"100% insane", writes the outraged Daily Mail columnists about the idea of IDing alcohol-buying young people.Richard Littlejohn is in urgent need of a sense of direction. And some camomile too. His Daily Mail column is already renowned for producing far more bile than a dozen surgically removed gall bladders.
Today's piece, however, is like a showerhead gone crazy, with a staggering display of venom hurled at all directions, even if it ridiculously contradicts stuff regurgitated by his own paper.
Let's focus on one specific target of his warped view of the world.
Littlejohn finds it "100% insane" that Tesco may wish to ID alcohol-purchasing youths. Aside from the fact that Littlejohn's sensationalist words are cavalier with the truth (he writes that "Tesco is now insisting you have to be over 25 to buy alcohol - even though the legal age is 18", whereas what Tesco are planning to do is to ask people who look under 25 to prove their age, an action they decided to adopt after they were repeatedly caught selling alcohol to underage teenagers), when the walking bilefeast talks of "identity madness", he should take a look at his own paper's views on binge drinking.
Today's same Daily Mail carries the following article: 'Thousands of young teenage girls hospitalised after binge drinking', which includes calls for "tough action on round-the-clock availability of supermarket cut-price drink".
Let's focus on one specific target of his warped view of the world.
Littlejohn finds it "100% insane" that Tesco may wish to ID alcohol-purchasing youths. Aside from the fact that Littlejohn's sensationalist words are cavalier with the truth (he writes that "Tesco is now insisting you have to be over 25 to buy alcohol - even though the legal age is 18", whereas what Tesco are planning to do is to ask people who look under 25 to prove their age, an action they decided to adopt after they were repeatedly caught selling alcohol to underage teenagers), when the walking bilefeast talks of "identity madness", he should take a look at his own paper's views on binge drinking.
Today's same Daily Mail carries the following article: 'Thousands of young teenage girls hospitalised after binge drinking', which includes calls for "tough action on round-the-clock availability of supermarket cut-price drink".
No week goes without a Mail piece reminding us that "teenage drinking [is] out of control", "British teenagers drinking champions of Europe" or that "Teenage binge-drinking in Britain [is] at 'chronic' levels". Indeed, the Mail have even been calling for action to be taken, including raising the legal drinking age to 21. Why doesn't Littlejohn write a piece calling his own employers "100% insane?"
ID-ing youngsters buying booze may not be ideal and neither is it going to eradicate the problem, but one gets a touch suspicious, just a touch, that if supermarkets decided to officialise an ID-free alcohol policy, Littlejohn would get an anger-induced seizure while writing a piece about "liberal insanity".
4 comments:
This is most unfair to Richard Littlejohn. You're expecting someone who doesn't live in this country (allegedly in Florida in splendid opulent but gated isolation), who is incapable of connected thinking and who normally depends on parroting US shock journalism to have an original constructive thought, aking note of reality and sense.
Shame on you.
Do you think he intentionally misleads with the thing about "only selling alcohol to over 25s" instead of "ID if you look under 25"? Or do you think he misread it? I do often wonder this, if their "pc gone mad" goggles lead them to get angry anytime they read anything (be it government report or shopping list, I would imagine), so he got angry misreading it and in fact so angry that he didn't go back and... erm... check the facts.
Helen, you're right. The strong Florida sunshine and the brilliance of his prose make it so difficult for him to check anything he writes. But then does an omnescient superhero need to check anything? If he thinks it, it must be so.
Helen, you're right. The strong Florida sunshine and the brilliance of his prose make it so difficult for him to check anything he writes. But then does an omnescient superhero need to check anything? If he thinks it, it must be so.
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