The Demographics Dividing Britain

I understand that people have different values and priorities in life so it follows that we will all vote differently. That is the beauty of democracy, afterall. I have the utmost respect for that. In my immediate friendship group, many of us have different political allegiances and it’s that kind of stuff that makes the world go round. I’m all for it. What I find unforgiveable though, is sheer ignorance. I’m not particularly interested in politics, I rarely read the political sections in the newspapers and avoid anything about politics on the TV but for important votes like Brexit or the recent General Election, I read each of the party manifestos.

I did this because I wanted to make an informed decision about the things that are most important to me; Education, Health and the Environment. I understand that older people might be less concerned with free university tuition fees and more concerned with their pensions. Fair enough, that makes sense to me and it makes sense that different political parties will target different sectors of the population. Again, that is what democracy is all about and we are lucky to live in a democratic society where we are given the opportunity to vote.

What I don’t understand though, and what I find almost frightening, is how so many people can base their political opinions on tabloid newspaper articles. How can anyone who has young children or grandchildren do that? How can they be so blasé about something so important – the future of the next generation?

My boys who are aged 10 and 12, were both taught at primary school the difference between a broadsheet newspaper article  - which may be politically biased by will almost certainly be factual, and the ‘news’ in the tabloids like the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Express.  When I did my A Levels the very first thing my lecturer said was ‘you need to read a broadsheet for the facts’.  When I did my professional Accountancy qualifications three years later, in the very first lesson the lecturer asked us to put our hands up if we read the tabloids and proceeded to lecture us about the importance of reading factual news and researching topics to make informed decisions. Later, when I did my degree as a mature student, we spent a whole term being taught about how the right wing tabloids manipulate their readers into thinking they are clever (how insulting is that to their readers???) while all the time their readers are simply parroting word for word what they have read, believing it to be true.

My son is in his first year of high school. During his first term, his English lessons concentrated on teaching the difference between the news you read in broadsheets and the news you read in tabloids and being able to distinguish the facts from the fiction. They looked at the language, the headlines and the vocabulary used in tabloid articles versus broadsheet articles. Thank goodness our educational institutions are now teaching our children this.

There is increasing pressure, quite rightly, on the right wing media and its political proponents, for their culpability in the escalation of Islamophobia that we are currently witnessing across the UK. On the day of the Finsbury Park terrorist attack one Daily Mail reader had commented of Muslims ‘they deserve everything they get’. That one comment had 15000 ‘likes’. There were thousands of similar comments. On the same day, Katie Hopkins had written an editorial encouraging ‘us Brits’ to ‘pull together’. Conveniently forgetting that she asked for a ‘final solution’ to the ‘Muslim problem’ calling Muslims ‘filthy rodents’ and encouraging ‘Western Men’ to ‘rise up’. Was the Finsbury attack what you had in mind, Katie?

The fact is that Islamophobia is so endemic within the Daily Mail, The Sun and its readership, that when Katie Hopkins expresses Islamophobic views, they are not recognised for what they are, but instead, are treated as legitimate expressions of political opinion even though the law is very clear - the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act states that ‘a person who uses threatening words or behaviour or displays any written material which is threatening, is guilty of an offence if he intends thereby to stir up religious hatred’.

It’s not just what the right wing tabloid media prints about Muslims, it’s also about what they don’t print. One of the largest peace marches in the history of the world took place two weeks ago with 20 MILLION people marching against ISIS. 20 million people!!! Despite being one of the largest ever events in global history, the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Express didn’t report it. Not a word. It’s difficult not to conclude that they didn’t report it because they were Muslims marching for peace – and of course, that doesn’t fit with their narrative and what they want their readers to believe about Muslims. People who read these newspapers are getting such a sad distortion of the truth.

Hopefully the tide is changing. Both The Sun and The Daily Mail have both recently been singled out in a Government report on hate speech and discrimination in the UK citing ‘unscrupulous press reporting’ and ‘offensive, discriminatory and provocative terminology’ and for ‘perpetuating racist violence, intolerance and hate speech’. In addition, several universities around the UK now have a campus ban on The Daily Mail and The Sun because they ‘stir up racial hatred’. The feelings of these students against right wing tabloid media seem to be corroborated in a recent YouGov poll for the General Election which concluded that ‘the more educated a person is, the more likely they are to vote Labour’ finding that ‘amongst those with no formal qualifications, the Conservatives lead by 35%’

I guess it would be easy to shrug off the Daily Mail as merely toxic propaganda, but increasingly people aren’t and that can only be a good thing. As Malcom X famously prophesied ‘if you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing’