News of the World RIP

As we all know by now Rupert Murdoch's News of the Screws is no more.

Now I don't for a moment wish to underestimate the enormity of what they have done, nor how repulsive their actions have been, not to mention the illegality and just how immorally they have behaved for far too long. Even News International are telling us there is more (and we can only presume, worse) to come.

I'm not going to do the outrage, I'm not going to explain the significance of it all, shit you can get all the stern disapproval elsewhere, about the collapse of society as we know it.

News of the World has been part of my life since I started to read it agog as a paperboy in the late 1970's. Even before that 13 year old boy became a reader, (and I admit, a fan) I had a vague sense of its national importance. Looking at the front cover on a Sunday morning is like looking at those smutty postcards at the seaside. You know, the "ooh-er missus" type of thing.

You might be wondering what on earth this has got to do with the unemployed and the benefit culture which is what I profess to bang on about? Well for starters there's the two hundred journalists who lost their jobs over the weekend. I must admit that they finished their last shift with some dignity, all leaving work together. I'm old enough to remember the huge fuss when Rupert Murdoch moved his News International set-up; lock, stock and barrel from Fleet Street, or thereabouts, to Wapping. This was 1986 when union bashing was very much in vogue.

I'm reasonably certain that it was journalists who worked for Murdoch who invented the phrase benefit scroungers, this alone speaks volumes about News of the World and their outlook, and I don't doubt their boss, Rupert Murdoch. I really feel that we have lost a piece of what can only be described as a part of the British establishment.