Feminism 2018: The state of things so far

We are only 21 days into 2018 but already I have rolled my feminist eyes so hard, I am in danger of being able to see out of my ear holes.

First, let's talk about where the hell the #MeToo movement is headed. It has been a great thing in many respects, getting women to speak out about their very real experiences of sexual assault and harassment, even if we have to constantly let men know that:
1. We are aware that men can be victims too and we are disgusted by attacks on men.
2. Encouraging women to speak out makes it easier for men to speak out. It does not negate horrible experiences men have had or make them any less awful. When women are cut down for speaking out, is it any wonder that men are often reluctant to share their own experiences?
3. The existence of this movement and the ensuing conversations, or the existence of women's shelters or services, are not affronts to men. They are entirely necessary.
4. Men can and should start their own movement, start their own conversations, open their own shelters and start their own services to help male victims of sexual assault, harassment and domestic violence.

Now we have allegations about Aziz Ansari via a woman identified only as "Grace" on the Babe website. Predictably, critics of #MeToo have seized upon this as a sure sign that the #MeToo movement is over, it has jumped the shark, it is now only concerned with the supposedly petty trifles of bad dates. Never mind that when a date turns bad, it can result in rape - that would require the naysayers to quit missing the point.

But here's the thing - our ladybrains are not so tiny that we are incapable of having more than one important conversation.

Just as we can talk about sexual assault and sexual harassment, as exemplified by the horrible Harvey Weinstein stories, we can talk about what happens on dates, when dates go bad, why they go bad, the worst-case scenarios on dates, how men and women behave on dates, understanding consent, reading non-verbal cues, raising women to be comfortable with saying no, raising men to accept no for an answer, the radical notion that both men and women can be horny, and that sex is not merely something that men get and women give.

And let's be honest here - the #MeToo movement really needs to trickle down a hell of a lot more than it is. Don't get me wrong - if I was appearing on the red carpet at the Golden Globes the other week, I would absolutely buy yet another black dress for the occasion - but the impact it is having on Hollywood and in politics needs to be happen for so many more women in so many industries. The #MeToo movement cannot just be the domain of the wealthy, privileged and famous. It needs to change the lives of the women who wait tables, pull pints in pubs, work on factory production lines, ring up groceries in supermarkets and so on and so forth.

Too easily, the working class women are forgotten in popular movements. Hell, many of them are too busy working for a living to be activists, let alone share their experiences in a few pithy tweets. Activism is frequently a luxury denied to those who could really benefit from wholesale social, legal and political change.

See also, the bungled attempt by Richard Branson to ban the Daily Mail from Virgin Trains. I completely agree that the Daily Mail teems with all manner of sexist and bigoted bullshit but the outcry from all quarters was faintly ridiculous. Anyone who gleefully thought this would be the end of people reading the Daily Mail on Virgin Trains didn't seem to grasp that the paper could still be bought at one of thousands of outlets across Britain and read on the train. And anyone who furiously accused Richard Branson of censorship and thought policing also, er, didn't seem to grasp that the paper could still be bought at one of thousands of outlets across Britain and read on the train.

It was never going to be a feminist victory and, on the same token, the critics from the right missed the point that Virgin is a private company and is therefore entitled to stock whatever the hell newspapers it likes. In any case, if anyone cares about Virgin's treatment of women - and indeed people in general - they might like to get outraged at the company suing NHS trusts, and their Hoovering up of NHS contracts, even though they are clearly not always the best candidate for the contract.

Indeed, the death of a woman has happened on Virgin Care's watch - the family of Madhumita Mandal probably don't give a damn what newspapers are available on the East Coast mainline. Mrs Mandal was triaged at Croydon University Hospital by a receptionist instead of a medical professional, a series of delays followed, an ovarian cyst ruptured, and she died of multiple organ failure four days later.

But these are the kind of stories Virgin would rather us forget. Hence the Daily Mail ban was a distracting stunt, albeit one that backfired badly.

That is where we are now - there are plenty of distractions to steer people's minds and anger away from things that really matter. #MeToo runs the very real risk of being a movement that mainly helps the privileged and those in the wealthy, developed world. Meanwhile, the girls and women of the under-reported countries and women in minority groups and poor women in developed countries, continue to suffer.

While actresses are lauded for wearing black dresses, women are getting excited about an ineffective Daily Mail ban, and people are arguing on the internet about whether bright pink pussy hats are racist or discriminatory against trans women, violent rapes are endemic in India, the rape and murder of a seven-year-old girl in Pakistan dropped out of our news cycles, a doctor in Kenya is using faux feminism to try and legalise female genital mutilation despite a 2011 ban, women living in poverty in the US are more likely to be denied access to abortion, there is a real crisis in mental healthcare for black women in the UK, in Australia, the first Aborginal woman MP in the state of Victoria is receiving death threats for having the temerity to have an opinion on observing Australia Day, and in South Africa, a lesbian couple has been raped and burnt to death.

In 2018, feminism is as relevant and necessary as it has ever been but it remains to be seen how much will actually be achieved.

NHS reform for dummies

Amid this week's entirely justified furore about the Daily Mail's "legsit" front page in which Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon's Brexit/Scottish independence discussions were reduced to body parts, there lurked another steaming turd that demanded closer inspection.

Directly below the calf-obsessed photo of our two most senior politicians, there was a deafening headline about NHS reforms that will apparently fix everything and save billions of pounds. The Daily Mail was selling the story as if the reforms are a good thing, the Daily Mirror was taking the opposite view, pointing out longer waiting times and no extra money being spent on the NHS by the current government.

But without an electable opposition, this does not really amount to a hill of beans. That said, shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth did a solid job when he was interviewed by Sophy Ridge on Ridge on Sunday this morning. Whenever Jeremy Corbyn quits hanging around the Labour Party leadership like a fart in a car, I'd urge his replacement to keep him on.

In the meantime, however, people continue to prove the notion I put forward last time I blogged on the NHS which is that there is still plenty people will tolerate in terms of stupid healthcare reforms before they will get angry.

The Tories currently own the "free at the point of use" rhetoric - as long as people are not noticing any real difference to the healthcare they receive, it is very hard to get people to care about issues such as taxpayer money going to private companies to provide services formerly provided by the NHS, or private companies getting away with all manner of crap because they are exempt from Freedom of Information laws. The cost of administration of NHS contracts, which renders any cost savings meaningless, is not being discussed especially widely and the billions that are sucked into the PFI debt vortex each year is a problem consigned to the too-hard basket.

The cold reality is that stories such as the Daily Mail's splash about a "blueprint to save the NHS" are swallowed en masse without too much thought. If only more people got their news about the NHS from Private Eye instead.

"Dramatic drive to cut costs unveiled that will see dolling [sic] out of painkillers scrapped and GPs ordered to crack down on health tourists" is the online headline that sets the tone and the agenda.

The health tourism line is routinely trotted out because it appeals to xenophobes. Sure, there is an argument for ensuring that those who are not entitled to NHS care pay up but it is delusional to expect that to magically fill a funding hole - it makes up around 0.3% of NHS spending. Additionally, since 2015, non-EEA citizens who come to the UK for more than six months as students or temporary migrants have paid a health surcharge as part of the visa process. But because the figure is estimated at £300 million, the outrage ensues. Daily Mail readers are held in utter contempt by the paper with the editor and his acolytes assuming they will be dazzled by a big number, the kind of figure very few of us will ever see in our bank accounts.

And the Daily Mail is at it again in this week's report, dazzling its readers with the claim that Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England, has a plan that will "save the Health Service up to £1 billion in two years". So all these plans might save around half a billion per year out of an annual budget of around £120 billion. Meanwhile, PFI has left the country £222 billion in debt.

As ever, people are getting excited over plans for the NHS that are the equivalent of getting 20 plumbers over to fix a leaking toilet while nobody is being called on to look at the house's crumbling foundations.

As for the painkillers crackdown, if the NHS simply used its enormous purchasing power better, it would be procuring painkillers far more cheaply. In any case, painkillers will still be given to patients in hospital and the whole "make people pay for their own Panadol" rhetoric is pretty lame. Don't tell Simon Stevens this, but most of us already do buy painkillers for ourselves.

The plan also includes making people pay for their own indigestion and hayfever remedies. Again, millions of us across the country already do this. Even the most die-hard NHS defender probably just pops a pill from the bathroom cabinet in the event of a hangover, a springtime sneezing fit or a growling stomach after too much curry.

The move by Stevens to crack down on GPs prescribing gluten-free food is another pretty stupid distraction. At a cost of £25 million a year, it is far from the NHS's biggest cost pressure but the NHS does get ripped off by suppliers charging it more than supermarkets, but a voucher system for supermarkets would solve that problem - or, once again, better procurement.

In any case, prevention is better than cure, for patients' wellbeing and in terms of cost-efficiency, and ensuring coealics have access to gluten-free food is a good example of this. But it's another easy, lazy headline if people think the NHS has become a gluten-free outpost of Greggs.

Then there is the scandal of the NHS funding unscientific, non-evidence-based homeopathic treatments. It is hard to come by exact figures on how much of our money is spent on woo and bunkum but the excellent Good Thinking Society estimates it at around £5 million per year. Again, it is a drop in the ocean - although still a dazzlingly large sum of money in Daily Mail land - but any plans to entirely scrap this bullshit from the NHS is absent from Stevens' plans. At least the funding of gluten-free food and painkillers is based in science. But with Jeremy Hunt being a homeopathy-loving health secretary and Jeremy Corbyn being a homeopathy-loving ageing student protester, this won't change any time soon.

Unsurprising to anyone who has been paying attention, Brexit will cast a long shadow over any attempts to fix the NHS, including this latest blueprint from Simon Stevens. It is all well and good to desperately tweet "FORGET ABOUT BREXIT! THE NHS IS BEING DESTROYED!" but the harsh reality is that Brexit is now inextricably tied to the future fortunes of healthcare in this country.

The plan includes trying to ensure NHS managers don't hire expensive locum doctors but we are facing a Brexit-induced doctor shortage. A British Medical Association study found that 42% European doctors are considering leaving the UK following the Brexit vote and another 23% are unsure. Out of 10,000 EU-trained doctors, that is a significant number we could lose.

On top of this, from July GP surgeries will be acting as border control when they will be obliged to check if all patients registering have a European Health Insurance Card (EHIC). These are issued by one's home country and entitle EU citizens to NHS care on the proviso that their government pays back the costs. If someone is turned away from a surgery for not having the EHIC, they can simply go away and obtain one and then register. But this alleged reform sounds like it's going to be punitive for EU citizens so it holds appeal for Brexiters.

Additionally, we in the UK are entitled to the EHIC so we can receive medical treatment in Europe. It is a wonderful thing because it works both ways - but once we leave the EU, we will probably lose that entitlement. Possibly. When the blisteringly incompetent Brexit secretary David Davis was quizzed on this by Hilary Benn at the Brexit Select Committee this month, he said he did not know what would happen to our access to the EHIC. He admitted that his department had not looked into this not-insignificant matter.

So there you have it, kids. A blueprint to save the NHS that merely tinkers around the edges, with bonus features that will probably be rendered pointless thanks to the idiocy of Brexit, all brought to you by the Department of Smoke and Mirrors.









Photography by Elliott Brown/Flickr

Sexist legsit for Brexit...

Women MEPs are concerned about the impact of Donald Trump bringing back the global gag rule.

The Daily Mail - at least for England and Wales - reduced Theresa May and Nicola Sturgeon to their pins yesterday. Accompanying a rather leg-oriented front page picture, the eternally asinine Sarah "Don't you dare accuse me of feminism" Vine felt the need to write a piece about how the legs of the Prime Minister and Scotland's First Minister were their greatest weapons in their ongoing wrangling over Scottish independence and Brexit. A "light-hearted" take on it all, according to the Daily Mail. 

"Never mind Brexit, who won legs-it?" was emblazoned across the front page.

Nothing screams "serious journalism" like a line that is basically the world's creepiest Dad joke. 

It was just like the time the Mail reported on the peace agreement between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak back in 2000 and Sarah Vine wrote that hilarious piece about who had the firmest arse in the Middle East. Or her witty ode to Putin and Obama after their awkward handshake in Lima last year in which she declared each man's biceps would be used to forge a bold new relationship between their countries.

Except that never bloody happened. Instead, Sarah Vine wrote a parody-defying load of tripe for yesterday's paper, the journalistic equivalent of taking upskirt photos on a tube station escalator. She came across like a sex pest. Well played, sister!

The Daily Mail issued an explanation. It was just a joke and, anyway, we did loads of serious coverage on Brexit! Bags of it! The crazy feminists clearly need to lighten up! 

Except that every time female politicians are belittled, reduced to their body parts, when their legs or their tits or their clothes or their hair or their faces are the focus, not their policies or ideas, it makes it that little bit harder to encourage smart women to enter politics. And it makes it that little bit harder for women in general to be taken seriously.

The Mail's explanation also pointed out that they're an equal opportunity body snarker - they've also run photos of David Cameron looking a bit portly while on holiday, that sort of thing. Er, yeah. Two things, Dacre. Firstly, it's still gross to reduce male politicians to their body parts too. Secondly, even when the Mail runs such nonsense, it's not usually tied to the biggest political story of the week. The coverage when men do politics is far more respectful.

Of course, plenty of right-wing anti-feminist apologists piped up with their latest lame zinger. "Why are women angry about this when there is FGM and IS is making Yazidi girls and women sex slaves?". Er yeah. Two things, dickheads. Firstly, IT IS POSSIBLE TO CARE ABOUT MORE THAN ONE THING AT A TIME EVEN WITH OUR LITTLE LADY-BRAINS! Secondly, when you are the same people who would deny foreign aid to help stop FGM or to offer shelter, healthcare and employment training to Yazidi girls and women, you are monstrous hypocrites with zero right to tell women how to do feminism.

And when women are belittled out of putting themselves forward as leaders because of the constant sexist noise over which they must shout to be heard, there won't be as many women in positions of real power who are able to stand up for oppressed women everywhere.

In any case, the "Never mind Brexit, who won legs-it?" debacle, it really is a microcosm of the Daily Mail/Daily Express/Sun mentality on the issue of leaving the European Union. The one-liner encapsulates perfectly the simplistic Brexiter mentality, the one where self-serving con artists like Nigel Farage convince people that there is nothing to worry about, that the process of making trade deals and sifting through EU law will be a piece of cake. These people say without irony that it could all be sorted out in a month. These people are irresponsible idiots who make Britain a dumber place. 

Worse, it reflects the mentality of the right-leaning Brexiter of not wanting to take any actual responsibility for the whole shit-show - they do not want to acknowledge the inevitable problems it has caused and will cause and they do not want to do any of the tedious dirty work involved in ensuring leaving the EU doesn't reduce Britain to a joke nation.

Nope, these pathetic dinosaurs are the deluded fools who voted to leave because of some misguided notion that it was better in the good, old days, even though the good, old days were, frankly, a bit shit. But, hey, at least back then, we could all could openly ogle a woman's legs in peace without those feminazis getting upset, am I right...

Image: European Parliament/Flickr

NEWSFLASH! BRITISH TAXPAYERS ARE NOT FUNDING THE ETHIOPIAN SPICE GIRLS!

This week's right-wing fauxrage was all about British foreign aid funding Yegna, "the Ethiopian Spice Girls". Unsurprisingly. the hate-fuelled, ill-informed charge was led by the Daily Mail and The Sun, with much smug crowing after Priti Patel, the hard right populist excuse for an International Development Secretary, a woman now leading a department she wanted to abolish, announced the £5.2m grant would be withdrawn.

OK, a few things...

1. The only thing Yegna has in common with the Spice Girls is that it is a five-member, all-female group. The Spice Girls was set up to as a moneymaking venture. Sure, the "girl power" message may well have inspired plenty of girls and women to take an interest in their own empowerment, and it'd be churlish of me to dismiss that, but the "girl power" slogan was a marketing tool, first and foremost.

2. Yegna is part of a bigger project called Girl Effect. Girl Effect works in multiple ways to empower girls and young women in Ethiopia as well as other parts of Africa. Since 2013, Yegna has reached millions of girls through music, drama, a radio talk show and online platforms, discussing issues such as child marriage, forced marriage, violence against girls and women, female genital mutilation and ensuring girls complete their education. Ending child marriage, forced marriage, violence, FGM and girls not completing their education are all essential not only for their own safety and empowerment, but to fight poverty.

3. As well as Yegna, the Girl Effect projects include Ni Nyampinga, which educates girls and their communities on education, sexual health and violence prevention, online youth clubs and mobile platforms allowing girls to communicate with each other and share ideas, job creation in the fields of research and data collection, and a programme to encourage girls to study in the field of technology in Nigeria, soon to expand to Rwanda, Ethiopia, India and Indonesia.

4. Sadly, "UK foreign aid helps a broad-based project that empowers girls and women to finish their education, not marry as children and not be subjected to FGM, all of which helps fight the root causes of poverty in Africa" does not make for as snappy a headline as "ETHIOPIAN SPICE GIRLS AND YOU'RE PAYING FOR IT!".

5. A common howl from the outraged right was "FOREIGN AID SHOULD BE FOOD DROPS!". The problem with limiting aid to food drops is that food gets eaten. And then more food is required. But with food drops, nothing is done to create jobs that enable people to buy food, or to improve agricultural methods so food can be successfully grown, or to ensure kids are going to school so they can go on to work in skilled and professional jobs, or to stop girls from marrying young and never reaching their full potential. Food drops are like putting a sticking plaster on a compound fracture.

6. Anyone who watched TV in the 1980s saw the harrowing scenes of famine in countries such as Ethiopia and this helped create two false narratives. The first was an inaccurate image of Africa as a homogenous blur of parched landscapes full of starving children, when it is a diverse continent of varied landscapes and climates and differing levels of poverty in different nations, many of which have a growing middle class. The second was a mentality that food drops equal effective aid. As per my fifth point, it is not effective in addressing the root causes of poverty. Creative ways to bring people out of poverty need to be explored and supported.

7. It is naive to think all aid funding goes to projects that help people and that none of it ends up in the coffers of corrupt governments. But by directly funding projects such as Girl Effect and Yegna, the money has a much better chance of being used constructively rather than funding some dictator's new Bentley, again another stereotype when democracy is becoming widespread across African countries.

8. There was the additional fauxrage in the last couple of weeks about, according to the increasingly parodic Daily Express, "UK foreign aid spews out of cash machines in Pakistan". This created inaccurate images of every Pakistani simply rocking up to their nearest ATM to greedily hoover up thousands of our British pounds. Again, it was hateful, inaccurate reporting on the Benazir Income Support Programme which helps people living on less than a dollar per day - it has enabled children to stay in school, empowered marginalised women to earn a living, improved healthcare and enabled people to start saving money. Educated, empowered people who are earning an income are less likely to be radicalised. It is a hand-up rather than a hand-out and it is working effectively. The aid is distributed via ATMs as this is a cost-effective, ensures it goes to the people who need it, and prevents fraud.

9. It is also naive to think that the motive for spending money on foreign aid is entirely altruistic. In the long term, there are additional trade and investment benefits for countries that get involved in aid projects. Indeed, foreign investment, when done properly is a win for all parties and often more effective than traditional forms of foreign aid. Multiple African countries, for example, benefit from foreign investment in energy, construction and infrastructure projects, especially in countries such as Nigeria and Ghana where local content laws require employers to hire local people and use local companies and suppliers wherever possible.

10. The UK spends 0.7 per cent of GDP on foreign aid. We can afford this and we should continue to ensure our money is being spent responsibly on projects that address the root causes of poverty across the world. Unfortunately, Priti Patel is the wrong person to be in charge of this budget as she demonstrated this week by letting inaccurate, hateful headlines that pander to racists sway her decision-making. She has thrown girls and young women in poverty under a bus with her latest hard right populist stunt. Yes, this is where we are in 2017 and it is shameful.




Photography: US Embassy Addis Ababa/Flickr

Nadiya Hussain and the half-baked ideas

"Happily married mother of three deservedly wins baking contest" was never going to fly as a Great British Bake-Off headline. It is naive to think that Nadiya Hussain's hijab, religion or skin colour were going to go unnoticed as she went from strength to strength with a peacock cake, baked nuns, bubblegum frosting, and her final showstopper, a lemon drizzle wedding cake draped in a sari of Union Jack colours. Intentional or not, Nadiya expertly trolled the Daily Mail and the hordes who populate the online comments section with ill-informed blather.

If you held you nose and dived in under the online story that announced Nadiya's win, you'd find people who declared the whole baking contest to be a politically correct and convenient fix, an EU conspiracy, a Jeremy Corbyn conspiracy, and a vehicle for Nadiya to become a celebrity, because apparently she is also a desperate and grasping fame whore.

This was hot on the heels of a ridiculous piece by Amanda Platell claiming that 19-year-old Flora, a young white woman, might not have been eliminated if only she'd baked a chocolate mosque.

But "Nineteen-year-old baker is not quite as good as older, more experienced bakers" does not a good headline make.

Then the Daily Mail got some stick for not putting Nadiya on the front page on the morning after the nation found out that she'd won Great British Bake-Off. In previous years, the white-faced winner was on the front page, but not Nadiya, born in Luton, of Bangladeshi heritage and unashamedly wearing a flour-stained hijab.

And it turned out that some of their readers quite liked Nadiya and were genuinely happy that she won.

What better way then, for the Mail to try and adjust the balance than to commission Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a Ugandan-born, British Muslim journalist, to write a piece saying that Nadiya is the best thing for British race relations in a long time.

This is the same tactic the Mail used when, after weeks of scaremongering about the refugee crisis in Europe, it became clear that people were genuinely horrified by the images of Aylan Kurdi's dead body on a Turkish beach and briefly ran some sensitive, measured coverage on the story. And then it was back to business as usual. The people again become a "swarm".

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown's piece was ridiculed for the following quote: "Today her adopted hometown of Leeds is bursting with pride. It was ten years ago this July - the same year Nadiya and Abdal wed - that four bombers attacked London; three of them were raised in or near Leeds."

In the context of the article, Alibhai-Brown goes on to say that Nadiya is not viewed as the unwanted foreigner (well, yes, she was born in Luton...), that she is an example of how integration happens through "natural respect, shared interests and a sense of ease". This is very true but it is still sad that three utterly repugnant bombers that have nothing to do with Nadiya should to be mentioned at all.

Sometimes a baking contest really is just a baking contest.

The broader context is how Alibhai-Brown's column fits into the the Daily Mail as a whole. Online, there was a link on the same page as her column to a stupid piece about the loveliness of Nadiya's husband's skin. If anyone thinks Alibhai-Brown's column is the start of a brave new world for the Mail's coverage of anything related to race or religion, they are naive in the extreme.

I don't begrudge Alibhai-Brown for writing her piece for the Mail. If most writers are honest, especially liberal ones, they'd happily take the opportunity to write an opinion piece for the Mail, to attempt to be a Trojan horse in the midst of some frequently awful content. I'd let the Mail run this or anything else from my blog if they paid me. I'd write something fresh for them if they paid me too.

But none of this makes the Mail immune from criticism about its past or present content. In a free press in a country with freedom of expression, the Mail can print what it likes but that does not mean nobody should call them out either.

And in the midst of all the noise, one person has been forgotten despite her lovely face being everywhere. The one person is Nadiya herself. She might not want to be hoisted onto a pedestal as the poster girl for integration, especially given she has lived her whole life in Luton and Leeds. She might just want to go back to baking amazing cakes. And if that is the case, we should let her do that in peace and quit trying to politicise her.



Image by Karen Arnold

Piggy wiggy woo-who cares...

I can't lie. Like most of Britain this morning, I gasped and laughed when I first heard the astounding claim that David Cameron inserted his penis into the mouth of a dead pig in some initiation ritual during his days at Oxford. I can never resist a pun and I found myself in a piggy pun vortex with friends on Facebook. The shots were cheap but we all needed a good laugh, joking as I was with friends who regularly roll their eyes at the sorry state of British politics. I freely admit my own hypocrisy here.

But now the time has come to analyse this situation a little more soberly, even as "Get Piggy With It" remains my earworm. I usually reserve the conspiracy theories for the likes of Pamela Geller and David Icke, but the timing of the Daily Mail breaking this story in the form of extracts from Call Me Dave, a book by the sour-grape-laden Lord Ashcroft and ex-Murdoch journalist Isabel Oakeshott is curious to say the least.

Just last week, the Daily Mail, along with the usual media suspects, was busy writing reports on Jeremy Corbyn that had very little to do with policy. Corbyn should be as open to policy scrutiny as any other party leader, but some of the crap in the media last week was ridiculous. Most absurd of all was the Daily Express exposing Corbyn's great-great grandfather as a workhouse boss. What next? Corbyn's caveman ancestors beat their wives with clubs?

By splashing the "bizarre initiation ritual" story across the front page, the Daily Mail was effectively flying the false balance flag. "Hey, look! We can slag out the left and the right! We are equal opportunity sex scandal peddlers!", they may as well be yelling from the rooftop at Northcliffe House.

It's funny how this story breaks just as some real news was starting to seep through the cracks of mediocrity. People were actually talking about cuts to free school meals and cuts to junior doctors' salaries. Some were even embracing a less circus-like approach to parliamentary debate.

But not today.

Never mind that the free school meal cuts break yet another Tory manifesto promise and cutting junior doctors' salaries will see even more medical graduates seek careers abroad. The Daily Mail doesn't want you worrying your pretty little heads about those sorts of things.

It suits the Mail's agenda to have Britain laughing at #piggate and we've all pretty much fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.

Don't get me wrong - the notion of initiation via dead pig fellatio is gross and anyone who compares head-fucking a dead pig to the more commonplace university hijinks, such as stealing traffic cones, is an idiot. Hell, most of us manage to have sex with living people when we're students. But the whole awful story - which is still a pile of allegations - is a distraction from real issues that will have long-term implications on the country.

And it's not just the fact that the story broke after a week of Corbyn-bashing that is pertinent. This story has broken during the week Parliament goes into recess because it's party conference time again. The Twitters got all excited about the prospect of MPs oinking at this week's Prime Minister's question time (wow, that's the kind of mature debate we need...) or subtle porcine references being slipped in to the questions.

So then people were deflated when they realised PMQs is not on again until October 12. That is more than enough time for this to blow over, for us to be distracted by something new and stupid, for the party conference season to throw up more stories, many of which will invariably be personal attacks rather than policy criticism. Woe betide the MP who attempts to crack a joke or tests out a daft new haircut.

And it is plenty of time for important issues to be swept aside because the likes of the Daily Mail don't actually want us to talk about them. I'm not sure if I am enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe David Cameron knew about this in advance but it has probably done him a perverse favour. And Toby Young will no doubt benefit one way or another by taking one for the team as the only Tory to stick his head above the parapet today to defend Cameron.

Anyone thinking of wearing a pig mask and oinking outside outside the Conservative party conference in Manchester the week after next is part of the problem.



Photo by Lilla Frerichs



  

The hypocrisy of the royal paparazzi outrage

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have done the very British equivalent of hanging their heads out the window and yelling at the top of their lungs: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!". They wrote a strongly worded letter.

Essentially, it was a plea to paparazzi photographers for the same sort of privacy non-royal parents enjoy. It was a call for control over what photographs of their kids are shared widely. Just as it is up to parents to decide what pictures of their little darlings end up on Facebook, on mantelpieces and on naff Christmas cards, William and Kate would only like official photographs and photographs taken at official photo calls to be published.

Of course, if they truly want to raise their kids in a normal environment, a republic would solve that problem. They could live as private citizens and get jobs and everything. Yes, I know Prince William works as a part-time air ambulance pilot and donates his salary to charity, but he can afford to have the luxury of such altruistic principles. He could always give up the tax-free money his dad gives him from the Duchy of Cornwall and pay tax like the rest of us.

But to suggest a British republic is still, for many, as absurd as suggesting we all wear shoes made of tofu and hats made of argon. So that leaves us with the letter from the here-to-stay-for-now Duke and Duchess, which was dutifully published in full across multiple newspapers, including the Daily Mail.

It was nice of the Mail to do this, accompanied by official pictures of Prince George and Princess Charlotte. No seedy pap pics taken from the boots of cars. But on the Mail's website, right alongside this reverential reprinting of the letter were paparazzi pics of Brooklyn Beckham, aged 16. And this was just days after the non-story of four-year-old Harper Beckham photographed sucking on a dummy was considered front page-worthy.

A quick click on the Mail's homepage as I write this reveals, along with the usual papped shots of grown-ass adult celebrities, the following kiddie-based crap in the sidebar of shame: the Beckham kids again (this time, Romeo, Cruz and Harper but no Brooklyn, who was clearly too cool to attend his baby's sister's recital), a video filmed from across the street of David Beckham and all four of his kids performing the fascinating act of getting into the car, Kylie Jenner's boyfriend's two-year-old son, 17-year-old Elle Fanning trying to eat a frozen yoghurt in peace, Reese Witherspoon and her sons, aged 12 and two, Kourtney Kardashian and her kids, aged five, three and 18 months, and Kim Kardashian and her two-year-old daughter, North West.

They were all paparazzi shots. None of them were pictures the celebrity parents volunteered to the world's media. They are dull pictures of famous people and their kids going about their business, doing the same boring things the rest of us do. How come in Daily Fail-Land, papped shots of underage celebrities and underage celebrity kids are OK but papped shots of royal kids are a crime against media ethics? Prince George and Princess Charlotte can't help who their parents are but neither can the kids of David and Victoria Beckham, assorted Kardashians or Reese Witherspoon.

Which leads us to the bigger question here: Why the hell does anyone care at all about photos of celebrity kids?

If you are so pleased William and Kate took a stand against those evil paps, but you read the Daily Mail, especially the website, you are part of the problem. If you blush a little, giggle coyly, and admit the sidebar of shame is your "guilty pleasure", you are part of the problem. Hell, if you buy any magazine that uses pap shots, you are part of the problem. The editors know people want to see pictures of celebrity kids, they know it makes them money through copy sales, ad revenue and clicks.

You are creating the market for pictures of celebrity kids. If you feel a bit creepy about this, that is a good thing.

You should be embarrassed if you regularly pore over photos of children you will never meet. It is not the same as looking at photos of your nieces and nephews or your friends' kids on Facebook. It's an invasion of privacy and those pictures online will live on forever for the kids of celebrities, usually with nasty comments at the end.

A free press is a wonderful thing and it should be defended. But when we feed the market for the journalist equivalent of sniffing bicycle seats, for bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping non-news, we end up with the media landscape we deserve.




Photography by Anna Langova

Just in case anyone is still taking the Daily Mail seriously...

It was a front page that should come as no surprise to anyone, but the irony of the Daily Mail describing anything as a "vile product" is still astounding. Today, Mick Philpott (and his kids, it would appear from the picture that was used...) is the "vile product" of a welfare state, according to the screaming headline. No reasonable person would ever defend the actions of Mick and Mairead Philpott, who burned six of his 17 children to death. But to use an extreme example of one seriously dysfunctional family to demonise everyone on benefits is completely ridiculous.

The Philpott verdict conveniently coincides with the government's welfare reforms, including the ill-conceived "bedroom tax"/"spare room benefit cut"/whatever you call it, it's an unworkable policy that will cost a fortune to administer and fails to take into account a genuine housing shortage or do anything constructive about soaring private rents or job creation.

But with the crown alleging that Mick Philpott set the house on fire in attempt to frame his mistress and obtain a larger council house for themselves and all those children, the timing was Daily Mail gold.

Wait, hang on... This is the same Daily Mail that demonises women who have abortions as well as women who have "too many children".

This is the same Daily Mail that gets outraged about teenaged girls having access to free birth control and teenaged girls who become single mothers.

This is the same Daily Mail who condemns young mothers as feckless, older mothers as irresponsible breeders of deformed babies and women who don't have kids as bitter shrews.

This is the same Daily Mail that has no issue with the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge about to move their family of soon-to-be-three into a nine-bedroom house.

This is the same Daily Mail that regularly peddles the "Won't someone think of the children?" mentality while treating underage female celebrities like sex objects.

This is the same Daily Mail that treats rich murderers far more gently than poor ones. When the rich kill, it is a tragedy that not even being a millionaire could have prevented but when the poor kill, it is because they are always feckless criminals.

Oh, and in case anyone has forgotten, there are six children who are dead. 

David Goodhart responds!

Well, this is interesting... David Goodhart has responded to my last two blog posts, where I can be found criticising his ridiculous portrayal of the borough of Merton, in particular a distorted view of the impact of the Baitul Futuh mosque on the community, and a reflection on the response to the blog post.

I invited him to respond and this is what he shot back with over Twitter:

@David_Goodhart
@georgialewis76 happy to reply to Ranting person though the single FACTUAL criticism of me is wrong. Merton is 48 per cent white British.

Good. Fine. So why did Goodhart not include this stat in his article with a source? I asked him this and challenged him as to why he used generalisations about white people throughout the article. He uses the word "white" without any nuance using lines such as "The white population has more or less shuffled along the bench and allowed others to sit down" and "Poorer working-class whites are doing worst of all in Merton."

This attracted a response from Goodhart that basically asks me to buy his book, which is plugged at the end of the original Daily Mail article:

@David_Goodhart
@georgialewis76 I did include lots of footnotes in the book that the extract is taken from - perhaps read that and then complain

I told him that any relevant stats should be sourced in the article. That would be good journalism. There is no reason why someone at the Daily Mail couldn't have edited the article to cite sources. Indeed, Goodhart could have requested this before publication - the article is an extract from a book he is desperate to sell. The only footnote to the article is a line about how much the book costs and how to buy it.

Aboo Salik, tweeting as @aboosalik weighed in with:
@David_Goodhart how many factual criticism do you need? "Replacing the dairy which provided jobs for few hundreds" "when it was closed for 7-10 years and was the local crack den? Or small elite being invited to the mosque."

I'd also love to hear the justification for this part of the article, in which Goodhart creates the false impression that the mosque builders kicked out the dairy and caused hundreds of workers to be sacked and conveniently leaves out the fact that there was almost a decade between the end of the dairy and the start of the mosque.

Aboo Salik then goes on to win the internet when he invites Goodhart to get involved with a charity event in Milton Keynes that the mosque is helping. Just in case he is busy that day, Aboo Salik also suggests that Goodhart could possibly make a donation. After all, the multiple charities that will benefit from the event do indeed include those that help poor people, including the "poor white people" Goodhart mentions in his article. And failing that, Aboo Salik also tells Goodhart he is welcome to visit the mosque at any time. Surely that would be a good thing, no?

The invitation to visit the mosque is sincere. Surely, in the interests of fair journalism, the Daily Mail would be interested in a follow-up piece after Goodhart failed to mention the mosque's work for secular charities in his original article. After all, this is a newspaper that cannot get enough of follow-up articles by people such as Samantha Brick tackling the big issues of being too attractive for this cruel world.

At the time of writing, Aboo Salik had emailed Goodhart an invitation to visit the mosque and to attend the mosque's charity events. Goodhart is now considering the invitation. I will be visiting the mosque on April 12.

A postscript to the manufactured Merton mosque outrage

The response to my last blog post on a ridiculous Daily Mail story about the mosque in the London borough of Merton has been very heartening indeed. Multiple residents of Merton, the borough in which I have happily lived for the last two years, have told me how ridiculous they found the Mail's attempt to portray Merton as some sort of hotbed of racial tension. Nobody who communicated with me after my blog post recognised the Merton David Goodhart tried to sell us in an article cynically timed to coincide with news on immigration changes announced this week.

As well as an overwhelmingly generous response from people who attend the Baitul Futuh mosque, non-Muslims also shared with me their acceptance of the mosque and their complete rejection of the suggestions in the article that the mosque has somehow created what Goodhart appallingly called a "polite apartheid."

Goodhart wrote that the mosque - the largest in Europe so therefore an instant catalyst for ragefits by Daily Mail disciples - "replaced" a dairy that employed hundreds of local people. Except there was a seven-year gap between the dairy closing and the mosque building work commencing. Merton residents who have lived there for longer than I have told me that after the dairy closed, the abandoned site attracted drug-related crime. It was not a pleasant part of the borough and the mosque gave that end of Morden (for Morden is just one part of the borough - not that you'd know that from the article...) a new lease of life and a new and interesting community.

The worshippers of the Baitul Futuh mosque are from the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and their slogan is "Love for all, hatred for none." The worshippers perform a wide variety of charity work in Merton. I have been visited by a mother and daughter from the mosque who were collecting for the Save The Children charity, a non-sectarian organisation. The mosque has also raised money for the Queen's Jubilee charities, they hold regular blood donation drives, hold clean-up days to remove rubbish from the streets and joined other community groups in 2005 in a campaign to save and sensitively redevelop a popular local park. This is not the work of a group that refuses to integrate with the wider community. Indeed, attempts to stir up anti-mosque feeling by the National Front in 2002 were rejected by local residents and it was peacefully inaugurated in 2003.

My blog post has been tweeted to David Goodhart and I welcome his response to my critique of his attempt at journalism. He has, at the time of writing, not responded. It could well be that the published article is the result of the original copy going through an extreme editing process, as happened to many people who have written for the Mail in good faith and not recognised the story that has been published. But even extreme editing with an obvious agenda does not excuse Goodhart describing Merton as a "polite apartheid."

It was also heartening to not get trolled by UKIP, EDL or BNP types as a result of my blog post. The closest I received to a negative response was a bizarre tweet with a link to a horrific "honour" killing that took place in a Muslim family in Mitcham. Yes, Mitcham is part of the borough of Merton and "honour" killings are completely inexcusable, but there is no evidence that the Baitul Futuh mosque supports such crimes or that the family involved even attended the mosque.

Since writing yesterday's blog post, I have met via Twitter some very friendly people from the mosque - it turns out that one of my new virtual friends uses the same butcher that I do. In a fine example of cross-cultural integration, this is the very friendly Muslim butcher who has joked with me about using wine with his meat - his lamb mince and my red wine-laden moussaka are a winning culinary combination.

Soon these Twitter friendships will move from the online world to the real world. On April 12, I have been invited to visit the mosque and I look forward to this opportunity.



Photo by Fin Fahey

The Merton mosque and the manufactured outrage

I try not to share links from the Daily Mail website because that is what they want - clicks galore to keep the advertisers happy, regardless of the nonsense the articles regularly peddle. But I am making an exception for a particularly bizarre article in Mail this week written by "leading liberal commentator" David Goodhart (although he identifies as "post-liberal" on his Twitter account). This is because it paints an absurd picture of the London borough of Merton, where I live, and the article needs serious analysis.

Just as Andrew Pierce, an openly gay man, regularly writes pieces for the Mail opposing such things as marriage equality, it would appear that Goodhart is a liberal whom the paper has decided is OK and therefore he can be used to further agendas. The pitiful "OMG, the Muslims are taking over and white people are becoming extinct!" agenda is the one Goodhart is helping push, whether he realises it or not. This becomes increasingly obvious as you read what Goodhart has to say about the Baitul Futuh mosque.

The Baitul Futuh mosque, the largest in Europe with a capacity to accommodate more than 10,000 people, is like a rage lighting rod for the average Daily Mail reader. As Goodhart tells us, the mosque "dominates the neighbourhood." Sure, it's a big building, but the edifice that truly dominates this neighbourhood is the unfeasibly ugly council building which looks like row upon row of broken, rotten teeth looming above the library. For those who are offended by the mosque, the very sight of it is blocked by repulsive council offices as you stand at the Morden tube station.

Goodhart then appeals to the Daily Mail reader's yearning for a bygone (read: whiter...) era when he tells us that mosque "replaced an Express Dairies bottling plant which provided a few hundred jobs for local people and lots of milk bottles - an icon of an earlier, more homogenised age."

In the mind of the Mail reader, this screams: "THE EVIL MUSLIMS CAME TO A NICE, BRITISH BOROUGH AND TOOK BRITISH JOBS AWAY!"

Except the dairy closed in 1992 and the mosque was inaugurated in 2003.

In an insult to anyone who suffered under apartheid in South Africa, Nazi Germany or segregated America, Goodhart says that in Merton "a polite apartheid reigns, an accommodation rather than an integration." He then goes on to tell us that "the white population has more or less reluctantly shuffled along the bench and allowed others to sit down." Honestly, he is making my innocuous middle-class neighbourhood sound like a place that requires the activism of a terrifying white equivalent of Rosa Parks.

The white rage continues as Goodhart tells us that Merton's minority population as risen from 10% in 1980 to more than 50% today and the primary schools "which were still majority white as recently as 2003 - are now 64% ethnic minority."

Except, according to the last census, this is crap. Of the 20 wards that make up Merton, all of them have white ethnic groups in the majority - ranging from 57.12% in Longthornton to 87.21% in Lower Morden. The overall average for all the wards is 75.23% of people in white ethnic groups.

There's no real explanation from Goodhart as to why a white majority (which exists even though he says it doesn't) is a good thing or how this awesome whiteness is defined. Ever the generous soul, Goodhart says that because there's no one dominant minority in Merton, this "helps to make the changes feel less threatening." Well, that's a relief then. We can't have the white people freaking out at all this multiculturalism.

And, like all good attempts to manufacture outrage, there is a paragraph to which any sane person would say: "So what?". Goodhart "reports" that at a park near the station, on a sunny day (not that we've had a sunny day for a while so God knows when he did this particular piece of stellar research...) "the place is usually full but divided along ethnic lines: large groups of Pakistani women picnicking with children, Polish guys drinking beer, young Indian men playing cricket, Africans playing basketball."

What would he prefer? If the Pakistani women and their kids had a beer with Poles before joining in a vigorous game of basketball with the Africans? Did he ask all these people how they felt about life in Merton? Is he certain all the cricket players were Indian, for cricket is very popular in Pakistan and Sri Lanka too? Hell, is he even sure all these people were born outside the UK?

Moving swiftly along, Goodhart inadvertently destroys one of the Daily Mail's favourite immigrant myths when he writes that "several of the more entrepreneurial communities, such as the Indians and Tamils and Iraqi Kurds, create jobs". So they create jobs, contribute tax revenue and aren't claiming benefits. Good to know!

But Goodhart concludes this line with the mournful "but they invariably go to members of their own community." Much like a lot of white people do, I would imagine.

Not content with passing off random observations in a park on a sunny day as fact, Goodhart plays another Daily Mail trump card - the fear of immigrant crime. He tells us that "some minorities import historic feuds." Instead of providing any real crime stats or interviewing anyone from the local police to back up this portrayal of Merton as a hotbed of racial tension, Goodhart tells us: "Orthodox Muslims in the area are suspicious of the Ahmadiyans [who worship at the Baitul Futuh mosque]; Tamil youths fight among themselves, as do Somalis; and the historic black (Caribbean and African) versus Asian antipathy is also played out on some streets."

Then Goodhart jumps off on another tangent and tells us that "economically, many minority Mertonites are doing pretty well in their enclaves." ("Enclaves  being Daily Mail-speak for "ghetto") He points out that it's the Indians and Chinese who are "doing best at school and in jobs, closely tracked by Koreans and Tamils" and, like the rest of the UK, "the white British are somewhere in the middle." I'm sorry if anyone is offended by people from ethnic minorities getting an education but this does not stop white kids from striving to do well at school. Are all white families failing to put a high value education for their kids? Surely that is a stupid stereotype on par with everything else Goodhart has spewed forth in this sad article.

Finally, Goodhart manages to quote someone, albeit anonymously, when a hairdresser tells him: "We don't like it, but we don't have much choice, do we?" of a "Muslim hair-cutter" who opened a shop two doors along. No, sweetheart, you don't have much choice - it's a free market economy. Offer your customers good service and good value and you'll probably stay in business. Would she say the same thing if a spate of Christian salons opened in Merton?

Then, after saying that the Ahmadiyans who worship at the big mosque are "model immigrants in many ways" and pointing out that they are grateful to live safely here and that they took out advertisements on London buses congratulating the Queen on her Diamond Jubilee, Goodhart goes on to quote another nameless resident. He describes him as "White Heritage Elder Male" and he was at a Merton council focus group when he said: "We've lost this place to other cultures. It's not English any more."

It is not clear what exactly parts of English life are now denied to White Heritage Elder Male as a result of all these immigrants. Goodhart didn't elaborate. Did he even bother to ask White Heritage Elder Male any hard questions after the focus group was over?

Is this gigantic mosque is causing the erosion of Christianity in Merton - that favourite measure of Britishness of the Mail? Probably not. Like the ethnicity question in the last census, the religion question revealed that a majority of residents in every ward identify as Christian. From a still-high low of 54.59% in Graveney to 74.36% in Lower Morden, it would appear that Merton is not on the verge of mass conversion to Islam.

Goodhart lectures us, saying that local political leaders "have no choice but to celebrate the new diversity." That'd be the diverse people who have has created jobs, opened businesses, paid taxes, not claimed nearly as much money in benefits as the Daily Mail would like us to believe and do such heinous things as have picnics, play cricket, drink a few beers and shoot hoops in the park on a sunny day.

The article then comes out with the usual argle-bargle about how we should be proud to be British. Goodhart, despite the earlier nonsense, even says that "very few British peoploe think you have to be white to be part of this." Good. Then why so much dishonest blather about white people being in a minority and losing their culture then?

Bizarrely, he concludes with the story of local Labour MP Siobhain McDonagh's father who arrived in Britain in the 1940s to work as a labourer. He married an Irish nurse, they had two daughters both did well with one becoming an MP and the other becoming General-Secretary of the Labour Party. Goodhart writes sentimentally as he tells of the father watching one of his daughters become a baroness and muttering under his breath: "Only in England... Only in England."

He says that he was "not technically correct - these things happen in other places, too - but they happen here far more than we admit and it's time our national story reflected them."

Right. So he concludes that our national story should reflect the achievements of immigrants? Or does he mean only white immigrants? It's hard to tell from such a flabby, directionless article what he is driving at with that conclusion. Is he trying to claw back some liberal credibility at the end? Is he trying to paint a completely false picture of the multicultural neighbourhood in which I love to live? Whatever the case, all this article has achieved is (at the time of writing) 571 reader comments, most of which indicate Goodhart succeeded in peddling more Daily Mail immigrant myths. Well played, sir.Well played...





Photo courtesy of sarflondondunc

It's about time for another World of Stupid...

I was delighted to be described by one of my favourite tweeters, @MoronWatch, as a "freelance moron watcher". I do wish I was paid my usual freelance rate for watching morons - there are so many of them out there that it could be a fulltime job. But I digress... Here is the latest swag of morons from around the globe:

1. A US company, Solid Gold Bomb, came under fire this week for selling some rather awful T-shirts. In possibly the worst variation on the tiresome "Keep calm and carry on" genre, the T-shirts were printed with the slogans "Keep calm and rape a lot", "Keep calm and hit her", "Keep calm and grope a lot" and "Keep calm and knife her." Just as terrible as the T-shirts was Solid Gold Bomb's attempt at an apology:

The company claimed it had been "informed of the fact that we were selling an offensive T-shirt primarily in the UK" and said: "This has been immediately deleted as it was and had been automatically generated using a scripted computer process running against hundreds of thousands of dictionary words."

Really? A computer error just so happened to generate four moronic slogans and nobody noticed. Did the computer also post the T-shirts as being for sale on Amazon with no human noticing this at any stage of the process? What about when orders started coming in? Did anyone say: "Hang on, why are we selling rape T-shirts?" Here is some interesting stuff on blaming rape-apologist algorithms for all this. It is indeed a convenient way to not take any responsibility.

Or maybe someone at Solid Gold Bomb accidentally hit the "Create T-shirts for douchebags" button.

2. Hilary Mantel was again proven right this week. Her claim that society and the media are obsessed with royal women's bodies was strengthened by the vulture-like reporters hovering around London's King Edward VII Hospital where the Queen was recovering from a bout of gastroenteritis. Everyone seems to have forgotten how badly that all ended last time a royal woman was at King Edward VII  - the obsession with the Duchess of Cambridge's severe morning sickness took a dark turn with a prank call and a nurse committing suicide.

But royal gastrointestinal systems are clearly as newsworthy as royal wombs and the reporters gathered outside the hospital in case of, er, I dunno... In case the Queen's doctor was going to emerge with full details of Her Majesty's bowels? It was boring, stupid television and to waste hours of time hovering around an expensive hospital when the NHS is being undermined at every opportunity is rather obscene.

3. Speaking of which, the Huffington Post's UK outpost has developed a creepy obsession with the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge and other knocked-up celebs. "Baby bump" has become their equivalent of the Daily Mail's "all grown up". As well as Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, Imogen Thomas, Fergie from the Blackeyed Peas, Rochelle Humes from The Saturdays and a Chinese woman known only as "Zhang" all come up on a "baby bump" search of the website.

It's gross and what was extra-stupid was the headline: "Kate Middleton Pregnant: Duchess and 'Bump' Visit National Portrait Gallery." As if she could simply take it off! I know there are madder elements of the prolife movement who'd disagree with me, but I'm pretty sure the foetus isn't going to remember this trip to the art gallery.

Whoever managed their Twitter account thought "Kate Middleton takes her baby bump to a wedding" was a sane thing to say and that moronic sentence leads the article that was linked to the tweet. Again, it's not as if she really has a choice in that matter. But I am sure the bump had a tremendous time at the nuptials.

4. Just in case anyone out there is labouring under the misapprehension that human rights laws are a bad thing, we have sickening news from Saudi Arabia that transcends mere stupidity and drives straight into completely vile territory. Seven men convicted of armed robbery face execution by crucifixion and firing squad. Yes, crucifixion. Six have been sentenced to death by firing squad and the main defendant is scheduled to be executed by crucifixion. For three days.

The condemned men claim they have had no access to lawyers, confessions were extracted under torture and most of them were juveniles at the time of the offences. If you are OK with any of this, you are seriously not well.

5. The Merriam-Webster dictionary continues its murder of the English language by letting the moronic use of "literally" creep into its pages. Every day, people claim they are literally on fire, that they literally have work coming out of their arses and that they would literally die if something non-lethal happened. These people do not need to be encouraged by dictionaries. It literally has to stop.

6. I've spotted some insane sex advice from Cosmopolitan's UK website but I may save that for later...


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

Off with her head! Behold, it's Hilary Mantel hysteria!

Beheading people for treason isn't really the done thing in Britain these days. It is mildly terrifying that the last person executed in Britain for treason was not so long ago - it was William Joyce, hanged in 1946, the year my father was born. But even though treason is still an offence here, surely we are not interesting in reverting to the dark days of calling for people's heads to be severed from their necks. Or are we?

Given the kneejerk public reactions to the abysmal reporting of Hilary Mantel's erudite, fascinating and articulate London Review of Books Winter lecture, I am not so sure we have moved on from an era of hysterically waving pitchforks and wanting to see blood spilled as judicial entertainment.

The lecture, entitled Royal Bodies, actually took place two weeks ago so the journalists of the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Independent and Metro were not exactly on the ball. But a 5,000-word lecture, with all its nuances and historical context, does not make for a sexy news story. It is far easier to lazily pick the eyes out of the lecture, offer quotes out of context, get a shedload of easy hits to your website and watch as the easily outraged readers believe the shoddy journalism. Hell, it's not as if they're going to bother to read or hear what Mantel had to say.

And because Mantel dared to mention that most pristine and sacred of all media cows in her lecture, the Duchess of Cambridge, it was so easy to set her up as an object of hate. The lecture was an attack on the obsession by the media and the public with not just the body of Duchess of Cambridge but the bodies of royal women throughout the centuries. The fascination over whether Anne Boleyn was going to produce a male heir for Henry VIII in the sixteenth century is no different to the womb watching that Kate has to endure.

Of course, reading Mantel's well-written words was too hard for the foaming-at-the-mouth masses. It was far easier to look at the photo of Mantel, juxtaposed beside a winsome shot of the Duchess, and conclude that she is fat, unattractive and jealous of Kate's body and marriage. 

Never mind that Mantel has publicly spoken about her battle with endometriosis, a condition which has left her overweight and infertile. Never mind that she is the patron of an endometriosis charity. Never mind that she speaks with humour and grace on the trials and tribulations of being a large woman in a world were the sylph-like are worshipped. Never mind that Mantel has been married since 1972. It is clearly a resilient relationship - the marriage ended in divorce in 1979 but the couple then remarried. If Mantel was truly snide and vile, she might have alluded to the fact that she worked on her own marriage and gained a stronger relationship as a result, unlike many a disastrous royal union.

But in the minds of the angry mob, her only motivation for saying anything remotely critical of the saintly Duchess is jealousy and hatred. 

Even David Cameron felt the need to weigh in from India. Like almost everyone else who has shot their mouths and keyboard fingers off today, he obviously didn't bother to find out exactly what Mantel said and instead rose to her defence like a pathetic, populist knight in shining armour.

And then Ed Miliband took time out to defend Kate. Seriously, Ed, come on. There's an NHS to defend but instead, he also jumped aboard a populist steed of his own, donned the armour of lameness, and said: "These are pretty offensive remarks. I don't agree with them." Oh, and he added the usual mindless twaddle about how hard the Duchess works.

Have we reached a place where only thin, pretty women married to princes are allowed to comment on thin, pretty princesses? The furore echoes the sexist attempts to silence the brilliant Professor Mary Beard simply because she expressed a mildly controversial opinion and doesn't live up to some ridiculous standard of female hotness.

The defenders of Kate's virtue clearly didn't read to the very end of Mantel's piece because then they might have realised that she was calling for kindness towards the Duchess, for us to not be so obsessed by her body and the contents therein. 

In the last paragraph, this is what Mantel wrote: "We don't cut off the heads of royal ladies these days, but we do sacrifice them them, and we did memorably drive one to destruction a scant generation ago. History makes fools of us, makes puppets of us, often enough. But it doesn't have to repeat itself. In the current case, much lies within our control. I'm not asking for censorship. I'm not asking for pious humbug and smarmy reverence. I'm asking us to back off and not be brutes."

You'd be hard pressed to find a more eloquent way to tell the media and the public to not behave like voyeuristic dickheads where royal bodies are concerned. But you'd have to read 5,000 words, many of them with more than one syllable, to find this eloquence. Nah, it's much easier to simply swallow the moronic hysteria generated by lazy journalists and slag off the fat woman instead.


Image courtesy of www.kozzi.com

Another world of stupid because there's just so much of it...

My Zero Tolerance of Idiocy policy is already taking a hammering this year. Here's a summary of the latest tidal wave of stupidity to come my way. Honestly, stemming this tide is like trying to stop a tsunami with a tampon...

1. Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham has wondered out loud if sugary breakfast cereals, such as Frosties, should be banned.* No, they shouldn't. This is a free market economy and there is clearly a market for Frosties. Yes, sugary cereals are gross - but the responsibility for what goes into the mouths of British kids lies with parents. How about education, awareness and parents taking the time to read the nutritional information on food packages? It is all there on the box where anyone can see it.

If reading labels on stuff you are going to feed your children is too hard for you, you're not going to win a Parent of the Year prize any time soon. Assuming the parents of Britain are that stupid and lazy, perhaps a clear, brightly coloured label should be introduced for foods high in sugar, salt and fat. To make it really clear that Sugar Puffs contain sugar. Frankly, there should be a stigma associated with feeding your kids nothing but Sugar Puffs for breakfast, when healthy cereals are just as affordable. But if you're an adult, you have every right to eat whatever the hell cereal you like.

And there's nothing to stop you putting sugar on your kids' All-Bran when you get home. Or perhaps we just need to ban sugar as well. And The Great British Bake-Off...

2. Ann Coulter, queen of non-sequiturs and false equivalencies, says that if the names and addresses of gun owners are made public, as suggested by some Democrats, then it is only fair that the names and addresses of women who've had abortions should be made public too. There's idiocy all round here. Publicly naming gun owners could backfire, if you'll pardon the pun - burglars may target houses of people they know to be unarmed, or if an intruder wants to target the house of someone they know to be armed, they'll probably just rock up with a gun of their own. Guns should be registered**, but it isn't terribly productive to have the list easily available via, say, a Google search.

Equally, the details of women who have had abortions should not be available for all the world to see because, just like records for any other medical procedure, it's nobody's damn business.

3. Prince Charles has stuck his head over the parapet and said he is concerned for the future of the planet, especially as he has a grandchild on the way. That's great, Chuck. How about you start by telling your mother she probably doesn't need to drive a Range Rover. And you could always set an example by flying economy class when you travel internationally and insisting your family does likewise.

4. And while we're on the topic of royal ridiculousness, Prince Charles is apparently*** also concerned that the consequences of allowing a firstborn daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to ascend to the throne or allowing heirs to the throne to marry Roman Catholics haven't been properly thought through. Good grief. The fact that this is still being discussed in 2013 is beyond absurd. Republic, anyone?

5. And while we're on the topic of non-news invented by the Daily Mail, that excuse for a newspaper is still trying to create a controversy where none exists over Jack Whitehall's jokes on The Big Fat Quiz of the Year. Not content with reprinting the allegedly offensive gags and trying to imply that Gabby Logan and Richard Ayoade were uncomfortable with it all, the Mail published a bizarre article about the price of houses in the Whitehall family, ex-girlfriends of Jack Whitehall's father and other such stalker-like material. Did Jack Whitehall spurn the advances of someone in the Dacre family?

6. And speaking of pearl-clutchers, there has been a predictably hysterical reaction to an excellent article about paedophilia in the Guardian by Jon Henley. The charge of poor reading comprehension was led by ex-MP Louise Mensch who started a Twitter storm over it all. Except the article doesn't actually condone paedophilia or say it's acceptable. Henley has instead offered a balanced, even-handed account of how there is still much disagreement among experts on paedophilia, its definition and its consequences - and why understanding paedophilia is important when finding ways to protect children. Read it here and judge for yourself.

7. I've received a press release for wedding chests. Wedding chests that cost £2,600, to be precise. The press release, spruiking on behalf of Tom Aylwyn, claims this is a modern take on the wedding chests of old. Except it's not. It's still a box in which to put housewifely stuff. This seems a bit insane if you've already moved in together. And even if you haven't shacked up, surely you'd rather spend £2,600 on useful stuff for the house rather than a goddamn box.

Here is one of the chests. You can't even sit on it without getting a weird pattern on your bum...

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* Despite this idiocy, I'd prefer Andy Burnham to be Health Secretary instead of Jeremy Hunt. Yes, Jeremy Hunt really is that unsuitable for the job. Or for Parliament.

** Yes, I know criminals will always get their hands on guns, but that is not actually a reason to give up on registration.

*** This is according to "friends" of Prince Charles who told the Daily Mail. So it could be a total load of bollocks. But my point still stands that such discussions should have ended some time in the 16th Century.

Happy new year! The first world of stupid for 2013!

2013 is here and the stupidity is showing no signs of abating. Here are a few examples of early idiocy for the new year...

1. Kay Burley, who is inexplicably still employed by Sky News, plumbed new depths in moronic journalism the other day when interviewing a doctor about Britain's baby boom. She could have asked intelligent questions about the social and economic implications of all these new people, she could have asked if the country's health services can cope with it all, she could have referenced an inquiry into unplanned pregnancy that has been largely ignored by the mainstream media. Instead, she asked whether Fifty Shades Of Grey was responsible.

2. The Daily Mail got off to a flying start with the first front page of the year by manufacturing outrage at Channel 4's The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, a new year's eve programme featuring James Corden, Jack Whitehall and Jimmy Carr. Not only did the comedians, all of whom are over the age of 18, drink actual alcohol on telly but they made "offensive" jokes about the likes of the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Usain Bolt and Barack Obama, according to The Daily Mail. Anyone who expected this trio to make witty puns about bunny rabbits and spend the programme in quiet prayer and reflection is too stupid to have a TV licence.

The jokes were made "seconds after the watershed". Er, yes, so that would mean they were broadcast after the watershed, when rude jokes can be broadcast. The Mail then reprinted all the offending jokes, just in case we needed to check how hard our pearls needed to be clutched.

3. The Telegraph has been a little bit more restrained in being outraged at The Big Fat Quiz of the Year, but in their article today, describing it all as "vulgar", they have helpfully told us when Channel 4 will be repeating the programme. Just in case we didn't catch the jokes being reprinted in the Mail and we need to see it for ourselves to check how hard our pearls need to be clutched.

4. In the United Arab Emirates, a group of labourers have been taken on a dinner cruise and given phone credit recharge cards as an expression of appreciation for their hard work. This would be in lieu of them being paid a proper living wage so they could not only send money home but be more economically active within the UAE, living in accommodation with a modicum of privacy, being able to bring wives and families over to live with them in the UAE and having any real rights...

5. This seems to be a thing in America but it might catch on elsewhere - ultrasound parties! That's right, folks. Pregnant women not content with posting ultrasound pics on Facebook can now book a technician with a sonogram machine to make a home visit so everyone can gather around and look at fuzzy grey foetal images. "Hey, friends! Come on over and see my reproductive organs!"

This is not about being prolife or prochoice. This is about being pro-privacy and anti-ridiculous.

I am filing this one under the category of "If I am ever pregnant and you catch me doing this, please throw a glass of cold water in my face...".