Friday, August 01, 2008 

Jordan gets her kit off for the Times.

A couple of years back the Guardian delighted its readers by giving column space to Peaches Honeyblossom Michelle Charlotte Angel Vanessa Geldof to talk about herself whilst one of the regulars was away. Giving Simon Jenkins a run for his money, she wrote of MySpace, her boyfriend and her dog.

At least Peaches probably wrote the column herself. You can't necessarily say the same for Katie Price, who's taken to the pages of the Times (yes, that's the Times) to bemoan the fact that she wasn't allowed to attend a polo meeting, told, despite paying £6,000, that she wasn't the sort of person they wanted.

Normally this blog would be completely opposed to snobbery it all its forms, including to a thick as horse shit glamour model who personifies everything wrong with modern culture. Can you however imagine a more suitable place for a missile or meteor to strike than the Cartier Polo International, at the Chinawhite tent, where those inside have paid £6,000 for the privilege of watching people who resemble horses ride horses while whacking around a white ball?

No, we couldn't afford to lose Jordan in such a way. There has to surely be a more fitting, violent and amusing demise for her to suffer. Like a knitting needle to the chest.

(I'm dreadfully sorry for this unfunny rubbish. Jenni Russell, incidentally, metaphorically eviscerates her.)

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8/01/2008 10:11:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, July 02, 2008 

Snobbery? On my internets?

Most would agree that the worst threads on Comment is Free occur beneath every posting on Israel and Palestine, as the interest groups on either side flock via Google Alerts or GIYUS to commence battle whilst boring everyone else to tears. There are other posts that attract high amounts of criticism, and excluding ones by radical feminists, which usually deserve it in spades, it almost always seems to be when the person in question writing is below the age of 30. This was true of the Max Gogarty meme, who although a poor writer and son of a hack hardly deserved the scorn which was poured on his head from all across the internet.

Enter Majid Ahmed, a state school student from Bradford who achieved 4 A grades at A-level, but who unfortunately was convicted of burglary when he was 15, on the basis of which he had his offer of acceptance to study medicine from Imperial College London rescinded. Having admitted his mistake, in which he was a bystander rather than someone who participated in any actual robbery, most would accept that shouldn't bar him from a place on a college course. The crowd on CiF of course has other ideas:

But would I want to come to you with my health problems? Probably not.

Majid - you sound self-pitying.

A mixture of "how clever am I!" bragging and self-indulgent whinging.

Very typical of emotionally immature teenagers, of course.

Someone with so little judgement as to hang out with the wrong crowd in the first place, let alone break into someone's home, is not innocent and is no way mature enough to be a doctor.

People respect others who admit their mistakes. Admit you did something utterly stupid and screwed up. Your whining that you were tricked into it sounds like a six year old kid who has been caught nicking sweets.

You claim your guilty plea was an attempt to preserve your family's pride...nope, not buying it, how is a criminal conviction less bad than going to trial and being declared innocent?

Given that entry to medical school is so competitive, Imperial have every right to withdraw the offer. Throwing a public trantrum that it's not faaaiiir proves them right.

Grow up - you are not entitled to anything because you want it, or even because you worked hard for it. Study something else at uni, and if you really still want to be a doctor in a few years when you've grown up a bit, apply for graduate entry. It may not be the career for you anyway.


OMG what a story of woe. How can anyone keep banging on, with a straight face, about how they have overcome such hardships only to be stopped by some terrible snobbery.

This may surprise you matey but lots of people grow up facing hardship and gain good results and have to struggle to make good. However what they don't do is burgle a house and then bitch about how their conviction is proving a barrier.

Often people living in tough conditions have those conditions made much worse by their bad neighbours who break into their houses and make tough conditions tougher.

To be honest I don't want to visit a doctor who has served time in jail for crimes they have committed.

I find it crazy that you feel like a victim, rather than hold up your hands and admit that your poor choices have led to this situation. The real victims are the people who have been subjected to your dishonesty. Get over it and stop bitching.


You ask whether the outcome would be different had you hired professionals to draft your appeal - but you can write an article for the Guardian - are you being funny?

You claim you were goaded into breaking the law by friends, then you claim you were innocent but pleaded guilty. How you dealt with the police and the criminal justice system showed no sense of personal integrity. You chose immorally in breaking the law and then chose immorally again in pleading guilty while still considering yourself innocent.

There is no word of any sense of personal shame or of reform, only whinging in this article.

One of the lovely things I have found in working with many young Asian men and women in deprived backgrounds in their profound understanding of right and wrong, which is picked up in the family. This seems to have passed this candidate by.

The place will go to someone who was too busy studying to get a criminal conviction.

I am pleased that Imperial withdrew their offer of a place.

I spend a lot of time in hospital with a chronic and serious illness. While I am there I often see and talk to medical students on the wards as well as junior doctors. I don't want to consider the possibility that any of the people that the hospital lets loose on the wards have criminal convictions. Patients are often in a very vulnerable situation and the hospital staff as well as student doctors, nurses and physios etc must be beyond reproach.

You made a bad decision at 15 and now have to live with the consequences. You say that you didn't know you had no right of access to the dwelling but that you did know that they were a bad crowd - this should have been a major clue about their "new chill out pad" and as a dwelling is another term for someone's home I think it is clear that you knew it was not the home of one of your friends.

You seem very adept at working the cultural minority angle. Saying you didn't want the shame of your mother accompanying you through the courts so you had to plead guilty. Nonsense! If you were innocent of the charge then going to court to prove these would have been far less humiliating for your family than having a son who is a convicted burglar.

Get over your false sense of injustice. Medicine is a hugely competitive course and many students with four or five grade A 'A' levels and without criminal records get rejected for the course. Further, many people grow up in impoverished circumstances and successfully pursue their dreams without either burglarising someone's home or blaming everyone but themselves for their own stupidity. And, as for nothing in your life having been easy? Well, you seem to manage self pity with great ease.

Thank you Imperial; you make the right decision.

This is the most self-pitying trite I have ever read.

1. You committed a criminal offence. You were convicted of that offence, You have to live with the consequences. The fact that your background was perhaps tougher than others is irrelevent. We are all equal before the law.

2. You choose to make this a class issue, and attack the children of professionals. My children may have had what you would describe as "advantages", but don't you dare try and turn them into a burden for them.

3. How, precisely should universities be "accountable"? There are plenty of reasons not to admit people - not being good enough, not being pleasant enough, dare I suggest being a convicted criminal.

You urgently need to grow up, give up the self pity and realise just because you have played a bad hand well, the ride is not easy from here on in. Perhaps you could start by working for a year and making some form of compensation to the person or persons whose property you burgled.

Criminals demanding the right to be admitted to a particular university. Just whatever next?


Snooty individuals on CiF not acting like vindictive cretins, perhaps?

There are of course a few lone voices like this ahem, rather sensible chap:

Majid, ignore all the sour and bitter people on here that seem to think that committing a criminal offence when you're young and stupid ought to preclude you from having something resembling a life for the rest of your days; most of them probably did things mightily similar to you at the same age but didn't get caught. Re-applying to another college is a good idea however, as Imperial clearly aren't interested in your potential and only see you as a potential liability.

And we of course wonder why the youth of today are how they are.

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7/02/2008 11:47:00 PM | | | links to this post

Wednesday, March 05, 2008 

More on the Shannon snobbery, Allison Pearson's despicable hypocrisy and the McCanns' legal action.

Roy Greenslade expands at length on why the Shannon Matthews case hasn't attracted the same amount of coverage as the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and comes to the same conclusion as I did; that social class is overarching the whole thing.

Reading Greenslade's analysis and the article he links to in the Sindy, you realise just what Shannon's parents are up against. I didn't know that her mother, Karen, has six other children with five of them from different fathers. This is because such facts don't make any difference, or shouldn't make any difference, and haven't been featured in any of the coverage I've read. Just knowing that, it instantly becomes apparent why the Daily Mail for example hasn't gone overboard with its coverage: such a "lifestyle" as that apparently lived by the mother offends against every single sensibility in the Mail handbook. As Nick Davies and Private Eye in the past have outlined, even if you're respectable but black you're unlikely to get anything like the hearing you would if you were white, with numerous sources alleging that stories that were all ready to go were spiked at the last minute because they about those of the "dusky hue". You can imagine the casual prejudice which therefore is informing their coverage of Shannon's disappearance; why do "our people" care about a average-looking little girl unlucky enough to be born to an overweight, promiscuous mother, doubtless bleeding the state for all it's worth?

Unlike some of the posts I write here, this is one that is coming out more as a stream of conciousness. I was going to end the above paragraph with a quote from the Daily Mail columnist Allison Pearson, where she wrote of the McCanns "this kind of thing doesn't usually happen to people like us". She might as well have added, nor is it supposed to. After all, the McCanns were the Daily Mail dream family, except for perhaps Kate McCann working instead of staying at home to look after the children. They hadn't done anything wrong, or weren't a family where what happened to their daughter could be either justified or deemed excusable. Searching Google to see if I could get the exact article where Pearson wrote that, I instead came across a dispatch from Pearson where she writes about Shannon's disappearance, and it's as disgraceful, hypocritical and two-faced as you could ever possibly have imagined:

Poor Shannon was already a lost child

At the time, critics claimed that if the middle-class McCanns had lived on a council estate, they would have been in trouble with the police for neglect.

So where is the outcry over the disappearance of Shannon Matthews?

...

Four hours is an eternity for a little girl to be out on a dark winter's evening. And Shannon was afraid of the dark. Why did no one walk with her or care where she was?

But Karen insists Shannon was fine and enjoys a good relationship with her current boyfriend, 22-yearold Craig.

"Only on Monday, they were having tickling fights and telly cuddles. She views him as her dad."

Oh really? In that case, why was Shannon so desperate to be reunited with her real father?

...

But allowing a passing parade of boyfriends to play tickling games with your vulnerable small girl is, at best, naïve.

We must all hope and pray that Shannon is only missing and that her disappearance is not linked to any of the substitute dads who have trooped through her brief life.

But like too many of today's kids, Shannon Matthews was already a victim of a chaotic domestic situation, inflicted by parents on their innocent children, long before she vanished into the chill February night.

Incredible, isn't it? Gobsmackingly offensive, prejudging everything without so much as the slightest insight into the case whatsoever. The reason why there has been no "outcry" is because there is nothing except in Pearson's warped head to outcry about. The McCanns were condemned in some quarters because they had left their children alone in their apartment instead of putting them into a creche while they swanned off to have dinner with their friends. In Shannon's case, what happened was that she simply didn't come home, and doubtless her mother was already deeply worried if not panicking before she raised the alarm four hours after she had left school and failed to return home. In that time she was likely phoning round her friends, asking if she was with them, or even searching herself. Pearson has been one of the McCanns' most ardent supporters, comparing their anguish to both hell and to a Kafkaesque nightmare; that she condemns Matthews' parents simply because of who they are and what she thinks they've done shows the innate snobbery, bordering on class hatred which some who profess to be journalists suffer from, and which has so chequered the coverage so far. There hasn't been an outcry against Matthews' parents; there has however been almost precisely half the coverage given to Madeleine's disappearance, almost certainly because of the attitudes of those in Fleet Street which match Pearson's.

What we saw with the disappearance of Madeleine now also seems to setting in with the disappearance of Shannon. With no real developments to report, the media instead turns to speculation, innuendo, and downright scaremongering. The Sun, which to its credit has given the most coverage to Shannon's disappearance, was already at this on Monday, asking whether Sarah's law was the answer, despite there being no evidence whatsoever that any convicted sex offender is involved in her disappearance. Today it's turned it up a further notch with this fearmongering report, which will have no doubt done nothing to set minds at rest in Dewsbury:

NEARLY 1,400 registered sex offenders live within 25 miles of Shannon Matthews’ home, The Sun can reveal.

Many are based just a five-minute drive away.

...

And the Home Office statistic showing 1,387 registered sex beasts in the area was a stark reminder of the mountain detectives must climb. A further 400 live just 30 miles away in Manchester.

In the IoS article the local rector spoke of "helplessness... not hopelessness but anger, certainly". The Sun seems to be wilfully fanning the flames rather than making any effort towards keeping the calm.

P.S. Today's Private Eye (1205) reports that the McCanns are suing Richard "Dirty" Desmond's newspapers through Carter-Fuck, and are demanding a cool £1 million from each of his four newspapers for the incessant suggestions that they might have had something to do with the disappearance of Madeleine. A couple of thoughts: firstly, hiring Carter-Fuck doesn't come cheaply, which must mean that even more of the money donated to the McCanns is going on things other than directly finding Madeleine, although seeing as so far they've spent the most on the useless Metodo 3 private investigation agency which said that "Madeleine would be home by Christmas" they might as well be pouring that down the drain too. Secondly, if they do get suitably high damages, and Desmond has already apparently offered £250,000, will all of this be put back into the fund, or will some of it instead end up lining the McCanns' own pockets? The Madeleine fund's objectives are that only if she is apparently found will anything left over be given over to charity. As that seems ever more unlikely, questions will undoubtedly be asked about will be done with any eventual surplus.

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3/05/2008 08:52:00 PM | | | links to this post

Tuesday, February 26, 2008 

It couldn't be snobbery, could it?

This (short) post is likely to ruffle a few feathers, but here goes.

It's been exactly a week since Shannon Matthews went missing, with no apparent sightings of her since whatsoever. It looks increasingly like she's either died and her body has yet to be found, or that she's been snatched, although of course I hope to be proved wrong on both of those points. The original view was likely that she had ran away, having made such comments to her friends and written something along those lines on the wall of her bedroom, about wanting to live with her father, which mitigated against the media response being over the top. Even so, all the elements that made the Madeleine case so compelling last year are here; the vanished daughter, albeit one older and not quite as photogenic; the tearful parent, begging her to come home or for anyone who has her to let her go; and the police with apparently no leads whatsoever. The disappearance has even happened in this country, meaning that there is something those in the surrounding area can actually do to help, whether keeping a look out, reporting anything they thought suspicious, or actively searching for her.

Why then has it not caught the public imagination in such a way? Could it possibly be because this is a distinctly working-class family, where the father and mother have split up, and where the mother is, not to put too fine a point on it, not as aesthetically sympathetic as Kate McCann was/is? Or that this has happened up in the sunny climate of Dewsbury, a classic Yorkshire town, which simply can't compare to the attractions of Praia da Luz for the travelling hacks?

It might simply be missing white girl fatigue, especially coming on top of the murder cases recently resolved. Either or neither way, if I was a relative, I think I'd be distinctly insulted by how Madeleine was thrust back onto the front pages last week by yet another tourist claiming to have spotted her, this time in France, while a little girl missing in this country is relegated to the far inside pages.

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2/26/2008 09:19:00 PM | | | links to this post

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