Thursday 28 February 2008

In the Bag

By and large, the Daily Mail is a fairly decent newspaper. Oh sure, it has its annoying features, like a total blind spot when it comes to reporting anything remotely technical, but over all it's not too bad. Until, that is, they get some damn fool campaign into their heads.

It's an exceptionally irritating feature of this newspaper that's been around for a very long time, and I was hoping that, like a child growing out of an annoying habbit, they'd got it under control. How wrong I was!

The Daily Mail, in its raving lunacy, has mounted an all out assault on the common plastic bag, under cover of some evironmental clap trap. For a couple of days now, this usually sane newspaper has been stuffed with cute pictures of various animals in various stages of expiration due to plastic bags. Now don't get me wrong, I like animals and I'd be very happy to see them NOT dying in plastic bags.

But I can't help wondering what the damn photographers were doing whilst, seemingly all around them, the beasts of the land and sea were dropping like flies! And if they weren't, exactly, dropping like flies, the Daily Mail is being just a little disingenuous, isn't it?

But best of all, I just LOVE today's headline "Gordon Brown gives supermarkets one year to start charging for plastic bags ... or else" and the associated story which contains the words, "The Prime Minister is lending his voice to the Daily Mail's campaign against the blight of "plastic poison". "

I have lost count of how many times the Daily Mail, along with just about every other newspaper, has lambasted this incompetent Prime Minister on just about every aspect of his policy. And now, because he has, cynically, spotted an opportunity to smarm his way into the good books of Daily Mail readers everywhere, the Mail is singing his praises. Oh PLEASE!

Let's have a little reality here - a bloody awful Prime Minister, leading a government that's descending further into a midden of its own making every day, is in no position to ban plastic bags. Let's hear something about the election that never was, or forgotten donations, missing personal information or a European Treaty that we didn't get to vote on.

We do NOT need to hear about plastic bags, unless it's by how much the government is aiming to enrich itself when they enforce payments for them. Oh yes, Gordon Brown-Trousers SAYS he'll be donating the money to worthy causes. But we know that one by now, don't we?

And, in the meantime, what does he think we should be carrying our shopping in? The bags issued by most chain stores are already wafer thin and prone to disintegrating just as you get out in the rain - perhaps we should just give up and stop buying things right now?

As for the Daily Mail, well, these things are usually only temporary fads, lasting only until saner heads prevail. Until they do, I'll be sending the paper a get well soon card and heading for a rival that makes even a little sense - possibly, the Sunday Sport.

Billy Seggars.

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