I hate the Daily Mail – for a long time I’ve hated the way it has spread poisonous anxieties to its readers to promote its own anti-liberal agenda and, naturally, to sell newspapers. I hate the Daily Mail but, unlike the Daily Mail it seems, I love Britain. I love it’s freedom of speech and for that most important gift, the freedom of the press. I love Britain too because these freedoms allow us all to debate what can make Britain a better country to live in. I’m not sure that the Daily Mail agrees.

If you are lucky enough to live far enough away from the UK not to have been exposed to the depressing bile belched out regularly by one of this country’s most widely read tabloids, this week, the paper has been at the centre of a row for its attempt to discredit the leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband,  by writing a hatchet-job  article about his late father, the Marxist academic, Ralph Miliband. The article carried the headline: The Man Who Hated Britain.

The idea behind the article was perfectly fair. The Labour leader often quotes his father as a profound influence on his life. Ed Miliband is undoubtedly sincere in his admiration for his father, a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Belgium who found a new home in Britain, fought for it  during the Second World War and, as an intellectual Marxist, hoped that his ideas might change society. It would have been entirely fair for the Daily Mail to have written about Ralph Miliband’s ideas and to attempt to trace his influence on his son, a potential British prime minister. Whatever scurrilous comparisons were made  the use of that headline, The Man Who Hated Britain, has grabbed the headlines and the aggrieved son, Ed Miliband, has criticised the paper not only for crossing the line of decency but also being wrong about his father who, his son insists, did love the country that gave him refuge from anti-semitic persecution.

Can you love your country if you are a Marxist? Apparently not, if you agree with the Daily Mail. Certainly Ralph Miliband disagreed with many of Britain’s institutions and devoted his life as an academic to writing about how the nation should be changed. It is here that the Daily Mail over-states its case. One of the many things I love about Britain is the way we are all free to love or hate things that we think are wrong in our country. The Daily Mail, though, began its article with a quote from the 17 year old Ralph’s diary making this the “proof” that Miliband senior was a dangerous influence on his son and, by implication,  if we ever elect Ed Miliband prime minister, the danger that Britain could become a Marxist state:

“On a hot summer day, a young man made his way alone to Highgate Cemetery in North London to make a lifelong vow.

Solemnly, he stood at the grave of Karl Marx at a moment when, in his own words, ‘the cemetery was utterly deserted . . . I remember standing in front of the grave, fist clenched, and swearing my own private oath that I would be faithful to the workers’ cause’.”

“Years after that early visit to the cemetery, he wrote: ‘I have not, from that day to this, departed from the view that this was the right cause and that I belonged to it.’

Even his adoptive country, Britain, could still one day realise his Marxist dream. There was, he said, ‘no reason for the resigned acceptance’ of defeat.

‘On the contrary,’ he wrote, ‘what it requires is to begin preparing the ground for the coming into being of such an alternative.’

As his son, Red Ed – who lives less than a mile away from Highgate cemetery in a £1.6 million townhouse – talks of ‘socialism’ being the key word for the next Labour government, perhaps that ground is indeed now being prepared.”

Daily Mail founder, Lord Rothermere with Adolf Hitler

Father’s do leave legacies to their children. Ed Miliband does believe in socialism, he does believe that the financial crisis of recent times was a result of greed, corruption and incompetency in the international banking system and he does want to make a better and fairer Britain. Like his father too, he loves Britain but hates those aspects of British society that keeps the British down. His crime, in the Daily Mail’s eyes, is that he has just made an effective speech at the Labour Party conference and might actually, against previous public opinion,  be a popular alternative to the present Prime Minister, the hapless David Cameron. The row that has erupted over the article has, irony or ironies, wiped Mr Cameron’s Conservative Party Conference speech off the front pages.

Lord Rothermere too left an inheritance – one of hatred, intolerance and worse than that, simple wrong-thinking:

 “My dear Fuhrer everyone in England is profoundly moved by the bloodless solution to the Czechoslovakian problem. People not so much concerned with territorial readjustment as with dread of another war with its accompanying bloodbath. Frederick the Great was a great popular figure. I salute your excellency’s star which rises higher and higher.”

Long live the Daily Mail! Read it if you have to but, please, don’t believe it’s weasel words.

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I’m getting ready for the imminent publication (31st October 2013)  of my first novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can already pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

The post Does The Daily Mail Hate Britain? appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I heard that a really cool guy had been visiting Manchester, England, England,  yesterday so I switched on my television to see him. It wasn’t rapper LL Cool, even though he is considerably cooler than his number one critic Sarah Palin.

It wasn’t Brad Pitt either who is increasingly losing his cool these days but who would probably have passed as cool in Manchester if he had been there which he wasn’t……

…it wasn’t this self-consciously cool dude either….well who is he trying to kid?

Now president Obama is very cool indeed I think….I still think so in spite of all the brickbats flying his way at the moment…..but he wasn’t in Manchester because he has enough problems at home. Maybe it was the guy below….

… I think not….David Miliband, Britain’s former Foreign Secretary and narrowly defeated elder sibling in the British labour leadership contest, is very nice but, he will never be cool……neither can his younger brother Ed…..

…hang on a minute, Ed Miliband is cool. He won the leadership elections against all expectations when he first stood against his elder brother, the favourite, he doesn’t care what he looks like and he even told his party conference yesterday in his inaugural speech that he just wasn’t cool.

Now that really is cool. The boy might even do good.

The post Mr Cool comes to town. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.