Vile

If you didn't see the Daily Mail's headline in the wake of the Philpott verdict then you'd have to be blind or perhaps very lucky. 

Vile product of the welfare state, is how they lead yesterday's episode of the daily hate crime that is the Mail. Splashed above a family picture of the now-guilty Mick Philpott. I have never in my life read a headline as vulgar, as crass and as deeply offencive as that. 

It's been no secret for a long time that decent journalism has been in terminal decline in Britain, but this takes the absolute fucking biscuit - to use the death of children to push an odious agenda like this is not just a new low, it's the absolute nadir of journalism. Yet there will be plenty of people that believe this garbage. Plenty of programmed, emotionally charged insecure people that the Mail has convinced are the target of every weak minded lesser lazier person on the face of god's green earth. Whether it's foreigners, people practising one of those odd desert religions, people with brown faces, people on benefits, leftists, trots, socialists, unionists, unmarried women, single parents, children, other people, everyone else, they are all after you, your money, your house, and your family - in that order.

These purveyors of hate - as guilty as any Muslim hate preacher they spent the last decade decrying - would have us all believe the welfare state breeds these people. That it turns decent people into idle, good for nothing criminals, one step away from becoming the next child murdering arsonist scrounger, all because the devil makes work for idle hands. 

Social security is a very important safety net. Without it the capitalists have free reign to abuse and exploit. If you don't think that would happen then you are completely out of touch because it's already happening. Chris Rock, the comic, once made a joke about the minimum wage saying that what it really meant was "if I could pay you less, I would". How true. These are all protections for those of us not born into the right class or the right money. Take them away and we have the law of the jungle - then you really will see the likes of Mick Philpott multiply.

The way you deal with people like Mick Philpott isn't to deny those who need the money their benefit (a pittance paid to allow the dignity of not dying in the street). It is to invest in society. Instead of cutting the state to the bone and selling the hot flesh off to grubby American privateers, we should be investing in social services and education. Instead we get more horrible divide and rule hate crime from the black and redtops disguised as journalism.

If someone threw a petrol bomb (please don't) into the offices of the Daily Mail resulting in a complete loss of life, Mick Philpott would still be an even bigger criminal.