As much as I wish The Daily Mail didn't have such an influence on Britain, it does – and has done for decades. Despite being certified Nazi sympathisers, shills, polyp-looking twats who speak like they're holding all the air in their jowls like an English Bulldog. Which, I guess, would make them happy – it’s an English breed, after all.
Today, The Mail are framing the possible lifting of the two-child benefit cap as taxpayers "forking out for jobless families"... Which is fundamentally at odds with the truth. Over 60% of those affected by the two-child benefit cap are in work. But The Mail's journalists never let the truth get in the way of their fascism. After all, the truth is fundamentally at odds with the goals of fascists.
Point being: if you look beyond the cruelty of the words penned by Jason Groves – who, ironically, looks like something that lives among the damp surrounding a water tank – what you've actually got is a great example of the short-sightedness of British right-wing bell-ends who look like toads and are very, very angry about it.
I grew up in poverty. I also grew up in a domestic violence household. Social services were involved. I was chronically ill from stress and in and out of hospital. My mum was thrown from pillar to post, often lured by the illusion of help – only to be humiliated and sent home again.
It’s left a stain on my brain that I’ll never be able to erase – one that's made me deeply angry, distrusting, and allergic to the ruling and political classes. Especially the smarmy, middle-class grimace variety.
Essentially, I’m Rory Stewart’s nightmare. Because I’d argue that working-class people have every right to be utterly disgusted by those who directly and 'indirectly' oppress them.
Much like women exhausted by misogyny, or people of colour exhausted by racism, working-class people have every right to feel worn down – because it's by design. It's meant to exhaust us. It's meant to keep us too tired to fight back.
Because once you've been on the receiving end of the ruling classes' cruelty, your hatred isn’t pulled from nowhere. It's a direct response to being treated with utter disdain – whether you're a child in poverty, whose suffering gets a passing head tilt of sympathy before people look away, or a parent dealt impossible cards while the privileged stand around debating "personal responsibility".
The ruling classes give me no reason to feel otherwise. Whether they're in the arts, peddling trauma porn as the only representation of working-class life, or writing bile for The Mail, or hiring people to avoid tax, they're antagonists. They do nothing to help the millions of families in poverty. And whether they admit it or not – when you're poor, you see it. You feel it every day.
And it's short-sighted. Most artists and comedians of the '80s and '90s were on the dole – and now pay handsomely in tax. That won't happen again. The generations that followed had their third spaces decimated, their communities gutted, and their opportunities squashed. Even "outreach" programmes rely on self-identifying class – something grant kids at university will know is a bit of an issue, considering how often the middle class self-identify as anything that distances them from privilege.
Keeping children in poverty does nothing but create trauma – and reduce their chances of ever escaping it. The two-child benefit cap is nothing but a Tory policy meant to shame people into conformity. It doesn't fix the infrastructure that creates poverty; it drowns people, then complains they can't swim.
Lifting that cap will lift hundreds of thousands of children out of poverty – and hopefully out of shame that was never theirs to carry.
If you've got a problem with that, while billions are dodged in tax and the ultra-rich hold our governments hostage, then you’re just a bootlicker, I'm afraid.
I'm so tired of living in a system that is deliberately cruel, but being told the people who uphold it are not. It's fundamentally at odds with the truth. Anyone who has grown up in poverty knows the real face of this country... And it is not a kind, Christian one.
