The Daily Mail vs The Gays...vs Cancer

I suppose in some ways I need to thank the Daily Mail. Occasionally, living in my cosy liberal bubble surrounded by people who aren't constantly-seething, hate-filled, evil morons, I sometimes think we've progressed much further than we have in reality. So it's important that occasionally I'm reminded that we still have a long way to go.


In Outrage as Tesco backs gay festival... but drops support for cancer charity event, the Mail gives us a curious glimpse into the conservative mindset. Here's the gist of the story;

Tesco has triggered outrage by ending its support for the Cancer Research ‘Race for Life’ while deciding to sponsor Britain’s largest gay festival.

Some religious commentators and groups have condemned the decision and are calling for a boycott of the supermarket chain.

Suddenly, it's time to pick a side. Which side are you on, cancer or gays? NO, YOU CAN'T CHOOSE BOTH. Tesco has made two seemingly unrelated decisions here, but the Mail is convinced that Tesco have really decided they love gays more than they want to fight cancer. Maybe that's true, maybe the gay demographic spends more than the stricken-with-cancer demographic, I don't know, I'm not in marketing.


But what is the Mail really angry about here? They're not actually angry about Tesco dropping support for Race For Life, because that happened in September, and nobody, least of all the Mail (as far as I can tell), gave a shit. Y'know, because it was just another big company making another marketing decision based on its usual set of flipcharts and whatnot. Race For Life will continue, they're looking for other sponsors, it's probably all going to be fine. You can stand down.


What the Mail are actually angry about is the gays. Mail readers don't spend their hard-earned law-abiding taxpayer two-parent family money on Tesco's Finest Yorkshire Pudding ready meals, for that money to go towards helping The Gays have a street party! The Mail helpfully illustrates how outrageous this is with an entirely representative picture of five buff dudes in sparkly red underpants.


Let's get one thing clear here; the amount of money Tesco is spending on sponsoring Pride is tiny. Toward the end of the the article, we find out that it's a mere £30k, which for a company of Tesco's size is the equivalent of listlessly tossing a White Company button at a toll both like it ain't no thang. It's a mere fraction of the £800k Pride costs to run. This would suggest that this decision is a small-scale one unrelated to the dropping of Race For Life, except in the fevered imaginations of Mail hacks. So what is the actual problem here?


Well, I don't know about you, but when I want a balanced, reasoned reflection on corporate sponsorship choices and homosexuality, I head straight for the Catholic blogosphere!

Francis Phillips, a commentator at The Catholic Herald, condemned the shift, saying: ‘Tesco is a supermarket. 

The kind of searing insight only a life dedicated to solemn religious study can bring, there. But wait! It continues!

Its remit has been to sell good-quality food and other items at very reasonable prices, and in this it has been hugely successful. 

Why has it now aligned itself with an aggressive political organisation such as Pride London?

‘Why has it given up its sponsorship of Cancer Research? Or at least…why hasn’t it taken up with another mainstream charity such as the British Legion or Age UK? 

The next person it quotes is from 'Anglican Mainstream'. Why, it's almost as if this story has been lifted wholesale from Phillips' blog! It turns out the Anglican Mainstream may not be as cuddly and mainstream as they sound;

He wrote: ‘For Tesco to sponsor a tiny homosexual minority – according to the Office for National Statistics, that amounts to little more than 1 per cent of the population – will be showing the utmost contempt for a large proportion of British society that still adheres, more or less, to the morality and values of the Ten Commandments.’ 

Seems a rather baffling stance to me. I'm not gay, but I'm really quite fine with this. Were people who didn't have cancer being discriminated against when Tesco was sponsoring cancer research? I didn't realise I was supposed to be upset when people who aren't me are acknowledged in some small way. Still, cute of this guy to imagine that British society still adheres to the Ten Commandments. I would love to see him go out on the streets of a major city of a Friday night and ask people what the Ten Commandments are, in full. I guarantee that most of them would do better listing football teams' starting line-ups. "Something about an ass? Covering an ass? Don't do that?".

Next, we are told that homosexuality is one of a number of unnamed "dubious fringe political movements". I guess we need to get rid of these dubious political movements and replace them with minority religions instead, huh? To get an idea of the extent of quite how fucked-up this article is, one quote is - and I'm not making this up - introduced thusly; "Catholic campaign website Protect the Pope said..."


Protect The Pope! Excuse me while I sick up my fucking soul for a second. So what do Tesco say?

Tesco said it was in talks with the charity to support its work in other ways and would encourage staff to continue taking part in the Race for Life.

A spokesman said the decision to drop its support ‘is not connected to our £30,000 sponsorship for Pride, which is one of hundreds of community and charitable events that we will be supporting next year’.

You...bastards. Of all the things Tesco has ever done, sponsoring this inclusive street party which aims to foster tolerance and understanding of homosexuality is easily...oh, wait, it doesn't even register, does it? As much as the Mail tries to feign mass outrage here, all it can provide is quotes from wacky Catholic bloggers. Of course, their myopic presentation of the story as TESCO WANTS GAY PEOPLE TO DANCE ON CANCER PATIENTS' GRAVES does manage to elicit some choice wingnuttery in the comments. At the time of writing, the top-rated comment is an unhinged screed about how gays should just bloody well keep quiet and act a bit more flipping STRAIGHT, from a person who calls themselves "Free Britain from the unelected EU dictators in Brussels". This is your market, Daily Mail writers! I hope you're happy.

Ooh, just received an emailed addendum to The Gay Agenda. If anyone wants me, I'll be at Tesco's....
DISCLAIMER: This blog post was not sponsored by or endorsed by Tesco. But if anyone from their marketing department is reading, I am currently too skint to afford Modern Warfare 3...

On Charlie Wolf, the death penalty, and loss-leading bananas

I suppose the combination of the Daily Mail and a former TalkSPORT host who blazed a trail for Jon Gaunt to follow was never going to be quite perfectly tuned to my taste. Even so, I was taken aback to discover quite how often the "American broadcaster currently living in the UK" Charlie Wolf managed to make me splutter bewildered obscenities at my screen in his jaw-dropping piece on Troy Davis' execution last night by the state of Georgia (direct Mail link).

Wolf begins by painting a surprisingly quaint picture of the scene of the execution which I won't quote in depth; peaceful, gentle, humane. Lovely in all aspects really, with only the minor niggle of a man being slowly killed by the state having to be glossed over. "Putting down the family dog would have been a lot worse", claims Wolf, before embarking on one of those sentences you have to read numerous times, from different angles, possibly getting a trained professional to confirm that you just saw it;

Far from an execution, this was more like state-ordered euthanasia.

So...an execution, then? I'm not sure how something can be 'far from' being the thing that it is, but then I guess that's why I don't get paid the big bucks to write for the Daily Mail. It takes a special breed of...well, something. I kind of wonder why he stopped at 'euthanasia' in his brazen attempt to cutesify the fact though. Why not call it 'judge-encouraged natural causes'? Or 'state-nudged endless sleepytime'? I worry that some of these writers lack ambition.

Wolf though, sensing his moment, is in the ascendancy at this point. Other writers might consider pacing out the crass statements at this point to conserve energy, but Wolf boldly goes for the jugular and piles stupid on top of stupid in a wobbling Jenga tower of madness;

The average person going into any Accident and Emergency department would have had a more painful experience than those put to death as doctors jab, prod and shock people in an effort to keep them alive.

The key distinction, fans of subtlety may note, between going into A&E and being executed is that one is trying to keep you alive, and the other is trying to kill you. Some people might consider this difference big enough to make void such a comparison, but perhaps I'm missing the bigger picture. This sets Wolf off on an entirely pointless riff about how totally not-painful lethal injection is compared to having your heart restarted after a major coronary or something, as if opponents of capital punishment are only bothered about the pain of the subject in the brief moments of the act itself. Baffling non-arguments come thick and fast here; Iran has more painful executions! The Chinese kill people who haven't even killed people! Something about Guy Fawkes!

Having seen the level on which Wolf's arguments operate thus far, it's frankly terrifying to see him begin his next bewitchingly cock-eyed point with the phrase 'In simplistic terms...', but he does. Oh God, he does. Explaining how having the death penalty proves that a society 'values the lives of its citizenry' (no, really), Wolf scrawls the following with his very bestest crayons;

In simplistic terms think of it like one of those self-service scales in Tesco.

If I push the illuminated button for 'bananas' and the little sticky tag comes out I expect it to fall in a certain price range.

Too much and I don't buy -- but also, if too little, just pennies, I am suspicious too. Why so cheap? What's wrong here?

They mustn't be that good if they are worth so little.

Not having the death penalty, yeah, is like selling surprisingly cheap bananas. Right? Why would anyone eat cheap bananas? It seems obvious now he's said it. But you would never have thought of this analogy, would you? That's the difference between normal, human folk like you, and The Professional Writer. They're missing a trick not paywalling this stuff.

After a brief detour to the glittering outskirts of reality, Wolf returns to the Tesco metaphor he's obviously so proud of;

Getting back to the Great Tesco Scales of life... If I was to put the lives of Officer McPhail, shot in cold blood; James Byrd, dragged to a grizzly death; or the Petit girls and their mom, raped and killed, what is the price that would come up? How much would their lives be worth?

In this country, how much is the life of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman from Soham worth?

Seemingly for Wolf, the answer is 'exactly the same amount as their killers'. Victim dies, the killer dies. Balance has been restored! It's so simple, it's almost childish! Yes...almost.

For me, the reality is that the loss of a loved one is so huge that it can't be balanced out by removing someone else from the face of the earth in retribution. For Wolf, the value of your life can plunge quickly to nothing if you commit a serious enough crime. I can understand 'an eye for an eye' in principle at least. I just can't help feeling it does little other than increase the total amount of suffering. Not just killers, but their families. And people who find the spectacle of executing citizens on ceremony a tad distasteful. Anyway,

What is the life of James Bulger worth (what little there was; he was tortured and murdered at the age of two)?

Well, it's worth the lives of two other children (Thompson and Venables), apparently. This is how Wolf's macabre scales work. It's basic science, stupid!

No Daily Mail article would be complete without a wild flail at The Left, and sure enough Wolf gets a picture of Bianca Jagger up on his dartboard and takes aim;

But I don't see any enlightenment --or indeed consistency-- on the left. The only consistency is the fact that the liberal intellectual elite is secularist, and puts no stock or sacredness in the value of life.

They do not protect the lives of the unborn; euthanasia (and not just for the terminally ill) is toted as an ideal over palliative care; and in the case of heinous crimes they opt to protect the lives of the murderers over the victims.

Yes! You can cross that one off on your Tired Argument Bingo card and collect your prize; a gnawing sense of fruitless despair! What Wolf is arguing here is that the Left is mad for only giving a shit about the living, when foetuses should clearly be prioritised over those of us who are here (be it people convicted of a crime*, or women who don't want to have children). Wolf impressively manages to find time in that breathless run-through of a stock argument to cram in a hilarious bullshit strawman about how the Left approve of euthanasia for people who aren't terminally ill, and implies that they think it should be instead of palliative care instead of as a last-ditch alternative when palliative care isn't providing a tolerable quality of life. Quite a skill.

[*Let's not forget here that the reason this case has become so high-profile is because there's a widespread belief that Davis is the victim of a miscarriage of justice and may indeed be innocent. While I personally oppose capital punishment in all circumstances, his potential innocence is the reason this case is being discussed].

The abolition of a death penalty here is not the sign of some form of modern day enlightenment but in fact is just the opposite.

If anything it is a sign of moral weakness, of a society that is so afraid of its own barbarity that it cannot grasp the difference (or distinguish) between justice and revenge.

See? Liberals just don't get it! It's about justice! A word I've just appropriated and defined around my existing beliefs! Suck it! Stop being so morally weak and let the state have the ultimate power to kill people! What exactly is so unenlightened about leaving a man strapped to a gurney while he waits for lawyers to finish negotiating over whether he lives or dies?

Conveniently, the abolition of the death penalty in the UK was the fault of people Wolf already hates, which is a bonus. It was 'the intellectual liberal classes of Oxford and Cambridge in the sixties that hijacked the Left', in case you were wondering. Anyway, knowing the value of a strong finish, Wolf waits til a couple of paragraphs from the end before solving the tricky 'does the death penalty deter murder?' argument once and for all, with the razor-sharp clarity of a man who hasn't really thought about it for more than a single fucking second;

The deterrent effects of the death penalty in the United States are incontrovertible.

One only has to look at studies and statistics concerning murderers who have been let out to kill again to realise that the death penalty does work as a deterrent – if not for others, at least for the killer in question.

At this point I could go round digging for statistics about how many murders there are in the US, but I'd have more success walking out into the main road and trying to stop speeding lorries with my penis than I would trying to argue with this guy. It would probably be less painful, too. I'm not sure he even understands what the word 'deterrent' means. If he does, he's hiding it deep under layers of his own bluster here.

In conclusion, I could really have quoted more of this, to be honest. Part of me wonders why I bothered to share something this painfully boneheaded with you all. But then I thought, hey, an eye for an eye. If I have to suffer, I don't see why you lot shouldn't too. It's balance. Karma. And, er, something about banana prices.

Melanie Phillips and "normal sexual behaviour" vs the gay McCarthyites

Reading Melanie Phillips' columns holds a weird kind of fascination for me. Some people just had to watch '2 Girls 1 Cup', others graphic videos of beheadings or extreme porn. I, sadly, have the same morbid curiosity towards Melanie Phillips. I shouldn't read her pieces, I know I shouldn't. It's bad for me. No good can come of it. And yet, I can't tear myself away...

The thing that fascinates me is not so much what she talks about, as her tone. She has this dramatic, apocalyptic tone to everything she writes. The words drip with melodrama. Just look at the very title of today's: Yes, gays have often been the victims of prejudice. But they now risk becoming the new McCarthyites. Gays! The new McCarthyites!

Here’s a question ­shortly coming to an examination ­paper near you. What have mathematics, geography or science to do with homosexuality?

Nothing at all, you say? Zero marks for you, then.

For, mad as this may seem, schoolchildren are to be bombarded with homosexual references in maths, geography and ­science lessons as part of a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda.

The Mail has gone big on the story about terrifyingly gay maths and science lessons. I don't want to digress too much here, go read Forty Shades Of Grey for an analysis of the scaremongering bollocks involved. Again, the thing that strikes me is just the palpable fury and drama with which she writes. There aren't simply gay references in these lesson plans; kids are to be "bombarded" with them. And it's not to encourage acceptance of homosexuality, it's "a Government-backed drive to promote the gay agenda". Ah yes, the "gay agenda". No-one really knows what this is, (who can say for sure what goes on in the crazed minds of The Gays?), but what we do know is that involves brainwashing our kids.

And yes, she does actually say "brainwash":

Alas, this gay curriculum is no laughing matter. Absurd as it sounds, this is but the latest attempt to brainwash children with propaganda under the ­camouflage of ­education. It is an abuse of childhood.

The difficulty in blogging about Phillips is that her sheer absurdity makes her difficult to satirise. How can you top the claim that mentioning gay people in passing in a textbook question equates to "an abuse of childhood"? Next, we come to perhaps the most vile, hate-filled sentence in the piece:

And it’s all part of the ruthless campaign by the gay rights lobby to destroy the very ­concept of normal sexual behaviour.

That's a sentence absolutely dripping with contempt. The "gay rights lobby" isn't about gay rights, it's about "destroy[ing] the very ­concept of normal sexual behaviour". Destroying it. They want to destroy everything you hold dear. Hey, you know that sex you heterosexuals are having? That's normal! It doesn't matter if you're dressing up as Luke and Princess Leia and are shoving toy lightsabres up each other...it's all NORMAL because one of you is a dude and the other one is a chick. Go for it. I mean, as long as you're married. But still, even if you're not, it's normal for men and women to fuck, right? Two guys though? What's that all about? Two women? The world's gone mad!

Not so long ago, an epic political battle raged over teaching children that ­homosexuality was normal. The fight over Section 28, as it became known, resulted in the repeal of the legal requirement on schools not to promote homosexuality.

As the old joke has it, what was once impermissible first becomes tolerated and then becomes mandatory.

That last line is just baffling, isn't it? Can anyone please tell me when it's going to become mandatory? I don't remember being consulted. I'd just like some notice of when The Gay Lobby are going to brutally force me to change my sexuality as part of their Agenda.

The rest of the column is shot through with myopia and misrepresentation.

The bed and breakfast hoteliers Peter and Hazelmary Bull — who were recently sued for turning away two homosexuals who wished to share a bedroom — were but the latest religious believers to fall foul of the gay inquisition merely for upholding ­Christian values.

They weren't merely upholding Christian values. They turned away a couple in a civil partnership because they disapproved of their sexuality, contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law. It's tales like that which are exactly why there still has to be a gay rights lobby. Let's hope that one day we can all be grown-up enough to treat each other equally. Until then, unfortunately we're going to have to use the law to enforce, y'know, basic fairness and human decency.

It seems that just about everything in Britain is now run according to the gay agenda.
For, in addition to the requirement for gay-friendly hotels, gay adoption and gay mathematics, now comes, apparently, gay drugs policy.

Last week, the Government announced the appointment of some new ­members to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, who included a GP by the name of Hans-Christian Raabe.

Here, Phillips launches into a perplexing rant about the appointment of Dr Raabe. You would think that his actual appointment, in spite of his homophobic views, would be evidence that perhaps not everything is "run according to the gay agenda". But no. The fact that people have complained proves that it is. Presumably, then, by the same token, the fact that Phillips is complaining about gay rights proves that the country is in the vice-like grip of the authoritarian Melanie Phillips lobby. Everything is run according to the Melanie Phillips agenda!

It was the BBC’s Home Editor Mark ­Easton who led the charge. On his BBC News blog, he announced that Dr Raabe’s views on homosexuality were causing such fury among (anonymous) members of the Advisory Council that at least one member was threatening to step down.

Well may you rub your eyes at that. Just what have his views on homosexuality got to do with illegal drugs? Well, according to Easton, more than one member of the ­council is gay or lesbian.

How extraordinary. Just imagine if the boot were on the other foot and Dr Raabe had refused to serve on the drugs council because some of its ­members were gay. He would be out on his ear within the hour.

At the end there, you get a little hint of the reasons for Phillips' beliefs. In conflict with all available evidence, she seems to believe that being gay is a belief, an opinion, a lifestyle. Refusing to work with someone because you believe they have virulently anti-gay beliefs is, to her, the same as refusing because they are gay. Phillips simply cannot see a difference here. And, of course, she singles out a fairly straightforward piece of reportage and presents it as a clarion call from Mark Easton. Because, y'know, he's from the BBC. You know what they're like.

The curious thing about it all is Phillips' claims about tolerance for free speech. She makes a big fuss about various cases where she believes people have been unfairly persecuted for expressing sincerely held, anti-gay, beliefs. Freedom of speech is important, she argues. And yet, the mere idea of mentioning gay people in a textbook is something that must be opposed, stopped, cried out against. Where's the freedom of speech for that? It doesn't matter. That is brainwashing our kids, destroying our ideas of "normal sexual behaviour", and thus it must be stopped.

Phillips finishes off by describing the "crazy, upside-down world of the equality agenda", and expressing fear of the "seemingly all-­powerful gay rights lobby". If there's one thing Melanie Phillips can never be accused of, it's understatement.

BREAKING: Melanie Phillips not impressed with the Left, feminism

The thing that always strikes me when I read the extended word-vomits that Melanie Phillips calls her newspaper columns, is that they do actually sort of make sense, as long as you buy into one or two comically absurd notions about her opponents.

First, a summary. Over the past couple of weeks, debate has raged on the left about Julian Assange and Wikileaks. It's been interesting to follow, and a lot of very sensible (and some stupid) things have been said. One major issue that has caused some arguing has been people's reactions to the rape charges levelled against Assange. The timing of the arrest so close to a major bout of embarrassment-causing by Wikileaks has caused some to be suspicious that the charges were not genuine, and this has not been helped by a torrent of misinformation about the nature of the charges, ranging from the bizarre "it was sex by surprise!" to the idea that a condom simply broke. As a result of this confusion, and in some cases no small element of political bias, some on the left were perhaps rather too quick to insist on Assange's innocence. In the worst cases, this has led to some tremendously ugly bashing of the women concerned, which has understandably caused some of us to feel rather uncomfortable. This Kate Harding post makes a pretty good fist of explaining why it's okay to support Wikileaks and still take the rape allegations seriously without resorting to slinging mud at the women making the claims. Above anything else, regardless of the facts of this case, it's important that women are not discouraged from reporting incidents of rape and sexual assault, and reactions like this (which have come from both the left and right - indeed the Mail itself was the source of much of the smearing of the women concerned), are not helpful in the bigger picture.

So, serious issues, big things at stake, topics worthy of grown-up debate and discussion, right? Enter Melanie Phillips [I apologise for any disturbing images that phrase may have given you]. Phillips is reacting to this with absolute glee. Arguments on the left of politics are not a sign of adult discourse, or a reflection of genuine disagreements about real issues. They're just funny. Funny, and a sign of wavering moral confusion. "...our most sanctimonious campaigners have managed to hoist themselves simultaneously on not just one, but multiple politically correct petards", she reports.

Phillips rampages through this tale with unconcealed joy. It involves Sweden! Liberals like Sweden! Isn't that terribly funny? What a hilarious mess! She gets to have a go at 'luvvies', and most joyously of all for her, the Guardian. At no stage in the piece does Phillips particularly concern herself with stating her own beliefs, either about Wikileaks, about Assange or the allegations. Pointing and mocking is fine enough.

What confuses Phillips the most though, and its a theme that courses through her writing, is nuance. Melanie Phillips isn't really about nuance. It's not something she does, or feels she needs to do. Like her fellow columnist Peter Hitchens, everything is simple. Things A and B are right and moral. Things X and Y are wrong and disgusting. Person 1 is dead wrong. Person 2 is dead right. Phillips never seems to be able to understand why other people cannot instantly uncover the rights and wrongs of a situation in the way she can. There are a couple of examples of the binary way she views the world in this piece, and she asserts the same central canard twice. The first is here:

For the whole world-view of the Left rests upon its iron-clad conviction that America is a global conspiracy of evil from which all bad things ultimately emanate.

...and repeated in more depth further on:

To understand why there is such an ear-splitting screeching of brakes from The Guardian, it is necessary to consider the mind-bending contradictions of what passes for thinking on the Left.

For it believes certain things as articles of faith which cannot be denied. One is that America is a force for bad in the world and so can never be anything other than guilty. Another is that all men are potential rapists, and so can never be anything other than guilty.

Now, that's an absurd caricature of liberal thinking. It's a fairly common view on the right that the left HATES America, but it's a bafflingly simplistic depiction of it. A lot of time is spent criticising the US, but that's a reflection of two things; 1) the power which the US has, and 2) its democratic nature. We spend a lot time shouting about the US because in many ways it's the biggest hope for worldwide positive change. The direction of US politics can be changed by political action, if we can demonstrate the will. We criticise the US harshly at times because we recognise that if we want any kind of global political change, the US is always going to be a key player, and can be influenced in a way that other nations can't. It's kind of the friend we like to criticise constructively because we know what its capable of achieving.

The other 'article of faith', that the left believes that all men can never not be guilty of rape, is a cartoonish simplification of a viewpoint which isn't held by a majority of feminists, let alone leftist liberals. But you get the feeling Melanie Phillips actually unwaveringly believes that this is the stark, Manichean way liberals think. She's projecting her own binary way of thinking onto her opponents, seeing them as a mere mirror image of herself and unable to ever accept that maybe things are just a little less neat than they appear.

Of course, what Phillips is utterly unable to provide are any quotes to support her assertions that we all passionately hate the US and all assume men are guilty. I've read a lot of blogs and articles from various sides of this debate, and I've yet to come across a single feminist who has stated that they assume Assange's guilt; the vast majority have been at pains to point out that, at this stage, we simply cannot know. It's simply about taking serious allegations seriously, and affording the alleged victims the chance to put their case before the courts without simply dismissing the charges out of hand because the timing looks dodgy or because Wikileaks is something we may support. For all the fighting and debate that's gone on, ultimately there's no contradiction to be found when it comes to reconciling the two issues; Wikileaks can be a good thing whether or not Assange personally is a good man. We can defend Wikileaks' right to disclose documents that can inform debate without needing to assume anything about the truth of the personal allegations made against him.

Word games with Littlejohn

Sometimes I almost admire Richard Littlejohn. Not for his principled opinions, his witty prose, or his charm, none of which exist, but for his ability to move almost seamlessly from any given starting point into one of the subjects he has a stock rant prepared for. You can imagine this as a round on a mediocre Radio 4 quiz game, where contestants are challenged to get from topic A to topic Z in as few words as possible. I think Littlejohn would be good at this. Ask him who he thinks should be in the Ashes squad and he could be bending your ear about New Labour's nightmarish refuse collection system in no time. Ask him where he's going on his holidays this summer and before you know it you'll be slowly losing track of time as he makes what he imagines to be hilarious remarks about gyspies tarmacing driveways and how crazy it is that you can't call a spade a spade any more.

In today's Who wants to be a billionaire? Brits sadly lacking in the 40 super-rich giving away fortunes, Littlejohn manages to deftly turn the feelgood story about some of the world's richest billionaires pledging huge sums to charity into a launching pad for rants about socialism, the BBC and something about sex-change operations.

Littlejohn claims that "Both the BBC and the NHS have brought tremendous benefits", yet he doesn't seem to grasp the point of the BBC and why we have state-funded broadcasting. In his next paragraph he says:

Take the recent squabble over the future of BBC Radio 6, an obscure music channel beloved of a vociferous minority and financed from the licence fee.

Why should the common people be forced to pay for affluent pop stars like Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker to sit in a studio playing their favourite records on the wireless?

The whole point of tax and non-commercial broadcasting is that it doesn't just fund the things you as an individual want. Sometimes your tax money goes to fund hospitals treating sick children, even though they're not your kids! Imagine! The BBC is put in between a rock and a hard place; broadcast things with low ratings and it's all "no-one watches that shit, what a waste of money!". Broadcast populist ratings-chasing nonsense and they're criticising for copying ITV and Channel 4. You can't say you think the BBC does good things one minute and then criticise something like 6 Music, which is exactly the sort of thing the BBC is for. It provides something lots people want, but that would struggle to exist in the same form on a commercial station.

Littlejohn then goes on a rant about US satellite radio and how diverse it is, but the US is a wildly different beast to the UK. 6 Music existed because commercial radio wasn't providing it, as anyone with the misfortune to sit through more than an hour of Xfm's All Kasabian, All The Time playlist will be able to tell you.

Similarly, why should taxpayers also have to fork out for tattoo removal, breast enlargement, fertility treatment and sex-change operations on the National Health Service?

Yes, Richard, because those things are all the same, right? The attitude of some people towards sex-change operations in particular baffles me. It's treated like it's some kind of whimsical choice, like there are hundreds of people waking up thinking "Yeah, I fancy switching gender today!", getting their NHS doctor on the speed dial and wasting a few grand of taxpayer's money for shits and giggles. Does Littlejohn really think it's not a serious medical condition? Does he think that people are making the choice to put themselves through the incredible social stigma attached to a sex change operation in the same way they decide what toppings to get on their pizza? Sadly, I suspect he does, because if you accept that there are serious health issues involved then I don't see how you can treat it in the same way as someone getting rid of an embarrassingly misspelled tattoo they got when they were pissed.

The philanthropists who founded hospitals before the advent of the NHS would never have donated their hard-earned if they thought it was going to be frittered away on such fripperies.

Would they? How can you possibly say that? And how can you not understand that, even if that were true, society's attitudes change over time as our understanding grows?

Littlejohn goes on to complain about taxes on high earners. Might anyone care to speculate as to why? Not that I'm suggesting for a moment that Littlejohn's dazzling columns don't earn every last penny of his upper-six-figure salary! He argues that if we just let the hard-working rich keep more of their money instead of bloody taxing them, they might probably give all their money to us! Even though much of the US philanthrophy he's talking about is going to developing countries rather than getting his bins emptied. I suspect that if British billionaires were beaming on the front of the papers about all the money they've given to AIDS orphans in Africa, he'd be moaning that they weren't doing enough here.

Anyway, I hereby offer this advice to Littlejohn; it's okay if you just want to go on a rant about the BBC, or lefty Islington liberals, or immigration, or how PC has gone mad except you can't say 'mad' any more because of PC gone mad. No-one is coming to you as a serious news source, you're a polemicist. So spare us the sight of you trying gamely to tie your stock rants half-arsedly to a prominent current news story. No-one really cares, and you could use the paragraphs you've saved to squeeze in another mention of what the gays are up to these days.

The Ethnics are coming!

This is the actual front page of the real Daily Express today:



No, really. The Express have actually gone with ONE IN 5 BRITONS WILL BE ETHNICS as their headline. On a day when most papers are reporting pointless fluff like the unprecedented NHS cuts, the Express has gone for the real big story, the one about how there's gonna be loads of blacks and Asians living here one day.

First of all, the word "ethnics". It's my genuine belief/hope that in 10 or 15 years this will become a taboo racial slur. "Ethnic" simply means of or pertaining to a race. It doesn't really make sense on its own; you can be "ethnic Chinese" or you can be an "ethnic minority", but this reference to races other than your own as "ethnics" is a troubling usage of the word that has crept into the language recently and still, incredibly, remains used frequently by the mainstream media (or at least it does in the Express). It's a shortening of "ethnic minority" that takes all the meaning away and instead creates this divisive term; there's us, the white British on the one hand, and then there's those ethnics. It's a brutal-sounding word, there's something nasty about the way it sounds and I've heard it used by people who would probably have once said "darkies" in its place when looking for a catch-all description for non-whites.

It's a very clear message from the Express here; the rise in the number of "ethnics" is something that should worry us. Last night, when I first saw this story, the online version used a fairly mundane picture of a British passport. At some point between last night and this morning, this was switched for a more incendiary picture of two veiled Muslim women, as if 1 in 5 Brits will be niqab-wearing Muslims by the date not mentioned in the headline.

The story itself is just some figures projecting that people from an ethnicity other than "white British" on the Census will form 20% of the population in 40 years' time. I don't know if these stats are accurate, but to be honest it's not that important. Let's assume that's true. What's important is the tone and the placement of this story, and that shocking, pisspoor headline. This is a dry population prediction spun into something more damaging, the sort of story people will be using to demand we close our borders and keep the "ethnics" out, lest we lose our nebulous sense of identity. An identity which, one can assume, is wholly derived from our skin colour.

So, is it really a problem? What does it matter that in 40 years, British people won't just be white? It's not as if they are now, unless you subscribe to the BNP's "just because a dog is born in a stable doesn't make it a horse" maxim. Britain has a long and proud tradition of making people of other races who settle here feel British. You can't expect everything to remain the same, but by and large immigrants that settle here speak English and immerse themselves in the British culture. They help shape it, but that's natural; all cultures evolve.

When I read this story, I was reminded of a quote that stuck with me from a couple of months ago. Spurs defender Benoit Assou-Ekotto gave an interview to the Guardian about how he feels about football, which was most notable for the fact that he considers it a job above anything, rather than a passion. But also interesting was his perspective on racial integration; as a French-born player with a French mother who chose to play for his father's native Cameroon, he claims to feel no real affinity for France:

"...the country does not want us to be part of this new France. So we identify ourselves more with our roots. Me playing for Cameroon was a natural and normal thing. I have no feeling for the France national team; it just doesn't exist. When people ask of my generation in France, 'Where are you from?', they will reply Morocco, Algeria, Cameroon or wherever. But what has amazed me in England is that when I ask the same question of people like Lennon and Defoe, they'll say: 'I'm English.' That's one of the things that I love about life here."

And that, for the most part, is how it is. Personally, I think that's something we can be proud of. We have ethnic minorities who were born here and raised in this culture. Mostly, they identify as British or English, because that's what they are. Why should they be treated as if they're simply "ethnics"? Well, because the Express, frankly, is either suspicious and fearful of people who aren't white British, or thinks its readers are and panders to them. Remember, this isn't about immigration, it's not about illegal immigrants or "bogus" asylum seekers or alien cultures; this is a straightforward division the Express is highlighting between whites on the one hand and everyone else on the other. The "ethnics" include second and third-generation "immigrants", people who were not only born here but whose parents were born here, and who are British in every meaningful sense. Oh, but they're not white. Now, I don't want to cry racism at this, but bloody hell folks, you're making it fucking difficult.

It's just so depressingly familiar; mundane predictions rendered in apocalyptic tones, quote from Sir Andrew Green, ramblings about Poles, picture of scary Muslims, we've seen the story a million times before in the Express and the Mail, either by Macer Hall or James Slack. But today, with that headline, the Express may just have surpassed itself for spite and nastiness.

The more things change...

Having taken a fairly lengthy sabbatical from writing this blog, and indeed reading the papers, for a while, I thought I'd dive back in this week and have a look at what progress has been made in the world of journalism since the beginning of the year, while I've been sleeping and playing video games and trying not to read things that make me want to cave my own head in with a desk drawer. What I read all seems disturbingly, or maybe comfortingly, familiar.

Of course, it should be no surprise that Richard Littlejohn is still, for want of a better word, an arse. Today's column finds him predictably dancing a wee jig on Michael Foot's grave, calling him a coward and sneeringly referring to Foot's asthma as 'alleged asthma'. He follows this with a 'hilarious' imaginary conversation between two people from 'the real world', which concludes that real people in the real world don't give a toss about Lord Ashcroft's apparent £127m of avoided tax, and are instead more concerned about MANDELSON, BIG GAY PETER MANDELSON, LOOK OVER THERE AT WHAT LABOUR ARE DOING. Never being one to shy away from the important issues, Littlejohn then moves on to talking about how Ashley Cole's beard makes him look like a terrorist. No, really.

Elsewhere in the Mail we get reminded about the terrifying nature of our willies and front bottoms in yet another outraged article about the communist plot to ruden up our kids' fragile minds with dastardly sex education. The headline of this one describes the "Parents' anger" (plural), but it soon becomes apparent that the article hinges on literally one complaint by one mother about a sexy cartoon sex video the authorities sexily tried to sexify her 7-year-old daughter with. The parent, one Mrs Bullivant, sets herself up as an expert in psychology:

There is no educational or psychological benefit or need for children of this age to have full knowledge of what sexual intercourse actually entails

...which she may well be, for all I know. Still, the complaints of a single parent about a video which, according to the obligatory stapled-on official response at the end of the article, has been around for ten years, seem a somewhat flimsy basis for an entire story. Anyone would think the Mail was full of nannying conservative busybodies desperate to shield their kids from being educated about anything that might seem rude!

Still, at least the writer did attempt to disguise their agenda by tying it to a bit of factual information that, if you squint a bit, could almost be considered newsworthy. Not something that troubles writers at the somewhat lower-rent Daily Express, where I stumbled upon this curious piece about Anthea Turner by a writer named Elisa Roche. This piece is currently the fourth most important story on the Express' website, above the interest rate freeze, the Lord Ashcroft thing, and that boring story about the British child kidnapped in Pakistan. Anyway, this piece is one of the most bizarre I can remember reading. I urge you to read it in full (it's not very long), and when you've finished, tell me where the a) news, or b) comment is. It's essentially a potted biography of Anthea Turner's career which gives you the impression that she's no longer making as much money as she used to. This may not come as a surprise to you; it didn't to me, because I used to see her on the telly a lot, and now...not so much. It reads like a section from an Anthea Turner Wikipedia entry, written by someone with too much time on their hands and not deleted or tidied up yet because no-one bothered to read all the way through it.

What confuses me about this article isn't so much its absolutely staggering pointlessness (finding superfluous Daily Express articles is not a task that requires training and dedication, given that the paper loves to plug Desmond's OK! magazine by giving news space to fellating vapid celebrities), but the fact that it doesn't attempt to disguise its absolute absence of worth by orbiting loosely around a recent Turner-related news story. "But there are none!" I pretend to hear you cry! Well, quite. So why this? Did Roche wake up late, realise she had barely any time to file any copy, and then spin some kind of big celebrity wheel which told her to write some witless nonsense about Anthea fucking Turner? I mean, I know it's Friday (which is why I'm writing this rather than doing the work I get paid for), but seriously, have some standards! It's an unwritten law of journalism that you bloody well tack your hollow celebrity witterings onto some kind of nominally newsworthy happening that involves them, even if it's just a new picture of them on a red carpet or looking a bit fat. Elisa Roche, you have flouted these rules and left me dazed and confused. I don't know what to believe in any more.

Nor of course, does my old favourite Andrew Brown over in The Guardian, who in his guise as Chief Wet Blanket Of Spirituality has penned another inconclusive article about religion which is sort of sceptical but also sort of credulous. Brown's articles seem forever pitched at the sort of people that consider themselves agnostics or nice atheists, but who would really like some kind of interesting proof of god's existence to come out, if only so they could slightly impress their friends at a dinner party with a quasi-spiritual tale that begins "Well, actually, I'm an agnostic atheist but I did read an interesting piece in The Guardian the other day...". In this piece, Brown tells the tale of some religious folks who like to make cups of tea for god, only for him to mysteriously not drink it. The ever-sensitive Brown resists the urge to be mean about them, and instead concludes his piece by quoting someone quite mealy-mouthed saying something a bit enigmatic, from atop a particularly broad fence.

So, yeah, I'm back, and fuck-all has changed. The Daily Star, lost for headlines without a current reality TV series to run angry "It's a fix!" front pages about, settles for some bollocks about Madeleine McCann. The Sun, meanwhile, is a sucker for stories about how prisons are basically holiday camps, and therefore is particularly incensed that Jon Venables ate a burger (with chips, mind you) when he should be eating humble pie on a bed of soil.

Fearful Venables is being given 24-hour protection inside jail as he gorges on burgers and chips in his cell.

We can only hope and pray that it was a Tesco Value burger and not one of those more expensive lamb and mint burgers. A source with no apparent sense of self-awareness said;

"The level of protection he has is incredible. It's like he is some kind of celebrity."

Ah, sometimes the satire just writes itself.

In which I join a mischievous and heavily orchestrated internet campaign

Yeah, so pretty much everyone has joined in giving Jan Moir's spectactularly offensive Mail column, "Why there was nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death..." (now pathetically retitled "A strange, lonely and troubling death..." as if a more thoughtful headline somehow mitigates the swill within) a good kicking. Normally I try and avoid the subjects everyone else is doing, but in this case it's hard not to want to join the kickers.

It's hard to know where to start. Moir begins with a bit of pointless padding about other celebrity deaths (Heath Ledger and Jacko), and then starts talking about how the recently-deceased Gately couldn't really even sing. Now, I don't give a fuck about Boyzone; I've got a bunch of Six Organs Of Admittance and Chris Corsano records, and I listen to genres stoner doom metal entirely without irony (or drugs even). Heck, I've even got a surprising amount of Jandek albums which I had to grow a beard that I could stroke along to. I've made 26 records of my own which had a combined listenership that could safely fit on a single-decker bus, so to see these lucky chaps performing bland ballads and inexplicably getting showered with money and awards and the wet knickers of teenage girls has always been a bit depressing. All of that is irrelevant to Gately's death though, so to set the scene a supposedly serious column by joking that "he could barely carry a tune in a Louis Vuitton trunk", as Moir does, seems a bit crass somehow.

Still, that probably would have made for a better column than the one she launches into, which defiantly casts scorn on the coroner's verdict:

But, hang on a minute. Something is terribly wrong with the way this incident has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend, like a broken teacup in the rented cottage.

Actually, no-one called it a mishap. The official cause of death was pulmonary oedema, which is a dangerous accumulation of fluid in the lungs.

The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again.

As many people have pointed out, 'healthy' and fit men DO die in their sleep, for a variety of reasons. Although in this case it's a disingenuous argument; if he had a fluid build-up in his lungs then he didn't just die for no reason, and having a serious medical condition requires a particularly loose definition of the word 'healthy'. What's troubling about this is that Moir is just nudging and winking at the readers; the coroner and the family may believe one thing, but WE all know different, right, folks? We know what people like Gately get up to! This would be staggeringly heartless so soon after his death even if there were solid grounds for casting aspersions, but with an official explanation in place and nothing but assumptions in the opposing corner it's just pure vindictiveness.

After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards.

What was, Jan? And how did it relate to his death? Any evidence? Some kind of theory? ANYTHING?

Gately's family have always maintained that drugs were not involved in the singer's death, but it has just been revealed that he at least smoked cannabis on the night he died.

Nevertheless, his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family.

Yes, because a hereditary heart condition known to be present in his family is absolutely ludicrous, whereas cannabis = death is just pure, solid science you can take the bank. Where the column gets most outrageous is towards the end, where this tragic death is somehow co-opted into a rant about civil partnerships:

Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

Kevin McGee hanged himself. He wasn't in a civil partnership at the time. He had been battling drug addiction. There's genuinely no similarity between the two deaths other than that they were both gay, and that they'd been in the papers. This kind of dog-whistling, "see what happens when the gays try to get married" garbage is just so utterly foul that it's hard to imagine a paid newspaper columnist actually going through with writing it. But here, sadly, we are.

The reaction has been strong enough that Moir has put out a damage-limitation press release to try and make herself look vaguely human. It's not an apology, which I suppose is fair enough since she doesn't feel sorry and clearly meant every word she said. "Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately", she points out. I'm not in the gay community, and I'm certainly not in the Boyzone fan community; I'm just one of those crazy human beings who thinks that viciously raking over the largely imagined details of a tragic death, in public, before a man's even been buried, insulting his family and casting doubts on the integrity of the coroner, is kind of not really cricket. You may not be sure about the wisdom of civil partnerships, Jan Moir, but this is really not the angle to be criticising them from if you want to get any sympathy, even from people who thinkthat equality is somehow a bad idea. The response goes on, hilariously suggesting that her critics probably haven't read the massively widely-available online piece that got Tweeted around the globe, before compounding it with another torrent of burning stupid:

However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death.

It doesn't matter what it seems like to you, Jan. The facts don't care what you think. That's why we have coroners and inquests and police. There's a reason we don't write on death certificates "Fucked if I know...looks a bit dodgy though, he was one of them weed-smoking gay fellas...just put that down". It seemed 'unlikely' to me that a professional writer would think this column was a good idea, but hey, I'm revising my opinions in the light of new evidence! So, what was that you were saying about civil partnerships?

"In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages."

What happy-ever-after myth? Find me one person, one single living person in human history, who claimed, nay, even suggested, that civil partnerships would in all cases be a lifelong recipe for happiness. Just one. Were you asleep when we debated civil partnerships, Jan? Because I'd always assumed that the reason we did it was that homosexuals are just people, as complex and uncategorisable and multi-faceted as any others, imperfect just like you and me (well, perhapss not quite as imperfect as you). There was no expectation of a 100% success rate for gay marriages, just a simple recognition that some sort of basic fucking equality in the eyes of the law might be quite nice, an acknowledgement of the fact that gay people are not freaks to be marginalised and stereotyped and looked upon as a threat. Get with the fucking nineties, Jan!

"In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones."

Yeah, you're right. All these people who read your article, they don't really think it was nasty. They're all quite right-wing and intolerant usually, but on a Friday they like to let their hair down and pretend to be politically correct liberals for the lulz. It's how the kids roll these days! We don't feel anything! It's definitely not that journalists have been cossetted for years by the cosy world of printed media, reaching a largely sympathetic audience who can't really reply. It's definitely not that journalists like you are only now suddenly coming face-to-face with what reactions their columns genuinely provoke in real people in an age of instant communication. Just keep believing the problem is everyone else's and nothing to do with the bilious drivel you wrote, it'll all be fine!