Nick Griffin is right

It has been nearly six months since I blogged about the prospect of the BNP winning the right to represent Britain in the European parliament and a week since 'Nicky' Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time. I found the excitement that preceded his appearance bewildering: why was everyone so sure what the consequences would be? It seemed strange to me that the Free Speechers saw Question Time as the sort of forum wherein can take place clear-eyed debate and the demolishing of weak theories. And neither was I convinced that Question Time would be the BNP's springboard to power. With the benefit of my enlightened and subtle mind I concluded that we could predict no more than that the shit would be stirred; how it would settle was unforeseeable. I now realise that things are no clearer in the post-Question Time landscape; the shit, it seems, is in constant motion.

Too much time has since passed for it to be worthwhile talking about what happened during the show; whether I think Jack Straw waffled for long enough to defeat fascism or who wore the most pluralistic tie. But one of things that Nick Griffin said, it got me thinking it did. He said, "Everybody's always going on about the Aborigines but no one but no one gives a fuck about the English." He's right! I thought - I don't give a fuck about the English or the British, for that matter. The panel's response to this was that 'the English' is a silly concept because people who live in England have been marrying foreigners for hundreds of years; the English are not genetically distinct from the rest of the world. But that's not why I don't give a fuck, I thought, I wouldn't give a fuck even if they were genetically distinct and, what's more, conceding that it might be important to preserve genetic types is to buy into a racist myth. And this got me thinking about why I don't give a fuck about all kinds of other things: why don't I give a fuck about preferential treatment for women; why don't I give a fuck about why black people seem to be allowed to say nigga with impunity and white people aren't and why I don't give a fuck about mocking Christianity when I would be wary of mocking Islam. And then finally: might I not give a fuck about all these things for the same reason?

So I'm going to have good old-fashioned think about these things to see if they are connected. Then I'll get back to you. Boy, you're lucky.

Handwringing

I spent yesterday surfing the Jan Moir pre-emptive Gately grave trampling Twitter-wave, even going as far as submitting a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission. Now it's the morning after (the morning after surfing a wave, so what?) and it seems that for all the righteous anger felt by me and my close Twitter friends – Stephen Fry, Graham Linehan, Victoria Coren, Peter Serafinowicz, Derren Brown and Caitlin Moran among others – there is a chance that Gately's family and friends will not be gladdened by all this fuss and may not have appreciated the interruption of their grief by a call from the PCC.

It's often said by us Guardianista, Twitteratchik, blogrades that the Daily Mail is a paper that trades in rage and hate, that its readers will feel anxious if by lunchtime they have had no reason to swell into a Vernon Dursley-style fury. Sometimes, when especially droll, we call it the Daily Hate. But we Observermmunists like to vent our anger too – check out the most viewed stories on the Guardian website this morning:



Ignoring for a moment that three of them directly relate to this Jan Moir buisness, it is noticeable that two of the top five mention 'outrage' and all of them are about the woeful, immoral ways of lesser publications printed on less spacious paper. I know this is not representative of the most viewed all of the time but it does seem to reveal a unhealthy level of press-tribalism.

***

Anyway, having vented my worries about the speed of this Jan Moir bandwagon, I'm going chip in my two cents about her
stupid article. First of all, this bit:

"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."

What the fuck? That last sentence: I have no idea what she means. Does she mean 'what happened' to same-sex relationships? Does she mean 'what happened' on the night of Gately's death? Does she mean 'what happened' concerning Kevin McGee's death? Or does she just have not know what she's talking about? Did she, like me, become lost in that sentence? Of course, these deaths are clearly the same seeing as they're both gay.

Several clever Twitter people also pointed out another example of her Bad Grammar wherein she claims (unintentionally, we would imagine) to be a champion of gay rights:

"As a gay rights champion, I am sure he would want..."

This, I am reliably informed, is an example of the dangling modifier. As a hate-spreading idiot who doesn't deserve to be a journalist, I would have thought Jan Moir would be au fait with this sort of thing.

Elsewhere in her column she calls Tara Palmer-Tomkinson too old, the Nolan Sisters too fat and denounces maternity leave. She's just bitter cos she's gay.