I don’t normally read the Daily Mail, or its website, but I had to go over and check out how it reported the research from Keele University (pdf) that showed an endemic disregard for the law among the soi-disant respectable middle class. The Daily Mail’s article is here, although I don’t know for how long, and the BBC report is here.
It’s hardly surprising that the Daily Mail doesn’t think to point the finger at itself – it’s a tabloid, after all, so it lives on spin – but I wonder whether any of the journalists recognised their habitual tone of spluttering outrage in this description:
The middle classes justify their [immoral] behaviour by treating it as a “revolt” against apparent injustice
And so the Daily Mail’s philippics against ‘rip-off Britain’, ‘corrupt’ politicians, high taxes and ‘scroungers’ have come round to destroy that very moral rectitude that they claim to be supporting.
Read the comments on the Mail piece to see some quality DM hypocrisy – the responses there at the moment can be paraphrased as either (a) “They aren’t really crimes, the real crimes are the ones committed by those evil people who aren’t us”, and, hilariously, (b) “it’s only because Blair is so evil that other people commit crimes”.