Having vented their spleen on working-class benefit "scroungers," the "Daily Mail," apparently spooked by stories about pregnant young women throwing themselves off tower blocks with their children in their arms, have now turned their attention to middle-class "scroungers." Such people, they suggest, exist because of an "entitlement culture" that has created envy amongst even the affluent middle-class who feel that they should also get a piece of the state pie. Unable to find such people the "Daily Mail," however, has to rely on annecdotal evidence - or rumour as you and I would understand it - and on publishing a picture of Antony Worrall Thompson who has absolutely nothing to do with the story whatsoever. The "Daily Mail," aware that the Tory myth of working-class benefit fraud is beginning to backfire as the horror stories of suicide multiply to shame us all, have now changed their tack hoping to find a more acceptable set of victims to illustrate their thesis. Annecdotes, they have realised, don't commit sucide and don't attract sympathy, but can offer "proof" that the benefit system needs to be dismantled. Meranwhile Britain's real scroungers, the MP's who fiddle their expenses and believe that the world owes them everything from a bag of crisps to a £1 million London mansion, the bankers who believe that failure should be rewarded and business executives who see the rest of us merely as "marks" in a never-ending shell game, steal with impunity, avoid paying their taxes and invent ever more imaginative schemes to scam the system.
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