The terrorists become ever more ingenious in their ways to kill us all, but some things remain reassuringly the same.
On Thursday morning the BBC reported that 18 “British-born” people had been arrested during raids by the security services and the Metropolitan police. It’s a peculiar way to describe the alleged plotters, when you think about it, isn’t it? After all, most of us over here are British-born, so — in theory — to describe someone thus tells you almost nothing about them. You never usually hear the term “British-born” in domestic news reports, as in, for example: “The prime minister, the British-born Tony Blair, today resigned.”
Wasn’t there something else the BBC could have told us that might have better informed us as to who these people were and what their purpose was? Some common bond shared between them, an ideology, or a common creed? The following morning, the BBC increased the amount of information to which we were allowed access by describing those who had been arrested as “British-born of Asian descent” — which was again mincing words and, as it happened, inaccurate to boot. At least one of the alleged terrorists was a British-born of British descent. In desperately trying to avoid saying the word “M****m”, the BBC had got the story wrong.
The corporation was perhaps following the example of Sir Iqbal Sacranie, the former leader of the Muslim Council of Britain, who has decreed that one cannot be an “Islamic” terrorist. The two words are semantically incompatible, he has argued.
Later various British-born community leaders appeared on the news to simultaneously condemn the alleged terrorists, sympathise with their real anger and hint darkly that maybe the fuzz had got it wrong again.
A chap from the increasingly gobby Muslim Public Affairs Committee insisted that while murdering thousands of innocent people was unquestionably wicked, if the rest of us didn’t begin to appreciate just how very angry — justifiably angry — were many young British-borns, more terrorism was likely to occur.
This strikes me as being a few yards short of a full, unequivocal, condemnation. If we reassure them that we do indeed understand their anger but nonetheless do not agree with their views, will they cease attempting to board aeroplanes with soft drink bottles full of nitro?
Heather, the girl we love to hate
Britain’s least favourite amputee, Heather Mills, found herself locked out of her estranged husband’s London home last week and the police were called — yet another indignity foisted upon a woman whom nobody seems to like very much.
We are usually rather treacly about disabled people who spend their lives trying to stop dogs being skinned alive, or campaigning against landmines. But not Heather; the fact that she is 50% deficient in the old leg department and has done nothing more objectionable recently than tirelessly raise money for charitable concerns has not endeared her to us. Instead, we carp that she is about to coin it big-time in a divorce settlement and mutter darkly about her past.
We feel she has sullied a national institution by marrying it. Paul McCartney’s latest complaint, by the way, was that her nanny took three bottles of cleaning fluid from their former marital home. It seems a strange and petty objection from someone worth £825m. Or, at least, worth £825m for the moment . . .
Breeding a lot of bad feeling in Norfolk
Is it wholly fair to describe the people of Norfolk as inbred, window-licking mutants with webbed feet and the collective IQ of a small shrubbery, as one local MP seems to have done? In truth, these were not the precise words of the excellent Ian Gibson, who represents or misrepresents the voters of Norwich North.
Aside from being one of the very few independently minded MPs, Gibson is also a former university biology lecturer. He was concerned with the increased prevalence of a certain type of diabetes in his county due to “inbreeding”.
Cue a furore. The good people of Norfolk began dusting down their banjos and practising scenes from Deliverance for Gibson’s next surgery. Their community leaders bubbled with condemnatory bile.
My guess is that Gibson, both as a geneticist and a Scotsman,
knows a lot about inbreeding. If I were Gibson, though, I’d be a bit nippy on my feet if, in the distance, he hears the cry: “Squeealll, li’l piggy.”
- If you are not the possessor of a baby then there is little reason for you to have come across that smug ball of bovine advice, Gina Ford. She is an “expert” on rearing young children, despite having none herself, and has made a career out of stating the bleedin’ obvious to lots of parents — most of them in north London — who are apt to indulge the every whim of their ghastly, mewling offspring. “Get stricter, you morons” is — free of charge — a useful summary of Ford’s approach.
She is currently getting very strict with a popular website, Mumsnet.com, where a debate has been raging about her “techniques”. In fact, her lawyers have tried to close it down because some bloggers said unkind things about her. The real issue here is that self-important people are not merely insisting websites remove material that might hurt their feelings, but that the websites themselves must be closed down.
To be sure, the internet is choked full of lunatics but it is at least a welcome forum for diversity and freedom of speech. Either we introduce a spot of legislation to protect this, or websites will be forced to locate offshore so that they can smack the likes of Gina Ford around the head with impunity.
In an eminently sensible decision, Judge Jeremy Roberts has not jailed Prashant Modi, an Indian man, after he admitted sexual assault.
Modi picked up three Swedish girls at a London nightclub who cheerfully accompanied him for “supper” at his hotel at five o clock in the morning. Two of them then, equally cheerily, climbed into his bed (the third crashed out on the sofa). Modi snuggled up and tried to take off their clothes.
Call it a clash of cultures. It is only in the West that women drink themselves senseless, accompany the man who had paid for their drinks to his hotel in the early hours, climb into bed with him and then be shocked that he could possibly think they might be in the mood for “love”.
