This year on my winter hols in the same
place I found myself in the same situation, so I once again discarded my
Guardianista sandals, shaved off my beard, put on my red blazer and weird white
horse-riding stocking-type trouser-wear, and, with riding crop in hand, decided
to see if, tally-ho, my revelatory post had shamed the editors into changing
their devious ways. Amazingly, it didn’t. So, here’s another deconstruction of
some articles from a random edition of the Hatey Torygraph, specifically that
of Saturday
29 December 2012 .
One Page 1, the lead story, unless you
count the picture of Bradley Wiggins and story of him accepting the title Sir
so he can modestly decline to be called Sir: “State school quotas face
axe”. The subtitle has the spin in the
tail, though: “Minister prepare to back down on plans to force top universities
to discriminate against private schools”.
There you go: “discriminate against private schools”. The first line takes up the theme:
“CONTROVERSIAL admissions rules intended to force leading universities to take
more students from state schools are to be reviewed after protests.” As before,
the dissonance between Poshograph headlines and stories soon becomes clear, or
clearer at any rate, because, of course, encouraging universities to take more
students from state schools is not the same as discriminating against private
ones. At no point at all does the article explain in what way any private
school or private school boy or girl would be hurt by more access for those
from state schools, or indeed be discriminated against in any way. Instead, the
Lie-ograph merely asserts the impression of injustice by using words such as
“CONTROVERSIAL” and “after protests”.
Other words that pop up: “Critics”. But they remain unnamed, presumably because
speaking out against inequality and injustice is so dangerous. The only person
named here is the author, Tim Ross, the paper’s own “Political Correspondent”,
who presumably sees himself as brave enough to speak out, like some sort of
Martin Luther King of the British Upper Crust who has a dream that one day his
children will not be judged by the quality of their minds but by the size of
daddy’s bank account and his willingness to buy his children a centre-forward
position on the downwards slope of an unlevel playing field. Yet such is the
awfulness of today’s anti-elitism that Tross raises the spectre of Stalinism-style
tyranny, stating that (unidentified) “Head teachers accused the Government of
pursuing a ‘Communist-style’ agenda of social engineering....” You are of
course given to understand that being able to purchase a place at Oxbridge via
private secondary education, a place that might have gone to a state-school
student with a lesser education and even (but by no means necessarily) lower A
Level grades, but who nevertheless has higher intelligence and greater
potential, is not social engineering. It is, presumably, the natural order of
things. The argument for ensuring more equal accessibility for state-school
students (what the policy is really about) is dealt with by a couple of sources
cited saying that school background is an ineffective way to predict the HE
potential of students. Yes, and presumably that’s why rich parents are willing
to pay enormous sums to send their children to private schools: because they’re
not better resourced and because top universities don’t presently discriminate
in favour of private schools. But that’s another story; not one you’ll find in
the Etonograph.
That’s class done, now gender. Turn to page
7 and you won’t find actually find any of the more choice quotations from the
Book of Jeremiah, but you will find a story headlined “Women don’t ask, so they
don’t get the same wages as men.” So, to give the paper some credit, it
acknowledges at least on this occasion, the existence of the pay gap. But, it
turns out, it’s women’s own fault, so they’re you go. Below that, “Make love?
We’d rather lose a few pounds.” Separate sphere, same story. Then below that,
“Mothers can’t see if their child is too fat.” Obesity crisis? Blame women. The
only other major story on this page, besides one slyly implying that a Welshman
is being ridiculous and over-sensitive for insisting on being spoken to in his
native language in a shop in his home town by an assistant who was herself
Welsh-speaking, is “Danger UXB. Boy digs up bomb with his Christmas gift metal
detector.” It is complete with a picture of Danger Boy holding his metal
detector in a horizontal position. As this is not the correct position for
proper usage of a metal detector, it’s almost as if the picture is posed to make
it look like Danger Boy is holding a machine gun, or some other deeply subtle
symbol of masculinity. Fortunately, he was a slim boy who had not been
subjected to obesity by an overbearing mother force-feeding him pies, or else his
natural daredevil boyishness might have resulted in his corpulent figure being
blasted over half of Norfolk. Because of his mum. Women, eh?
On page 8, we have “Mandrake”, or Tim
Walker as he is also called, presumably so that if you combine the two names
you can come up with anagrams with the word “Wanker” in them. He has a
delightful little piece called “Miliband’s journey” in which in a mere 132
words manages to point out or claim that Ed Miliband is Jewish and anti-Israeli,
and that the Labour is anti-Semitic. Which ought to keep both the paper’s Nazi
and its Zionist readers happy. Top chap, that Lit Dreamkam Wanker.
So, we’ve had class, gender, and race. Just
one more about class. Page 12: “Before you go, here’s £100 to clean your
council house.” In which “Nearly 400 council tenants were paid £100 each to
tidy their own homes before they moved out, costing the taxpayer £38,000” by
“Labour-run
There is more, plenty more. But you’ll have
to do it for yourself from now on. I can’t do any more. It is simply too much
to bear.
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