I’M flabbergasted. Right-wing thugs are rioting in the streets and spouting their hateful views with no apparent cause at all. None whatsoever. Totally out of the blue. It’s like magic.
Most likely they spread their vile opinions by word-of-mouth or hate sheets printed out in their Swastika-draped homes, while the mainstream media – like the newspaper I work for – only publishes balanced, fastidiously fact-checked articles urging tolerance and respect.
Articles such as my last one: ‘By not stopping the boats we have given dusky Islamic fanatics a licence to turn England into Iran’, or my recent plea for calmness and sanity: ‘Are jihadis taking over your Waitrose?’
Journalists like myself have an obligation to research and double-check every story. My piece ‘Black Lives Matter means Go To Hell, Whitey’ required me to spend hours reading comments by anonymous strangers on Facebook and Twitter – an exhausting task when they insist on confusingly using ‘are’ for ‘our’ and eschewing lower-case letters.
And yet we are witnessing riots in sleepy English villages like Southport, where right-wing agitators have hijacked a tragedy caused by successive governments’ policy of uncontrolled immigration and free pizza for the rapist scum of the Third World.
My colleagues are equally concerned. A friend at the Sunday Times says it depresses him to hear people spreading fake news when quality journalism such as ‘There’s only one book your children will be studying at school – the Koran’ can be found in his own publication.
Like me, you are probably asking: what can be done? I believe we in the established media must reclaim the political space the hatemongers have occupied by writing articles that reflect the views of ordinary people in the street who we have imagined.
Articles like: ‘Stop these pervert doctors giving our little boys vaginas’, ‘Must we be so squeamish about mass deportations at gunpoint?’ and ‘Why IS there no black in the Union Jack?’ It is the only way to stop the march of the far-right.
