Last week I had the misfortune of reading Jan Moir’s Daily Mail ‘article’ suggesting that the late Stephen Gately’s death was not “natural” and rather a result of his “lifestyle”. Although briefly blinded by the outrage, I struggled through to the end of the piece where she questioned the legitimacy of same-sex marriages (let’s ignore the fact that at the moment they are not in fact marriages but civil partnerships according to UK law – we’ve still yet to get to the stage where they have equal legal status) and attempted to relate Gately’s death to that of M
att Lucas’ ex-husband. I say struggled to the end, the column flicks from casual homophobia to a light-hearted ‘story’ about Tara Palmer-Tompkinson’s risqué dress-sense with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, at which point my patience had long-since been excessively tested.
I have yet to work out quite what I’m most appalled about; is it:
a) That someone with such a large potential readership has he temerity to insinuate that gay people are victims of their own sexuality?
b) That it is still legal to get away with saying something like this in modern twenty-first century Britain?
c) That the second most-read newspaper in the country is willing and able to publish such material?
d) That the people reading such an article nod their way through it and actually agree with the dross which is being written?
I think for all liberal-minded Guardian readers the answer is sadly probably ‘d’. We don’t necessarily fear what is being written; the real fear is that British people might genuinely agree with it.
It seemed rather bizarre that Moir challenged the verdict given by the coroner’s report which stated quite clearly that there were no suspicious circumstances involved whatsoever. Her words are extremely disrespectful not just to gay people, that’s a given, but to all of those healthy people who do in fact die with no prior symptoms.
Anyhow, by the time that I had digested the abhorrence of the spouted drivel, I had a Charlie Brooker-inspired compulsion to vent my feelings to the Press Complaints Commission. At the time about 4,000 others had done likewise. I joined the accompanying Facebook group and posted urging others to do similarly.
As you read this more than 22,000 have. The PCC have had more complaints in the last 7 days about this than in the whole of the past 5 years. Of course they’re not going to do anything about it, other than perhaps a strongly worded letter of irrelevance, as only complainants involved in a story can make anything happen.
But I partly made the complaint out of principle. After all Middle England loves complaining. If we all lived in an ethnically-cleansed, sanitised, Clarkson-esque world they strive for they’d still be complaining that there was nothing to complain about. Let’s not forget the 40,000 people who complained about Jonathan Ross & Russell Brand being rude (and actually not very funny) to Andrew Sachs – when 39,998 of them hadn’t even listened to the programme in question. I’m not an especially big fan, but I watched Ross’ show for weeks after it came back on air just in protest to contribute to getting the ratings as high as possible.
In any case, to my dismay I later discovered that the head of the Press Complaints Commission is, you guessed it, the Editor of none other than the Daily Mail…
The now infamous Question Time episode waded
happily into this debate though, with BNP leader Nick Griffin true to form describing gay couples as “creepy”. Well what did you expect?
It was disappointing in a way that the programme didn’t run on its more regular format in order to oust Griffin from society by bringing to light his horrific fascist policies. In the end he ended up being defensive and was able to take a moral stance that he’d been ‘victimised’. Oh how the irony was lost on someone who if he had his way would be doing an awful lot of said victimisation.
It was right though that the BBC allowed Griffin on the debate. In our culture of free speech it would have been hypocritical to have banned him from appearing – and would have given him far more credibility had he not been permitted to attend.
Griffin came off badly as the despicable man should have with his pathetic attempts to side-step his holocaust denial and ludicrous suggestion that Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke was a non-violent figure. It was a shame though that the senior members on the panel that night were unable to make any killer blows - but kudos to the magnificent member of the audience who suggested sending Griffin to the South Pole – “a colourless landscape that will suit you fine”.
One final thought from the superb News Quiz – along with Have I Got News For You by far and away the best topical satire around – who quoted this Nick Griffin line:
“Sadly it’s not the indigenous, hard-working, middle class tax-paying population that’s exploding; my worry is how many immigrant mums have contributed anything to this country before landing us with another child to educate…”
“…Oh wait hang on, no that was Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail, that’s odd…”
Enough said.
