Between Phase 1 and what I've done of Phase 2, there's only one major British weekday paper that I've left out so far, and I'm going to be taking that one on now.
The Daily Express bills itself on the frontpage as "THE WORLD'S GREATEST NEWSPAPER". So no pressure then. The main frontpage headline today is "FANTASTIC 'CURE' FOR SKIN CANCER", which is good because it's actually news. It's actually about a twice-a-day pill being trialled in the United States that can dramatically slow the growth of certain skin cancers and could be further developed in future to treat some bowel cancers as well. It's all good news, but the specifics of the story remind me that there is no such a thing as 'a cure for cancer', and there likely never will be. Different cancers have different causes and different treatments, so there can only ever be cures for specific types of cancer, never a catch-all for every type of cancer. There's also yet more about Madeline McCann on the frontpage, a story I stopped caring about over a year ago, so I shall move on.
Australian outback dust storms make for some interesting pictures, a story about the new 'broadband tax' (actually a tax on all landline telephone connections, it's designed to pay for greater broadband coverage, hence the slightly misleading name) which has an utterly meaningless but obviously quite profitable phone poll attached asking "Are Britons taxed too much?" (possibly, but given that this is a conservative paper, the answer will be an overwhelming YES from the readers, I didn't need to be told that). There's also Colonel Gaddafi throwing his toys out of the pram at the UN, which is amusing but not really interesting.
Things continue to keep my interest as we move on to John Travolta and the death of his son, where some people apparently tried to extort money off his. All I can think is whether the Travoltas have yet admitted that Jett has autism, or are they still insisting that he had Kawasaki disease? There's also yet another call for Gordon Brown to resign, which won't make any difference to the coming election (I'm of the opinion he should just go to the queen tomorrow and request that she dissolve parliament so we can have a snap election, just get it over and done with). I also spotted a story about an ex-SAS solider who killed his gay ex-lover, which doesn't happen every day. Finally before we reach the first of the opinions, we have further controversy over the new ruling making it easier for friends and family of terminally ill patients to help them end their lives abroad. The fear is that suicide clinics in the UK are the "logical conclusion and natural progression" of this ruling, which is something I'd agree with, though I would also think that to be a good thing.
The opinions start with criticism of Gordon Brown's plans to reduce our fleet of nuclear submarines from four to three. The writer tries to make a case for this being dangerous, but really struggles. Iran might attack us? The Iranian conservatives have severe tunnel vision and can only see Israel, that's where any weapons fire from them would go. Pakistan? They only got nukes because India had them, and the only reason they keep them is as a deterrent against India. North Korea? They're on the other side of the fucking world! After they've done with South Korea, Japan, and the United States, we may then enter somewhere on their attacking shortlist, assuming North Korea still exists after attacking the most heavily armed nation in the world.
They also say that Neil Kinnock was hurt by his stance on unilateral disarmament and Brown will be hurt too by this. On this, I don't know where to start. How about the fact that a reduction in arms is not disarmament and there's no way the Tories could successfully spin it as such? How about the fact that Britain had the Soviet Union to worry about back when Kinnock was running and now we only have a few rogue nations that don't care enough about us to attack to be thinking about? But I think most important is that voters just don't care all that much about losing one nuclear submarine. What they do care about is the massive budget deficit, and cutting one nuclear submarine would save a very considerable sum, making it so we can cut services less, cut benefits less, and/or raise taxes less. That's what will gain Brown votes, he knows it, and no amount of squawking from war hawks like this will change that.
There is also an op-ed by Lee McKinstry about the modern police force which I'm not going to bother going in-depth with. Why? Quoted from his piece "Too many police chiefs see their constabularies as the shock troops of New Labour, promoting Marxist orthodoxies rather then fighting crime". I think this sentence adds nothing to the piece and makes the whole thing impossible to take seriously, in fact I think it would've been best just to omit this sentence, as everything around it makes about as much sense without it.
The letters page includes the standard stuff about illegal immigration and Labour being too politically correct. The two surprises are the reason writing about Labour being too PC also doesn't like David Cameron, and one reader saying we should be welcoming asylum seekers from Afghanistan since most are only trying to get into the UK as they're trying to escape conscription by the Taliban. There's also the old myth that glass is just a 'super-cooled liquid' (I've also heard 'amorphous solid') which keeps moving very slowly, which is why very old windows are thicker at the bottom than at the top. This is actually not true, very old windows are thicker at the bottom than at the top because the way glass was made back then meant it was of an uneven thickness and the thick part was installed at the bottom to make the pane stronger, in fact some poorly-installed windows of the period were installed upside-down an so have the thin part at the bottom. In reality, glass is solid, it doesn't move.
All in all, the Express was pretty much as I expected. A lot like the Mail. It is a bit cheaper (40p as opposed to 50p) and feels a bit cheaper (mostly due to having less colour pages) but is the same size as the copy of the Mail I had in my review of it at 80 pages and otherwise has about the same tone. So why is the Mail (circulation: 2,178,640) doing so much better than the Express (circulation: 728,296)? To be honest, I don't know. I don't like either of them, but I think I'd have to give the Express the edge simply due to better value for money (and also the presence of Calvin and Hobbes).
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