Dear reader, would you have guessed which UK paper included these lines in its editorial yesterday if it wasn’t for the title above?

We’re all in this together – or so the politicians never tire of telling us. If only it were true. In reality, the Britain now fighting to overcome the economic crisis is divided into two very different nations.

In one lives the great majority who bear the full crushing burden of the disaster that reckless bankers and a spendthrift Labour government brought upon us.

This is the Britain in which hard-working families are struggling to make ends meet, as taxes and prices rise and real incomes fall. It’s the nation in which tens of thousands of public employees face the misery of losing their jobs, like so many private sector workers during the recession.

But then there’s another Britain, populated by bankers who go on paying themselves ever more generous bonuses and an increasing number of companies that avoid paying UK taxes – taxes that should be helping to reduce this country’s terrifying debts.

Let’s examine the bankers – the men and women whose avarice and incompetence brought on the crisis in the first place.

The politicians should be under no misapprehension about how angry people are about these inequities. If bankers won’t behave decently of their own free will – curbing their bonuses, lending to small businesses and offering fair rates to savers – then the Coalition must force them to.

But the City is not alone in this other Britain that puts self-interest first and treats patriotic duty with contempt.

Increasingly British firms are using every legal trick in the book to avoid the UK taxes needed to pay off our debt.

Boots, Vodafone, Cadbury’s, WPP, Wolseley, Brit Insurance, Matalan, Shire pharmaceuticals, Experian, the British arm of Starbucks.. these and countless others are avoiding paying their taxes to the country where they have made their profits.

We’re all in this together? Let the bankers and tax-avoiders try explaining that to the millions of Britons who pay their taxes – and in return expect fairness to be applied to everyone.

The Daily Mail? Backing UKuncut? It’s got some residual unsatisfactory bits about accepting the Tories’ economic premise, but it’s otherwise basically there. The movement has noticed, and it’s not a one-off, either. On Friday they ran a piece called “The Great Tax Heist“, which included the following line:

“But there is a widespread feeling that while most hard-working taxpayers have a considerable portion of their income removed by PAYE, there is something immoral about businesses that can employ expensive accountants to find increasingly complicated ways of paying less tax.”

Today they followed up with pictures of Philip Green sunning himself in Barbados, and revealed that he’s staying at a recession-ignoring £16,000 a night hotel. Two weeks ago, they gave Kraft/Cadburys both barrels over their tax exile status.

The left hates the Mail, in particular for its homophobic and racist pieces, for the association between benefits and cheating they thrive on, and for the bizarre obsession it has with the weight of women in the public eye (every last one is too thin or too fat).

The list goes on: health scares, drug paranoia, PC gawn mad, etc. Being criticised by them, for instance as the voice of the “irresponsible left-led anti-family anti-christian gay whales against the bomb coalition“, is rightly a badge of honour.

And so we loved Mark Thomas’s campaign to force them to print “The Paper That Supported Hitler” under the masthead. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” is an editorial rightly hard to live down.

When I buy the paper for work I still find myself at the till explaining that I’m not a “Daily Mail reader”, while it’s hard not to be fond of Tom Royal‘s “Tea and Kittens” Firefox plugin that replaces the Mail site with two of my favourite things.

But that’s stopping us seeing the whole picture, literally in the last case. It’s not just UK Uncut. There are a series of campaign issues on which the Daily Mail is simply the best paper going, and my list has been growing over the last ten years.

I first noticed the Mail challenging my prejudices in 1998 over the GM crop campaign, the issue first got into direct action over. Most of the papers stuck entirely to the pro-GM line, simultaneously accusing us of relying on emotional arguments and then telling us that GM crops would feed starving African babies. Even the papers that took a more sceptical line glossed over the real reasons behind the campaign. The Mail, in contrast, ran a full-page piece which set out the scientific concerns about the technology, showing how retroviruses were used to insert DNA snippets into unpredictable parts of the chromosome, looking at the risks of genome instability, covering the way herbicide and insecticide tolerance would grow and spread, and they even looked at the economic issues around enhanced corporate control over the food chain.

Take another issue: civil liberties and the surveillance society. This 2007 piece on the spread of CCTV doesn’t even do the “on the one hand, on the other hand” we expect from journalism – it’s out-and-out critique.

Two other big campaigns for the Greens have been against the Trump eviction/gated community project in the North-east, and in favour of repairing the Forth Road Bridge rather than building a new one for £2.3bn. On both these issues they’ve been the closest paper to our position. I don’t have a scan of the best piece they did on Trump, but it was a double-page spread by Jonathan Brocklebank giving the families’ perspective in great detail, and giving the magnificently quotable Michael Forbes (“I wouldn’t negotiate with him even if he was dead, buried and teeing off in hell”) plenty of space.

And then last week, this excellent piece appeared on the additional Forth Bridge. Elsewhere in the media, the comfortable view appeared to be that if all the other parties were in favour of it, it must be right. No investigation of the alternatives, no critique. Even the Scotsman, where Bill Jamieson has sounded increasingly sceptical, got sucked into the SNP’s spin.

Even on gay rights, the coverage isn’t always what you’d expect. In October, for example, they reported polling we’d done on equal marriage. Sure, they quoted the Catholic Church, but they quoted Patrick Harvie first and at greater length. That’s not because I pitched the story to them, either (which would have been an odd decision). Even the headline isn’t even slightly provocative: those are just quotes, not scare quotes (if they’d just put the single word “wed” in quotes the tone would have been very different).

They really aren’t The Tablet writ large on other issues either. Yesterday’s Mail also jumped onto Cardinal Keith O’Brien for “suggesting that the economic misery being endured by thousands of families across the country could be a blessing in disguise” (Mail’s words), even pointing out he lives in the lap of luxury, a story which the Herald took in the totally opposite direction.

So, are the Mail more radical than we think? On many issues, they clearly are, and we need to work with them. The other way to look at this, though, is that we’re less radical than we think.

I want to live in a world where we aren’t monitored as a potential threat by dozens of cameras on a short walk to work, where little old ladies get to know their own homes are their castles even if grasping American billionaires want their land, where as many as possible have access to healthy food, where public money is used prudently instead of building monuments to politicians’ egos (the polling we did on the Bridge showed, incidentally, that Tory were even more in favour of repair than Green voters), and where the rich pay their fair share of taxation.

And these are some of the Daily Mail’s values too, it seems, in amongst the stuff I still abhor. Perhaps it’s time to stop hiding it inside Private Eye when I come out of the newsagent.

image from red molotov

Tags: cctv, daily mail, gm, trump, ukuncut