When I originally got into the Daily Mail, it was sort of by accident. I never bought the newspaper itself, so thankfully, I cannot list myself as a funder of tripe in times past. It was, however, one of the unrestricted news websites I could access at the workplace I was at back then, and it turned into the main source for my news during the workday.

Bad idea, it turns out.  Everything was depressing; the government who had done so well under incredibly difficult circumstances, Labour, were hailed as if they had thrown Britain to the dogs; and I found myself suddenly very biased towards people who had probably not ‘been born in this country’.

As a fellow writer on MoonProject, Tish Weinstock wrote a back in May, things such as the Femail section are actually incredibly patronizing towards women, and the fact that they publish people like Samantha Brick should say it all.  Oh, and gay marriage is only an acceptable idea now that David Cameron has said  it is.

The thing that makes it all so intensely irritating is that it panders to being a read of the Yuppie type, the mid-life, hard-working sort, and the sit-back-and-enjoy-my-retirement sort, because it assumes that these are the only people who must have any form of intelligence, and that their views MUST be on preserving – teeth bared – everything that they have worked for and maintaining the status quo.  But a society cannot survive like that.  To say that that is how man must move forward if it is to survive – survival of the richest and elitist as opposed to survival of the fittest – would necessitate the acceptance that this is all our ancestors did for millennia before we acquired anything as sophisticated as civilization.  This is not the case.  Man would surely have died out long ago, or not have evolved as much as we have, were those viewed as lower down the chain of command in olden times as barbaric as they are now thought to be.

This latest dump all over Miliband’s dad would be a final nail in the coffin for someone like me, who hates their laughably blatant (though it’s supposed to be subtle) Tory, if not Fascist leanings, providing us with articles designed to abhor the fact that foreign-born people dare live in our country, laugh at the lower and under-classes and their attempts at survival, and rewrite history to make Margaret ShitAllOverEveryone Thatcher some kind of demi-goddess.

But the truth is, for me personally, it was over months and months ago.  The actual Goodbye Daily Mail article – for me – was Richard Littlejohn’s, whose article (available here) after the landmark ruling that crimes towards Goths and Alternatives were considered hate-crimes in Manchester (not nationally yet, sadly), deplored the fact that a law had been set up to PROTECT ‘[these] gangs of punks’ instead of the people they supposedly terrorize.  Having no possible insight into the intelligence, predominantly middle-class background (!) and good-natured-ness of our subculture, I could have cried for his stereotypical, ignorant misrepresentation of a group of accepting, deep and very interesting people.

But sadly, it was far easier to merely turn away from the Daily Mail and the way they actively encourage us to hate everyone who isn’t a boring, money-orientated, physically perfect (not usually naturally, given their health section’s articles) members of society.

Do yourself a favour.  If you read it, even every now and again, stop!

Watch how your mood and belief in human nature improves following this.