Jan Moir’s record speaks for itself
You all know that I’m the kind of blogger who checks things out, so when Jan Moir claimed to be ‘on the record’ as supporting civil partnerships, I just had to go find out exactly where…
Gay weddings are fine, but a gay divorce…
Since new legislation was introduced in this country nine months ago, more than 15,500 gay couples have done the decent thing and got married. The rise and rise of civil partnerships have pushed up sales of porcelain tea sets, Ralph Lauren cashmere blankets and quality Champagnes — none of your muck here, darling – and most people seem to be in agreement that the new laws were long overdue and a jolly good thing.It is interesting, however, that the vast majority – more than 14,000 – of the ceremonies took place in England. And while the popularity of gay weddings has surprised everyone, is it too soon to point out that I can’t wait for the first of the high-profile gay divorces to start happening? Surely some of them will turn out to be the kind of fabulous ding-dongs that make a wet Monday morning, a hot cup of tea and a trashy tabloid worth living for.
Even the most well meaning and kindly Daily Telegraph readers know that, somewhere out there, among the nascent gay divorces hovering over Never-Never Land, there will be a few that will promise to make the McCartney/Mills ructions look like a teatime tiff at the Ritz.
Roll on round one.
With ‘friends’ like Jan Moir, does the gay community actually need enemies?
Does the Arts Council need trimming too?
contribution by pagar
Unity wrote an article recently questioning whether, as we approach an era of fiscal restraint and pressure on public spending, it was appropriate to give public money to a rich organisation like the Catholic Church. And this got me thinking.
Are there other areas where we are currently spending public money that it would be appropriate to axe before we have to get to the nurses and teachers?
I came up with quite a few but perhaps the most obvious is funding for the Arts Council.
In September 2008, a £150,000 managed funds grant enabled 40 artists and scientists to set sail on Cape Farewell’s 12-day Disko Bay expedition. The trip aimed to put artistic responses to climate change in the spotlight, and the crew featured 10 musicians (including KT Tunstall, Martha Wainwright, Jarvis Cocker and Ryuichi Sakamoto), two architects, two oceanographers, a ceramicist and a comedian. This was the organisation’s seventh expedition.
The right’s silly obsession with marriage
The right’s prejudice in favour of marriage can sometimes lead it to some very sloppy thinking. Two recent pieces suggest this. First, the Spectator’s leader cites ONS research showing that married men are more likely to find work that single ones, and infers that “perhaps it’s time to chivvy the unemployed to church.”
This inference suffers from two problems. One is: why does marriage enhance employability? It could be because marriage causes men to want to work more, perhaps to escape the wife’s nagging. Or it could be that marriage is merely correlated with factors that make men attractive to employers: good social skills, reliability, a conventional mindset etc.
There’s lots of research (pdf) on this question – none of which the Spectator cites – which is gloriously ambiguous.
continue reading… »
Moir: over 1000 complain; Mail admits pulling ads
The Press Complaints Commission has received over 1000 complaints today over Jan Moir’s article in the Daily Mail.
She has released a statement through the PR firm Brown LLoyd James blaming an “orchestrated campaign” and denied her article was homophobic or bigoted.
New Media Age magazine today confirmed that Daily Mail Online had indeed pulled ads from her article.
They reported James Bromley, Mail Online MD, as saying:
We removed the advertising within minutes of the article being published as we saw the strong reaction This is done frequently and by other newspapers. For example, we wouldn’t want a mobile phone ad next to an article about mobile phone masts.
The Press Complaints Commission admitted that their website had slowed down tremendously because of the huge backlash to the article.
Times journalist Caitlin Moran tweeted a tongue-in-cheek message saying: “Jan Moir better pray she never needs another hair cut or interior design job again.”
Full statement by Jan Moir (via Ian Burrell)
Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions.
However, the point of my column-which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read – was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all.
Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death – out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger – did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.
The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned. On this subject, one very important point. When I wrote that ‘he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine’, I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality.
In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.
In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.”
More at Journalism.co.uk
Wilshire: MP’s salary “close to minimum wage”
Paul Waugh appear to have uncovered evidence of soon-to-be-ex-Tory MP David Wilshire having an Alan Duncan-style foot-in-mouth moment…
As if things weren’t bad enough already for David Wilshire, here comes what looks like more trouble.
A group of journalism students say that they interviewed him during a trip to Parliament this week – coincidentally just before yesterday’s Telegraph splash effectively did for his career.
The students say that Wilshire came up with the following quotes (which have a strange echo of Alan Duncan’s ‘rations’ complaint) during a mock press conference:
“I work 60-70 hours a week some weeks. When you look at what I earn over the year, it comes dangerously close to working out as the minimum wage”.
With many MPs feeling they have been unfairly treated by Sir Thomas Legg, he reportedly added:
“Is it fair to drive someone perilously close to a nervous breakdown or suicide over a packet of biscuits?…What’s happening at the moment is like being told your salary is £20,000 a year and you earn that much for five years.
“Then after that time someone says to you actually, sorry, we made a mistake, you’re not supposed to be on £20,000 you’re on £15,000 – so can you pay back the extra £5000 a year over the next five years. You’d be pretty annoyed wouldn’t you?”
Waugh’s post, on his Evening Standard blog, indicates that he’s still trying to contact Wilshire to put the these alleged comments to him.
It is, however, well worth noting that even if a backbench MP did regularly put in a 70 hour week in return for their annual salary of £64,766 that would still see them earning £17.80 an hour.
Currently, the National Minimum Wage stands at:
- £5.80 per hour for workers aged 22 years and older
- a development rate of £4.83 per hour for workers aged 18-21 inclusive, and
- £3.57 per hour for all workers under the age of 18, who are no longer of compulsory school age
Mail pulls ads on Moir article after campaign
It looks like the Daily Mail has been forced to pull advertising from Jan Moir’s article today on the “strange” death of Stephen Gately.
A Twitter campaign was encouraged by various people including @malcolmcoles – asking people to demand that the likes of BT, Marks & Spencer and other major advertisers pull their ads from the website.
The article currently does not feature any of the Daily Mail’s stock banner advertising on the left and right-hand side.
It has some stock advertising from Google still coded into the page, but the prominent ads look like they have been pulled.
As of writing the article has attracted over 500 comments, most of them negative.
The Press Complaints Commission has released a statement saying:
It may be a matter for the family of Mr Gately to raise a complaint about how his death has been treated by the Daily Mail.
Homophobia, misogyny and hypocrisy
The death of gay popstar Stephen Gately from pulmonary oedema this week was “unnatural”, not by virtue of foul play but because of his sexuality, according to frothing baghack Jan Moir of the Daily Mail .
More unnatural than the death of 38-year old Siobhan Kearney, whose former husband this week lost his appeal to be acquitted of her murder.
The judge confirmed that in 2006, Brian Kearney strangled Siobhan in her room then used a Dyson Vacuum cleaner flex as a ligature before trying to hoist her over the en-suite door in her bedroom in an attempt to make it look like a suicide. He then left the house, leaving their three-year-old son alone downstairs whilst his mother’s body slowly cooled.
More unnatural than the death of Kate Ellerbeck, who rowed with her mutually unfaithful husband and asked for a divorce, attacking him in a rage when he refused.
HSBC investment banker Neil Ellerbeck, who was this week convicted of manslaughter, told police that restrained his wife “forcefully”, pinning her to the ground with his entire 15stone bulk until she stopped “wriggling and kicking”, and left her corpse in the hallway. He then texted his lover, bought a lottery ticket, and went to pick up the couple’s ten-year-old daughter from school, telling her “Mummy’s not here because she’s gone shopping”.
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Jan Moir in the Daily Mail: sickening homophobia
Since Stephen Gately’s death last week, the Daily Mail has been desperately trying to dig up some dirt.
In spite of official confirmations that the Boyzone star died of natural causes, the Mail has decided that the unfortunate death of an innocent 33-year-old man is fair game (see, for instance, Paul Scott’s unashamed hatchet job the day after Gately’s death).
The lowest point was hit today by Jan Moir with her article “Why there was nothing natural about Stephen Gately’s death “, where this overpaid food obsessive uses a personal tragedy to lash out at civil partnerships and sexual minorities.
continue reading… »
Could this be Boris Johnson’s achilles heel?
While his party leader talks about trying to help the poor and looking out for their concerns, London Mayor Boris Johnson unveils crippling 20% fare-rises for London’s commuters.
A year ago Boris did exactly the same: hiking up transport fares across London and trying to blame Ken even though the previous administration left him with a 5% growth in budgets.
That’s two years in a row he has brutally punished London’s commuters – hitting hardest London’s poor who rely on public transport. In some cases, as Tom points out here, fares have risen by a third.
During that time he has sucked to the City and defended the very bankers who caused the recession, been ‘bought off’ by hedge funds, wasted a huge amount of money scrapping bendy buses, and created a financial black-hole by getting rid of the Western Extension Zone and of course described his £250,000 income from writing as “chicken feed”.
He’s creating his own negative narrative.
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Introducing Another Anti-Science Tory
As was amply demonstrated during the debate on the abortion amendments to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, the Conservative Party has more than its fair share of mouth-breathing morons festering away on its backbenches.
But for sheer unadulterated nuttery even Nadine Dorries struggles to live down to the standards of David Tredinnick, the Eton-educated Member of Parliament for Bosworth.
Thus far is his parliamentary career of 22 years, Tredinnick cuts a noteworthy figure only for having been suspended from the House of Commons for 20 days for accepting a payment of £1,000 in return for asking a question in the House of Commons about an entirely fictitious drug – (no, not Cake, unfortunately) – losing his position as a Parliamentary Private Secretary (unpaid bag carrier) in the process; and for having spent a little over £500 of taxpayers money on a piece of Astrology software, and associated training, which he claimed was to help with a parliamentary speech on alternative medicines.
Given that the only previous occasion on which Tredinnick waxed lyrical on the subject of astrology was in 2001, I must assume that the speech in question was the one he gave on Wednesday in the course of an adjournment debate, in which case, and speaking as a taxpayer, I’d very much like my fucking money back.
The Quackometer has already started to pick over some of Tredinnick’s more delusional, and wholly untruthful remarks, although for sheer entertainment value it would be remiss of me not to highlight one particularly spectacular piece of outright lunacy:
I could have referred to radionics, for example, for which a double-blind trial is almost impossible, yet it is very popular because people believe that it gives them the ability to get remote healing. We need to think out of the box here. As with healers who can do remote healing, it is no good people saying that just because we cannot prove something, it does not work. The anecdotal evidence that it does is enormous. I know that the Minister is a forward thinker, and I believe that the Department needs to be very open to the idea of energy transfers and the people who work in that sphere. Will she comment further on that?
Like many, if not most, advocates of woo, the idea that the plural of anecdote isn’t data, let alone evidence, is one that utterly fails to register with Tredinnick, as does the simple proposition that there is absolutely no plausible scientific mechanism within either biology or physics that could account for ‘radionics’ for the simple reason that what he’s actually talking about here is magic – plain old-fashioned pig ignorant witch-doctoring ju-ju.
continue reading… »
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