The Thought Police

The front pages of The Telegraph and The Guardian today make chilling reading.

Telegraph journalist, Martin Beckford, has unearthed a document passed by the Department of Health last month, which equates NHS staff talking about religion to harassment under disciplinary and grievance procedures.

Alan Travis from The Guardian has relayed a House of Lords report, published today, stating that Britain has constructed one of the most extensive and technologically advanced surveillance systems in the world; a system which risks undermining our basic freedoms.

CCTV is a mixed blessing. It does help to solve and deter crime. However, putting cameras up all over the place chips away at the very freedoms we are trying to protect. The very anxious begin to think that because a lift is not equipped with CCTV, anyone travelling up and down in it is “at risk”. And the sanctimonious come out with the blackmailing line: “If you are not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.” If former Home Secretary and ID cards fan, Charles Clarke, was travelling alone in a lift listening to his I Pod, I doubt he would be the kind of man who would break into a dance. However, some of us might. But if there was a camera there, we might think again. And who would be watching? It all feels a bit creepy.

Martin Beckford’s report in the Telegraph contains a strong quote from Dr Peter Saunders, the general secretary of the Christian Medical Fellowship. “One of our cherished freedoms is that of freedom of speech, which enables us to have important debates about crucial issues,” Dr Saunders is quoted as saying. “But we’re seeing a culture of thought police emerging.”

There is also a thought-provoking quote from Neil Addison, a Roman Catholic barrister who specialises in religious discrimination cases. “To what extent do you stop ordinary conversation?” he asks. “What they’re doing is saying you cannot even talk about religion and that means a whole area of human experience is cut off.”

We should stand up for our civil liberties and resist George Orwell’s 1984.

British Neuroticism

Snowfall is one of the best opportunities the British have to prove there is truth in the cliche that Britain is the world's most neurotic nation.

Just watching the BBC News this evening I couldn't help myself from telling the earnest-looking reporter, who was talking to us all like a parent worried that their child might step outside the door without a coat on, not to make the British any more neurotic than they already are.

Award-Winning Tragedies

(Note: If you have not seen The Reader or Revolutionary Road, or read the books, and you don't want to know what happens, then don't read on!)

Kate Winslet won two Golden Globes for her performance in The Reader and Revolutionary Road and is now up for the Baftas and the Oscars.

She is excellent in both and they are good films.

However, it is hard to escape the fact that the two characters she plays kill themselves off at the end.

Does one have to die in a tragedy?

I think not.

If our heros, heroines, villains and tortured souls all killed themselves off - directly or indirectly - what would that mean for the rest of us?

Save The Possessive Apostrophe!

Foreigners often remark, with a sly grin, that English is the easiest language in the world to learn. I don’t take that as a compliment, but as a playful poke that English, despite Shakespeare, is unsophisticated and lacking in expression. Of course, I don’t believe that for a second. But the movement backing the abolition of the apostrophe (and I wonder how many of them speak a second language), is doing its very best to destroy one of English’s unique eccentricities.

The Times reported today that Birmingham City Council has decreed that possessive apostrophes shall no longer appear on street signs. The Times ran a photo of the correctly written sign, “St Paul’s Square” against the new sign, “St Pauls Square”. It is a painful sight to look upon.

Before Christmas I heard Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight coming out in favour of dropping the possessive apostrophe with the brisk line: “It is not necessary”.

Using the possessive apostrophe actually gets us to think about what we are saying and who or what belongs to whom or what – whether or not we think possession is a good idea in itself.

The possessive apostrophe is also useful and practical in certain grammatical phrases, and it is fun!

Let’s fight for the possessive apostrophe and, at the same time, for the English subjunctive! Oh, and the semicolon!

Gay Issues In The Left And Right Wing Press

There have been a number of stories in the media this week about gays and lesbians, but today a comment piece in the Daily Mail against a feature in Guardian’s G2 have topped the lot.

In The Daily Mail we have Richard Little John foaming at the mouth over the case of two gay men adopting two children and “stealing” them away from their grandparents.

Then in G2 Julie Bindel tells women to become political lesbians as a solution to escaping rape and domestic violence. Excuse me? Does she really think gay women, or gay men for that matter, live in some kind of fairytale world in which they never inflict violence – mental and physical – on each other?

And as for Richard Little John drawing a parallel between two gay men and two paedophiles, his loathing couldn’t be more naked.

The Times They Are A-Changing

Today is a day for the history books.

The world is about to get its first openly gay head of state.

Icelend's Johanna Sigurdardottir breaks all the moulds. She is a woman. She is 66. She is a Social Democrat. She is glamourous. She is openly gay and in a civil partnership. She has two grown-up children. She is popular, having been dubbed "Saint Johanna" - according to a report on page three of today's Independent - and hailed as an "unexpected but brilliant" choice to take her party's centre stage.

This is one progression to have emerged out of the global economic crisis.

Young People In The Media

The British right wing press has given young people a good bashing today.

Forget Generation X or Generation Y, The Daily Mail has decided to sneer and deride youngsters by branding them “Generation Sex” and dedicating a whole double page spread – and a sizeable amount of its front page – to an article all about how teenagers are living depraved and meaningless lives in cyberspace.

The Mail Online has run yet another article on teenage pregnancies and obesity, loudly shouting (as if we didn’t hear the first time) that Britain has the worst statistics in Europe.

The Telegraph takes a subtler tone in its derision as it gives space to a British Social Attitudes report, which found “most young adults do not share the views of their parents’ generation on the importance of marrying a long-term partner or the role of women in the household”.

This, alongside the knife crime stories, would make you believe that Britain has no hope in its young people and that they were nothing but a problem waiting to be solved.

I know this isn’t true and I look forward to young people getting some positive media coverage in the right, as well as left, wing press!