ifwhitemiddleenglandtoldthetruth

One of the benefits of being the (slightly) older member of Great Men is the appreciation of keeping life simple and truthful. Truth is important – it is also beautiful. People are not. 2 examples of this have piqued my interest this week, both come from the 2nd best selling national newspaper.

Check your mum’s coffee table – it’s probably there – burn it.

C-Bomb will be using the impending World Cup to lock himself away and create the next batch of super human, super sonic riffs. Being a Real Man as well as a Great One I’ll be watching – but far from the sunburned, bulldog tattooed En-ger-land idiots. Patriotism is indeed the egg from which wars are hatched and enjoyed by the kind of people who lapped up the recent story about the “banning” of England football shirts. My favourite example comes from THAT paper:

Heady stuff and provoked suitably angry responses from the enraged masses on the comments page. There is only one problem with the story – best described by Paul de Santis, the bus company’s commercial director: "As time has gone we have reached the conclusion that the incident did not happen”.

No driver on that route matched the “dodgy-foreigner” description given and no other witness recalled the incident. It just didn’t happen. Apart from the possibility of a pitchfork wielding mob scouring the streets of Staffordshire this story seems a little harmless.

Sadly the same isn’t true of another story from that paper. I’ll not dwell on the papers contemptible decision to abuse the suffering and illness of a dying mother for its own political motives. The TRUTH of the matter is that again the paper completely invented the facts around this story.

Rather than the 15 rejections of cancer treatments in the past 18 months that were reported – the agency responsible for appraising new drugs for the NHS actually approved 10 of those 15 and is still considering another. Either the journalist and Editor were criminally stupid or they just plain lied. I have my suspicions which of those statements are correct.

Even successful battles against cancer are terrifying and painful experiences for sufferers and their families. To brazenly lie about cancer treatments to create more fear in order sell a few more copies of your newspaper is shameful.

Check your Mum’s coffee table – it’s probably there – burn it.