After graduating I determined to spend several months on the dole and managed it. My mother developed other ideas and announced one day that she had found me a job in “tunnels” instructing me to call a distant relative.

Tunnels sounded good and I called Sean who explained that rather than tunnels my mother had meant “sewers”. This was at the time of the Fourth International’s turn to industry (well done on that Ernest and Livio!) so it seemed only right to give it a go. By chance a group of American SWP (prop J. Barnes) members were at the meeting at which I displayed my enthusiasm for the line. They were impressed but the Belfast comrades considered sending me to what we call the “nervous hospital”. My career in sewage was short beginning on Monday and finishing on Friday. The foreman tried to be kind saying “I’ve never met a Belfast sewer man with such a subtle grasp of late medieval Italian poetry but you know f#~k all about brickwork so f#~k off”.

The comparison with sewers and the Daily Mail is obvious. You are often only a few feet from both and each contains all sorts of unpleasant stuff you’d rather not know about and you don’t have to come into contact with them very often. In much the same way that reasonable people don’t open sewer covers on the street to see what is down there they don’t spend a lot of time looking at the Daily Mail. You have a good idea what you are going to find.

But sometimes, maybe every three of four years you dip into Daily Mail land to see what it’s like. A big story this week was that someone at Limehouse police station thought it would be a good idea to mark LGBT history month by flying the rainbow flag over the cop shop. This did not get the approval of London’s top peeler Paul Stephenson whom the Mail describes as livid. Only the butcher’s apron can be flown over police stations says the rule book.

Rampant homophobia was, not so long ago, a compulsory qualification for police officers. It is not anymore and several forces seem to be doing reasonable work working with LGBT communities. The flag flying incident shows that some of them seem to be taking it very seriously.

This is not the Daily Mail’s take on the matter which manages to shoehorn “crisis”, “row”, “political correctness”, “playing politics”, “tokenism and posturing” into their short article covering the matter.

Compared to their readers the journalists on the proto-fascist rag are the voices of sweet reason. Those wingnuts are allowed to run verbally riot in the comments section for each article, a facility which seems to be turned off at night. Here is a pretty random selection with the original spellings intact:

• These minority factions get away with too much because many people now-a-days are afraid to state their own opinion for fear of being labelled homophobic, racist or religious bigot when just expressing their own, legitimate, views.

          Peter, Sutton Bridge

• It’s disgraceful. Lets get a flag promoting hetrosexuality. See how gay people like that one. It’s one thing tolerating other peoples ways of living, it’s another having it shoved in your face!

          Simon, London

• If you wanted proof that we live in a sick society!

          Edward, Belfast

They really hit their stride with the sacking of Carole Thatcher for describing someone as a “golliwog”. Elizabeth Windsor has a shop that sells the things and has apologised for doing so. You can have a few entertaining minutes trawling through the hundreds of comments on this but here are my two favourites

• This situation is just getting ridiculous now. Are black dolls to be banned next?

           Clare

• Utterly ridiculous! What the hell is wrong with portraying the black and white minstrels anyway?

When last I looked no one had suggested that slavery was a good thing but it can’t be long before some plain speaker gets that out of their system.  Where will it end if we are all to be stopped from expressing our legitimate racist, homophobic views in public or at work citizens of Daily Mail land must be asking themselves? There probably are some grand conclusions to be reached from the insight that twenty first century interactivity gives into the minds of this organ’s readership but other than the fact that there are a lot of bigots out there I’m not sure what they are.

Next week a piece on how shocked I was to find out that the cat litter was really smelly after it hadn’t been changed for several days.