The Trouble With…. The Guardian Newspaper

On Thursday past, The Guardian Newspaper posted the latest in a ceaseless succession of klitta pieces about what fine people Guardian staff all are and what a blessing be their existence in a cruel unjust world. Usually this practice is reserved to fading regionals or tabloids which serve as the propaganda sheet of the proprietor’s ego.

The Guardian tends however to do this a lot, and increasingly so. It is becoming annoying.

Like all of Britain’s four major broadsheet national ‘quality’ newspapers – the others being The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The i (a truncated more mainstream successor to the now-online only Independent) – it has been suffering from a decline in readers, and despite a near monopoly when it comes to the serious left-wing newspaper market (its only actual competition being the tabloid Daily Mirror which is more or less a comic for grown ups who found the vocabulary of The Beano about their limit), despite the surprising rise of Jeremy Corbyn to a national popularity no dyed in the wool left wing leader has enjoyed in the United Kingdom since the days of Clement Attlee.

Trouble is, The Guardian backed all of Corbyn’s opponents before they saw the light. Twice.

They also backed Tony Blair for too long – who threw old Labour table scraps from the masters to the prole dogs so they would accept Diet Toryism as still better than full fat. The public have not been in a mood to forgive – not least of all to a newspaper which seems to have more in common with a religious cult.

Look no further than how its loyal readers (‘Guardianistas’ as they’re sometimes referred to, a pun on the Sandinista left wing revolutionaries who took control of Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990 to popular claim by leftists worldwide, but who were soon found as wanting as the pigs and dogs in George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ – reacted to the above puff piece, or rather the way The Guardian allowed it to be perceived they reacted.

Remind you of anyone?

The Guardian is for people cosseted within the snuggly duvet of their own smugness who think themselves as better than they really are (whether intellectually or morally), and as such its readers are in a permanent daily grind of rationalising a perpetual cognitive dissonance towards a capitalist society they’re happy enough to take what suits them to enjoy from it – on ethical or moral grounds, of course – before criticising anyone who does the same over what they don’t like. Don’t do what we do, do what we say.

They are particularly obsessed with righteousness of thought, or at least pretending to be. They ‘think’ multiculturalism is all about being able to buy foreign food and experience foreign culture when what they really mean is they get to pay less for a tradesman to do their kitchen, next to nothing for child minders, have an endless supply of ‘competitive’ Uber taxi drivers, desperate Eastern European ‘interns’ with evening dive bar or cleaning jobs to make ends meet (while awaiting the offering of the full time contract that will never come) and their morning takeaway pretentious coffee ‘treat’ on their way to work.

In short all those things the proletariat (whom they ‘love’ in a paternalistic fashion) struggling to pay food and board cannot afford – all the while congratulating themselves that they’ve allowed foreigners to come into the country as a good thing for the lower orders to experience rather than being the importation by confidence trickery of free range wage-slaves for the sole benefit of the affluent.

Any negative consequences, meanwhile, are simply people being racist. Or sexist. Or any other of a hundred other -ists which Guardianistas like to label anyone who disagrees with them. Bad names for bad people. Bad people deserve bad things happening to them.

It is a paper for those living comfortable lives with little major material worries over paying for food, energy and the rent – the sort of matters that tend to drive people to populists proffering panaceas (whether left wing like Corbyn or right wing like Farage) when matters get desperate. The sort of world your average Guardianista never understands, and has little interest in doing so. It is no coincidence that university academics, members of the clergy and others in well paying or at the very least genteel professions propound within the ranks of the Guardianistas.

Deep down your average Guardian reader despises the working classes and lower orders, who sold their liberal-socialist birthright for a mess of pottage in accepting Thatcher’s destruction of their livelihoods, communities and traditions in return for any sort of employment. Let none dare suggest this as anger that they lost in turn their own birthright as ‘facilitators’ of the proles (‘yes, they do need to be led by the right sort of people, you understand of course – it’s for their own good, poor little ducklings.’). Or merely facile.

They see the lower orders as easily led by their base instincts toward strong drink, the abuse of prescription drugs, loveless sexual practices and other short term escapes for the horror of their meaningless lives. As such, they are gullible, shallow and likely to make poor life choices, such as buying non-ethically sourced products from multinationals. From this they need to be protected. By legal coercion if need be.

They are unaware that they are part of an international racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, [insert current fashionable oppressed minority being treated like they are a pet]-phobic capitalist conspiracy traversing the world in a perpetual maelstrom of divide and conquer in order to continue their exploitation and suffering.

(This, despite all evidence to the contrary that the working classes and lower orders are more than capable of finding reasons to scapegoat and turn against one another without any outside intervention, such as the pogroms against cats and the Jews during the Black Death, despite repeat attempts by local authorities to stop them)

The irresistible impression of the average Guardianista is one regarding the lumpen proletariat with much the same view the old English ‘High Society’ did, with a paternalistic instinct at best so long as they knew their place and didn’t start getting ideas above their station (for all the lofty talk about ‘bettering’ them, the notion of them rising to equality of opportunity was a step too far – ‘it wouldn’t work, it would only spoil them!’).

They despise them even more than their arch enemies the Daily Telegraph. Or at least that’s who The Guardian likes to consider as opposition. In truth it spends more time feuding with its two old enemies the Daily Express and Daily Mail – two former broadsheets which gave up the broadsheet ghost over half a century ago (unable to compete against the The Times and the Telegraph for journalism) and which The Guardian – in turn – will be obliged eventually to join.

Which may be sooner than they think. On the same day The Guardian indulged in self-congratulation by devoting their letter page to having all their readers telling them how wonderful they are, the following appeared:

The editorial of the paper ‘whose values are needing more than ever before’, attacking goody-goody woman-tween Taylor Swift (twenty seven years old, going on fourteen) because she personifies the value of the great Twitter Behemoth known as Donald Trump and has (unsolicited and unwanted) support from being postergirled by rednecks and racists. At least, when viewed by the Guardianista’s eye.

It would be funny if they didn’t actually mean every bit of it. They are trying fairly transparently to coerce her into attacking Trump in order to prove her ‘innocence’ and spare her from the casting of other such aspersions – the same bully-boy verbal thuggery that is the meat and drink of the far-left, and equally as unedifying.

This isn’t new ground: back in the late 1980s they painted bubblegum popster Debbie Gibson as everything that was wrong with Reagan’s U.S.A. as it bullied the globe and taught impressionable young minds swearing Nazi style allegiance to Old Glory in schools that Americans were the master race saving the world from the Communist Evil Empire, homosexuals and other degenerates who didn’t believe in the All American Way of Freedom (mainly freedom to exploit, extort and exterminate). Much of the criticism was regurgitated from The People (a Sunday tabloid of a supposed left wing bent) and the rather Trotskyite music papers of the time (all but one of which have since gone bankrupt) because The Guardian as it wasn’t very interested in the latest popular music (too ‘low art’) unless it involved someone working with former members of The Clash or Jerry Dammers.

It looked incredibly stupid a blink of an eyelid later when the very heterosexual Ms Gibson became the first mainstream celebrity to break ranks openly concerning ‘God’s Judgement On Gays’ (as opposed to merely teasing support) and take part in an AIDS telethon at massive risk to her own nascent career – for which she is still regarded as a gay icon. It turned out she was still involved in a number of local homeless and Catholic church charities dating from long before becoming famous, but she’d chosen to keep quiet about to spare them unwanted outside attention. You could hardly blame her.

Being a smiling, giggly blonde airhead singing about the fatuous concerns of the average teen and cosmo-chick doesn’t necessarily make you shallow and stupid. Thinking it automatically does however smacks of the inverted snob – a two word summation of both the Guardian and its supporters if ever there was one.