The government terrified of the Daily Mail
Discussion
DonkeyApple said:
off_again said:
Fantastic example of how bad the Daily Whail can be:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1346563/Mi...
Its about West Mids Police having a Lotus Evora on loan. Anyway, within a few words of the title you have the facts, that its donated from Lotus (as a publicity exercise). Cue plenty of reader comments about the cost of sports cars and that the police are wasting money.... if the average reader of the DM cannot make it 35 words into the article then there is NOTHING we can do.
The DM know their market and fuel the embers of annoyance within it. It works well, clearly, and is not a good example of journalistic integrity.
#http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1346563/Mi...
Its about West Mids Police having a Lotus Evora on loan. Anyway, within a few words of the title you have the facts, that its donated from Lotus (as a publicity exercise). Cue plenty of reader comments about the cost of sports cars and that the police are wasting money.... if the average reader of the DM cannot make it 35 words into the article then there is NOTHING we can do.
The DM know their market and fuel the embers of annoyance within it. It works well, clearly, and is not a good example of journalistic integrity.
Just one look at the home page this morning and the main visual features are a girl from X Factor and a girl from an American reality show. The paper is aimed at 2 types of people, those who are unhappy with their life, have immense internal rage at their own failings and need a vent and the plain f
king stupid.It's a scum paper for failed human beings. It is a hate fuelling propaganda machine and it is utterly depressing that it exists in this country.
dandarez said:
Opulent said:
Morningside said:
Who actually reads 'The Star'?
A colleague. It's toss, you can read it cover to cover, and STILL have no idea about what is going on in the world. They lie incessantly about the ages and intelligence of their Page 3 girls too.
There's only one way you can know isn't there?
YOU must read it!
So don't tell lies and blame 'a colleague'.
He buys it, then while he's asleep at his desk (he's a proper old fart) I have a scan through, quick look at the norks and a laugh at the non-stories. It's a bit of a joke at work - this old boy thinks he's high-brow and world-wise, yet reads the Star, and the hairy-arsed foreman who speaks in multiples of 4 letter words gets the Indy, Telegraph, and Wail delivered to site each day, and can normally have all the crosswords done by the end of lunch break.
I don't buy papers - the first thing i check every day is PH, you lot seem to have your finger on the pulse and anything important is soon up in N,P&E.
Derek Smith said:
Loads of good points about how life wasn't necessarily better in the past
Mrs Gaspode has a weakness for what I call 'comfort television': stuff like Heartbeat and Born and Bred. I have to confess I lift an eye from the laptop now and again if there's a nice classic car on, there's a nice blue Austin Taxi that I swear is in every single episode of Poirot.But she and I reckon that there are lots of people out there watching this stuff believing that life really was like that back in the 50's, 60's or whatever.
The truth of course is that we tend to blot out unpleasant memories and stick to the comforting ones. In a world where the future is uncertain, the past has a familiar cosiness, but that doesn't mean it was nice at the time.
One of my earliest memories is of being taken to visit a great uncle on the occasion of his 95th birthday. This was in 1964, I was 5 years old, and it was the first time I had ever heard swearing. All I remember is an impossibly old bloke in incredibly shiny shoes banging a walking stick on the carpet, saying "Bloody Country's gone to the dogs!"
I often wonder if his earliest memory was back in the 1850s, listening to someone saying the same thing to him...
Gaspode said:
Derek Smith said:
Loads of good points about how life wasn't necessarily better in the past
Mrs Gaspode has a weakness for what I call 'comfort television': stuff like Heartbeat and Born and Bred. I have to confess I lift an eye from the laptop now and again if there's a nice classic car on, there's a nice blue Austin Taxi that I swear is in every single episode of Poirot.But she and I reckon that there are lots of people out there watching this stuff believing that life really was like that back in the 50's, 60's or whatever.
The truth of course is that we tend to blot out unpleasant memories and stick to the comforting ones. In a world where the future is uncertain, the past has a familiar cosiness, but that doesn't mean it was nice at the time.
One of my earliest memories is of being taken to visit a great uncle on the occasion of his 95th birthday. This was in 1964, I was 5 years old, and it was the first time I had ever heard swearing. All I remember is an impossibly old bloke in incredibly shiny shoes banging a walking stick on the carpet, saying "Bloody Country's gone to the dogs!"
I often wonder if his earliest memory was back in the 1850s, listening to someone saying the same thing to him...
When I joined my force after initial training we were taken around a nick and 'observed' an early morning briefing. One of the few I've seen run properly, even those that I ran later in my career. One 'old' boy, probably 15 years younger than I am now, came up to us and said stuff like your old uncle. Just as he started to walk away our instructor said: That reminds me, I should warn you that you might not ever get promotion. A certain degree of invective resulted.
It was a bit different in my family as post war, even with rationing, they had a better standard of living than before. All had 'proper' jobs, most had paid holidays, they weren't fired on Christmas Eve only to be re-employed on Jan 2. And they got a living wage as well. And, of course, one should not forget that the NHS had started. I had an aunt Eva who was a 'midwife' before the war. No training, no courses, but she used to deliver babies locally for those who couldn't afford doctors.
There was one local doctor, O'Reirdon, who used to spend the majority of his time pre war giving free help to those who couldn't afford to pay. I was dragged off to his funeral when I was around 10, time off school, and there were thousands there, many crying. There were lots of blokes as well. I had whooping cough as a 3-year-old and it nearly killed me I'm told. He visited twice a day every day, weekends included. Without him I would have died they said.
So for my family, bog (half) Irish in the east end of London with my father having 17 siblings and my mother 7, the post war austerity was really a step up in the world as everyone had jobs. I can't say that I ever heard any of my family say how things were better in the old days. Of course, the fact that I'd been born into it was a big positive.
(I suspect I should be glad I have no idea what you mean.)Derek Smith said:
I had whooping cough as a 3-year-old and it nearly killed me I'm told. He visited twice a day every day, weekends included. Without him I would have died they said.
So did I, and it nearly did me too. This was 1968. My GP apparently came round every morning and evening too, on his way to/from the surgery. Dangling me over the banisters, held by the ankles, on one occasion at least when I was going blue and him shaking me as violently as he could/dared to get me to start breathing again.
Proper Doc.
A little eccentric (spotted bow tie, half moon glasses and empty tobacco pipe seemingly always clamped in his teeth, so he spoke out of the corner of his mouth) but he was my doc from 2 until I was 25 or so and we had a great rapport.
I don't think the system allows that many are left like him anymore............................
tubbystu said:
A little eccentric (spotted bow tie, half moon glasses and empty tobacco pipe seemingly always clamped in his teeth
I know just what you mean, and I mean no criticism of you, but that is definitely one thing about modern life that has got worse compared to the world we grew up in. Despite 30 years or so of baby boomers supposedly celebrating the virtues of individual development we now seem to have a society which demands far more boring conformity than ever we used to have - to the point where a spotted bow tie is considered 'eccentric'.
edited for typos
Edited by Gaspode on Friday 14th January 13:14
Opulent said:
Derek Smith said:
my father having 17 siblings..
That is amazing!
The wars took all but two uncles on my dad's side but that still left quite a family and my mother's 7 filled in any gaps. If you weren't family you weren't anyone but that still left more adults than I could remember names. I had three uncle Berts.
My paternal grandfather was very badly injured during WW1, losing a lung and a bit of sight, and couldn't get work so my grandmother brought all the kids up. She was a formiddable woman, very certain of what was right. She was brought up in a nun-run workhouse in Co. Cork where her twin brother was locked in a cupboard for crying and died.
Times were so much better then. This country has really gone to the dogs where children from single parent families are not sent into slavery to pay for their mothers' sin. No wonder you can't get decent laundry. And where casualties of war are not given pensions despite not being able to work.
Where, when you couldn't get a job because there were millions unemployed, and you had life-threatening injuries, because you could not afford a doctor you didn' get any treatment. That'd sort the people out nowadays. So much better ways to run the country.
Many on here seem to use socialism as some sort of swear word but you can see why, when my family members had nothing to look forward to, they thought a structured state held some definate benefits and when, after the war, they had access to healtcare, they believed that their beliefs were correct.
Then, of coures, disillusion came on, but not before dangerous conditions at work were outlawed, not to mention giving workers some degree of representation with the bosses. Oh, and then education rights for those who were intelligent enough to benefit from further education. I had a cousin who was something of a child prodigy. His opinion of the students at Oxford was that most were stunningly stupid.
Can't have that, can we: further education based on merit.
Some things are worse nowadays. Affordable housing, rail fares that meant you could travel by rail, connections that actually connected and, if one train was delayed by a few minutes, the other one would be held. And buses that linked and supported rather than competed. Pretty stupid ideas in many ways.
DonkeyApple said:
Opulent said:
As serious as your post is, I must admit I had a little chuckle at 3 Uncle Berts!
Truly shocking about the brother in the cupboard though. And this is the behaviour from Nuns...
The Nun. I'm not aware of a more evil creature existing on this planet.Truly shocking about the brother in the cupboard though. And this is the behaviour from Nuns...
Opulent said:
As serious as your post is, I must admit I had a little chuckle at 3 Uncle Berts!
Truly shocking about the brother in the cupboard though. And this is the behaviour from Nuns...
My grandmother was born of a single mother. She and her twin brother were 'allowed' to stay with their mother until the age of around six before being found in need of moral care. Or, to put it another way, being able to work and bring in a profit.Truly shocking about the brother in the cupboard though. And this is the behaviour from Nuns...
So they were snatched from their only parent and taken to a workhouse. I'm not sure if this was what they were called in Ireland in those days, circa 1870, but it is what she called it. Her brother cried a lot so was locked in a 'cell', a punishment cupboard with no light, where he died.
She was, she said, of some trouble to the nuns and received regular beatings, as many did. She ran away when around 14 or 15 - she had no real idea of dates - and got to Liverpool where she married an ex-pat Irishman who seemed, by all accounts, to be kind and certainly generous as he'd fathered 18 children by the time my father, the youngest, was born in 1914. My grandfather was seriously injured at some pointless battle or other and was expected to die but managed to survive but only infrequently left the house.
One son was torpedoed in WW1 but was rescued by HMS Russell. My father was being christened on the day the news came of his rescue so his name was changed from Albert Eric Smith to Albert Eric Russell Smith. Unfortunately, HMS Russell had already been sunk with few survivors, none of which were my uncle.
One brother was sunk, I think in the far east, but could be wrong, and inhaled crude oil. He, like his father, had a lung removed and opened a pub in Portsmouth. He was largely viewed as the rich end of the family. the German bombing of Portsmouth early on in the war took him out, as well as vast areas of Portsmouth. Two down, six remaining.
Three uncles were in the Royal Navy. One jumped ship in the Battle of the River Plate, or just before, and stayed in South America. Five left as this was considered an act beyond the pale by the family, i.e. my grandmother.
Two others were in separate battleships as my gran would not allow, I'm told, two of her children in the same boat in case it was sunk. Both were killed more or less at the same time in the Indian Ocean by Japanese dive and torpedo bombers.
Another died but I’m unaware of the circs. So three out of eight.
We don't know what the Axis had against the Smith family.
All the married sisters - there was a scarcity of men during and after WW1 and not all were married - lost their husbands during the war. Rough estimate is six. One got married the day before he embarked on some RN ship and he was killed in action. She lived in widow's accommodation in Greenwhich, by St Alphage Church, in a grotty little one and a bit up and two down terraced house for the rest of her life. It is now prime real estate. She had a pension and I assumed he must have been an officer.
My dad was the only brother not in one or other of the navies, joining the Royal Artillery in 1938 to rid the world of the curse of the nazis. By 1940 he had still not fired a big gun, even in training, and remembered watching the Battle of Britain overhead while mucking out the horses in Woolwich.
He was sent as the only regular (corporal) to a battery of anti-aircraft guns near London and was a big disappointment to his CO when he told him not only had he never seen that style of gun before but had never fired an anti-aircraft gun in his life.
He was shot in the head by an anti-aircraft shell but otherwise came out of the war with little damage, apart from a groove in his skull and a fear of being under lorries after sheltering under an ammo lorry during an air raid on an airfield in France just after D-day.
So the family he came back to after seven years in the army was a shadow of what he’d left.
My generation and those that followed have no real idea of how lucky we are.
I know the Daily Mail would not sell many papers with headlines of: No Germans bombers overnight but a sense of proportion and history would not go amiss.
Also single mothers could be locked up in asylums for life as in need of moral control. Whilst care for the mentally ill is in most cases non-existent, at least there needs to be overwhelming evidence of need before people can be incarcerated.
Specific to the nuns: the catholic church saw itself as beyond the law of man in those days and priests and nuns, let’s not forget them, could do what they wanted to innocents with impunity. This continued well into the post war period. We know now something of the extent of this and, given the atmosphere nowadays, it seems unlikely that it goes on to anything like the extent it did.
Further, in my day there was little of the superstition that bedevilled my grandmother’s and my parents’ generation. People seem aghast at the control some religions have of their acolytes nowadays but this used to be the norm. I had a hail mary section of my family who felt that my gran should have put up with the abuse as part of a trial sent by some bloody-minded god.
My gran used to walk at nuns. We had a local nunnery, grey clothing, we called them the ghosts. If one came near my gran she would bump into them and she was a rather big woman towards the end of her days. She’d have made a terrific second row forward. You stayed bumped into. They were often knocked to the floor.
We became methodists sometime between the wars after a priest came round to see my mother and demand a cut of the laundry money she made despite my father having to go to bed hungry frequently.
Ah! The good old days.
My gran was still ashamed of the fact that both her mother and she had never been married and this was kept from the grandkids until after she’d died as she did not want us to think ill of her. We worshipped her. She was a tremendous woman. But still the old guilt got to her. As if any god would have had anything but admiration for her.
We live in enlightened times if you want to take advantage of it. If you are a religious nut then it is, quite clearly, your own fault. You have a choice. And thank god for that.
Edited by Derek Smith on Friday 14th January 16:43
robsti said:
DonkeyApple said:
Opulent said:
As serious as your post is, I must admit I had a little chuckle at 3 Uncle Berts!
Truly shocking about the brother in the cupboard though. And this is the behaviour from Nuns...
The Nun. I'm not aware of a more evil creature existing on this planet.Truly shocking about the brother in the cupboard though. And this is the behaviour from Nuns...
DonkeyApple said:
crankedup said:
Being one of the 'lucky'? so called baby boomers I guess I may fit into the categorised group referred to in the OP. I find it difficult not to agree with that groups wailing, except I don't read that particular paper. Being an old fart I can recall family days out and we never locked up the house when we left it!! not sure if that was cos we had nought worth nicking or it really was trust thy neighbour, I suspect the latter. Coppers were certainly Authority figure's and did command respect, each Booby had a beat and knew which ear was to be pulled (as Dandrez said). It would be so easy at this point to write happy memories, but houses were for living in and not expecting to profit from. I won't mention renting in case Groaks in the room Newspapers were used in the Lav' or to wrap your Fish'N Chips in. Happy days! sorry back to the thread.
Bad parenting from the Baby Boomers? Newspapers were used in the Lav' or to wrap your Fish'N Chips in. Happy days! sorry back to the thread.But just look again at what I have written, a tiny part of life in the 1950's/60's. Its all true and not embellished at all.
Leave your house door unlocked when your out : Insurance void
Copper pulls ear of kid : harassment and ABH.
Houses for living in not profiting from : don't expect help from anyone if you can't pay your mortgage.
Have your fish'n chips wrapped in newspaper : Health inspectors would shut the shop instantly.
Happy days : erm, well yes.
The big Social changes came in the mid 1960's early 1970's, I was getting older and noticing events that would have an impact on the rest of my life. I didn't know that at the time.
Derek Smiths comment nun and child in cupboard, child abuse in the good ole' days was simply unheard of, put another way unreported and ignored. A very good friend of ours used to offer short term 'adoptions' to young children that had been abused by parents. They mentioned one case of a little girl locked in a cupboard for years, she was so fragile in all senses. She received medical help and then went to our friends on short term adoption. This is way off the topic, but I want to point out that sometimes the 'wailing stuff' has brought about some benefit.
crankedup said:
Derek Smiths comment nun and child in cupboard, child abuse in the good ole' days was simply unheard of, put another way unreported and ignored. A very good friend of ours used to offer short term 'adoptions' to young children that had been abused by parents. They mentioned one case of a little girl locked in a cupboard for years, she was so fragile in all senses. She received medical help and then went to our friends on short term adoption. This is way off the topic, but I want to point out that sometimes the 'wailing stuff' has brought about some benefit.
Things are so good today, we have people like Sharon Shoesmith earning £130k a year, and children are still abused or just plain old murdered.tinman0 said:
crankedup said:
Derek Smiths comment nun and child in cupboard, child abuse in the good ole' days was simply unheard of, put another way unreported and ignored. A very good friend of ours used to offer short term 'adoptions' to young children that had been abused by parents. They mentioned one case of a little girl locked in a cupboard for years, she was so fragile in all senses. She received medical help and then went to our friends on short term adoption. This is way off the topic, but I want to point out that sometimes the 'wailing stuff' has brought about some benefit.
Things are so good today, we have people like Sharon Shoesmith earning £130k a year, and children are still abused or just plain old murdered.My Mother had her first child out of wedlock and this would have been just post war. She was pushed around the family (ie 'aunts') and then sent to a single mother home run by nuns. Evil in cloth.
GavinPearson said:
otolith said:
The Guardian does much the same thing, it just takes aim at a readership with a different set of attitudes and prejudices.
Presumably people who call themselves socialists, think of themselves as intellectual, but can barely string a conerent sentence together and like their publications to be riddled with typos.Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff