System shock jocks: Why columnists ignore big reasons in favour of niche explanations and pet peeves...
On cricket, Ofcom, swimming pools and tactical ignorance as the newspaper columnist's greatest tool.
Ideology is a helluva drug; free to acquire and cheaply available from every national newspaper in prodigious qualities on a daily basis. Like the contents of the nos canisters that litter some London streets, like some surreal harvest from a forest of metallic trees, ideology is invisible but it goes straight to your head1.
British columnists vehemently deny their ideology addictions, preferring to claim they are consumers of a much more socially acceptable but equally insidious substance — ‘common sense’ — even as their output makes it abundantly clear that they are quite, quite out of their minds.
Let’s start with a relatively mild example from Janice Turner’s Notebook column in today’s edition of The Times. Beneath the not-at-all hyperbolic headlined Shortages are turning us into Soviet housewives2, after a section about her failure to secure a particular kind of tinned-sardine making her feel like the titular Soviet housewives, another on sex scenes in Sally Rooney’s latest novel, and a third on electrical problems at her house, she writes:
The most depressing news this week is 2,000 swimming pools are at risk of closure. With so much emphasis on “wild swimming”, no one cares about ugly 1960s leisure centres, workaday places where children learn, old people stay supple and everyone can enjoy the most stress-relieving exercise on Earth.
A recent study found 96 per cent of children aged seven to 11 can’t swim 100m or tread water for 30 seconds. We all learnt to inflate our pyjamas, did our distance badges. Now some schools don’t teach swimming and it’s left to parents to book lessons. The gaggles of girls getting changed after classes at my local pool invariably have middle-class accents. The less fortunate are being left to drown.
This kind of story is perfect for a columnist looking for some roughage to fill out their word count, and it’s difficult not to see the "wild swimming” reference as a dig at The Guardian’s pathological obsession with the trend which anyone who grew up around rivers or the sea used to call simply “swimming”.
But there is also something of the anti-woke nostalgia-drunk Facebook meme about Turner’s position (“Remember when the bin men were hard? And we were allowed to go out until midnight with just a bottle of pop and a flick knife to ward off the attentions of the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water?”).
The Local Government Chronicle, reported on a warning from Swim England — which clearly has a dog… or maybe that should be a duck… in this fight — that there could be 2,000 more pool closures by 2030:
Local authorities need £1bn in capital investment to prevent the number of swimming pools in England dropping by 40 percent, a report by Swim England has warned.
This could see 3.86 million people unable to access swimming pool facilities by the end of the decade.
Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, 206 pools have been forced to close either permanently or temporarily.
As it stands, 23% of local authorities in England have a shortage of one swimming pool, with London the worst off with a shortage of 31 pools.
The looming shortage is based on pools which were constructed in the 1960s and 1970s and are coming to the end of their lifespan, while not enough new facilities are being built to replace them.
It’s not, as Turner implies, that well-off lefties have been smashing down the leisure centres in some kind of wild swimmer frenzy, but that successive governments have squeezed local government budgets and councils have chosen to neglect pools in favour of other priorities.
Boris Johnson’s government, heartily endorsed by The Times at the 2019 election, points to the £100 million National Leisure Recovery Fund, which is a mere drop in the public pool when it comes to fixing the problem. In August, the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, received planning permission to build a £400,000 leisure complex at his manor house, including a lavish pool.
The problem of public pools being closed — just as public libraries, public parks, and public toilets have been — is not a new one. Private companies have been gobbling up public space and amenities since Margaret Thatcher’s administration began selling off school playing fields in earnest (between 1979 and 1997, 10,000 were sold).
The threat to public swimming pools come up every few years, usually after an Olympics when the success of Britain’s swimmers makes people wonder if it might be a good idea to not destroy all the pools where those swimmers train and where new swimmers might take up the activity.
During one of the last eruptions of concern about public pools, BBC News published an article headlined Rebecca Adlington: Why are we closing swimming pools? in which several people pointed the finger, not at a cabal of fanatical wild swimmers, but systematic issues:
Civic pride isn't such a strong force as it was. Nowadays value for money is paramount and councils don't pay the health budget," said [Chris] Costelloe [of the Victorian Society]. "There is an intrinsic problem in the system."
“One hundred years after some of these pools were built, there is far less recognition of the importance of helping people to be healthy," said campaigner Sally Wainman, from Ipswich.
On one level Turner is simply using the story of public pool closures to indulge in nostalgia she knows will hit the buttons of The Times’ older readership (“We all learnt to inflate our pyjamas, did our distance badges…”) in a light-hearted way. But the way she does it speaks to the underlying reactionary instincts of The Times and other parts of the right-wing press like The Daily Telegraph, which The Times increasingly resembles.
Look at this sentence again…
With so much emphasis on “wild swimming”, no one cares about ugly 1960s leisure centres, workaday places where children learn, old people stay supple and everyone can enjoy the most stress-relieving exercise on Earth.
… which flows from frustration at the apparently faddish (“so much emphasis on ‘wild swimming’…) to a cheap assertion (“no one cares about…”). In fact, a quick search reveals many campaigns across the country to save public swimming pools and the fact that lots of people care passionately.
But one of the underlying principles of The Times is that problems are not really caused by the market or the government it backs but by an amorphous mass of young/woke/lefty people who prefer pronouns to public pools.
Implying the blame lies with modish young people rather than neglectful governments allows Turner to avoid having to pick at the systematic issues when doing so might unravel all the way up to newspapers like The Times and their role in framing and shaping public debate.
This same combination of tactical ignorance, bad faith rhetoric, and refusal to link the personal with the political is present right across The Times’ Comment section today as it is most days:
David Aaronovitch, who said way back in 20033 that he’d never trust a government again if no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq but more recently trusted a purveyor of knockoff leather jackets, writes that Boris Johnson should explain why he’s changed his mind on climate change as if the Prime Minister is capable of holding any position in good faith.
Meanwhile, James Marriott, still not long out of university himself, argues that “students are facing segregation by wealth”, in a winding tour through the history of halls that again avoids thinking too hard about what governments supported by The Times — hardly a bastion of class consciousness itself — have done to exacerbate that segregation.
Finally, Iain Martin writes his column about how beastly the EU is again and James Coney, the paper’s Money editor, contributes a Thunderer piece that serves as part 12057 of the ongoing partwork series ‘Rupert Murdoch Hates Union So We Do Too’, arguing that it’s bad and naughty and wrong for academics to fight to defend their pensions.
Of course, The Times is not alone in having a roster of columnists so high on ideology their spirits are actually floating high above their corporeal forms. Over at The Telegraph, the addictions are so acute that most of its writers now exist in totally different realities to the rest of the world, bubble universes where they crave an imagined 1950s and fear the ever creeping influence of the woke under the bed (like the Reds but with fewer potatoes and more avocados).
Perhaps the most ideology-ruined brain at The Telegraph belongs to Beaker’s bastard brother, Simon Heffer, a man who experiences footling irritation with every aspect of modern life. The last two columns we’re going to look at today both come from him and were both written in the last 24 hours.
The first concerns the MCC’s suggestion that “batsman” be replaced by the word “batter” when referring to cricket players for the quite sensible reason that not all of those playing the game are, in fact, men.
Of course, Heffer is furious about all this, partially because he considers himself a kind of Grammar Cop4 but also because he will never get over the disappointment of it being the year 2021 rather than the 1951 of his feverish cream tea-addled imagination.
Heffer rages:
[Batter] is not just that this noun is more usually associated with the stuff fish is fried in, or with which one makes Yorkshire pudding – or, worse, that the verb has associations with horrible people who beat their wives and children, driving them to refuges for their own protection. One wouldn’t expect MCC’s tin ear to pick that up. It is that women have happily played organised cricket since Victorian times and have, having embraced a game begun by men, accepted its terminology quite willingly, and without apparent harm.
If any woman felt upset about her gender being compromised or ignored (though I was under the impression that we were all supposed to be ‘fluid’ these days) then no one would object to the use of the specific noun ‘batswoman’ in women’s cricket. Oddly, in the theatre, the people we used to call ‘actresses’ are now often called ‘actors’, without being forced to undergo gender reassignment, and something similar can happily apply to cricket.
Nothing much change in Hefferland. If he could have dipped the entire world in aspic in about 1952, he would gladly have done so despite the fact that, having been born in 1960, he would not exist.
This is deranged prose even by the extremely deranged standards of The Daily Telegraph. Heffer, a man with ego enough to encourage him to publish multiple wrong-headed ‘guides’ to the English language, seems incapable of coping with a word having multiple meanings in different contexts.
That, as Caulorlime points out on Twitter, ‘batsman’ and ‘batter’ were used interchangeably in the 19th century and we use bowler rather than “bowlerman” without any great upset from hufferlumps like Heffer also seems to have escaped him. He is, to borrow Noel Gallagher’s description of his brother Liam, impotently angry like a man with a fork in a world of soup.
If Heffer took even a moment to think about why ‘batter’ might be a preferable word and why it will have absolutely no effect on his ability to enjoy cricket — or otherwise as I’m sure Heffer doesn’t actually enjoy anything — he wouldn’t have bothered pumping out 800 words on the issue.
But it is not Heffer’s job to think. It is his role to get progressively more puce as he contemplates the fallen nature of the awful modern world then hammer away at the keys of his Imperial Typewriter Company machine before forcing the ink-stained pages into the hand of a messenger sent forthwith to the dark foreboding towers of Telegraph HQ (actually a pretty sterile tower block).
After a rant that encompasses his disdain for The Hundred — essentially how dare anyone try to make cricket marginally more accessible or interesting to people who don’t become tumescent while reading Wisden — and general wailing about wokeness without which no Telegraph column can be considered complete, Heffer concludes:
All great sports are about traditions: destroy them and you destroy the game. Changing a word may be a small matter to those outside the game, but to those of us who love cricket, it is a sign of something sinister and self-destructive. There will be toadying conformists who love what has happened, and doubtless, commentators will be ordered never to utter the word ‘batsman’ again.
They will be vastly outnumbered by those who have had enough of bean-counters trifling with our sport in this way, for few cricket lovers enjoy seeing our game – and it really does belong to us all, a true definition of inclusivity – being treated with this measure of contempt.
Heffer is so lacking in perspective I’m surprised he doesn’t create Mr Magoo-style chaos and property damage wherever he goes. To him, all change is a personal affront, a brick in a wall built to prevent him from getting at things he has always had access to and believes he has personal ownership over. So a minor adjustment to language is really part of a vast plot by Heffer Hate Society (join today, I’m making badges).
What really makes the ‘batter/batsman’ column is that his follow up, published today, is yet another howl of rage about language. This time he wants everyone to know that he is not offended by the word “gammon” and that Ofcom is ridiculous for putting it on their list of potentially offensive terms (elsewhere in the paper Julie Bindel takes the opposite line saying she’s glad Ofcom has included ‘Karen’ in the same document).
Pretending he’s a High Court Judge baffled as to who or what The Beatles are rather than a 61-year-old man (the same age as, for example, Nigella Lawson and Hugh Grant), Heffer writes:
As a middle-aged white man who supported Brexit and has been known to vote Conservative, I am supposed to be offended if somebody refers to me as “gammon”. At least, that is what Ofcom thinks, for this word – which until educated by a younger colleague I innocently thought referred to a pork product – is on a new banned list of terms the regulator would rather not hear on television. “Boomer”, too, is outlawed because it is allegedly ageist (I have aged: we all do: so what?).
I couldn’t, actually, care less. I make no apology for my age, gender, class or boomer gammon views; if someone wishes to mock any of them, good luck.
Thank you for the blessing, Heff, I’ll do that.
Heffer, like many other columnists and reporters across the British press today, pretends that Ofcom has made a list of “banned words”, when in fact all it has done is release its latest research into words and terms that different audiences find offensive.
While Heffer claims that “the list has been drawn up by Adam Baxter, who runs audience protection at Ofcom” — taking the opportunity to become livid about Baxter’s job title — a brief look at the organisation’s website, where the research is available, shows that’s not true. He’s simply reflected what the people who took part in the survey said.
But for Heffer, huffing that sweet, sweet ideology, this is another opportunity to pretend that society is going to hell in a handbasket (manufactured no doubt by Mr Tony B Liar):
Much misunderstanding comes from a failure to grasp the nature of history, but also a failure to grasp the tolerance civilised people need to show towards the uncivilised. You can’t nationalise manners or speech in a free society. Some people will, whether by nature or by lack of advantages, be coarse and brutal in their expressions. At the extreme – racial abuse, for example – the law can and does have such louts prosecuted. But calling someone “gammon” or a “snowflake” is just part of the warp and weft of life. Those who can’t handle it should consider a monastery.
I’m not sure what Heffer thinks he knows about tolerant, civilised people, not being one himself and having spent the bulk of his career among like-minded souls at The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail. Nor is his argument strengthened by the apparent joy he gets from calling people “snowflakes” and “remoaners”. Heffer is definitely the sort of man for whom puns are the height of comic skill.
The rest of the column is a litany of the usual claims that the BBC is a hotbed of Marxists out to indoctrinate us all, that it’s terrible that TV is not filled with It Ain’t Half Hot Mum repeats and that the regulator is actually a censor with a big red stamp hammering it into the big red faces of gammons everywhere.
But Ofcom is merely providing broadcasters with a snapshot of how audiences feel in order to help them understand what content could be offensive. “Gammon” is no more banned than “Karen”, “snowflake” or “remoaner”. Heffer is angry because the public does not think the same as he and the alternate universe dwellers at The Daily Telegraph do. But he cannot admit that or accept that society evolves, so he has to pretend that it’s a cabal of wokeists driving everything, who he and his friends can root out and defeat.
The job of most British columnists is not to reflect the world as it is but to shout at and cajole those with whom they disagree and reassure readers who are on side that, “No, in fact, it is the children who are wrong.”
Please note: I am writing this edition of the newsletter absolutely out of my head on that great natural high “lack of sleep because of a child who could not sleep” so any typos are a result of me shifting into a completely different plane of mental existence.
The column opens with the line “We’re told the dearth of CO2 and lorry drivers will mean shortages of bread, chicken and beer. All the main food groups. Yet this summer I’ve noted many minor gaps on shelves.” but avoids mentioning the government’s role in causing/exacerbating these shortages.
He hates people bringing this up as if it’s somehow bad form to quote his own words to him and we should all subject ourselves to a Men In Black-style mind wipe.
If you want a laugh while subjecting yourself to serious psychic damage, try his 2010 guide Strictly English, which was correctly described by one reviewer as “pompous garbage” and a “ghastly, insufferable, obnoxious, appallingly incompetent book”.