the brilliantly leaping gazelle

While it is often said that life imitates art, I never really believed it to be true, not true in the sense of there being incontrovertible evidence that proved it to be so. All that changed a few moments ago though, when I saw this headline in “The Guardian’, ‘Susan Sarandon, Olivia Colman and Paul Mescal join star donors of Cinema for Gaza auction.’ 

 Joining the celebrities is the former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn – billed as the star of Sumotherhood, thanks to his cameo in last year’s Adam Deacon urban thriller – who is donating a Zoom poetry reading and a selection of homemade jam.’ 

Did anyone else think of Janet Breen and the Jam Festival, the sketch in ‘The Day Today’ which expertly lampooned the presumed moral superiority of people who are successful at one thing deluding themselves that their outrage at another more complicated thing has greater value than that of others.

All actors do is dress up and play make believe essentially, and you tend not to get plumbers, refuse collectors or nurses carrying on like this. 

Its all just virtue signalling, no its worse than that, its selective virtue signalling, the selection being based upon a self-serving desire to be well thought of. Or at least not be rounded upon, as happened to Olly Alexander a few weeks ago, when he refused to withdraw from Eurovision because people were upset about Israel’s participation in it. But that’s all forgotten now, because he’s ‘ offering ‘a Zoom serenade of the song of you choice’  and has redeemed himself, in the opinion those whose opinion he cares about at least.

That’s the main problem that I have with all of this very public display of virtue signalling, that it’s all done so very publicly. If they were doing it privately, possibly donating a days salary, then that’s one thing, but not rummaging around your attic for some old tat – Mike Leigh’s donating an ‘Abigails Party poster – or to read your children a bedtime story like Rebecca Hall. Oh, Tilda Swinton wants to do that as well, although not at the same time and not in person.

But the absolute pick of a very unworthy list of contenders is Josh O’ Connor – he played the young Prince Charles in ‘The Crown’ – who is offering a ‘perfect porridge masterclass via Zoom’ 

“Sometimes, it’s hard to be a woman.” So sang Tammy Wynette in her 1968 hit ‘Stand by your man’, and if Tammy found it hard then, she’d find it incalculably harder in the Scotland of 2024. Even asserting that a woman is a biological female and not a man who likes fancy dress, can have you arrested and imprisoned, thanks to their new Hate Crime Bill (HCB). Welcome to the even more enlightened version of the Enlightenment, where some people are so enlightened that they believe that women can have penises.

Not since Westminster passed the Trade Union Act of 2016, has legislation been passed that expressly increases the rights of a very small minority at the cost of weakening them for the majority. That the HCB was introduced into law on April Fools Day is telling, not least it passed into law by the Scottish parliament in April 2021, and the delaying bringing it into force results from police concerns as to how exactly it is be implemented. 

So this post is concerned with why this confusion exists and to do this I’ll be quoting not just from the law itself, but from the Explanatory Notes (EN) that accompany it. Think of the attention grabbing headline in a news article and the boring details hidden in paragraph eight that hardly anyone ever reads and you’ll get the idea. 

My main problem with the HCB, aside from its curtailing of free expression and blatant authoritarianism, is its imprecise use of language. Now it may seem ironic for me to focus on this, given how often my posts will have words missing here and there, but I am brain damaged, whilst the civil servants responsible for its drafting and the politicians responsible for scrutinising it line by line at committee stage before finally voting it into law, are not. 

The HCB chooses when to be specific – as it does when defining who the law is designed to protect in Section 1 and throughout –  and when to believe that certain other words or phrases have a commonly agreed and understood meaning, giving the HCB an excuse not to provide one. ‘Malice and ill-will’ are two such examples of this kind of laxity and whilst these words may have a meaning in the publics mind, legally there isn’t an agreed one. Although these words crop up with alarming frequency in the early sections of the HCB as something the accused must be guilty of demonstrating toward the victim if an offence is deemed to have taken place, it is assumed everyone accepts the unspoken meaning.

Nowhere is this presumed osmosis more disingenuously used as when the HCB makes continual references to what a ‘reasonable person’ might consider this or that to be. The this and the that includes racial harassment, threatening behaviour and offensive material, to name but three. But the very notion that there even is such a thing as a ‘reasonable person’ is utter nonsense. Everyone imagines themselves to be reasonable and everyone else to be on the spectrum of unreasonableness. More importantly, this absurd fantasy imagining of what constitutes being a ‘reasonable person’ is dangerously naive, especially if it is left to the ‘victim’ to determine what ‘a reasonable person’ might think. 

One of the most chilling aspects of the HCB is not just the scope of what is communicated might be, but the detailed way in which it sets out in its EN how they might be communicated.

Behaviour or material which is threatening or abusive could arise in any setting, such as—

• on social media, such as Twitter, Facebook etc.,
• at the dinner table or elsewhere in the home,
• in an office or workplace,
• in a teaching environment, including religious education,
• during a religious sermon or as part of religious preaching or practice,
• in a public or private meeting,
• in a newspaper, blogpost or other media setting,
• when performing, including in a play or a show on stage or in a film.

Can anyone else hear the clocks strike 13?

One of the great fallacies of the HCB is that it is predicated upon a fundamental misconception of society, namely one that suggests that people only exist either as potential victim, or else as a potential offender.

If my reading of both recent Scottish political activism and the HCB are correct, the act will embolden those transgender activists who wish to use fit or vengeful and malicious reasons and to silence gender critical feminists. They will use it as a weapon in their ongoing struggle against the reality of biological sex and to not reaffirm their narrative of being part of an oppressed minority but then also to change that narrative so that they have now the power, they have agency. Which is great for them, all 24,000 fancy dress enthusiasts, or 0.5% of Scotlands population but not the 2.8 million Scottish women or 51% who make up the rest of it.

Which makes it all the more galling for those transgender activists anticipating a judicial gag on opinions that don’t match their delusion, the that HCB grudgingly concedes that the right to freedom of expression as contained in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, includes the general principle that the right applies to the expression of information or ideas that offend, shock or disturb. Basically, an acknowledgement of the fact that the HCB is liable to a successful challenge on that basis and that everything in the HCB can be contested. Meaning that the only winners in all of this will be the estate agents, luxury car dealers and stock brokers of the lawyers who’ll spend years sorting this out, before taking it to Europe.

It’s as if the Scottish parliament has effectively ceded responsibility for sorting out what the HCB means to lawyers. So it isn’t J.K Rowling who should be worried, she has enough fame and wealth to protect her for now, but rather those without her fame, wealth and time needed to mount a robust and costly legal defence. It is those women upon whom the law will be first tested, allowing legal precedents to be set, case law to be established and judgments to be be referenced that are the one’s who’ll suffer most. Why would anyone run a race without first having done the training needed to win?

And Tammy was wrong. It isn’t hard to be a woman, well certainly not for the vast majority of trans women who haven’t yet had genital reconstruction surgery. 

Alright, we get it, about how in the world of perpetual criticism and finding fault that masquerades as journalism over at ‘The Guardian’. That whilst it can be trying to find new ways to pandering to its disciples need to feel guilty to just for being alive, in their world, The Garrick Club is something vexing. Their interminable pursuit of this men only members club has been a staple of its output for well over a week now, so much so that it has reached beyond the confines of “The Guardians’ sanctimonious morality, and causes four judges to resign their membership of it today.

If ‘The Guardian’ were a dog, one would think it had rabies it’s been frothing so angrily about it. But the thing about it is, is it really that important a story? How is the fact that a group of successful men like to socialise in comfortable surroundings with other successful men and have formed a club that only allows successful men to join it a story? Especially since they’ve been at it since 1831.

But in the echo-chamber that is ‘The Guardian’s’ editorial stance, one which ruthlessly assumes some evil machinations lurking hidden somewhere such a privileged club, being a member of such a club is suspicious and that suspicion is enough to permit a kind of guilt by association that’d make Senator Joe McCarthy blush.

It’s as if no-one at ‘The Guardian’ would ever dream of using social connections to help bolster theirs, their friends or associates careers, or to use those connections to some other advantage. It happens everywhere, from rugby clubs and Chambers of Commerce to the Women’s Institute. To imagine it wasn’t ever thus is being dangerously disingenuous. If Kath Viner, the editor of ‘The Guardian’ was serious about highlighting the pernicious dangers inherent in of cronyism, of friends doing friends favours and keeping those favours quiet, then possibly being open and transparent about her relationship and subsequent marriage to Guardian copy whore Adrian Chiles might be a good place to start. He claims the relationship started after he started working there in 2019, ending in marriage in 2022.

Isn’t this exactly the sort of behaviour that ‘The Guardian’ would be quick to condemn? Someone in a position of power, not only having a relationship with a subordinate but also powerful enough to terminate their employment? Just because here there is a reversal of the sexes of the people involved that usually accompanies these stories, doesn’t make it any the less problematic. They’re ever so quick to call on someone to resign over something that offends their own highly selective moral sensibilities, just as long as it doesn’t happen to involve their editor, it seems.

And also what, essentially, is the difference between The Garrick Club and Warner Hotels. One is men only club whilst the other provides other adults only holidays. Can someone explain why one kind of discrimination is so much worse than another? Or is age discrimination alright, just as long as its done to those too young to notice their being discriminated against?

(Not sure whats’s happening. The second email version of this post was meant to correct the formatting errors of the first one. It didn’t. But being stubborn I’m giving a final go. Apologies for adding more guff to your spam folder)

Much the same as most peoples, my reaction to the news that Middling has cancer was sa adness that a mother with young children was so afflicted, quickly tempered by the realisation that any sympathy was misplaced. Her being married into the family of the biggest benefit fraudsters in the country, means that the  state will pay for all her treatments and do so willingly, not even questioning her right to such entitlement. The press, knowing their role and performing it with an eye on future rewards of honours and titles, will act as cheerleaders for it being our patriotic duty to think this, that it’s almost our privilege to pay for the sort of medical care others can only dream of.

Writing about dreaming puts me in mind of one I had early this morning, when I was considering who were properly deserving of our sympathy amid this ridiculous confection of concern. I thought of  Billy Wilder and Ken Loach and if neither of those names mean anything to you, then you have no reason to be reading this blog. In a nutshell, one of them is probably one of the best film directors ever, and the other been the social conscience of British cinema since 1965.. Specifically, I imagined what manner of delights would they conjure up out of all the supposed grief and other phony emotions that have allegedly consumed vast swathes of the population this weekend.

Billy Wilders deeply cynical ‘Ace in The Hole’ tells the story of an out of work reporter who stumbles upon a small story but inflates it until it becomes massive sensation, with him directing the narrative. It’s a biting examination of the seedy relationship between the press, the news it reports and the manner in which it reports it. The film also shows how a gullible public can be manipulated by the press. Sounding familiar?

What would he have made of the circumstances whereby a conspiracy theory involving a famous person is created by and shared on social media and then that conspiracy theory is reported on and discussed by the press in a perpetual orgy of speculation and rumour.. Until the famous person is put in a situation where they are forced to reveal an even bigger story about themselves. The press and social media are delighted by this, as the newer, bigger story is so much better. Social media then turns on itself, needing as always, someone to be critical of, this time it is the people who spread the conspiracy theory The press reports on this, in a manner suggesting that they are merely curious observers of this digital onanism, free from any blame. And should they then turn on each other, so much the better, as they can report on that.

Then there is the emotional inflation, whereby a normal expression of sympathy from an estranged relation is imbued with such import and earning so much admiration that you’d think the relation had done something worthy enough to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The various opinion pieces in the press that are all variations of the same opinion. One has to admire the  genius of their benefit scam alchemy, where cutting ribbons, visiting factories or hospitals, and shaking hands is somehow transformed into work.

Billy’d have so much fun with all that, and being old school Hollywood, would do it less than two hours.

Ken Loach, always keen to tell the stories of Britain’s neglected and downtrodden, worlds away from wizards and superheroes, would unfavourably compare the gushing tributes toadied about Middlings ‘bravery’ with that of real bravery in the face of a similar diagnosis. A single father, maybe living on a sink estate, working two minimum wage jobs to support her and her young daughter. The only drugs he can get hold of is heroin from hus pimp because the waiting list for NHS cancer treatment is so long. So long, that it became terminal before she got an appointment. He doesn’t do froth, our Ken.

 Being Ken, he’d also include references to Middlings husbands family habit of going to hospital for a two night precautionary stay if they felt unwell, about how it wasn’t condemned as a flagrant mockery of the society upon which they sponged off by the press, but instead sold to a credulous public as a right and proper thing to do. And while he was at it, allude to the plights of the thousand other men who were diagnosed with cancer on the same day as Wayne, king of the spongers. You know, those men unlucky enough to be born to the wrong parents.

I care about her about as much as she cares about me, possibly because she hasn’t earned other feelings from me due to the fact that she’s had no positive effect on my life. Now if Neil Tennant or Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys had cancer, that’d be another story, because they provided the soundtrack to my youth. When the their album ‘Introspective’ came out, I took the day off college to immerse myself in and it was a good job that I did, because I fondly remember spending hours listening to the opening track, ‘Left To My. Own Devices’. The utter lush majesty of it was so unlike anything I’d ever heard. Epic sonic indulgence in eight minutes.