Today’s right-wing newspapers will carry variations of a headline that shows how far we, as a country, have fallen and how close we are to falling catastrophically further still. They’re also an object lesson in another, more common demonisation.
Here are the Daily Mail’s, Telegraph’s and Express’ front pages in response to a decision by judges to uphold a law that is inconvenient to the aims and aspirations of a handful of billionaires, along with those of the super-rich individuals and companies whose interests align with theirs and the politicians who serve those interests:
The Express headline looks at first glance slightly less rabid, but the article compares EU membership to rape and forcible sterilisation and to the darkest days or World War II.
When a more sane journalist commented that this showed how close we are to ‘civic breakdown’, he was jumped on:
‘Dangerous to attempt to thwart the democratic will’. Good God.
The job of a judge is to uphold the law. If the law does not agree with ‘the democratic will’, governments are free to change the law – if they can get those changes through Parliament.
The democratically-elected Parliament.
The rule of law is absolutely critical to the healthy good order of any country. It’s far more important than the will of despots – whether the despot is a monarch or a ‘demos’, the people. If the ‘democratic will’ is considered to override the law, we have mob rule.
Speaking of mobs, one of the ‘news’ papers above was very, very supportive of a particular mob some 80 years ago:
The fascist ‘blackshirts’ were inspired by some people in Germany who enjoyed using a very similar line to today’s papers:
Translation: “Betrayers of the People – kicked out of the German people’s-community”
So who’s really the ‘enemy of the people’?
Those judges did their job properly – for the sake of all of us, whether we’re for or against ‘Brexit’.
If that inconveniences Theresa May and her ‘Brexiteers’ and makes them go a longer way round to get to where they can invoke Article 50 (formal notice of Britain leaving the EU) – tough.
Those ‘news’ papers are serving the interests of a tiny group of people and attempting to manipulate the rest of us into a mindset that is completely against our own actual best interests.
Which is an important lesson.
3 judges do their job properly for the sake of the actual good of the country, in a way that threatens the wishes of a handful of billionaires – and are demonised and derided for it.
Jeremy Corbyn does his job properly for the sake of the actual good of the country, in a way that threatens the wishes of a handful of billionaires. Do you think there’s any credibility to the way he’s derided and demonised for it?
The real ‘enemies of the people’ are not hard to identify. It’s time ‘the people’ woke up and realised it.