Recent Articles

Medusa’s daughter and the golliwog

In the league table of personal insults, calling someone a ‘golliwog’ ranks about on a par with calling them a ‘muppet’. Even as a racial insult, it’s not quite the sort of epithet that you hear bandied about at BNP meetings (though they do sell golliwogs in BNP t-shirts at some of those meetings, apparently).

Nevertheless, if Carole Thatcher had said it on air, I don’t suppose there would have been much disagreement about her being taken off air as a result. Nor do I think there can be much disagreement with The One Show presenter Adrian Chiles, Jo Brand and others for picking up Medusa’s Daughter over her use of the word during an after-show conversation in which she blabbed out her ‘off-the-cuff remark made in jest’ to describe a tennis player in the Australian open.

(Why the widespread coyness, by the way, in naming the tennis player concerned? I couldn’t find one mainstream news outlet prepared to say that Thatcher was talking about French player Gael Monfils. Didn’t any of them think it might have been instructive to get his opinion on the subject?).

I don’t think it suggests any degree of sympathy for the use of racially-based epithets, however, to feel that the reaction to Thatcher’s foot-in-mouth has been just a little OTT. When the Beeb doesn’t have the bollocks to broadcast a DEC appeal for Gaza, it feels a mite disproportionate to start acting all macho over an ex-prime minister’s gobby offspring.

What an odd idea of democracy, Boris

Boris Johnson beat Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral contest last May in big part because a lot of people wanted the right to drive their vehicles wherever, whenever and as fast as they like. Now he’s taking the first step towards paying them back for their support by announcing the abolition of the western extension to London’s congestion zone.

Actually, bicycle-riding Bojo didn’t have the ungreen guts to simply abolish the zone off his own bat. He disguised the decision as the product of a public consultation exercise. And he warned those who were ‘consulted’ that abolition would cost a lot of money, cause a lot of congestion, pollute the air in London even more than it is already and generally make life more difficult and unpleasant in the city. So he could palm off all responsibility for this environmental disaster in that bumbling Bojoish manner with a ‘Look, I did my jolly best to make the environmentalist case but the public just weren’t having it and who am I to ride my bicycle roughshod over their democratic verdict?’
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Council bans Christmas

Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without the familiar seasonal reports of local authority killjoys trying to ‘ban’ it. And like the Christmas displays in the shops, which the laws of commerce now require to be in place before the first leaves fall from the trees, the reports of the bans start earlier every year.

This year it was the city of Oxford that was first in the media firing line with the Oxford Mail’s ‘Council set to axe Christmas’ headline on 1 November setting the tone for a spot of ‘political correctness gone mad’-style bureaucrat bashing.
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Roll on 2012

Of course I know all the arguments about the cost, the human rights issues, the corporatism, the exploitation of athletic achievement for chauvinistic purposes. But there’s still something about the Olympics that shines through it all and when that gorgeous torch went out in the Beijing sky an hour or so ago, I felt more than a tinge of emotion about the whole affair.

I think, on balance, it was right that the Olympics went to China. I think it was right, too, that there were widespread protests, most notably as the Olympic flame made its way around the world from Greece to Beijing. I think that both the presence of the Games in China and the protests against them can only help the cause of liberalisation and democracy there.

Am I trying to have my sporting and political cake and eat it too? I don’t believe so.
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The BNP laughs while the left fall out

It’s been a depressing weekend for anyone who’s opposed to racism and concerned about the rise of the British National Party.

On Saturday, in case you missed it (which you probably did, since both the pre-publicity and the turnout were tiny), there was a central London ‘march and carnival parade’ organised by Unite Against Fascism. It was predominantly youthful, colourful and vibrant, but if there were more than two or three thousand present Trafalgar Square has got a lot bigger since I was last there.

That’s a long way short of the 60,000-plus who turned out in the rain for the Love Music Hate Racism event on the weekend before Dismayday (see ‘Just like ’78′); and no more than turned up at short notice to say hello to George Bush on his visit to London a week ago.
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A bad hair day

Four thousand quid is a lot of money for hurt feelings. By way of comparison, the most you can get under the Criminal Injuries Compensation Scheme if you lose your unborn child as a result of a violent assault (which might be expected to hurt most people’s feelings quite a lot) is £5,500.

So my instinctive reaction to the news that a young Muslim woman had been awarded £4,000 for ‘injury to feelings’ after a London hairdresser refused to employ her because she wore a headscarf was:

a) That’s a bit steep (which also happens to be the exact phrase used by the hairdresser after the industrial tribunal made its ruling).
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Goodbye to Ken

London, my London, looked little different this morning, when I tried to shake off the mares of the night before (Bojo and the BNP at City Hall) in the Regent’s Park summer series 10k race. I did about as well as the Labour Party on Dismayday, leaden legs limping lumpenly to the finish line.

The sun was shining, the plane trees were fruiting, the bus lanes were still functioning, there was still the same myriad mix of people, united in our variety. This is the city I never dreamt I would stay in when I first arrived here from the provinces. And this is the city I have grown to love and call home.
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