In a sign of increasing desperation as welfare reforms unravel in all directions, the Daily Mail has stooped ever lower in an attempt to smear all of those on social security as scroungers.

Fresh from exploiting the sad deaths of the Philpott children to pursue their vile agenda they have now dragged Brendan O’Neill out of the gutter to air his relentless vitriol aimed at those with nothing.

O’Neill styles himself as a leading left wing thinker yet he is nothing of the sort.  In truth he’s a clapped out cultist from the defunct and woefully misnamed Revolutionary Communist Party. This bizarre bunch of largely public school freaks spent the 80s and 90s trawling university campus’ preaching Trotskyism right up until most of them graduated, got middle class jobs and then proclaimed themselves as the capitalist voice of the true working class.

Rejected by the left and never truly embraced by the right, O’Neill now attempts to scrape a living by being an ‘edgy’ and controversial right wing clown.  This means the right wing press occasionally pay him to spew out nasty dishonest diatribes that are too much even for the likes of Richard Littlejohn to stomach.

Whilst this is hardly news to the rest of us it seems to remain a constant source of astonishment to the under-employed Brendan O’Neill. 

When not shouting at the pigeons in the local park he appears to spend his entire life pouring over the liberal press searching for evidence that Polly Toynbee ate a vol-au-vent once.

And so he went on, and on, in the Daily Mail yesterday in a feeble attempt to prove how out of touch those opposed to social security cuts are with the real working class who are being affected by them.  He even invokes an imaginary friend on benefits who tells him how shit and boring being ill and in poverty is. 

The answer to this is more poverty according to O’Neill. 

Even the people who only exist in his head must think he’s a wanker

Nowhere does O’Neill call for full employment or decent training for those unable to work.  His only answer seems to be less money for the poor, and he justifies this by claiming that’s what the poor want – apparently based on the opinions of his brothers who unlike him have real jobs as builders.

His only other evidence for this position is that there hasn’t been any resistance to social security slashing from those on benefits themselves. The only people who care about those with least facing destitution are the latte slurpers of Islington dinner parties according to O’Neill.  Disabled people made homeless due to the bedroom tax will go dancing into the streets, miraculously cured of all ills by Atos and ready for an empowering night’s kip behind the supermarket bins.

Like all tin foil hat tirades, O’Neill has decided on his warped position and then ignores any facts which don’t fit his deluded ideas. So the claimant led movement which has seen Disabled People Against Cuts shut down the DWP headquarters or anti-workfare campaigners sabotage the government’s plans for mass forced labour is completely ignored.  He neglects even to mention that protests against workfare, Atos and the bedroom tax have taken place in almost every town and city in the UK.

The truth is that it has been disabled and unemployed people, single parents and those on low wages, who have led the increasingly visible fightback against the savage cuts.  The Guardian, Labour Party and even the unions have been desperately trying to catch up as those affected by the cuts have found ever more precision-targeted ways to stop welfare reforms directly.

Of course none of this fits with O’Neill’s view of the world in which everyone working class is a grasping Tory wannabe like him.  He has tried this trick before, when he accused the website Calum’s List of being some kind of Guardian orchestrated plot.  In fact it is a website chronicling the ever growing number of tragic suicides linked to welfare reforms which is run by disabled people, claimants and those affected by the deaths.

The irony is that it is O’Neill himself who lives in a London bubble of pseudo-intellectuals who seem to spend their lives hanging around trendy North London gastropubs trying to find ways to prove climate change is a conspiracy started by Greenpeace.  He wouldn’t last five minutes in a Jobcentre, where his mouthy middle class rants would see him slapped down and reduced to the cowering little scab he has become.

Follow me on twitter @johnnyvoid

SEE: ‘Brendan O’Neill is a Knob’ ~ by Johnny Void Posted on July 4, 2012