THE TWITS

Twitter does have something of a reputation as an online asylum for the angry, unhinged and immature, and on occasions this reputation is undoubtedly deserved; whilst some may derive enjoyment from petty playground name-calling, I had enough of that at school. The ‘evils’ of Cyberspace discourse are never far from tabloid headlines, and the kind of moral panic once reserved for musical movements such as Punk Rock or Acid House is today more likely to be aimed at social media; the powers-that-be rarely miss a chance to sweep their own failings under the carpet by attributing society’s ills to the internet. Google is already policing YouTube now, having bowed to pressure from government under the dubious pretext that the video forum is a refuge for Jihadi vloggers; and every teary-eyed second-division celebrity to share a daytime TV sofa with a simpering host doesn’t take long before she wails about being a target of trolls during her fifteen minutes in the spotlight.

As with every medium, however, it often takes a patient sift through the surface slurry to discover the gems that make it worth investing in. Spoof Twitter accounts of household names, if done well, are one of the narrow channels in which satire staggers on in the face of increased censorship and a rush to take offence with more traditional media (which has responded by waving the white flag at pressure groups). They serve a purpose in puncturing the pomposity and self-righteous proclamations of annoyingly ubiquitous talking heads whose omnipotence on TV discussion shows and in the pages of broadsheets sometimes make one wonder what their job descriptions actually are.

It’s tempting to wonder if Twitter had existed in the twentieth century what form spoof accounts of the equivalent irritants would have taken; imagine a Malcolm Muggeridge spoof account, or a Sir Gerald Nabarro one. This thought occurred to me a couple of days ago when I was directed to a 1971 edition of Radio 4’s evergreen debating society, ‘Any Questions?’; the subject under discussion was commercial radio and whether or not the BBC’s monopoly of the airwaves should end. One of the guests who was vehemently opposed to the idea was described as a journalist, and though the programme was transmitted at the height of the ‘Permissive’ era, this snooty unknown sounded as if she’d been transplanted from the 1920s – pure Nancy Mitford. What a wonderful spoof Twitter account she could have inspired.

But it’s not as though we’re short of condescending, self-appointed experts when it comes to making up the numbers on the ‘Any Questions?’ panel in 2017, and these are sitting ducks for the spoof Twitter account. One such account goes by the name of ‘Owen Joans’, which accurately parodies the Gerry Anderson puppet socialist and Grauniad columnist who pops up with tiresome regularity on the telly. Owen Joans describes himself as ‘Working class hero, intellectual lightweight, Oxbridge, Faux Northern accent and #religionofpeace advocate. Retweets all sycophants.’ There’s one final – and fairly crucial – word at the end of Owen Joans’ brief biog, and that’s ‘Parody’. A pity Bradford West MP Naz Shah didn’t notice that earlier this week.

You may recall Ms Shah was briefly suspended from the Labour Party last year for making anti-Semitic comments online and had to make a grovelling apology in the Commons that was reminiscent in its absence of sincerity of a child being forced by its mother to say sorry for kicking a football at a neighbour’s window. Having already criticised her ‘disgraced’ Labour sister Sarah Champion for saying out loud what many felt on the subject of the Rotherham grooming scandal, Shah’s scramble to be seen as the biggest box-ticker on the backbenches saw her retweet and ‘like’ a comment from the Owen Joans account that placed her hot on the heels of Jess Phillips in the race to decide who is the thickest Labour MP.

The comment in question was ‘Those abused girls in Rotherham and elsewhere just need to shut their mouths. For the good of #diversity!’ One hardly needs to be a regular reader of the middle section of Private Eye to recognise a piss-take when one sees it, but a far-from bright button like Naz Shah can’t be expected to distinguish between pastiche and the genuine article. And she didn’t. Only when her embarrassing error was pointed out did Shah delete the retweet and unlike the post, but by then it was too late. The whole thing had been endlessly retweeted and Shah’s spokeswoman was furiously attempting to emphasise the retweet had been a genuine mistake that was rectified in a matter of minutes.

The head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Rebecca Hilsenrath stated the bleedin’ obvious by saying Naz Shah ‘should know better’ and added ‘We need to keep the victims of these horrific crimes at the heart of the debate and always remember that diversity is not served by silence.’ To be honest, though, I wouldn’t have expected anything else from such a vacuum of intelligence as Naz Shah; and Owen Joans, whoever he – or she – may be, has been thrust onto the front pages as a result of one dim MP’s desperate desire to cling onto the diversity bandwagon as her ticket to the frontbench.

The actual Owen Jones, along with his fellow humourless online narcissists JK Rowling, Lily Allen, Gary Lineker and dozens of others, set themselves up for a Twitter fall with every tweet; they provide endless open goals for those that are quite tired of being lectured at by people who regard their fame and fortune as some form of degree in human rights that gives them the authority to tell the rest of us why they’re right and we’re wrong. They need a good satirical kicking, and if every other medium is too scared to put the boot in, at least Twitter when in the hands of the wittily mischievous can provide that function. For now, anyway.

© The Editor

THE SOCIAL CONTRACT

Liverpool bans The Sun. Victory! Milo whatisname’s book is withdrawn before publication. Victory! Katie Hopkins’ wings are clipped by legal action. Victory! Of course, there’s an easier way to express one’s distaste with all of these ‘offensive’ individuals and institutions that thrive on attention without trying to ban them – ignore ‘em. Loathe as I am to reference Sir Alex Ferguson in the positive, one nugget of wisdom nevertheless emerged from the former Don of Old Trafford when he looked back on the rough ride he was receiving from the media during his difficult early tenure at the helm; his most illustrious predecessor Sir Matt Busby rang to see how things were going; when Ferguson replied the press were on his back, Busby responded with simple logic – ‘Why read ‘em?’ Pity so few today can react the same way.

Following in the footsteps of Lily Allen, Owen Jones is the latest name to flounce off social media in a huff; granted, receiving online abuse is especially unpleasant, but it’s worth remembering that one is not legally obliged to maintain a permanent presence in cyberspace. Back in the day when household names could be inundated with traditional Hate Mail, i.e. coming in the form of a letter delivered by the postman, there was little one could do; having a fixed abode means anyone can reach you via these methods. Unless one decides to seal up the letterbox, that toxic message is going to get to you, however vile. The same doesn’t apply online.

Of course, a man with a media profile, both mainstream and social, cannot just switch off his mobile or avoid the internet when on his laptop; nor can he spurn the invites to ‘Newsnight’ or ‘Question Time’; the publicity drug is too embedded by then. There has to be a grand announcement akin to the one DLT made when he jumped the Radio 1 ship before being pushed; it’s virtually written into the contract that slipping away from social media can’t be undertaken without a press statement. Lest we forget, however, being on Twitter or Facebook isn’t a job; it’s supposed to be a pastime. Somebody whose weekends might consist of going fishing doesn’t need to contact the Daily Mail or the BBC should they decide not to bother anymore.

Social media has a habit of making people feel important in a way that previous pastimes didn’t; in theory, it provides a platform giving a voice to those whose voices had an extremely limited range in the past. It also enables those who already have a prominent voice in more established arenas to extend their reach whilst simultaneously bringing them into contact with audiences whose only point of contact before would have been the radio phone-in or the humble letter; in the latter case, the likelihood of a reply was a rarity, as anyone who has written to a famous name they admire will know only too well.

When said famous names take to Twitter in particular, the guaranteed millions of followers or thousands of ‘likes’ and re-tweets in a matter of days of joining can bolster the ego immeasurably, increasing the recipient’s sense of self-importance and becoming a useful cyber CV when seeking evidence of their significance. Remedying the age-old insecurities of those desperate to be loved is something that can be enhanced by the ‘virtual friends’ they collect online, and it is an undoubtedly effective illusion.

As an example, an absence of comments on one of these here blogs can easily lead one to feel it ain’t worth bothering with anymore; utterly ridiculous, I know, but if one has received a glut of comments on the previous post, it’s unavoidable wondering what one has done wrong this time round. Why is nobody responding to this post when they responded so enthusiastically to the last one? Why don’t they love me anymore?! Such thoughts say more about the author than the reader, but the satisfaction of a dozen positive responses can be cancelled by a solitary negative; like the actor who can only remember his bad reviews, social media in its numerous forms is a dangerous addiction for anyone who masks their fragile ego in the thick skin of the online identity. The level of one’s dependence on it (not to mention the size of the audience) is reflected in how one reacts when it turns sour.

Therefore, I can to an extent understand how those whose followers and re-tweeters far outnumber my own little cult coterie react with such theatrical histrionics when they find a sweet-scented bouquet of relentless praise sometimes contains the odd viper. The shock of someone not only disagreeing with them, but spewing limitless vitriol whilst doing so, can shatter the false premise of the ‘all girls together’ echo chamber that social media generates when everyone tells you how great you are. But, again, it’s not compulsory; you can actually not go online if you want.

I only took a few days off from here because I’d posted for five straight days and I do also have other things to attend to that are not dependent on cyberspace. Unlike the more well-known users of the medium, I am not wired to a mobile, programmed to respond to every tweet every few seconds, incapable of making a move without first checking what’s happening on that little screen. It can be quite liberating not bothering for a few days, and what one can be doing in the meantime – if involving real people – reminds the user that there’s more to life than this. Don’t get me wrong – I do like this or I simply wouldn’t bother; but it helps to have something else as well.

© The Editor

CONSENSUAL HEALING

The profile pictures of columnists in what used to be called the broadsheets are often an accurate pointer to the sanctimonious smugness of the scribe and his or her musings before the reader has even read them. The image of the Grauniad’s socialist-in-residence Owen Jones that appears on the paper’s webpage announcing the sacking of the crafty cockney Eric Bristow from his Sky Sports pundit job matches his pompous declaration that ‘Eric Bristow’s toxic tweets matter. These attitudes silence victims’ – a statement lifted from the piece I couldn’t bring myself to even look at. Like so many in his position who pose as an inquisitor of the consensus, Jones summarily fails to question any of the historical child abuse narrative and accepts it wholly as fact. The irrelevant viewpoint of an ex-darts player is a convenient red herring that gives Jones the green light to release the moral high-horse from his stable instead of addressing the actual issue.

The gruff opinion Eric Bristow tweeted in response to the spate of ex-footballer confessions over the past week or so is precisely what anyone with half-a-brain would expect a man of Bristow’s background and age to tweet; it wasn’t exactly ‘sensitive’, but if I want ‘sensitive’, I put Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ on the turntable, not 2 Live Crew. It is the unvarnished blokeiness of Bristow that has always been at the core of his appeal to those that like him, just as it is with Nigel Farage or Jeremy Clarkson. Maybe he should keep his opinions to his boozing buddies, but isn’t Twitter supposed to be a democratic forum where everybody is entitled to their say, a cyber Speaker’s Corner for the masses? That’s the theory, anyway.

When George Osborne copyrighted the phrase ‘We’re all in this together’ (one he should rightly be tarred with forever), the context in which he intended it to mean anything has been utterly transcended by everything else it can be applied to in this repressive, censorious society populated by timid, obedient schoolchildren masquerading as adults, terrified of being out of step with the rest of the class. Whether online, on campus, in media of both the print and broadcast variety and (especially) in public services, the fear of ostracism and exclusion from the crowd breeds the belief that if we all agree to pre-conditions in how we speak, think and respond then we’ll finally achieve the inclusive Utopia that Coca-Cola once portrayed when it tried to teach the world to sing.

Producing the next generation of consumers that will keep the economy on an even keel is a patriotic duty that opting out of risks vilification from the hypocritical harpies of Mumsnet, whose own concept of unity is rooted in an untruth because no mother dare admit her children have robbed her of her independence and taken away her identity. As someone whose morning routine is soundtracked by Radio 4, this is something I have never heard aired on ‘Woman’s Hour’, and I doubt I ever will. If Eric Bristow can lose his living because he tweeted something ‘offensive’, can you imagine the kind of punishment awaiting a prominent female in the public eye if she admitted she wished she’d never had the children that have become effective parasites draining her of all sense of who she is? Yes, we’re all in this together, none more so than that hotbed of competitive self-deception, motherhood.

Many of you may have read last week’s post, ‘A Social Disservice’, and this is a kind of sequel to that one, even if it might appear I’ve taken a roundabout route to it. But I think so much of the bureaucratic brickwork that the mother of the child I diplomatically referred to as X has come up against in an effort to retrieve a life for herself is mirrored in the wider world. It’s just more pronounced in the arena of social services and the detachment of management level, where patting one’s self on the back and earning Brownie points at dinner parties for proclaiming ‘I work with disabled children’ to an anticipated round of applause is the extent of actual involvement, as far removed from the reality of being cooped-up with a child suffering from extreme autism as WWI generals were from the trenches.

X was collected from four days in the care of the State last Friday and once back in the bosom of the family home reverted to feral type, reminding her mother why she’d deposited her in that care the previous weekend. X’s deterioration over just the last six months has rendered even the limited tricks that could once be used to momentarily occupy her completely redundant. In care, an entire team are employed to reduce X’s appetite for destruction, but the social services expect her mother to do the work of four or five people around the clock, 24/7, subjecting herself to continual assaults of biting, scratching and screaming for all of X’s waking hours. The individual members of staff attending to her in care have been subject to the same treatment, yet have to make excuses for it in order to accentuate the non-existent positivity that their box-ticking training requires.

X’s mother was informed a panel would review her situation at an unspecified future date, a Star Chamber hearing at which she would not be allowed to present her case nor provide the video evidence of X’s behaviour. Instead, an inexperienced social worker who has never even met X in the flesh would be there on her behalf, to submit a report compiled from an interview with X’s mother that (unsurprisingly) wouldn’t suggest any members of that panel take X into their homes for 24 hours to see for themselves precisely what X’s mother has to deal with. This virtual Soviet trial would then decide the future of someone not entitled to attend, with the umpteenth social worker to have dealt with X’s case during her short life being the mother’s proxy representative. This is the kind of farce that forces parents such as X’s mother into taking dramatic action.

The authorities are not accustomed to parents challenging their authority and questioning their wisdom because the parents are usually so mentally and physically browbeaten by the experience of looking after their problem children that they have no energy to fight back. X’s mother knows if she doesn’t take this stand then her life is effectively over. On Sunday, she rang the same emergency number she’d rung the previous weekend and after the phone was answered by a human being, the moment she explained the situation she was immediately transferred to an answer-machine. So staggeringly ineffective are the social services, someone in a similar position even advised X’s mother to dial 999 instead. She didn’t, but she dispatched an email to all parties with a vested interest in her continuing to endure a nightmarish excuse for a life and made it clear she wouldn’t be collecting X from school again on Monday. She stuck to her word and refuses to collect her at the end of the week.

The pressures on X’s mother following her actions, not only from the facsimile togetherness of the mother’s union, but from a system that expects her to fulfil a duty no sane person could stomach for as long as she already has before heading for the nearest bridge, is a consequence of a mindset that demands subservience to a consensus nobody signed-up for. And yet the consensus is there – in the social services, the DWP, the NHS, the police force, the media, online, f***ing everywhere. Oppose it at one’s peril, but for God’s sake oppose it. If you don’t, we’re finished; and the future will be a boot stamping on a human face, forever – although O’Brien neglected to mention it will be a smiley one. After all, we wouldn’t want to frighten the children.

© The Editor