I see that the Daily Mail (or Daily Hate, as I prefer to call it), has hit the headlines with a vicious character assassination of the late Ralph Miliband (father of Ed, the current Labour Party leader) by describing him as ‘The man who hated Britain.’ It’s not the first time this particular rag has dressed up nasty prejudices as legitimate political comment, though libelling a dead man is low even by their own very low standards. Well, the dead can’t sue, can they? These days, quite a few people would be tripped up by the Mail’s paper-thin definition of what it means to be British, me included. I’m a bleeding-heart pinko liberal who leans towards republicanism, refuses doff my cap to my ‘betters,’ can’t abide cricket or warm beer (make mine a chilled glass of French), prefers Italian to a full English, considers organised religion to be, at best, plain daft and what else? Oh, yes, I’m a shirt-lifter to boot. I guess this must mean I hate Britain too. Except, of course, this is nonsense.
It was left to Quentin Letts, that well-known man of the Mail (though not of the people), to defend the paper’s reputation on BBC’s Question Time. Over to Mehdi Hasan, a British Muslim and the political editor of the Huffington Post in the UK, who left poor Mr Letts looking like he’d just been scolded by nanny. Priceless.
If you want to know more about the story, simply Google ‘Ralph Miliband.’ It’s splashed all over the web. Make you own mind up. Don’t let the Daily Mail do it for you.
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