Alien life-forms have been cutting holes in sheep in Shropshire with highly powered lasers and strange glowing balls of light. According to a local farmer, reported by an oddly credulous chap from the Daily Telegraph, there is a ‘corridor’ of 50 miles stretching from Shrewsbury towards the Powys border where UFOs arrive quite regularly and do weird stuff with sheep. The farmer insists that sheep have been found with perfectly circular burn holes on their foreheads, and sometimes their brains dissected. Also he has seen the UFOs and pronounced them ‘frightening’. I agree with him. Most of the UFOs I have seen have been frightening, especially those which turn up just after there’s been a lock in at the local pub. They can be really scary bastards, swooping down with multicoloured lights and erasing my memory and sometimes removing my trousers.
I wish the alien-sheep stuff were true. It’s not that I wish sheep to have holes drilled in their heads, just that the revelation that UFOs really were speeding up and down the A5 with ovine mischief on their minds would distract me from the witless undebates of the general election campaign, the lies and elisions and smarm. But it’s not true, is it? You imagine you are the boss of the Intergalactic Space Agency (ISA) based on the methane-rich Planet Thrang, some 6,500 light years distant from earth on the edge of the Crab Nebula, and you have to explain to your politicians how this year’s budget is to be spent. What’s it to be, the ministers ask: terraforming barren asteroids in the Kuiper Belt? Making contact with those incredibly intelligent life forms inhabiting a solar system in Andromeda?
‘Nope, sorry. We thought we’d go to Oswestry and bugger around with some sheep.’
Huge intake of breath from the politicians. ‘What, again?’
That, I think, would be William of Occam’s response to the worried Salopian farmer: it’s not likely, mate, is it? Why would you travel all that way, at such expense, and confine yourself to sheep-worrying near Market Drayton? And it was as I came to this disappointing conclusion that a bell rang at the back of my mind and I suddenly started thinking about homosexuals.
The Chris Grayling debacle has probably set the tone for the election debate, a fugue of stupidity and pettiness against a backdrop of perpetual, hysterical shrieking from the metropolitan libtard left. Grayling said he thought that while hotels should be compelled to accept same-sex partners as guests sharing rooms, people who ran tiny bed & breakfast establishments in their own homes were probably within their moral rights — even if bigoted and misguided — to refuse to allow same-sex partners to share beds. Cue, immediately, the outraged intolerance of the left; the screaming for Grayling to be denounced, or sacked, or both; and the insistence that it just goes to show that the Conservative party is every bit as neo-Nazi and vile as it ever was, despite a cosmetic makeover.
How did we get to this position, where the most moderately expressed sentiment — that people should be allowed to apply the rules that they like in their own homes — should be subjected to a torrent of bile? As it happens, I disagree with Grayling, but only by the slenderest of margins; and the point at issue is an interesting one and worthy of debate. But debate is not allowed; it has been removed beyond an area within which debate is allowed to take place.
That’s what happens when you transgress the sensibilities of this minuscule — but very noisy — sliver of the population. Grayling was misrepresented and denounced and the odium was so disproportionate that it became, in the end, rather funny (although probably not if you’re Chris Grayling).
A similar screed of bile was directed at the BBC Today programme editor Ceri Thomas when he tried to explain, honestly and painstakingly, why there were more men than women presenting his excellent programme, and how he both expected and hoped that very soon there would be more women doing so. Misrepresented — and then the misrepresentations, bouncing back and forth between embittered Guardian columnists and the maniacally obsessive halfwits in blogsville, became a sort of fact, so that in the end, like Grayling, Thomas was vilified for something he hadn’t actually said.
This is what happens these days, almost all the time: a strangling of debate, a crushing of nuance, a removal of context, the twisting of an argument to almost the opposite of what it originally was. Chris Grayling said he did not approve of bed & breakfast owners discriminating against gay couples; Ceri Thomas said he hoped there would soon be more women presenters on the Today programme and there weren’t enough at present. But in either case, that’s not what you read in your newspapers. It is for this reason, I suspect, that the general election will feature no real debate at all, just a recitation of bland idiocies with which nobody could possibly disagree. Nobody wants to be hung out to dry for saying something with which someone else might disagree.
Incidentally, why would homosexuals wish to seek out bed & breakfasts run by bigots? It is rather like travelling from Planet Thrang to burn holes in sheep in Oswestry. Why would they wish to stay somewhere they were not wanted, when there are so many other establishments they could quite happily patronise? If as a society we are to be tolerant of homosexuals who wish to stay in a bed together, much as we are now tolerant of unmarried couples who might wish to share a bed together, should we not also be tolerant of people whose antediluvian religious views indispose them to such arrangements? And why — as has been suggested by those of more moderate colours — should they be forced to give up their bed & breakfast establishments and move into some other form of occupation? This seems to me a reasonable debate to have — a subtle and complex debate, in the end. But we will not be allowed to have it.
Offer ends in:
