Fighting The Tide! Britain's Epidemic of Ignorance

In my job I am surrounded by predominantly (I say that because one lad went to Gads Hill School) working class fellas. This is one of the few positives about my current employment situation. The days are filled with some degree of enjoyment and a small measure of freedom from the stiff mentality that penetrates most workplaces, especially those appealing to certain sections of the population. However, with this comes the menace that is the tabloid newspaper, a blight that has reduced large swathes of the British population to bile spewing idiots. The idiots who are often heard screaming tabloid phrases like the ever classic 'Broken Britain' when any young yob does something even slightly menacing, or mildly annoying. The same idiots who call all immigrants 'illegals' regardless of their immigration status and who believe 90% of the legal illegals are on benefits raising 48,561 children to be suicide bombers, either that or benefit scrounging but job stealing plumbers. To call them idiots is a tad harsh, but to me an idiot is anyone who does not stop to think, examine and then immediately dismiss this tabloid bullshit. Perhaps a better description would be ignorant. This ignorance is not necessarily (at least in my opinion) due to a character flaw but engineered by a tabloid press that wishes to breed this working class anger. A tabloid press that, with a few exceptions, is a Conservative megaphone. Simply setting out to repeat their divisive propaganda and spread it like a case of the clap amongst the working classes.

The reason I am writing about the nonsense propagated within the tabloid rags is because of a conversation I had with a colleague today whilst I set about earning my £3.33 per hour wage (thank you austerity by the way). He at more than one point used the term 'illegals', when he obviously meant regular legal immigrants, just before lambasting their presence in the UK and their benefit scrounging ways. I, as a left-leaning class traitor, believed I should intervene in his rant about some people who have every right to be in this country. In doing so I asked him what paper he had been reading. Not at all surprisingly to many it was that bastion of all things open-minded and sensible in this world.... the Sun. The paper that jerks knees left, right or centre depending on which political knees need jerking for sales*. This particular conversation went on for quite a while, back-and-forthing over what we believed, who was right, and the spin that all (or at least most) newspapers put on their source information to engineer an argument that better fits their agenda. A lot of what he said that wasn't backed up by something he read in a newspaper made sense, his own observations were reasonable and although I didn't agree with a lot of it I could understand his rationale behind it. However, this was often when something he read in the Sun would creep back into the picture and put an end to that. The conversation went on for so long I had pretty much exhausted myself trying to counter all of the arguments, expose the lies and find the partial truths in what he was mentioning (when I knew enough about the subject). I thought to myself that this was just one person, one individual out of the millions that consume this garbage masquerading as fact everyday. It was then that I found myself coming to the conclusion that as long as these 'news'papers exist it will always be an uphill struggle to get the nation to adopt sensible political views (and no I'm not talking about Labour here). This is not a criticism of him as a person, or of the working class in general, how could I criticise when I too was reading every page in the Sun and other shitrags at his age before somehow getting myself off to university? This is a criticism of those 'news'papers and their mostly right wing lies, their omission of facts, and their inclusion of partial truths carefully spun to catch human flies in their web. This is criticising the damaging effect on the otherwise sensible ideological leanings of the working class, on the people I work with, and most of all on the nation.

One massive positive was that he hated UKIP and knew more about their rarely mentioned and frankly bloody terrifying manifesto than most people I have spoken to... every little win and all that.

*Disclaimer: There are no prizes for guessing the knees that are being jerked in what he was reading.