Sorry, Rebecca, but you’ll just have to put up with the insults

Rebecca Adlington’s agent sounds like he is foaming at the mouth because a comedian dared to say some slightly mean things about his client. Of course, he’s not helping her by banging on about it, and Frankie Boyle’s response has been predictably pigheaded, refusing to apologise and heaping on even more mean comments. I don’t much like Boyle, but I do admire his refusal to be cowed by this nonsense. The whole thing speaks volumes about how qualified freedom of speech is in this country by who decides they are going to be upset and who doesn’t.

I mean, far worse things get said about people than Ms Adlington received at the hands of Mr Boyle, and in most cases people just shrug it off and get on with things. In this case, 75 people complained, resulting in the BBC Trust’s verdict that: “The comments about Rebecca Adlington were humiliating, and this was exacerbated by the fact that she had not sought celebrity status or courted media attention. There was no clear editorial purpose for the inclusion of the joke.”

Now, hang on. Even if you accept the principle that someone can have the right not to be offended (which I don’t), what does “seeking celebrity status or courting media attention” have to do with anything? Does calling up the Sun and offering an interview constitute courting media attention, and does this somehow mean you lose the right not to be offended? What if she appears on Question of Sport (she may already have done so, I’m not sure)? Does that mean she is fair game? Who gets to judge who can be joked about and who can’t?

These things are bad enough when you’re talking about social groups (jokes about Christians – fine, jokes about Muslims – outrage) where at least there is the vague justification that comments can be taken out of context by nutcases with an axe to grind against whatever group is being mocked. But when it comes to individuals, there is absolutely no grounds for seeing this as anything but a lapse of taste, and certainly no reason to do anything other than leave it up to individuals to decide whether they think Mr Boyle’s bitchy brand of humour is for them.

As for those 75 people who complained: interfering busybodies who seem to think that an intelligent, driven, accomplished woman is so meek and downtrodden that she needs them to get their knicker in a knot on her behalf. The ONLY person who could have derived offence from those comments is Rebecca Adlington herself, and possibly her boyfriend. Anyone else should have better things to worry about.

Don’t get me wrong. Boyle’s comments were nasty, asinine and unfunny. But then Mock the Week is habitually all of those things. It beats me why anyone was surprised, let alone upset. And as for gagging comedians for going close to the bone…people, that’s what comedy is FOR. It won’t always be pretty, it may even often not be funny, but if comedy can’t push the boundaries we’re doomed to an eternity of Terry and June. Please God, anything but that.

 

Grown up policies for grown up parties

One of the more disheartening sights at this year’s Lib Dem conference was that of Nick Clegg being ripped apart by the party faithful for having the temerity to suggest we might reconsider our stance on tuition fees, given that, y’know, it’s a bloody expensive policy and there’s a not a whole lot of cash around at the moment. Outrage was not too strong a word for the response. The policy, Clegg was told in no uncertain terms, had “served us well” (meaning, I presume, won student votes) and must on no account be changed. Oh yes, and it’s good for poor people too, right? Faced with vociferous, if largely vacuous, opposition, Clegg folded. The LibDem student vote is secure.

Or is it? Interesting to note that today’s Youth Parliament debate in the House of Commons was ambiguous at best on the subject of tuition fees, despite being conducted entirely by people the majority of whom presumably plan to attend university in the coming years. The young people of the UK, it seems, have realised that expecting ordinary tax payers to foot the bill for an education that will help its recipients get higher earning jobs in the future is hardly a progressive approach. There is no such thing, as one of them pointed out, as a free lunch.

In other words, they know what all the other ordinary voters know: you can have all the nice policies you like, but someone has to pay for them and that’s got to be justified. The fact is that the Liberal Democrats’ stance on tuition fees is not justified. As Julian Astle has powerfully argued, the party’s policies will not attract more poor people to university - since education inequalities have already become entrenched years before the age of 18 – and represent a significant redistribution of resources from poor to rich.

But all of this aside, this whole issue illustrates perfectly why the Liberal Democrats struggle to be taken seriously in UK politics. Clegg’s point was a very simple one: if we want to be accepted as a potential party of government, we have to have policies that reflect the financial restraints governments face, particularly in the current climate. There’s not enough money to scrap tuition fees, so we have to change the policy. It’s a no-brainer, frankly.

But apparently not. Never mind that the policy is flawed, unfair and unaffordable: it has “served us well”. How utterly politically cynical and navel-gazing, and how patronising to students to think they can’t tell the difference between a generous policy and a feasible one. If we want to be in government, then treating the voters – including students – like adults might “serve us” even better.

Drugs policy: more sensible analysis for politicians to ignore

Nice little article from Mark Thompson on the latest comments made by Prof. David Nutt about drugs policy. Particularly good response to a critic in the comments section that is worth scrolling down for.

I’d like to say I’m happy to read such a spot-on analysis of why prohibition is failing and will keep failing, but it’s just depressingly familiar. The fact is, the arguments have not changed since a decade ago (and a good deal further back than that). Despite the ever-increasing raft of evidence to back the legalisation arguemnt, we are no closer to making any dent on actual policy. I fear that this comment on Mark’s article sums it up all too well:

“The debate is entirely framed by dishonest and hysterical coverage in the bulk of the popular press, where one bereaved mother trumps endless volumes of serious research. To challenge this would require politicians with real gumption. Fat chance.”

Quite. And as long as we oscillate between Labour control freaks and Tory reactionaries, that’s hardly going to change.

The other problem is that half-arsed liberalisation won’t do. The Dutch experience shows that trying to maintain a semi-liberal approach to cannabis, for instance, with cultivating and supplying wholesale illegal but selling and using in coffeeshops tolerated, just creates confusion and contradictions. It also shows, sadly, that if one country takes steps towards an enlightened approach but nearby countries don’t, the resulting flows of “drug tourists” are likely to create such tension that pressure to go back to a less liberal stance will eventually become unbearable.

So: hysterical media, gutless politicians, a need for real radicalism, and in all probability a solution that needs to be pan-European. Yeah. Easy.

Children of Big Brother

One thing that really changed – for the worse – about the UK in the time I was away was the rise of reality TV. Now don’t get me wrong – I can enjoy a bit of low culture as much as the next man. When Big Brother first came out I was intrigued at first, and gradually hooked (I was gutted that Anna didn’t win). It seemed at worst harmless, and at best an interesting, if scientifically valueless, experiment. Then I left the country and pretty much forgot about it. When I returned two years ago, Big Brother become an unashamed freak show with whole swathes of the population revelling in putting mentally unstable, fame-obsessed nutjobs in a confined space for weeks on end in order to be able to feel superior to them.

Of course, BB is soon to be no more, but it’s too late. The Spawn of Big Brother has already taken over. And you just can’t get away from it – an endless diet of pap that people just seem to lap up. I don’t know how we got here and I’m vaguely ashamed that when a few people predicted the way things were going back in 2001, I pooh-poohed them. They were right and I was wrong. And what I don’t understand is why we get so obsessed in the UK. Here, reality shows are capable of filling multiple pages in the biggest selling newspapers. When I lived in Holland, the place that invented Big Brother, I was scarcely aware that the shows were airing at all (and yes, I watched Dutch TV and read Dutch newspapers).

Which is why I am slightly embarrassed to now be hooked on The World’s Strictest Parents. Admittedly this is reality TV with a heart, and yes it has some important messages about respect and self-respect that almost make up for the hyperbolic title. But ultimately it’s still parasite-TV: let’s have some loathsome teens move in for a week with some terrifying Georgia Christians and watch the sparks fly, and we can all feel smug that we’re normal and Not Like Them.

But my main problem with it is that it’s just too neat. Each show has the same format: days 1-2 are the conflict days, days 3-5 are the days when we see some valuable lessons being learned, and the final days we see that actually the teens weren’t as loathsome as we thought and they just needed a bit of tough love to bring out their true lovely selves. But hang on, this is reality TV, right? Since when did reality always work out so nicely, and so easily packagable into an hour’s TV?

It doesn’t, of course, because this is about as real as Star Trek. When Big Brother came out, today’s 17 year olds were still in primary school. They have grown up in the age of reality TV and they understand better than anyone of my age how the media works. These are savvy kids and they know what Mr BBC wants, so they give it to him: the fireworks, the tears, the hard lessons, the repentance and the reform. And in return they get not just a piffling 15 minutes of fame, but a whole hour. Not a bad deal.

It says a lot about me, and how I’m adjusting back to UK life, that I am fully prepared to watch the show knowing full well that it’s little more than a cross-continental soap opera with better than average scriptwriting, and that the kids are neither as awful as they appear at first nor as reformed as they claim at the end. They are just people, seeing a chance and grabbing it. And who can blame them?

Blair, Europe, power and legitimacy

So speculation is mounting as to whether Tony Blair will – or should - become the first president of the European Council. Of course it’s a bit difficult to reach a position on whether or not this is a good thing as no-one seems to know exactly what the job will look like.

But then that’s the problem. When you have a job – like the Prime Minister of the UK – that essentially moulds itself to the holder’s personality, you’d better be damn careful you get the right person in there. Now I’m not the greatest fan of Tony Blair, but as a statesman he was impressive. We may cry “Iraq!” and we are right to do so, but I think history will be kinder to him on his foreign policy record than current critics (his domestic record is another matter). If you want to see what I mean, you only have to compare Blair’s dynamism and energy with his plodding, depressing successor. As a face of the UK, I know which I would rather have.

But all that dynamism and energy are the exact reasons why Blair should not be president of the European Council. He is a man convinced the world needs his services, whether rightly or wrongly, and one thing he would never stomach is a ceremonial role. He would want impact and influence and he would want it in multiple areas. He would want, need to be president of a powerful and important foreign policy player.

But the EU is not and should not be any such organisation. 27 member states with fundamentally differing interests simply cannot reach a meaningful common position on most foreign policy issues. Nor is it desirable that they do so: the institution as a whole lacks legitimacy, a proper mandate or any real demos. Blair was accused of leading us into wars without a proper mandate because the vagaries of the British electoral system meant most people did not vote for him. At the head of the EU, he would be no less gung-ho but a good deal less legitimate. At a time when the EU is probably less liked by its citizens than at any time since its creation, do we really want to be making things even more difficult?

None of this, by the way, means I am anti-EU. I just think it is high time the political and bureaucratic elite stopped focusing their energies on boosting their own egos by making their behemoth baby even more all-encompassing, and started to address the longstanding concerns of European people about the Union’s democratic legitimacy and wastefulness. While they are at it, a half-decent PR campaign to explain to people the benefits of the EU (of which there are plenty) would not go amiss.

Such internal house-ordering is not going to be the responsibility of the president of the European Council. But electing a man like Tony Blair to that office will not only aggravate people like me who think the EU has gone way too far in the direction of political union. It will ensure that attention is distracted from what should be the priority business of the EU - wining back the support of European voters.

BNP on Question Time: British democracy exposed

So, Peter Hain is sulking because polls show an initial surge in support for the BNP following Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time. What he fails to realise is that the fault lies not with the BBC’s decsision to allow the man on the show, but with the shamefully poor way the programme was structured and the shallow and mud-slinging approach of the other panelists.

Step forward, Jack Straw. What a boon it must have been for a Labour minister to appear on a current affairs programme knowing that, this time, they will not be on the receiving end of the public’s vitriol. You could practically see the spittle, so keen was Straw to dish out to someone else what his party has been receiving for the past couple of years. It set the tone for the entire show: a never-ending stream of increasingly hysterical attacks on Griffin, with barely any substantial political content.

Griffin’s performance, or what he said, ultimately did not matter. A perfect opportunity to subject the BNP to the same scrutiny applied to other elected political parties, and thus expose their total lack of answers to the UK’s problems, was lost. Instead, Griffin may as well have been put in the stocks and had vegetables thrown at him. It was the yah-boo-sucks culture of British politics taken to its logical extreme.

Small surprise people said they’d consider voting for the BNP: stereotype it may be, but we do love an underdog. I wouldn’t vote for Griffin if he offered me free cheesecake for life (and that’s no small thing), but if I’d been polled on Friday I might have said “maybe”. Just to piss off those on all sides of British politics who think name calling and self-righteous outrage are the right way to go about democratic debate.

As for Hain, it’s astonishing that a man in favour of democracy responds to the votes of a million people by just telling them they are wrong and that he knows better. Rather than, say, acknowledging their concerns and sense of exclusion and attempting to address them. What is it about democracy that he doesn’t understand?

The whole thing exposed the state of democracy in this country: utterly lacking in maturity and principles, run by people who seem to think that shouting the loudest will win the argument. The BNP came out of it looking like they always have. British democracy came out looking like a sham.