When it comes to tabloid front pages, the phrase 'beyond parody' trips all too easily off the tongue. But there seems no description more suited to the front page of today's Sun, which has surpassed even its own contradictory standards with its LAWLESS BRITAIN splash, writes Laura Smith.
Here, writ large around a map of Britain, is all that is holy in the world of the rightwing tabloid: the soft-touch welfare system; politically correct policing; yob culture; borders out of control; paedophiles living next door.
But hang on a second, what's this? Amid the reactionary roll-call comes this incongruous headline: 'Racist murders on your doorstep'. Surely this can't be the same newspaper that has in recent months launched vitriolic campaigns against 'gypsies' and 'bogus asylum seekers' to replace the campaigns against the 'muggers' and 'rapists' of a previous era.
The fact that the editors of this newspaper can see no contradiction in running prejudicial pieces about brown and black-skinned minorities while at the same time abhorring racist killings says everything about their failure to take responsibility for the effects of their publications on wider society.
It is about time the Sun - and the other newspapers currently wringing their hands about the death of Anthony Walker - woke up to the fact that it is precisely the drip-drip of their own simplistic headlines which feeds the kind of intolerance that can lead an 18-year-old student to be murdered in a park because he is black. Life is sacred, ran the Sun's leader yesterday. Clearly some lives are more sacred than others.
