shitty but no different - in content rather than language - to what you find in the Mail all the time. You could find dozens of tweets more racist than that if you only searched the last five minutes. Not saying that her tweets are OK, obviously, but I hesitate to go straight to "racist" on that evidence. Unless there are worse tweets that I haven't read yet?

The ones talking about 'pikeys' were illuminating.