Spot the difference time

Here's one of the entirely uninflammatory posters which was used by the Swiss campaign against minarets to encourage voters to preserve their chocolate-box architecture and had nothing to do with Islam or racism at all:



It seems that the not-at-all-racist BNP have for some reason adopted the poster design for themselves. I'm not sure why they would want to have anything to do with a nice campaign about preserving architectural standards which isn't anything to do with racism or hatred of minorities, but there you go. Anyway, here's their effort:



Strange how they were so quick and so keen to adopt the imagery, if the anti-minaret campaign was nothing to do with racism or bigotry, but there you go.

*update* As Alex Ross points out, lists can be added to:

Food, glorious food

The Daily Express at the weekend provided the tremendously exciting news that 'breakfast is good for you', at least according to information provided by people who undertake work in PR for the breakfast cereals industry.

You might be cynical, then, when reading today's Express front page:



Mushrooms have beaten cancer! Imagine that, when human beings have been trying to do it for decades. Along come mushrooms and develop a cure for cancer, right under our noses. Why, those pesky fungi!

However, it's not quite 'beating cancer', as you'll see:

Scientists have revealed the maitake mushroom can shrink tumours by as much as 75 per cent.

That does sound impressive, but that's not 'beating cancer', that's just shrinking tumours, which isn't quite the same thing. Hands up who wants 25% of their tumour still remaining? Anyone... no...?

Still some way to go, then.

Today's Winterval card

Today's delightful card comes from Antilles Hades:



Think you can do better? Email me at antonvowl@live.co.uk

BBC Have Your Sieg Heil

The Swiss, as we know, have made a bold decision to be known for more than just cuckoo clocks, chocolate, Nazi gold and banks: now they want the world to see them as racists as well. The decision to ban minarets would strike any right-thinking person as ultra-nationalist at best, straightforwardly racist at worst. Well, you'd think so, but then you, my friend, haven't read the BBC Have Your Say discussion on it...



These are the most recommended comments, by the way - and it keeps on coming.



It always amuses me when the BBC is portrayed as a leftist institution when it's more than happy to allow this kind of debate to be swamped by the far right*. Well I imagine it's not more than happy, but what can you do? There are a couple of possible reasons for this: perhaps the vast majority, the 'silent majority' of people who read the BBC's news content, are extreme nationalists who hate Muslims of all shapes and sizes; or perhaps, just perhaps, ultranationalist groups target discussions like this in order to make their poisonous views seem more popular than they actually are. You can believe what you like, but if the views on this discussion are really representative of the majority of people in Britain then it is me, not them, who feels like a stranger in his own country and wants to leave.

SudaNim's comment sums up the classical 'oppressed white man' myth: that somehow, despite having all the advantages in life, white men are actually the ones who are most discriminated against. Chris in Nottingham brings out the textbook "If you don't like it then you can get out" attitute towards minorities so beloved of racists everywhere; and DaMuttzNutz produces the standard "Islamification aaargh we're all gonna die!" though I would have given bonus points for the use of 'dhimmitude', which I'm sure will turn up in the discussion somewhere.





Here's another argument you'll see time and time again: that because Saudi Arabia does something, we should be just as vile as them. But I don't think Saudi Arabia is really a nation whose values anyone should aspire to - is it? If Switzerland wants to be the Saudi Arabia of Europe, then it's more than welcome to. But I don't think it's a good argument to say "Islamic countries can be really repressive, therefore we should be just as repressive, out of spite" - that isn't the kind of society I want to live in. I don't want to live in a country that's taking part in a reactionary anti-freedom pissing competition.



And on, and on, and on it goes. A simple two-word comment like that gets voted positively by 54 people, but where are the opposing views? 4 pages in and still no sign of them... does everyone in the world really think that minarets are a terrible thing and that because there is little religious freedom in the Arab world, so that policy should be extended across Europe, and that's a good thing? Is that what we really think?

Oh, hang on:



But that's a mere island in the discussion, a mere moment in which another voice is raised, only to be squashed by the shouting of others.

I'm always left wondering what these debates actually achieve. What does this debate achieve, other than portraying westerners as idiots and racists? What does this do for anyone, except giving racists a place where they can congregate together and spout their angry invective? What have we gained from this, other than hearing that a lot of people think Europe should be more like Saudi Arabia, somehow, for some reason, or think that other cultures should not be allowed freedom of expression? Now I understand that's a perfectly legitimate viewpoint to have, vile though it is; but why are the BBC providing debates that are a touchstone for these extremist thoughts? This is just the sort of way in which the ultranationalist far right will claim it's actually in the majority or represents the real views of people.

Forty-seven per cent of people in Switzerland, you'll remember, voted against the ban on minarets. Yet you'd be hard-pressed to find 47 per cent of BBC Have Your Say correspondents who feel that way. So it's not even representative of Switzerland, the country which imposed the ban, let alone Britain, or let alone the wider community in Europe or reading these debates across the world. Again, you have to ask: what does this do, apart from over-represent those who hate, those who are prejudiced, those who want to cause division and those who want to drive out minorities?

* No, racists are not extreme left-wing, no matter what kind of "Aha, but National Socialists, weren't they, eh?" sophistry you try and pull out of the bag.

Winterval card Nov 29

Good things Jan Moir has written

Sometimes as a hand-wringing bleeding heart leftie idiot you find yourself thinking: crumbs, I may have been a bit mean to poor old Jan Moir in the past, calling her a numpty and swearing at her, and so on; perhaps she's not so bad after all. She's a human being, with feelings, and thoughts, and everything like that, at least I'm pretty sure that's the case. Why not look at the positive side of Jan Moir? Surely there must be something she's written that isn't self-harmingly awful?

So that's what I've decided to do. I'm going to focus on her column this week and find something in it that's actually good. Maybe I'll do it every week. Try and sprinkle a bit of happiness around. Prove that bloggers aren't just meanies who try and insult others: we can be kind, generous creatures who are always looking for the best in our fellow writers. What would be so wrong with that?

Now obviously, when looking at this week's Jan Moir outpouring, there is the business of her totally and utterly misguided piece about 'lessons in wifebeating' in which she gets facts wrong, comes to barking mad conclusions, writes badly and generally fucks everything up. To which I say: yes, that's certainly happened, and for a better analysis of that I should point you in the direction of my fellow blogger No Sleep Til Brooklands, who has written an excellent article discussing Moir's litany of failures.

But I'm not here today to look at the bad things in Jan Moir's output. I'm here to show you that there's another side, a witty side, an intelligent side, a fun side; and that it's wrong to portray her as something who gets every single thing wrong that she ever talks about, or is wilfully ignorant of what's going on, or someone who really should be down the JobCentrePlus. All that would be wrong. I'm here to prove that she can do something good.

So here's Jan's nugget of the week. You might say to me: Look, it's like trying to find Maltesers in human shit - but I would reply: no, it's worth doing this. I'm going to find the scraps of good writing in Jan Moir's output, and prove that she isn't all bad. Quite bad, yes. Pretty bad, you could say that. Very bad, well sometimes. But look. Here's the bit I liked:

[Jane Andrews] appeared to have spent most of her time in a muddy graveyard, before checking into a Premier Inn.
Then she was taken away by the police before even having time to enjoy the Freeview TV or the tea and coffee-making facilities.

There we are! See. Reasonable attempt at writing something amusing, there.

(I wouldn't go reading on after that point, mind. Just a friendly warning. You might end up punching your own face or running into a door to try and stop the feelings of revulsion and misery welling up inside you.)

SuBollocks

I think it was Charlie Brooker back in the TV Go Home days who did a spoof of a celebrity magazine covering a man walking past some crates. To prove that news does emulate comedy, here's today's Sky News website:



(Spotter's badge: ryanfmc)

Yes. It's true. A woman has walked up to her bin and put some rubbish in it. To clarify, the news story, on Sky News, a news channel that thinks it's grown-up enough to host a debate with the leaders of all political parties in the run-up to the next election, is that a woman has put some rubbish in a bin.

That would be bad enough, just the sheer banality of it, but they couldn't resist this:

Earlier this week, Boyle reportedly burst into tears while visiting the US for a whistlestop tour.
...
The star has previously suffered from stress and checked into the Priory clinic for treatment shortly after she shot to fame.

Ah, lovely. There we are: waiting for the tears, the breakdown, the stress and the problems so they can make fun out of her, just as they did when she was admitted to the Priory. Doesn't it make you proud of the British media?

How to be a football pundit

This is a bit off topic, if indeed there ever is a topic on this blog, which there often isn't - no wonder I'm not one of those brilliant professional journalists. Anyway, there's something that keeps rising up in me whenever I listen to people talking about football nowadays, an anger, a stench of bile.

It's generally when they come out with something like this, and I'm paraphrasing obviously, but imagine someone on the radio saying it, who sounds like Steve Claridge: "Course, they're a great team Arsenal, all that pretty football, but you look at their players, and they're not giants are they? Walcot's only five foot nothing, isn't he - how are they meant to play football? Didn't they realise it's only for really tall players? And as for Wigan trying to play football in the Premiership, that's just doomed to failure, it's all very well trying to play football, but look at West Brom - they tried and it didn't work. No, what you need is to smack the ball 90 yards upfield to a really tall player and that'll make everything all right. It's all right trying to play your fancy dan stuff but you'll get found out in this league, just belt it up there to someone really tall and that's how you play football in the top league in the world, forget about anything resembling skill or craft, just boot it up there, that's the best thing to do. You'll only get in trouble if you try and pass the ball around."

Do you know what I mean? There are only two times when I feel the need to throw the radio against the kitchen wall, smashing it to pieces: firstly, whenever Nicky Campbell or Jeremy Vine is having a phone-in and some barely conscious numbskull barks: "Well I don't know anything about the case itself or the details of the story but WHAT ABOUT OUR TROOPS EH? They don't go around complaining. Everyone else in the world should consider themselves lucky and has never been unhappy or experienced anything difficult ever, because they're not them. No-one else should ever have any money or anything or be allowed to have any semblance of fun because I said so, I pay my bills on time, why should I have to subsidise those who don't? I pay my taxes, why should I subsidise people who claim to be disabled who are probably too workshy? Why should I pay for anything except myself? Obviously except for when my house catches fire and then I'll expect the fire brigade to come around and I won't expect to pay the entire bill myself, but apart from that, and all other instances in which I rely on the state, I don't want to pay for anyone else, and the BBC, they're just grabbing my money, IT IS THEFT. If I STEAL from someone else THAT IS THEFT so how is it allowed for the BBC to collect money from me just for owning a television set? I don't watch any of their programmes anyway, except for all of them, and yes I do listen to radio phone-ins just so I can ring in about how much I hate everyone in the entire world, especially the BBC, but still..."

and the other time is when someone says that crap about football. It's as if there's a big unwritten rule somewhere that only a select band of football pundits know about, which basically says: "PICK LOTS OF TALL PLAYERS AND BOOT IT UP THERE", like that's the secret which has won every single team every trophy ever in existence and if you don't do it then you're sadly naive and don't really understand the English game, ignoring the fact that generally the champion sides have played the best football of all teams and haven't necessarily had to cram their teams with 11 freakily tall men to do it.

Seriously though. There really is more to the game of football than simply picking tall players and 'not playing all that fancy stuff'. I don't hear tennis pundits saying "Well of course, what Andy Murray's doing is wrong, what he wants to do is forget all that fancy stuff, spinning the ball, he should just hit it as hard as he can with every single shot, that's the way to do it, and probably be a bit taller, if he wants to win". Although I imagine there are probably some somewhere who think that way. I just want football analysis to be a bit more incisive than that. Is that too much to ask?

It probably is.

Is blogging journalism?

I think the answer is 'yes' and 'no' and 'it doesn't matter whether it is or not', kind of in that order, but first let me explain what all this is about. I noticed a somewhat outraged piece from the Bristol Blogger the other day about comments made on the Bristol NUJ website, and then went on to read the comments beneath it. I don't really want to wade into that, but I can't leave it alone either, because it infuriates me. And I am also a blogger based in Bristol.

First, the NUJ is plain dumb wrong and outdated to imagine that they can only accept members on the basis of what proportion of their income is derived from journalism - claiming it keeps out 'hobbyists' and keeps in 'professionals'. By that staggeringly flawed logic, Melanie Phillips would be welcomed with open arms despite her fact-free rants which often run entirely contrary to the truth - by dint of the fact some massive corporation is happy to pay her to write her drivel - yet some decent, hardworking blogger working with primary sources, doing impeccable research and attempting to tell the truth, rather than spout misleading polemic, is kept out because they haven't taken payment from an anti-union corporation. Do you see how this doesn't quite work?

I'll give you a real example. Look at the front page of today's Daily Express, a national newspaper:



Who knew? Who knew that breakfast was good for you? Why haven't we been told this before? What a startling revelation! I'm surprised that media outlets around the world haven't picked up on this stunning story - eating breakfast is good for you - nay, it's the 'secret' to being healthy. A story which, when you read it, has no research other than large sections of a press release copied and pasted and a quote from a nutritionist, who is delighted to extol the virtues of breakfast cereals. You'll see that the article is rather similar to this one, also published today. So not exactly deep digging from the Express to uncover that, was it?

What of the Express's other source, 'independent nutritonist' Lynne Garton? Well, look at her personal profile and you'll see she is:

Nutrition consultant for the Wholegrain for Health Campaign; responsible for communicating the health benefits of whole grains through consumer media.

Ah. I see. She also puts together content for Nestle's "Whole Grain" website. Now there's nothing wrong with that of course but here's someone who's being billed by the paper as an 'independent nutrionist'. Perhaps not so independent, if a lot of your time is spent promoting wholegrain cereals for huge corporations?

So, the journalist who didn't spot that (or did, and couldn't care less) would be welcomed into the NUJ quite willingly because although they're simply copying big chunks of press releases - they got paid for doing so.

Compare the Express's 'Ooh, aren't cereals good?' story to the blogger Unity, who over at Liberal Conspiracy is doing a stellar series of posts - unpaid - about the truth about immigration, exploding the myths created by those paid journalists, who'd be welcomed into the NUJ, who regularly mislead, tell lies and distort the true picture as regards immigration. Anyone who thinks bloggers shouldn't be called journalists should read it - look at the primary source information, the research, the hard work that's gone into that.

Which one would you prefer to be called a journalist? Someone who C&Vs press releases and rings up rentaquotes to put together tediously banal stories that tell us nothing except 'please buy cereals', but who gets paid; or someone who works hard researching and writing pieces on important issues, because they believe in it, because so many paid journalists have told lie after lie after lie regarding the subject in question?

But then there's another sense in which bloggers aren't journalists. When you're not getting paid, you can write what you like, when you like. There's no need to 'come up with a story' when there isn't one. There's no-one telling you to write something you don't believe in. There's no-one telling you to write something a certain way, because that's how they see the story and they don't care what you think, or what you might uncover. In that sense, bloggers aren't journalists.

My argument, though, is that it doesn't matter how you define a journalist. Anyone is capable of producing good journalism and incisive writing - some may not like it, but that's the truth. Good journalism happens where it happens; it may happen in a corporate environment by paid reporters; it may happen elsewhere, by 'hobbyists' who happen to see the story first, and write about it first, or write about those things that don't float the boat of the mainstream media. Journalism isn't just about research and news, either; it's also about opinion and argument. That has always been the case and it always will, and it's totally disingenuous to imagine otherwise.

And yes, some bloggers have spelling mistakes - God knows I make enough - and some may get things wrong occasionally. What you'll find with bloggers is that on the whole we're happy to engage with our readership, no matter how aggressive they are (up to a point) and happy to correct when things go wrong rather than scuttle under the stone of the self-serving PCC, designed to protect journalists from real scrutiny. That's the nature of the medium and it's important to get it right. And yes, we swear, just like those pros in the beloved Guardian who do it every week. And yes, some of us are anonymous - not just the NightJacks of this world, who had to do it for obvious reasons, but the rest of us who would be accused, wrongly, of wasting work time on our blogs if we wrote under our real names, and just don't fancy the hassle of doing it as ourselves. There's nothing wrong with that - if you want to get rid of pseudonymous authors then you'll strike out some of the master works of literature, let alone we mere mortals.

I think the answer is this: bloggers can be journalists. Journalists can be bloggers. Good journalism can come from all sources, both amateur and professional. In the end, the readers will decide whether we're good or not, not us. I think the NUJ's attitude comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what blogs are, particularly political blogs, and that's disappointing, as someone who reads both the dead-tree press, watches the news, listens to the radio *and* reads blogs. There's a hell of a lot of good writing out there that isn't produced for someone willing to make a profit; it's about time the NUJ woke up to it. And if you don't want us, it doesn't matter, because we're coming anyway, and we can succeed with you or without you.

*update* With regards to the cereal/Express aspect of this post, Tabloid Watch has done some sterling work. Now I'm afraid they haven't been paid so you might want to disregard everything you've done and not regard it as proper fact-checking, but have a look at the site if you like. It's really rather good.

Winterval card, Nov 28

Today's card comes from reader Morgan Jones.

I know I'm supposed to be angry, but I'm not sure why

This story over at the Mail today



has the unfortunate effect of not being direct enough with its readers about what they should be outraged about. Sure, they know they should be angry: it's about the BBC, for goodness' sake. So they know the BBC has done something wrong. But what have they done wrong - attempting to show the programme in the first place, or not showing it?



Bonus points for slagging off NuLabour as well as the BBC, and implying they have a joint agenda with Auntie. Maybe they don't have an agenda at all, which is why they can drop things? But then, it might just be Labour's fault entirely:



No wait, it's the BBC:



Ron gets voted down for this:



while this provocative comment



draws a furious response



which appears to be saying: "I hate the principle of the BBC and therefore everything they do, regardless of whether I find those decisions positive or negative". Which is ideal for this kind of story, where it's not obvious whether you're meant to be outraged by the BBC or the ballet company. This is the problem the Mail encounters when it's that little bit too subtle for the commenting chumps.

But here is an occasion where the Mail and its friends have won. The BBC has dropped something controversial for fear of having just this kind of story being trotted out by the usual suspects, you can't help feeling. And yet even that isn't good enough to escape the condemnation.

It's not about the truth

You have probably read by now the tale of Sue Reid's appallingly misleading and woefully inaccurate story regarding births at a London hospital. Tim at Mailwatch offers a letter to Daily Mail readers while 5cc does an excellent demolition job, and Uponnothing says Paul Dacre must die.

Reid, of course, has previous. Back in 2007 she offered money to Polish people to break the law, so she could write a story about Polish people breaking the law. The knowledge that a journalist could stoop so low didn't stop newspapers from publishing her articles, of course. Perhaps it was with a teenager's 'meh' shrug or a thought of 'There but for the grace of God...' that potential publishers looked the other way and pretended they hadn't seen anything wrong. This isn't about Reid, though, and it would be wrong to demonise one journalist. It's not the writers who decide what goes in the paper - those decisions are made above their pay grade.

But it's not about the truth. Journalism, at the level of the tabloids and even the 'quality press' from time to time, is about finding a convincing 'line'. If you can find a way of portraying a version of the truth in which a London hospital is swamped by foreigners and no British mums are giving birth there, and that chimes in with a newspaper's record of reporting immigration as a scary, overwhelming thing that's out of control, then that will do. But is it true? I doubt anyone even asked. It doesn't matter.

It's not about the truth. It's about a version of the truth that you can stack up for a few paragraphs, maybe with a supporting quote from someone who'll definitely agree with you (and that tedious business of getting a 'response', yawn yawn, which might contradict your story altogether but which you shove right at the end in the hope your readers won't get that far and will be convinced that what you've told them is what's actually the case.) In the case of the Sue Reid story, the response from the hospital is, I'd have thought, rather more important than something that should be bolted on to the end. Because it kind of contradicts quite a lot of what has been previously stated as a fact.

But no. It's not about the truth, or balance, or fairness, or accuracy. It's not about representing things as accurately as you can. It's about dancing around all of that to make your line as impactful as possible. Yes, you must try to get a response from people about whom you tell a pack of lies, so they've had a 'right of reply' - and if it appears to torpedo what you've written so far? Ah well. Just bung it on at the end and leave everything you've written intact.

It's never about the truth, and it's not quite about fiction. It's about painting the ghost-train so it scares you the most. It's about representing a version of reality in which your worst fears come true - in the case of the Daily Mail, it would appear to have decided that its readers' worst fears consist of immigrants and foreign people. I don't know what that says about Mail readers - I'm not so sure the readers are really that venomous, despite what you reader underneath stories sometimes - or about the paper itself.

If we assume that it's not trying to tell the truth - a simple FOI request to find out numbers would have provided more accuracy as would listening to what the hospital had to say and putting it in context rather than shoving it at the end of the story - then what is it trying to do? Is it trying to mislead, or scare, or enrage, or what? I think the answer might be that it is trying to tap into people's fears. In the case of its readers, it assumes they are afraid of foreigners and immigrants and so creates a world in which foreigners and immigrants are taking over, everyone is powerless to stop it because of the spectral PC Brigade, and guess who's paying?

I think it also assumes they're afraid of cancer, women having jobs, gay people adopting, technology, the internet, socialism, taxes and a whole host of bogeymen - though foreigners and immigration are pretty high up the list. I don't know if it's right, but I think that's what it's trying to do. If you like, you can look at the Mail as a kind of voluntary participation in Room 101 - all the things you fear are in there. Maybe people read it for the same reason they step into the ghost train or ride the rollercoaster or watch a horror movie - you can be confronted with your fears, and see them off, and then return to normal life. That is, if you understand you're being misled and suspending your disbelief.

What if people really believe it? What then?

Winterval card, Nov 27

Today's Winterval delight is sent in by reader Mark Pim. It has the Christian imagery that so many anti-PC types would love to see on Christmas cards, and I'm sure they'll be delighted by the sentiment as well:

Listeria

It's that time of the year, when journalists cobble together some lists to fill some space so they can go out and get ratarsed every lunchtime produce exciting lists of culturally important things so they keep their finger on the pulse and provide vital information for their readers.

This being the end of the decade*, there are even more lists. Thankfully we're spared the 'best stuff of the Millennium' drivel - remember Robbie Williams being listed as more important than Schubert? - but now is just the beginning. The coming weeks will see dozens and dozens of the blighters.

Here's the first I've seen so far, at the NME. 100 tracks of the decade. I suppose the whole point of these things is to create debate and make you sneer/cheer at the choices, but I can only find 14 in there that I actively like. Do I have rubbish taste or is it the NME who are rubbish? I am guessing it's probably a bit of both.**

Anyway, there will be more to come. More horrors to encounter. More lists to read. So I thought I'd come up with one myself. Here is my list of top 10 things I've hated reading in the newspapers this year:

1. Jan Moir and Stephen Gateley
No surprises here, the sheer sneeriness of it and corpse-being-barely-cold wins hands down.
2. The Scottish Sunday Express and Dunblane
How dare those kids be allowed to be normal 18-year-olds?
3. Jab 'as bad as the cancer'
Except no-one even said that.
4. Jan Moir and Zoe Ball
Second entry in the top 10 for Moir, who managed to imply that Zoe Ball somehow had something to do with female violence. Bonus points for a 'no-one is implying that Zoe Ball is responsible for this' then going on to imply that she might well be.
5. Sticking the boot into missing woman Claudia Lawrence
A truly unpleasant article about the missing woman's lovelife, with an anonymous 'friend' doing the kicking.
6. Jan Moir and laughing at the poor
Not just a crock of shit, but the same crock of shit twice. Well done to Jan for getting three appearances in the list though.
7. Daily Telegraph and 'benefits system favours migrants'
Yes, stated as fact despite the Telegraph's own stories providing the evidence to the contrary, it's a welcome appearance from the broadsheets. Well done for stooping so low!
8. Melanie McDonagh asking for a 'middle-class baby boom'
Lovely to see the Telegraph sneering about 'the Somali mothers you see in West London'. What a wonderful credit to its claims to be a quality newspaper.
9. Amanda Platell: If Melanie McDonagh can do it, I'm having some of that
Immigrant Amanda Platell lays into immigrants, sniping: "it is not the indigenous middle-class, hard-working, tax-paying population that's exploding." Could you be a bit more specific, Amanda? I can't quite work out what you're trying to say.
10. The Express reaches out to international readers
by telling them that "BRITAIN IS FULL UP", coincidentally the same slogan used by the BNP.

* I know. I know that technically there was no Year 0, etc etc, but it's always more exciting when the numbers tick over, isn't it? YES IT IS.
** In case you're interested, I like numbers 1, 14, 18, 30, 33, 42, 47, 48, 61, 74, 76, 83, 92 and 99.

Today's outraged Xmas card

I'm going to try and do one of these a day (or until you and I both get fed up with it, which may well be this afternoon), but here it is:

Winterval cards

I was thinking after this morning's post that there's a missing market for Christmas cards - disgruntled Mail reader types who are annoyed with the lack of traditional imagery and imagine it's the fault of the ever-present evils of the PC Brigade.

The comments have arrived on the PC Dave story, and as you'll see, as predicted most of them didn't bother to read any of it before adding their 1p's worth:



So using a well-known greetings card company, I've come up with a couple of ideas - see what you think.











I'm sure others can do better than me. But it's a start.

Disturbing sentence of the week

is this, from the Mail's latest story about Suri Cruise's shoes:



'She's looking a little grown-up for a three-year-old' - try saying that without vomiting blood.

Winterval watch: David Cameron is PC gone mad

Poor old David Cameron. Well I say 'poor old David Cameron' but he's neither poor nor old, and I don't really have a great deal of sympathy for him, given what he's probably about to do to the country I live in and the people who live here. On the other hand, while I can't agree with a lot of his policies, I do think he is trying to make the Conservative party a bit more socially liberal (in public at least), in step with the population of Britain rather than pandering to the "bring back the birch" grassroots grumpies.

Which infuriates the socially neanderthal. You knew where you stood with Thatcher, they moan: she brought extreme right-wing economics and spectacularly backward thinking on all social issues. Cameron has the economics bit but doesn't appear to have a cruel streak for minorities or think that everything would be better if it just reverted to the 1950s; he doesn't want to punish the vulnerable for perceived 'loony left' favouritism. This annoys them. They want both aspects in the Conservative Party, and it would appear they're not going to get it if Cameron is elected (though we will of course see if that's the case).

So even when Cameron does something as ordinary as saying 'Season's Greetings' in the official Conservative Party Christmas card, the backlash begins. It begins in the newspaper you'd expect, as well:



Note the subtle power implication of that headline. It's not PC Dave being ridiculously inclusive by not putting a ruddy great cross and bleeding Jesus on the front of his card saying "Pray for forgiveness now or you shall DIE oh and Merry Christmas if you like"; it's actually that David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, is not powerful enough to defeat the spectral PC Brigade and so therefore has to pander to them.

Which is nonsense. He's a grown man and he can decide what he wants in his Christmas cards. No PC Brigade foot soldier is standing there in Cameron's study holding a revolver to his wife's head saying: "We want something that won't offend people of other faiths, Mr Cameron, or she gets it." No. But you see how the spectral PC Brigade is such a brilliant construction. Somehow they are responsible for other people's decisions; they're so scary and so omnipotent that they can force people into pandering to their views, whether they want to or not.

But then you look a little further into the Mail story and you realise just what is going on here. It's not David Cameron's Christmas cards at all:

The Christmas cards, which are available on the party's website, avoid all religious imagery - preferring generic winter scenes and pictures of robins to pictures of Jesus and the Three Kings.

(I'd love to think that's because the Conservative Party realises it never fucking happened, but I don't think so.) So the Tories are producing nice Christmas cards showing traditional British winter scenes - so what? What's wrong with that in the slightest? I couldn't give a shit how they raise their money; they won't be getting any from me. And Cameron probably hasn't been involved at any stage, at any time, so whether it goes against something he said two years ago is entirely irrelevant. This is just another example of the usual concoction of outrage. Ring up a couple of rent-a-quote idiots on the back benches and whip up the outrage:

Philip Davies, MP for Shipley, said: 'If this decision has been made on a PC basis it would be totally unacceptable and I would be extremely saddened.
'This kind of pandering to extreme elements of the PC brigade is not something I
would envisage from the Conservative Party. I have yet to meet anyone of any religion who is offended by people in this country celebrating Christmas.

But not all Christmas cards do have Jesus or the Three Kings on them. Not everyone is religious. Which isn't to say people don't celebrate; just that not everyone believes in the little baby in a manger surrounded by nice-looking donkeys. I don't, but I still send Christmas cards with winter stuff on them - why not? Why should non-religious Tory supporters be forced into sending cards with a particularly religious message? Don't these people understand that corporate branding means you can't just go associating yourselves with one particular faith - many Conservative supporters are surely satanists, for example. What about them?

Last night, red-faced Tory officials were forced to announce a U-turn after being contacted by the Daily Mail.
A spokesman said: 'Due to an oversight, the cards available from our online shop currently have the words "Season's Greetings", but we have now added new stock with the words "Merry Christmas".'

But still no pictures of the shepherds, the big star, the snow in Bethlehem, the cow mooing as Mary pops the holy infant whizzing out through her hymen... this is still PC gone mad if you ask me! And don't you worry, the readers who comment on this story (they're still asleep, dreaming of vigilante justice and Enoch Powell) throughout the day won't have read down to that bit anyway. They know what's required of them on this story.

We want more immigrants, says Mail

...but only if they're Christmas trees.

Yes, hardworking overtaxed middle-class people may find it slightly more difficult to find a real Christmas tree for Jocasta and Simeon to sit around in their Surrey semi this year, according to this shock report today:



Horrors! There may be a slight increase in demand across Europe for trees so not so many will end up in the UK. But hang on a tick; what's this?

The Norway Spruce, the traditional British Christmas tree, is also expected to be in short supply, the British Christmas Tree Growers Association says.

I, I, I, I... what what what?! The traditional British Christmas tree is a bleeding spongeing dirty immigrant, coming over here and sucking nutrients away from ordinary hardworking indigenous British firs?!

Eight million real trees are sold in Britain each year and the Nordmann fir has become the favourite because of its dark green needles, which do not shed.

The Nordmann fir? Nordmann doesn't sound like a traditional English gawdblessthequeenmum conifer name, does it? It's exactly the kind of name which, were it the name of a Tory prospective parliamentary candidate, would probably anger Peter Hobbins and the massed ranks of Mail readers who roared in approval about his rant the other day. It sounds like it might well be - pass the smelling salts - a foreign tree.

Meanwhile, the Mail seems to find comfort in this paragraph:

Meanwhile, growers have reported one of the best-ever years for British-grown trees, thanks to the summer's mixture of rain and sunshine.

You mean to say... foreign types of tree... coming over here... taking our soil... there'll be millions and millions of them before 2030, if this increase carries on at its current rate! Aaaaaargh! We're doomed!

But no. It's all right if it's a Christmas tree. Just a bad thing when it's a human being.

(Thanks to Carl for the tipoff!)

Suri Cruise's shoes

Yesterday I wrote about how the Mail were wasting their time (and ours) by churning out spectacularly pointless articles, including one about a couple who happen to be BBC journalists who've split up. I didn't really notice the significance of this paragraph at the time

Not all of Mr Arney's tweets have been about his estrangement from Ms Iqbal. On November 10, at 9.42pm, he was concentrating on work-related matters and wrote: 'Just listened to very illuminating interview with Ecuador's splendid pro-people president, conducted by the ever-excellent Fergus Nicholl.'

but, reading it back, there's something poignant in there. On the one hand you have one journalist enjoying the fact that his department is covering highbrow, complex, 'illuminating' issues; on the other you have another journalist who is writing about how some people are arguing on Twitter.

While the BBC might be covering Ecuador's president, the Mail have bigger fish to fry. What kind of shoes is three-year-old Suri Cruise wearing, for example? You might say: hang on a minute, is it really appropriate to be writing stories about three-year-old kids? But yes. Apparently, it is. Last week brought the revelation that the pre-school child had been wearing high heels in the street:



And today comes the stunning news that now Suri Cruise is wearing Wellington boots.



Daily Mail Reporter, presumably just polishing off their very own article about Ecuador's presidency, types with excitement:

Maybe Katie Holmes decided the close call last week was enough to put an end to her daughter wearing footwear made for grown-ups? Or maybe the recent change in the weather convinced her that wellingtons were a more practical option?

We can only speculate at the moment, I'm afraid. It's depressing to know that wherever this three-year-old child goes, photographers will be invading her privacy. And newspapers will be there to buy the pictures and write shit stories about them. Just take a look at this list of stories. It's not going to stop anytime soon, I'm afraid.

Quick! Someone tell Littlejohn!

It was while desk-jawed in disbelief at the cruelty of Mail readers' comments towards a mentally disabled man who had ventured into a bear enclosure in a zoo - stuff like

there are some idiots on this planet

and

When bears come to humans homes, they usually got shot...when humans go to bear's "home" they should be shot too...
POOR BEAR!!!!

and

God, people are so self-centred and stupid. The Policeman should have shot the idiot man, not the poor bear. The bear was not attacking - he was defending himself. This idiot invaded his space. My deepest sympathies to the bear and I hope it gets well soon.

(isn't it 'self-centred' and 'stupid' to have a mental disability?) -

that I saw this on the right-hand side of the page (click for bigger):



Well, that appears to be an online dating site, and... wait. What's that? You mean to say that - gasp - 'men seeking men' and 'women seeking women' are being encouraged - accepted with a cheery wave, as if their existence is somehow equivalent to everyone else - to connect with each other AND BURN IN HELL FOREVER FOR THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR SICK AND TWISTED PERVERSION by... the Daily Mail?

Just goes to show, doesn't it? When you've got money to spend, they couldn't care less. Just leave a nasty comment about a seriously injured mentally ill man before you get going on the same-sex relationships, though.

Pointlessless beyond belief

A couple have separated. The husband claims to have been arrested a couple of times. The end.

Hardly what you'd call a sparkling story, is it? Then why is it even being covered by our friends at the Mail?



It seems the only reason is that they're employed by the BBC. It's a type of story you see every now and then and which strikes this reader as being particularly pointless. The Mail likes to blether on about all kinds of minor celebrities, of course, and journalists (not just BBC ones, to be fair) when they get into scrapes appear to fall within that category for the purposes of news ballast - but really. Who gives a fuck about these two people?

The estranged husband of BBC arts correspondent Razia Iqbal has boasted of being arrested three times in two weeks during a series of bitter messages on Twitter.

George Arney, host of The World Today bulletin on the World Service, has also used the social networking site to describe Ms Iqbal as his 'witchy ex-wife' and the 'Punjabi controller'.

Interesting hierarchical considerations in both the headline and story - George Arney only merits the description of 'husband' because his role as an international broadcaster (on radio) is deemed less important than Razi Iqbal's role as BBC TV reporter. So it's nice to know that it's not just women the Mail can obliterate into the role of 'spouse' when it's their other half that we should apparently really be interested in reading about.

But the story takes a decisive turn for the banal when it reports:

Not all of Mr Arney's tweets have been about his estrangement from Ms Iqbal. On November 10, at 9.42pm, he was concentrating on work-related matters and wrote: 'Just listened to very illuminating interview with Ecuador's splendid pro-people president, conducted by the ever-excellent Fergus Nicholl.'

BUT WHAT DID HE HAVE FOR LUNCH? AND WHEN DID HE GO FOR A SHIT? I MUST KNOW THESE THINGS.

It's a disappointing type of journalism, miserable and tedious, reminiscent of an old tramp scrabbling round in the bins and emerging triumphant with a half-eaten kebab with a fag stubbed out in it. Is this what Twitter has become - a dredging ground for crap journalists to harvest boring gossip about people you've hardly even heard about, who aren't being exposed as hypocrites or liars but just people who have relatively normal lives? Who gives a crap about all this? And what's the point of this tragic little bit of bathos?

A spokesman for the BBC refused to comment.

Of course a spokesman for the BBC refused to comment. What the fuck did you think anyone was going to say about this? Was an official spokesman really going to come out and say: "Actually, isn't it? Ooh. The cow! And he's no better! I mean, really..." or even "We deplore people having private lives and would prefer it if every single pitiful ruddy detail of everything they ever did was reported to the wider world, like anyone even cares." Or maybe they were hoping for "Yes, we've sacked them both. Bastards. How dare they do this, whatever it is that they're supposed to have done, either of them."

So in one sense it's a pointless journo story, not of any interest to anyone other than fellow pros - and even then I should imagine it's fairly tedious. In another, there's a whiff of the anti-BBC agenda, though I probably wouldn't make too much of that in this instance. And in another, you could see it as exactly the kind of waste of time and money the Mail so often rails against. What if that BBC spokesman had to be contacted out of hours, for example, costing the Beeb - and us - valuable overtime? I do hope the Tax Payers Alliance have been informed.

*Addendum* I can understand the accusation, if it's brought out here, that by posting about something so pointless, I'm being as - if not more - pointless by doing so. I don't really have a defence to that, except to say that I hope at the very least I don't give any trace of legitimisation to this kind of pointlessness by being pointless myself. Not that that counts for anything anyway. But I just wanted you to know, yes, I had thought that myself. And rejected it and thought, no fuck it, I'll write about it anyway.

Idiot says stupid thing. "He's right!" roar Mail readers

I'd like to think, one day, there'll be a time when some arsehole won't say something stupid and be cheered to the rafters for his stupidity. But no, not yet.

Today's cretinous shambles of an alleged human being is Tory party twatface Peter Hobbins, a councillor, who said:

I have been contacted by a Mr Dilon Gumraj and a Zerha Zaidi and others who are all on the approved Conservative Parliamentary Candidates list.
Not one of them has a ‘normal’ English name.
They want to be the PPCs for Orpington and asked me for my personal advice on how they would be the best candidates for the Orpington Constituency. My view? For Hell’s sake.

Nice guy, eh. People are kind and ask him for his advice, and he slags them off to his mates for not having 'normal English' names. Presumably he's embittered because he hasn't made it as an MP - not realising it might be because he's a total prick rather than because people who don't have 'normal English' names are getting priority over the likes of him.

Now quite rightly the Conservative Party has taken action against this complete cock, but that's a disgrace as far as our friends reading the story on the Mail's website are concerned.

The Conservatives, I thought are the party who understand that we have had enough of Labour,their mass immigration, their bias in favour of foreigners,any ethnic minority,if the y suspend Peter Hobbins, there is nothing wrong with what he said, they are no different to Labour.and misunderstand the general feelings of the voters.

- jack, ashford.england, 21/11/2009 1:16

And Jack of Ashford is not alone. He's joined by dozens of roaring bastards who can't understand that attitudes like Hobbins's, and theirs, are why people don't like the Tories, and think they're scum.

But the story has done its job. It's provoked the hostility it was designed to. The Mail are clever enough to leave a great big cheese outside the mousehole every now and then, and just wait for the readers to do their work for them. Last word to Hobbins though:

‘Why are the Candidates Department so keen on these foreign names?!!!! Maybe I should change my name to something foreign – how does Petrado Indiano Hobbinso sound to you?!’

Sounds like you're a cunt, pal.

Let's say Rupert Murdoch is completely benign

No, let's.

You might be thinking: How can you possibly say that? But wait. It's important to get our prejudices out of the way first. We may well have views about Murdoch and his children, about what they stand for and the way they do business; but these aren't important when considering whether it's right that he should get everything he wants from our elected (and probably soon-to-be elected) representatives.

Sure, it's easy to look at the Sun newspaper and think, isn't Daddy Murdoch meant to be the real editor? Haven't many former employees said that he's really pulling the strings there? And if that's the case, isn't he responsible for stuff like lying about football fans hours after a sickening tragedy?



Or implying that an innocent man was a murderer?



You could, if you wanted to, say that if Murdoch really was at the helm of the Sun rather than a hands-off proprietor, he was responsible for fairly obvious racism



about all kinds of people



from 'gipsy free-for-alls' to lying about exactly the kind of working-class people they claim to write for, just because they're Muslims



but that would be using too broad a brush, too easy to dismantle, too simple to dismiss as leftie scaremongering rubbish. Who knows whether Murdoch's the real editor or not? Who knows whether he approves of racism or lies about Muslims? We can't tell, so we can't say he does.

It might seem easy to suppose, for example, that simply because every single newspaper right across the world owned by Rupert Murdoch was in favour of the Iraq War, despite huge public opposition, that this was some kind of editorial influence at work. But we can't say for sure. They may have all reached the same (wrong) conclusion independently. It may be anticipatory compliance at work, but who knows? We don't, for sure.

But none of that matters. Let's say Murdoch is benign, despite our suppositions. Let's say he's a charming amalgam of everything we love, Joanna Lumley and Eric & Ernie mixed with Tim Henman and Alan Bennett. Let's say he's that. Let's say he's the best employer in the world, who aims to do only good, and he's a wonderful benevolent man who loves kittens and gives all that unpaid tax to charities in poor countries.

Even if he is completely benign, he still doesn't deserve to get what he wants from our political parties. He doesn't deserve to get Peter Mandelson giving him a cheery wave and lobbing him the power to try and smash his rivals:

Murdoch has recently said that he believes that copyright is being abused, particularly by organisations such as Google, which uses short extracts from online newspapers to create its Google News page, and the BBC, which he has accused of "stealing from newspapers".

Earlier this month Murdoch was vituperative about how search engines have aggregated news. "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them," he said. "That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... They shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."

By giving the business secretary the power to amend the Copyright Act at will, Labour fears Mandelson could be creating a Trojan horse that under a Tory administration would allow Murdoch to be rewarded for his support for David Cameron over Gordon Brown, for example by making it illegal to use such extracts from a news site for profit.

He doesn't deserve promises from the Tories to do the smashing for him when it comes to his rivals at the BBC, nor to prop up commercial broadcasters (including ITV, in which Sky has a 17% stake) who made millions when the wind was fair and who are now bawling about how unfair it is that things are going the other way, nor to allow more cross-media ownership, which is also exactly what he wants.

He doesn't deserve any of these things, even if he's a saint. Because it's shabby. Can we really strain our naivety far enough to imagine there's no connection between this



and a sudden slew of announcements from the Conservatives of policies that will benefit Murdoch's empire enormously? Are we really meant to be that dumb? Did you really think we wouldn't notice?

No-one deserves to get exactly what they want from all political parties, regardless of voters' views, even if they're truly a force for good. That's not how it's meant to work. We're supposed to have a say in all this. Elections are supposed to be about us, not what favours you can do your mates. But no. On the one hand there's Mandelson, attacking the little guy in favour of the massive corporation; on the other, there's the Tories, doing everything they can to please their new master. And we lose out. And we don't have a say. And it doesn't matter whether Murdoch's magnificent, or neutral, or evil: it's just plain wrong, and undemocratic, and it stinks.

Today's panic porn

Panic. Panic! Panic about everything. Panic about the same old things if you must



with the same story you run every few days, in which the population could reach twenty eleventy billionty five if everyone stopped dying and all those bladdy immigrants kept coming over here, and had a million kids each, and so on, and so on...

Or if you can't raise yourself to panic about the population you can panic about petrol, if you like.



Prices are going up! Who would have thought that the prices of things increased over time? Why hasn't someone come up with a name for this incredible phenomenon? We should call it something like 'inflating' to emphasise how things are blowing up and there's nothing we can do about it. I mean, rail fares and bus fares going up by double digits every year is one thing, and something well worth ignoring entirely, but when it's petrol, that means it'll hit the poor old middle class folk on the school run and no-one else at all!

My favourite panic porn today, though, is about this:



Aaargh! Some kids have copied a scene in which kids did something - and became ill because of it - and have become ill because of it. Next they'll be copying someone smashing themselves in the face with a brick, and it'll be the BBC's fault when they end up with bloody noses! But seriously. How reckless of the BBC to promote guzzling loads of booze! No-one would ever do that.



Great! I'm off to down 10 drinks because even though the headline says it might be dangerous, I'm too stupid to know about things! And I'm too busying about petrol and the BBC to care any more...