mmoa_writes

I haven't done of these in ages...



I love how the first topic was whether Britain had been turned into a laughing stock, seeing as we were practically shut down by bad weather. As if Britain could never have been a laughing stock before, because you know, we are just so damn amazing. As if the world has nothing better to do than to wait for Britain to slip up and thus have a jolly good laugh at us.

Oh dear. A tad self-centered, perhaps? (although it turns out that yes, some international newspapers did comment on the ridiculousness of the situation. But I mean, it was a ridiculous situation. Who wouldn't want to comment on it?). Geoff Hoon gave the first example of the classic 'this is why you should just say "our bad"...' It's not as if he wasn't saying anything that wasn't understandable. It just came across as wheedling, pleading excuses. No matter how hard you prepared for it, clearly it wasn't enough. Why go any further?

Ooh... and the guy who went on about state benefits recipients shifting the snow. Well. That was just rather mean.

Next came the promise concerning 'British jobs for British people', the all-too temprorary slogan that Brown took up. Then along came the usual hoo-ha concerning the EU. Not for the first time, I felt like screaming at the laptop screen 'we are PART of the EU, we are not RUN by it. If there's legislation we don't like coming from Brussels, we do have a SAY in it, because we are PART of it, you knob.' Stop hijacking the topic to become the usual anti-EU spiel. Many of our apparent problems with the EU all come down to the way we, the British people, have allowed it to infiltrate various aspects of society. The real argument to be had is with our government and the way they have interepreted EU legislation, rather than some political ghoul-figure in his hidey-hole up in Brussels.

Ah, Carol Thatcher. Fortunately in this case, the audience were pretty on the ball. One guy made the point that the distinction between 'public' and 'private' seemed to imply that it was okay to make slightly off colour remarks 'privately', just not 'publicly', which is clearly problematic, to say the least. The responses to Shami's points were rather heartening as well.

My real issue was the comparison with the Jonathon Ross affair. After all, Jonathon actually apologised soon after the affair, whereas Carol Thatcher explicitly refused to do so after she had been challenged over the remark. Neither of the people in question were truly malicious in intent, both cause offense beyond the direct target. But JR apologised publicly as quickly as possible. CT, on the other hand, didn't.

Another source of annoyance was on Question Time extra, when one of the presenters made the comment that we should be focusing on 'real racism' instead. The problem is, that if you take 'real racism' to mean phsyical assaults on a person of a differen ethnic group or outright discrimination, you will be hard pressed to find it, and it's probaby because of that definition that people can say things like 'racism/sexism is over today'. Our problem today is that racism, as well as sexism and homophobia and religious intolerance etc, is of a far more subtle nature. Just think about how we're brought up. We're not brought up with images of blacks as stupid or as servants, but we are brought up with other images, perhaps more subtle but equally detrimental to mainstream views of ethnic groups. It might seem like nitpicking, if you are not a potential target of such views, but that's because the major kinks have already been straightened out. We've moved on, and so should our targets as a society.



The rest was rather well debated, with Mr Hoon demonstrating time and time again why sometimes, the government representative on the panel should just keep mum. He even pulled out the 'we are better than the conservatives were 18 years ago...' line. Oh dear, oh dear...

Will Young didn't do too badly either, even if I was rather disappointed by his stance on the Carol Thatcher issue. Still, he seemed to avoid certain traps that so many non-politicals fall into, and it was rather nice hearing something beyond the usual mushy lyrics and badly intonated lines.