Who PullsThe Trigger?

I don't watch Carole Malone, unless she happens to show up on a discussion show I happen to be watching. I have long found her to be another ridiculous right wing troll. It used to be that I would watch the Wright Stuff of a morning. Unfortunately that show has long gone downhill, turning into the arse end of tabloid tv. Not surprising given that Channel 5 is owned by Richard Desmond now. There was a time though, when the show had James O Brien on, that it was half decent. There was also a time when the odious Malone was a regular talking head on the panel, but I kicked the habit years ago.

It seems she has outdone herself this week; on This Morning, that popular festival of informed and deep discussion, she claims that the Philpott family, who have no lost 6 kids in the most awful circumstances, somehow 'drew attention to themselves'. Consequently this has caused something of a backlash. But where has that backlash been all these years that Malone, and the rest of the obsequious right wing troll media, have been provoking the kind of 'enemies' she talks about the Philpott's having? Isn't it sad it takes something as awful as this tragedy to get people to see what these odious pundits are all about?

The point I want to make is this: if it turns out that fire was deliberate, and Carole mentions the use of accelarants being discovered, then we have to ask why people feel compelled to rage against 'scroungers' this much. I can tell you for sure that Carole is certainly one of those accelarants, as are all those within that part of the media; the part that happily preys upon the unemployed, milking them for headlines. "Look, here's a man with 17 kids, how dare he want what YOU don't have, or that which you have to WORK for." This increasingly shrill line has been underscored over the last decade, and ever more so since the coalition came into power. I am 100% sure that, were it not for this terrible event, Carole Malone's fake sympathy, she feels sad because that's what you do of course (i doubt the woman has an honest bone in her body), would be non existent and she'd be happy to write copy about the audacity of a man out of work with too many kids.

Her point is easily understated, because she understates it herself - as if this is what all right thinking hard working brits should think: that, while it's tragic, he somehow brought it upon himself. He made a name for himself in the media and got greedy. She sees nothing wrong with that thinking at all, but unfortunately there is a lot wrong with it, and the gutter press in general, which seems to me to be a feeding frenzy infused by ignorance and motivated by a kind of bitter envy. We should all be jealous of the man with, now 11, kids and his life of freeloading, as if having raising kids and being a dad to all of them isn't itself a full time job or at least an easy ride. I don't know much about his story because it's none of my business, but here's the media to make sure it becomes my business. Here come the likes of Carole Malone to make sure it does seem outrageous and to further burden our stressful working everyday lives with more dissonance, more reasons to be bitter and envious of our neighbours.

There is something really dangerous at work here: this may well have been an 'accident waiting to happen', but not for the reasons Malone says, as she of course casually distances herself from the troll horde she's happily made a living being part of. It was also no accident: anyone sick minded enough to try and burn someone they don't like to death, and their family, is someone that's easily manipulated by the media. But who set up the conditions for this 'accident'? Which part of society regularly feeds the minds of already embittered, stressed out, and generally uninformed working people, giving them direction in who to hate - because the media always needs a bogeyman.

Carole was right to say an accelarant was used. What she fails to mention is that accelarant isn't simply petrol: it's the right wing media of which she is a part. Malone and those like her have made a living feeding on working class fears and general ignorance for years. They have long stirred the pot, setting people against their neighbours to sell their tawdry rags and to appear on TV spouting more hatred.

If someone hated these poor people enough to comit arson, then part of that hate, at the very least, came right from her mouth.

The media always needs a bogeyman; unfortunately when it's 6 innocent kids who's only 'crime' was to be born to a man readily labelled a scrounger by the populist press, their deaths are just collateral damage for the sales and ratings of an increasingly sick minded machine.