The media hysteria over the reports on the YouTube videos showing two women shouting racist abuse on public transport has been way over the top.
What the women were doing in ranting about the large influx of foreigners into Britain is just the same as many of the national press have been doing exactly the same thing past and present by publishing such misleading information on the controversial subject in the newspapers.
Most people rightly feel that such ranting in public is unacceptable, but the reality is such racist incidents often happen on a daily basis, and not just on public transport.
The two women are neither mad nor stupid. They have been saying what most people in Britain are reluctant to say out loud. But they are choosing the wrong target for their anger, which should be placed at the people at the top: the politicians, the City financiers, the multinational corporations, the European Union, tax-dodgers, and so on.
Chancellor George Osborne is right to call time on the massive public debt. But he is wrong to suggest that many people, particularly many public sector workers who were out on strike today a dispute over pensions, should accept lower pay, worsening conditions and forced to work longer so they can get a decent retirement pot, that is if they don’t die first.
The best thing to happen at the moment, according to some commentators, is that the opposition to the government is divided. The Labour party’s arguments on the economy is shot down by the fact that Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor, was part of former prime minister Gordon Brown’s cabinet, whose fiscal irresponsibility helped get this country in this current mess. The Occupy protesters, despite getting a lot of publicity when they started camping outside St Paul’s Cathedral, have yet been unable to mobilise wider support for their struggle. Even the strikes that took place today will not have swayed public opinion to the trade union cause.
Maybe the real issue is that the ranting women have been saying for many years, and what most people think… that Britain is a country hopelessly in terminal decline, and that no measure of government (or foreign) intervention can change it.