‘NOT A PENNY TO COMPENSATE AIR CHAOS VICTIMS‘ screams the Daily Mail. ‘FLIGHTS HELL FAMILIES £1000s OUT OF POCKET‘, adds the Mirror. ‘AS AIR BOSS DOUBLES PAY TO £1.3m BRITS TOLD THEY’LL BE STUCK FOR 2 WEEKS‘, adds The Sun. ‘In 2021/22 there were 4.7 million people, or 7% of the UK population, in food poverty, including 12% of children‘ says no one at all, which tells you all you need to know about the gutter press and media and the people that consume it.
The Mail frets about people running out of medication, missing out on hospital appointments and children missing the start of the new school term and there I have some sympathy. I carry round with me a medium-sized pharmacy, I have an upcoming hospital appointment and we once had children of school age and while we usually arranged our foreign jaunts in the middle of the school holidays, not everyone can do that. But still. These are middle class, modern problems, not matters of life or death (although in its usual incendiary way, the Mail also gives prominence to a handful of fruitcake protestors in London who think air pollution doesn’t exist and wants to remove the elected mayor, presumably by illegal means).
We have been here before in recent weeks, what with the terrible fires raging across Europe. Tragic stories about loss of life and property? Not a bit of it. It’s only Johnny Foreigner, after all. Instead, lets stick a microphone in the face of Mr and Mrs Average in Rhodes who have been told to evacuate their holiday accommodation as a precaution. “Oh, it’s been so terrible,” they say. “The holiday company have just left us abandoned. What’s that? Another G&T? Why not? I blame someone. That climate change? I’ve just read in the Mail it’s all made up.”
Meanwhile, life goes on in jolly old Britain, where nothing seems to work and everything is broken. Curiously, the gutter press doesn’t seem to care too much about the NHS falling to pieces in front of our eyes, rocketing inflation and eye-watering fuel bills and, as I bang on with monotonous regularity, people unable to afford to eat. The people who are always ‘OUT OF POCKET’, what do they matter? Only the ones whose holidays have been, sadly, buggered up, matter much to readers of the red tops and listeners to junk radio phone-ins (and I include BBC Radio 5 Live in that category these days, as it descends to the level of TalkRadio, or whatever it’s called this week). Oh for a 24 hour rolling news on the radio like … Radio 5 Live used to be before it lost its way.
I wonder whether, as some great act of generosity, the odious Rishi Sunak will react to these modern problems by compensating those out of pocket passengers from the public purse? Given that the government has abandoned environmental protections in order to build more homes, leaving the taxpayer to pick up the tab, I wouldn’t put anything past them.
I almost never see headlines on the red tops, or on TV and radio for that matter, about how this country is more divided and broken than ever before, just a constant focus on modern, middle class problems. Indeed, the quest for holiday compensation is a far bigger story than millions of children having to skip meals. Sure, the collapse of air traffic control created a shit show for those involved and that needs to be resolved as soon as possible.
But, I suppose, we get the media we deserve by watching, listening to and reading it. And who really wants to read about people waiting years for hospital treatment, people freezing through the winter because they can’t pay their fuel bills and those who but for food banks would be literally starving when there are modern problems to occupy our thoughts?
