the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I must confess to not having the firmest of grasps regarding the events that caused such consternation in Parliament the other day, but what I do know is that it concerned the ongoing situation in Gaza. Apparently, a vote calling for something was so badly handled that the whole thing quickly descend into chaos. Lots of senior politicians then did what they do best,. Namely, blaming each other for it, calling on someone to resign and generally convincing themselves that the majority of the population felt so strongly about this as they did, so that they craved an endless diet of media analysis to tell them not only was it important, but why it was important

At no point in all of this, did any politicians stop to ask themselves that if, in the real world, the one outside the Westminster bubble, far removed from TV studios and headline writers, political pundits and wannabee has-beens does any of this actually matter? Will it have any effect whatsoever upon the issue upon which they were so preoccupied? Had the vote gone ahead, and if a motion calling for a ceasefire have passed, would have given rise to some sober reflection on the part of Netanyahu? Or would he would’ve thought, ‘The news that some people of no consequence have said something of no consequence, and have called for something that has no consequence, has no consequence for me.’

It is a seems to be a peculiarly British political class delusion, that no matter how much we are reminded that Britain no longer has an Empire, no matter how guilty modern Britain constantly finds itself to be over endless real and imagined wrongs committed by it, the antecedents of the class that oversaw it still feel emboldened enough to lecture other countries as to how to conduct themselves. And are possessed of a blinkered perception of their own self-importance to think it matters, one that they’d be first in the queue to condemn others for. They live in a fantasy world created in a belief of their own self-importance, a belief that when Britain speaks, the world listens, a belief that world whilst the world has changed, it essentially remains the same. A kind of Schrödinger’s politics.

An excellent article in spiked highlighted the grotesque disconnect between the concerns of the public and the concerns of politicians. It seems to me that our politicians are not so much interested concerns rooted in the everyday concerns of their constituents – the ones who put them on the soapbox in the first place and to whom they claim it is an honour to serve – as they are about being seen to doing anything that’ll garner approving tweets and which will enhance their chances of re-election.

Because to me that’s all it is, a fear of the digital mob turning on them and at the same time, a desire to say or tweet something that the digital mob can either turn into a viral entity or better yet, actual news. Being seen by some to say or do the right thing isn’t the same as actually doing or saying the right thing. Over Israel/Gaza, some of our politicians have failed to grasp that blindingly obvious truism.

I saw this headline on the BBC website yesterday and my mind went into overdrive, because the headline was so utterly bereft of any critical rigour as to be meaningless. It made on question the editorial standards that allowed such a headline to be even written. And here it is:

‘One million have undiagnosed type 2 diabetes in England’

Exactly how can one put a figure on something if that something hasn’t even been quantified? Well the BBC got around this by providing a link to some research by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) which apparently proves this fantastical claim. I haven’t read the whole thing – because in all probability the ONS will, knowing my luck, publish research that proves that the more statical research one reads, the more one increases their likelihood of dying early – but have just skimmed the main points and it is by turn both unintentionally hilarious and alarmingly contradictory

‘An estimated 7% of adults in England showed evidence of type 2 diabetes, and 3 in 10 (30%) of those were undiagnosed; this equates to approximately 1 million adults with undiagnosed type 2 diabetes.’

Ah good, our old friend ‘estimated’ making a not unexpected appearance in a piece of statistical scaremongering. One wonders if his trusty companions ‘projection’, ‘possibility’, and ‘eventually’ are lurking deep in the research paper? And then, just to ratchet up the fear still further, it added

Those with type 2 diabetes were also more likely to be undiagnosed if they were in better general health, and women were more likely to be undiagnosed if they had a lower body mass index (BMI), lower waist circumference, or were not prescribed antidepressants.

So hang on! I thought having better general health was a good thing? Also, isn’t women having a lower BMI an equally desirable thing? Or am I wrong? But there was no time to dwell on this, because;

‘Pre-diabetes affected around 1 in 9 adults in England (12%), which equates to approximately 5.1 million adults.’

What’s this now? ‘Pre-diabetes’? When did we start living in the world of ‘Minority Report‘? It follows that if there is a thing, then there has to be a time when that thing didn’t exist. If we accept that pre-diabetes is a thing, then aren’t 100% of people pre-death?

‘Groups most at risk of having pre-diabetes were those with known risk factors for type 2 diabetes, such as older age or being in the BMI categories “overweight” or “obese”; however, there was also considerable prevalence in groups typically considered “low risk”, for example, 4% of those aged 16 to 44 years and 8% of those who were not overweight or obese had pre-diabetes.’

So just to recap then. There are two things – undiagnosed and pre-diabetes – that can’t be proven, but are nonetheless presented as fact. The healthier one is the greater the risk of it being undiagnosed and even if you’re younger and slimmer, you’re still in the woods for the pre- version.

A few seconds before I posted this, I re-read the BBC article for any hint of healthy scepticism on the part of the reporter who posted this. They would’ve had access to the same, hopefully much more, information than I had, but there was not even a scintilla of doubt. It was presented as fact, whereas to me it reads like a last piece of ‘churnalism – a press release basically presented as news.

No wonder Dr. Andrew Wakefield got such an easy ride!

One of the things that neatly exemplifies just how ‘celebrity’ obsessed our culture has become, is not just the award ceremonies themselves, but the fawning sycophancy by a media that has suspended all objectivity for access to ‘talent’ It’s like a dog eating its own vomit, the seriousness with which they treat the basically trivial and woe betide anyone who punctures their ever so carefully inflated balloon of pomposity, as Ricky Gervais did to such great effect when he used to host the Golden Globes. Anyone would think he’d done something that mattered in the real world.

Tonight it’ll be Baftas, where the British film industry will delude itself once again that it’s nothing more than a tax break with a shared language and technical expertise. Once again the award winners will make teary speeches about how great this was, how lovely it was to work with that, but that actually the other was a story that needed to be told. And they’ll bang on about how brave this was, how selfless that was, and how humbling the other was, whilst being applauded enthusiastically by the losers who look overjoyed to have lost.

Nothing sums up the shallowness more, the utter fatuousness of these awards, than this The nominees are aware that a camera is right there in their face, to get their reaction when the result is announced so if they win, they need to act almost mortified but if they lose, act bizarrely delighted to have lost. It’s only a matter of time until there’s an award for Best Loser Reaction Shot. One for the showreel…

You don’t get this nonsense in any other field of human endeavour. You don’t get builders fondly reminiscing about a wall they’d put up years ago, how the mortar was so great. Neither do you get surgeons waxing lyrical about the thread they use to sew up patients after open heart surgery or waiting staff at a Harvester banging on tearfully about how the chef goes to great lengths to ensure that there’s always a vegan option on the menu. Because there are no awards for any of them, there not considered sexy enough to warrant that kind of attention, that’s not prime-time BBC1 enough, but what we do get is endless red carpet photos of actors wearing dresses designed feed the media cycle. Are they too this, or not enough that, or are they referencing the other?

David Tennant is hosting this year. Perhaps he might take us all on one last trip on the TARDIS to a time in human history that wasn’t so obsessed by self-important non-entities. Oops. silly me.There wasn’t. There never will be. Its the human conditioned to be conditioned.

The news that Wayne has got cancer saddens me.

Not for him, but because questions that should be rightly asked about health inequalities, especially those surrounding early cancer diagnosis, access to effective treatment and ongoing post survival rehabilitation have been largely ignored by the media. A glorious exception to this obsequious forelock tugging is an excellent piece in spiked by Joanna Williams. Much easier to focus on his two sons, Not Yet Wayne and On The Wane, whose every action is minutely dissected and discussed so as to help deflect attention from where it should be.

You know, instead of detailing the plight of some of the other 1000 people who were diagnosed with cancer on the same day he was. Those who by accident of birth will not get the same medical care he will. ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ As true today as it always has been.

It also saddens me that Waynes long standing devotion to homeopathy seems to have deserted him, and that this too hasn’t been remarked upon in the media saddens me. What better way to highlight its efficacy, to use his celebrity status to advance a cause he notionally passionately believes in and prove that homeopathy isn’t a load of old bollocks. But instead of staunchly sticking to his voguish affectations he, like countless others before him, jettison’s them when confronted with a potentially fatal condition and instead puts his trust in proper science, not pseudo-scince and expensive quackery. You know, the kind of science that actually works.

I always thought he was a hypocrite, its just nice to have it confirmed.

But what fills me with the most amount of joy about all of this – and yes, I find joy in this, I’m not going to do a Tony Blair after Thatcher died – has to be the awkward silences and unspoken recriminations and pent up rage directed at Ash by Wayne. He knew he was in love with her when he got married, continued his relationship with Ash and since the divorce from his wife and her subsequent death, has been tireless to rehabilitate the publics opinion of her. Again, it saddens me that the media haven’t drawn attention to the fact that whilst he isn’t a smoker, she is, and that his casual interpretation of his marriage vows are now coming back to haunt him.

Good.

It also saddens me that no-one has made the blindingly obvious observation – blindingly obvious to me anyway – that as the monarchy itself is a cancer on our society, that the cancer now has cancer.

The media coverage following the death of Terry Venables makes me think of Noam Chomsky.

Clearly the death of Mr Venables must be a cause of pain and loss to those who knew him, and as writing as one who recently was recently bereaved, I can understand their loss. But the acres acres of newsprint devoted to him, the elevation of the mundane to something approaching quasi-sainthood, is as both irrelevant as it is instructive. The ink that was spilled was by those regurgitating second-hand memories, banal platitudes and anecdotes disguised as ephemera whose only objective was a word count. His entire life was devoted to kicking a ball about, first by himself and then telling others how to do it and he was only ever reasonably good at that. He wasn’t excellent. He was a journeyman at best.

But not according to the outpouring of wholly fatuous guff that his death engendered.

Hers where Chomsky comes in. In my my mid-twenties I read a lot his books and his observations about sports, most specifically the function it provides our society, seem to have been starkly illustrated by recent events. Simply put, he posits that sports acts as a diversion, drawing the populaces mental energies and attention way from anything that might be be more worthy of effort. It’s hard at first, but then it gets easier and after a while you end up with what all political elites fear, namely a well informed electorate.

But whereas in the 20th Century we had Goebells and ‘The Big Lie’, now we have what is laughing called ‘social’ media – which is anything but – which helps spawn the hate marches that have befouled our capital over recent weekends. Because they offer people a ready made explanation of who is suffering and who is causing the suffering, because it easily be expressed in a chant or placard and because alignment with those views doesn’t require much in the way of critical analysis, has therefore become the perfect embodiment of way this can work to the detriment of society.

Since the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian gunmen at the Munich Olympics and the subsequent hunting down and killing of those gunmen by Israel, no-one can have been in any doubt that the killing by terrorists of any Israeli citizen is considered by Israel to be an attack upon Israel itself and therefore treated as such. And Hamas can’t have been unaware of this. As this report from the BBC – under 3 minutes long and using Hamas’s own drone footage – points out, the attacks by Hamas on the 7th October were well coordinated, using as they did land, sea and air and as such required months, if not years of planning.

After all, people who can operate motorised hang-gliders need some training. A decoy missile attack of 2,000 missiles requires 2,000 missiles. Drones that flew over the Israeli border and then shot up their surveillance towers needed people to fly them…

The sheer scale of the logistics is simply staggering, dwarfed only the factthat at no stage when all of this planning was going on did no-one say ‘But hold on, do we really think there’ll be no response from Israel from this. That they won’t see this as act of such barbarity that can only be met with overwhelming military action. Oh, we know this ahead of time and are going to do it anyway? That we value Palestinian lives almost as less as we value Jewish lives.? Forgive me, I didn’t know that. Okay then, carry on.’

That’s why I thought of Terry Venables and Noam Chomsky, easy soundbites and lazy thinking, echo chamber politics and moral hypocrisy.

I’ve written about the problems caused by others peoples noise on my sleep before now and even though I know its a first world problem, a first world problem is still a problem nonetheless and one that seems all the more problematic because there’s nothing I can do about it.

In my old house, the noise came from planes flying in the morning. Really early in the morning. The first one would be at four am, the second at five am and then every ninety seconds or so. With my insomnia, this was far from ideal, meaning that if I wasn’t fast asleep by the time that the planes started, I had no chance of sleep. Additionally, because there was no other noise so early in the morning, I could hear the planes long before they were overhead. And that in itself bothered me, the fact that the flightpath had been lowered, so the noise was even noisier.

Then nearly three years ago the landlords of my old house decided they wanted to take back possession of it, with predictable consequences for me. Fortunately, my good friend Nosferatu lives in a house with enough space to allow her to invite me to share with her.

Fandabbidosy.

The only downside to this offer was that she lives in a row of terraced houses in a part of North London, where it seems everyone either wants a loft conversion or an extension. And when they’re finished, immediately to sell it only for the new buyers to gut the entire property and start again. It’s like an endless game of whac a mole. A loft conversion is started and within a couple of weeks of it being finished an extension will be started at someone else’s house and when that’s finished, another couple of weeks will pass before work starts repairing someone’s roof and well, you get the idea.

The building work would start bang on 8am – the time that council legislation allows building work to start. Putting scaffolding up, knocking walls down, getting skips delivered, drilling, etc, etc. It was like being trapped in the film ‘Live. Die. Repeat.‘ as directed by Nick Knowles. I thought it couldn’t get any worse.

I was wrong.

It can always get worse.

Because at least the building work I’d hitherto had been incredibly annoying had at least been done by professionals, ones who knew what they were doing. By contrast, the neighbours opposite my bedroom window have thought to themselves ‘Hang on, didn’t that bloke build his own house with only YouTube tutorials as his guide. I assembled some IKEA furniture once so how difficult can it be to build an extension?’ With the zeal that only an enthusiastic amateur can have, they began in earnest only for that enthusiasm to wilt under the hot sun. In a way that a only a combination of blind optimism, a deluded estimation of one’s abilities and a misguided sense of the pollyanna’s can my make my life, never mind theirs, a bedevilment of of noise, they listlessly carry on. The dawning realisation finally sinking in, namely that professionals are called that for a reason, and that sometimes it’s better to throw money at a problem rather than creating loads of them. One hopes that they don’t accidentally electrocute themselves, or fall victim to some other DIY related fatality.

Although writing that, I’m aware that if no fatalities occur, that a trend might start, with the neighbours all attempting to out DIY each other with ever more elaborate structures. Then they can all proudly show off their magnificent erections.

This rather alarmist headline appeared in today’s Daily Express “Amber heat health alert for huge swathes of UK as warning of ‘risk of death’ issued”

“A worrying amber level heat-health alert has been issued for huge swathes of the UK as high temperatures continue leading to an increased ‘risk of mortality’ for some groups. According to the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), the prolonged warm weather could lead to “significant impacts” on the health and social care sector with an increase in “mortality” across the population “likely”. “

You see what they did there?

‘Likely’ is basically unlikely with one’s fingers crossed. It isn’t probable or any other expression conveying certitude. It’s guesswork, informed guesswork to be sure, but guesswork nonetheless.

It also struck me that in order to justify its own existence – and to avoid any budget cuts – the UKSHA hasto dress up basic common sense in the language of officialese as if the lower orders had never experienced hot weather before and were therefore utterly bereft as what they should do in these unprecedented times.

“The UKHSA warning continued saying indoor temperatures inside hospitals and care homes may exceed the threshold and impact on the ability of services to be delivered.” In other words ((IOW), nurses and care workers may become more knackered than normal. This may cause problems

“It also warned people being cared for in the community may be impacted and that the high temperatures could affect staffing levels as well as public transport.” IOW, the lower paid you are, the greater the chance you are to think ‘Fuck it, I’m sweating like a pig here, I’ll call in sick’

“These warnings mean minor impacts are possible across the health and care sector but there was still an “increased risk of mortality” amongst “vulnerable individuals” and “increased potential for indoor environments to become very warm”. IOW, the chances of anything we’ve said happening are small but be sensible. Drink water (not bleach) and open windows. That sort of thing.

“Significant impacts are expected across the health and social care sector due to the high temperatures, including: observed increase in mortality across the population likely, particularly in the 65+ age group or those with health conditions, but impacts may also be seen in younger age groups.” IOW, we’re hedging our bets here, but some age-groups are more likely than others to be affected.

I might put in a freedom of information request to the UKSHA asking them exactly how many deaths occurred following this stark warning, I mean there’s bound to be some.

As the government noted “During summer 2022, there were an estimated 2,985 (2,258 to 3,712) all-cause excess deaths associated with 5 heat episodes, the highest number in any given year.”

Again, you see what they did there? “All-cause excess deaths” means to me plenty of wriggle room with which to fudge the data.

I might put in a freedom of information request to the UKSHA asking them exactly how many deaths occurred following this stark warning, I mean there’s bound to be some. What and how many were the ‘significant impacts’ they cryptically alluded to and how ‘significant’ were they? No, thinking about it it, a far more sensible idea would be to contact the excellent ‘More or Less’ programme on Radio 4 to investigate. They love all this sort of thing.

As I imagine most people were, I was shocked by the news earlier this week that Woking Council, faced with a £1.2billion budget deficit, has proposed a plan to address this by implementing a drastic measure of cuts, including those to care, the arts, sports groups, playgrounds and community schemes. The scale of the councils debt is only matched by the number of councils that will soon be in the same situation.

The Independent reported that at least 30 per cent of councils in some of the poorest areas of the country are considering declaring effective bankruptcy this year and, for added doom and gloom also added that a survey of 47 local authorities in the North, the Midlands and on the South Coast revealed the severe strain on finances meant five are currently in the process of deciding whether to issue a section 114 notice of their inability to balance their annual budget in 2023-24.

The reason I was shocked wasn’t so much that this the situation we now find ourselves in, but more that an abject collusion of complicity between politicians and the electorate has allowed this to happen. That is sort of the point I was making in my last post, regarding the seemingly Faustian pact between us – the electorate – and them – the politicians -, that allows the fantasy of better public services and lower taxes to become a reality. The one that permits the electorate and the media to protest vociferously about individual incidents, whilst remaining conveniently silent about the system that perpetuates such. The one that that places increasingly unrealistic expectations on councils to do more with less .So in the last week we have had the scandal of the less than concrete concrete and now councils going bust and no doubt more scandals are just waiting to be revealed.

I was also shocked because this state of affairs needn’t be this state of affairs, if only politicians were brave enough to tell the electorate the truth and that the electorate was mature enough to hear it it. Yes, we have an ageing population, we know that, but what exactly does that mean?

Well, according to the Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR), whereas today 18% of the population is over the age of 65, by 2065 they predict it will be 26%. The OBR also has a lot of forecasts, analysis and projections that I’m sure are as fascinating as they are terrifying but what I takeaway from it is this; 26% of people in 2065 will be costing the state much more than they contribute, 15% of people will be under 16 and same thing, will cost the state more but contribute nothing, but the difference is that they will eventually contribute.

Under any metric one chooses, it seems to me that the current state of things – and things are in a right state – is as socially irresponsible as it is catastrophically unaffordable. I’ve just had a quick look at the UK governments care and statutory guidance as updated this year and it underlined for me not only why we are where we are as regarding councils providing these services and financial consequences resulting from doing so, but much more importantly, that we have to stop.

So rather viewing assisted dying as something best avoided, parliamentarians of all parties should instead seize the initiative, explain the sums of money involved – adult social care alone cost £26.9 billion in 2021/22, up 3.8% from 2020/21 and according to the OBR, pensions will account for 42% of the welfare budget this year, that’s £124 billion, the largest single expenditure – and as soon as possible introduce a scheme of state sponsored euthanasia.

When the current crop of pensioners – those over 80 I’m talking about here – were adults of working age and paid tax, successive governments had a realistic expectation that their time as a pensioner might last for maybe 15 years or so. Wasn’t that the deal with state pensions? That their tax paid for the pensions of the old, and when they were old the tax paid by others paid for theirs. However, the Office for National Statistics estimate that by 2045 there will be 3.1 million of them or 4.3% of the population. So to my way of thinking, anyone over the age of 85 who is claiming a state pension is guilty of benefit fraud. It may well be through no fault of their own, but they’re still claiming a benefit to which they’re not entitled.

However unpalatable one might find the prospect of state sponsored euthanasia, it doesn’t make it any the less logical. The government could offer pensioners upon retirement a deal, a lump sum equal to the value of their pension for 15 years – that’s the state sponsored bit – in return for a guaranteed undertaking for voluntary euthanasia on their part. 15 years seems about enough time for people to pit all their affairs in order, take all the holidays they’d never had and generally depart with dignity. Of course, when the 15 years had elapsed they could renege on their part of the deal, of corse they could, but that would mean an immediate termination of any governmental – local or central – responsibility for them.

And of corse the benefits to society would be worth it. If people knew what the deal was, then the money invested in private pensions – estimated to be £112 billion in 2021 by the Institute for Fiscal Studies – quite a bit of that might be ploughed back into the economy. It would also help the NHS. It’d help solve the bed blocking crisis for one thing and also alleviate its obscene staffing shortage and also its obscenely expensive cost. There’d also be a benefit to the housing sector, inasmuch as more stock became available, house prices and rents would fall. Employment too. There’d be a huge swathe of jobs that were no longer needed, thereby creating new employment opportunities.

It will happen. How soon it happens and exactly what form it’ll take, is a question of when the unthinkable becomes thinkable.

With a predictably that was as tedious as it pointless, the scandal of an unknown number of schools having been built using a less than concrete concrete, has been used by some in the media to have yet another swipe at this government. Today it was the turn of of Gabby Hinsliff, who penned an article in The Guardian with the headline, ‘Collapsing schools are the latest sign of a crumbling country – and a lesson in Tory cost-cutting’. It was a Guardian readers wet dream, combining parents fears for their children’s safety, bureaucratic penny pinching, departmental incompetence, ministerial buck passing and of course, Boris’s Jonhson. It ended at the point where I thought it was going to be more than just another piece of click bait for people whose smugness is only superseded by their self-righteousness.

‘The more disturbing question is how many other quick fixes, cheap compromises and questionable solutions to tight budgets have been quietly invented not just in construction but across the public realm during the past cash-strapped decade, with unseen consequences still yet to unfold for decades to come.’ To my way of thinking, this isn’t the more disturbing question. The really disturbing question is why successive generations of the UK electorate have been all too willing to buy into the patently absurd idea that you can have better public services and lower taxes.

For once, the blame isn’t all the fault of politicians; much of it is, but most of that is due to circumstance and that circumstance has been dictated by the electorate. Political parties only get to form governments if they’re elected and they’re only elected if they’re selling something the electorate want to buy. If not, then voters can make their feelings clear through by-elections, council elections, and ultimately a general. But usually it doesn’t come to that, because the incumbent government will proffer some mealy mouthed self serving justification of why a policy has to be ditched. Doesn’t always work that way though. Sometimes it is the politician who’s ditched. Thatcher and the Poll Tax leap to mind.

So it seems to me that since the mid 1980’s, the British people have been more than happy to enter a political equivalent of a Faustian pact, one that not only which obviates any need for them to examine in any great detail what exactly are these chimeric ‘efficiency saving measures’ that will deliver better public services and lower taxation, but also to complain about its necessarily calamitous shortcomings when they are exposed as if they were innocents in the whole sorry affair.

Politicians have a limited culpability in the less than concrete concrete scandal. From the ideology of privatisation that inexorably led to the decimation of once state owned public services under Thatcher, to the financial incontinence that is the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) aggressively enforced by Blair, Brown and Cameron, none of this was a secret. None of this was hidden. It was all out in the open. Politicians quickly cottoned on to the fact that whilst the electorate liked easy answers to complex issues, they weren’t so keen on asking too many questions.

I’m as guilty as anyone, anyone that is who isn’t suddenly concerned about how things are done on the cheap but with no diminution in quality. Schools, hospitals, libraries, care homes and many other municipal buildings built using PFI are now of concern. Now they are.

Hindsight. Wonderful thing.

If anything better sums up the offensively hypocritical contortions of some of those who purport to champion woman’s rights, then to me it is the case of Luis Rubiales.

Quite rightly, Rubiales, the head of the Spanish F.A, has faced fierce criticism for days after he grabbed Jenni Hermoso by the head and kissed her on her lips during the Women’s World Cup final trophy presentation. How he has reacted following the incident is a textbook example of what not to say or do when one finds oneself in the middle of a firestorm of outrage of their own making. Basically, not doing anything to make it any worse. It didn’t’ seem possible that he could, but he did, claiming on Friday that “The kiss was the same I could give one of my daughters,”

Appalling as his actions were – and they were – I can’t help but compare his justified vilification by the British press, with the treatment that Karen White received. And if her name doesn’t ring any bells, well, that kind of makes my point.

White entered the UK prison system as transgender. However, despite dressing as a woman, the 52-year-old had not undergone any surgery and was still legally a male. She was also a convicted paedophile and on remand for grievous bodily harm, burglary, multiple rapes and other sexual offences against women. In September 2017 she was transferred to New Hall prison in West Yorkshire. During a three-month period at the female prison she sexually assaulted two other inmates.

The Rubiales incident presented a very simple narrative. In addition to being seen live by millions on TV and therefore not requiring any detailed analysis, it had the added benefit of not being controversial. By that I mean that it was instantly understandable who was the villain and who was the victim, but also fitted into a pre-existing narrative; a man in a position of authority abuses a younger woman.The story wrote itself and he media piled in. They’re still at it, a week after it happened and show no sign stopping anytime soon.

The case of Karen White is much more complex for the media. There is the whole issue of transgender politics to carefully navigate. The media are acutely aware of the need for caution when reporting on transgender issues lest they become part of the story themselves. Because facts are something some trans activists take exception to, and are not averse to rousing a Twitter mob to right a perceived wrong. So no lead items on the news, none of the usual suspects writing endless articles querying why a man was judged as suitable to be housed in a woman’s prison. Indeed, and this to me is the most troubling aspect of the whole sorry affair, hardly anything regarding the complete abnegation of any duty of care towards the two victims by the prison service. A prison sentence is meant to be a deprivation of liberty, which is fine but it seems to me that the rights of two actual women were less important to the authorities than a kowtowing to an ideological travesty.

So yes, whilst are not entirely without the media are to blame for choosing to run and run with a story that kind of speaks for itself, are we the public just as, if not more guilty? Algorithms and other technological wizardry allow media organisations to gauge which stories we read – and by extension ignore – and tailor their content accordingly. Thats why click bait is called click bait.

Unfortunately, I can’t see any of the situations – men behaving badly, the reporting of such – ever changing