The Daily Mail has a problem with Jessica Ennis and race at the Olympics
AS the Daily Mail salutes Jessica Ennis and ‘plastic Brit’ Mo Farah, featuring photos of the 10,000 metre gold medalist celebrating with his family before a thrilled crowd and the heptathlon champion (Ennis) wrapped in the Union flag, we look back to what the paper’s Rick Dewsbury wrote on 28 July. Dewsbury watched the opening ceremony. The thing was overtly political. But that did not prevent it from being a great spectacle.
The headline announced:
The NHS did not deserve to be so disgracefully glorified in this bonanza of left-wing propaganda.
Glorified it was, but there were two patients to a bed. Dewsbury made his point:
But it was the absurdly unrealistic scene – and indeed one that would spring from the kind of nonsensical targets and equality quotas we see in the NHS – showing a mixed-race middle-class family in a detached new-build suburban home, which was most symptomatic of the politically correct agenda in modern Britain.
This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but it is likely to be a challenge for the organisers to find an educated white middle-aged mother and black father living together with a happy family in such a set-up.
Almost, if not every, shot in the next sequence included an ethnic minority performer. The BBC presenter Hazel Irvine gushed about the importance of grime music (a form of awful electronic music popular among black youths) to east London. This multicultural equality agenda was so staged it was painful to watch.
Ennis is mixed race. Her father is black. Her mother is white. (See photos above.) They seem delighted and united. We didn’t have to look far. And neither did Dewsbury, it seems, for a fews hours after that horror his story was altered to read:
This was supposed to be a representation of modern life in England but such set-ups are simply not the ‘norm’ in any part of the country. So why was it portrayed like this and given such prominence? If it was intended to be something that we can celebrate, that two people with different colour skin and different cultural heritages can live harmoniously together, then it deserves praise.
But what will be disturbing to many people is top-down political manipulation – whether consciously or unthinkingly – at a major sporting event.
The article then went away.
If being politically correct means showing black and white people living happily together, then I’m for it. If it means not calling the black man Sooty or Sambo, then, again, it’s ok by me. Of course, political correctness is shallow, a buildings with no walls created to fill the void where hard and fast rules – God, empire, Church and country – have been eroded. PC is weak and interventionist. It is there to be shot at because it has “gone mad”. Dewsbury’s error was to have attributed too much power to the mysterious PC elite, who exits in the fevered minds of the Mail and its ilk who can’t explain what happened to their traditional values and morals. Rather than bemoaning the PC brigade, the free thinker should just go for it. Say what you mean. Celebrate freedom of speech. Speaking in code only serves to emphasise your own the lack of direction and moral compass.
John Walker took screenshots:
Posted: 5th, August 2012 | In: Key Posts, Reviews Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
