Ress Financial Times Gang

Scan page 12

THE KRAY brothers' first public appearance in 13 years was something of a media event.

Actress Diana Dors was at their mother's funeral. So was Barbara Winter, and the former boxer Terry Downes.

The Daily Express had six photographers there. The Sun had three. Other papers made do with no mote than two.

Their front pages were filled with pictures of the twins, showing the contrast between the hard-faced gangsters of the 1960s and the tired men, older than their years, who left their security prison to see their mother buried.

In a week when the remains of West Beirut were being torn apart again, and when the papers themselves were exacting their revenge on Sean Geraghty, who had been hauled into the High Court, it was an odd, anachronistic subject for the papers to choose as their main feature.

It was as if the press was nostalgic for the days when the cardboard characters they described in their pages seemed to have their reflection in real life.

It gave scope for endless moralising. The Daily Express said: "Odd how the most vicious • humans always have a tremendous capacity for family love. If only they had realised that the greatest compliment they could have paid their mother was to stay away from the church"

The Sun said: 'For Violet Kray's mourners it was a moving service they will rever forget. For the rest of us it was a sickening exercise in vulgarity. A million rose petals could never hide the scent of perversion, murder and cruelty that surrounded the brothers" That is exactly the reason why the funeral filled the first three pages of that newspaper.

The Daily Star, whose reporter claimed to have been "invited" to the funeral, said: "Nobody who saw these pale, somehow insignificant, men could doubt that the Kray twins have been utterly destroyed as forces for evil. But we should remember that they committed terrible crimes. The debt they owe is not yet honoured"

The Daily Mirror sent their social diarist Paul Callan to cover the funeral, which he described as "an emotional lap of honour for the Kray twins"

The Krays were responsible for a number of deaths. They ruled their gang through fear and intimidation. They probably even voted Tory, since they had taken Thatcherite self-help to its logical conclusion.

Misery

But in terms of misery they are poor relations.

Their exploits with hammers, nails and guns are puny when put next to the attempted murder of an entire people, such as that carried out by Begin and his cabinet.

Yet even the harshest critic of Begin and Sharon in the pages of the bourg. eois press would not compare them to the Krays.

The Times, in the strongest condemnation of the massacre of the Palestinians so far published in one of the capitalist papers, headed its leader: 'Dare to call them terrorists"

But Begin and Sharon are still treated as misguided leaders who have miscalculated the effects of their actions on world opinion. The Krays are blackguards to be locked away for life, but Begin is a local tearaway, basically goodhearted, but with a tendency to get a little carried away.

This capacity to tolerate genocide while being unable to stomach a single death is one of the most sickening hypocrisies of the petty bourgeoisie -and therefore of the ideology which the papers pump out.

The nine-year old girl murdered in Staffordshire died a horrible death. But hundreds of her brothers and sisters in the Lebanon have died more horribly, coughing out their phosphorus-riddled lungs. Nurses have dumped dead bodies of children in buckets of water overnight to stop them burning. The press does express horror. It does not condemn the murderers.

In Britain, the press habitually makes jokes about Lord Longford - Ronnie Kray - Begin's poor re. possibly justified - and his eternal plea for compassion" for the most celebrated murderers of our age.

Yet on the international stage Begin has a thousand Lord Longfords heading the most thoughtful editorial columns in the world's press.

Disgust and horror in the newspapers comes out of a tap.

The delicate sensitivities of the editors can be turned on for victims of IRA bombs, sordid domestic murders, and the victims of ence-vicious hoods.

But when the massacre reaches a certain stage, when the stakes are the de-