Pontius Pilate Found Alive and Well and Editing the Mail on Sunday

I keep thinking the Mail must have reached the absolute limit on hateful bile, only for it to plunge effortlessly to new depths of hate, but today's report in the Mail on Sunday on the foodbank charity The Trussell Trust is going to take some beating. For those who haven't read it, a MoS 'investigative reporter' went to CAB claiming to be unemployed and in need of food, and was referred to a foodbank, which fed him, and apparently this is evidence that there really isn't a foodbank crisis.

That's right, the Mail condemned a charity, for feeding a hungry man, on Easter Sunday.

Beyond the horror that they did this to a charity, we need to be very aware of exactly what was done here, and it is a far murkier story than many will realise. The Trussell Trust has been flagging up the massive growth in people seeking their help for the last year or more, and this is not a narrative that the government is happy with, in particular it seems to be driving Iain Duncan Smith towards apoplexy, and this week saw the launch of a coordinated attack on the Trussell Trust in the pages of, surprise, surprise, The Daily Mail with the claim that "Food bank charity 'is misleading the public': Claim that 1m need food parcels 'just self promotion'" and 'DWP sources' (presumably code for IDS's Special Advisors) alleging the charity was engaged in "misleading and emotionally manipulative publicity-seeking". There is something deeply ironic that IDS, who brandishes his Catholicism at every opportunity, should choose Easter Week to launch a coordinated attack on a charity dedicated to feeding those in need.

This MoS story is actually a very carefully calculated piece of political propaganda designed to allow IDS and the Tory party to deny the reality of the foodbank crisis. Tory DWP minister and IDS-mouthpiece Lord Freud has repeatedly tried to claim that people go to foodbanks not because they are in need, but because it is free food; that strategy hasn't been working because no one believes him. The MoS story clearly sets out with the intent of proving that Freud's position is true, by inventing a story that makes it true. It then further twists the narrative by alleging that many of the people receiving food parcels were asylum-seekers, linking the foodbank issue to the xenophobic fears of the Mail's Little Englander readership, and seeks to undermine the Trussell Trust figures by implying that there is massive fraud across the entire foodbank system. The next time that foodbanks are in the news, watch out for IDS and Freud and the Tory hordes to come out waving the MoS story and claiming they knew all along that the figures were lies.

When Ministers and Fleet Street editors set out to make their spin true by creating a story from whole cloth, how can we trust either ever to tell us the truth?

(Updated title to use the religous allusion I actually meant to use, though Herod worked in its own way. Guess I'm even more lapsed than I thought)