Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

The Mail’s gone all Dave Spart

A remarkable turnaround from everyone's favourite right-wing rag. But the evidence is clear for everyone to see in these (badly written) leader columns - the Trots must have broken in to Mail Towers and sabotaged the printing press!

The DVLA and an indefensible parking racket

Indefensible. *sigh* Yes, it's not torturing or blowing up brown people that the Mail sees as indefensible, oh no. It's making middle-class people pay some of their hard-earned wealth on parking charges! OK, so this doesn't sound too Spartish so far, but bear with me.

Absolutely everything is wrong with a system that allows private parking firms to see the DVLA's confidential personal details of drivers - and then demand money from them.

Quite. Everything is wrong with a system that allows entrepreneurs to make money from the proleteriat. Why, I thought I'd never see the day, but... there you have it. A lot of right-wingers would say it's just the market allowing free enterprise to take over, but not the Mail! They'd clearly love to see all parking nationalised and taken under state control, with complete exemptions for heroes of the revolution. Well maybe I'm taking it a bit far, but...

We give this information to the DVLA only so that it can be sure we are qualified to drive and that our vehicles are properly registered.
It is a breach of trust for the agency to pass it on - for cash - to rapacious, bullying businesses.

Wipe away those tears, please. I know it's hard to contain your emotions when you think about middle-class people having to pay money to do things. But yes, businesses are rapacious and bullying! Hurrah for the workers! Storm the factory gates! Take control of the means of production! This is remarkable from the Mail...

The parking penalty industry long ago stopped pretending to be any sort of public service and is now a rude, greedy octopus mercilessly squeezing motorists.

A rude, greedy octopus. Pffffft! Did someone get paid to write this shit, or did they get the work experience boy in to knock together a few words for free?

Parking rules are designed to force drivers into expensive car parks, or to catch and milk them for minor infringements of ungenerous time limits.

See, a lot of people would just say: "Well duh, Mr Mail. Of course parking charges are there to make motorists pay. That's called the 'invisible hand of the market', which no-one is allowed to interfere with OR THE WORLD WILL EXPLODE!". But no. Not the Mail. They're taking on entrepreneurism and the free market: they want big-state controls over the corporate menace. Hasta la (queen) victoria siempre!

It is time the industry was tamed by law.

There it is in black and white. The Mail is demanding that industry be regulated by law. Splendid. Perhaps they'd also advocate the regulation of, oh I don't know, media industry by law? So that companies like DMGT can't fire loads of staff to keep their already enormous profits high?

Oh, hang on a minute though. While demanding regulation of one industry, the Mail, just a few sentences later, says that state planning is 'Stalinist'.

It seems that each generation has to relearn the folly of Stalinist state-planning for itself.

Would the 'invisible hand of the market' be better for the NHS then? Privatise it? But what if it made middle-class people pay a lot - which of course it fucking well would - what then? Would the Mail go bleating and crying on about how unfair it was, and stamping its foot?

This is a great pity for Britain's bright young doctors, trained in large numbers for jobs which now do not exist by a Government which believed that it could transform the NHS with a mixture of rhetoric and money.

It is the doctors - who must now go abroad or seek other careers - who are suffering from this predictable folly.

Right, and the solution would be...?

It ought to be the politicians but by now most of those responsible are beyond our reach. They have escaped to the private sector - which is strangely willing to offer fat sinecures to failed ex-Ministers.

Strangely? What's fucking strange about it? This government is a billion light years from Stalinist and is actually privatising the NHS. Of course the private sector wants ex-ministers to come in and advise it as it prepares for the big carve-up. Yet the Mail sees this as 'strange', which is, er, strange.

Well, it started brightly, but ended with just some shit-on-a-stick political point-scoring bollocks. What a terrible disappointment. And there I was thinking the Mail had changed its ways. Well not really, but if this is the logic that beats at the heart of this godawful newspaper, it's a surprise that the senior staff manage to tie their own shoelaces in the morning. Although I'm guessing that a few of them probably don't.

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