Jeremy Clarkson got into tremendous trouble last night . . .
. . . for suggesting on BBC’s The One Show that the public sector “workers” who took part in yesterday’s strike should be shot.
This is silly. It should be patently obvious to anyone who is familiar with his style or has seen one of his programmes – ie: everyone in the world – that Clarkson didn’t mean it. For one thing, being an informed fellow he would be perfectly aware that the government simply hasn’t the money to spend on bullets right now. For another, he must know that it’s perfectly possible that among all the diversity outreach consultants, renewable energy/recycling advisers and union reps who spent their day on the picket lines/early Christmas shopping in Bluewater yesterday at least a handful might actually have jobs which make some tiny contribution to the nation’s well being – so killing at least those ones would be counterproductive.
Oh, plus, he was employing it as a figure of speech. I know this won’t mean much to half the morons who complained to the BBC yesterday, but the English language is an extraordinarily rich and nuanced thing. Sometimes, when the speaker says that someone should be shot, he really does mean it: if, say, it’s an officer giving orders to a firing squad about to shoot a deserter or a looter in 1915. More often, though, he doesn’t. For at least the last fifty years “they should be taken out and shot,” has been a socially acceptable, perfectly unexceptionable way of expressing colourfully and vehemently one’s distaste towards a particular category of unpleasantness, be it striking Unison workers, revolting students, poorly performing members of your football team or the Lib Dem members of Cameron’s cabinet. Context is all.
The BBC I know is particularly squeamish about such matters. I remember once appearing on a BBC arts programme on Radio 4, in which I suggested that Robbie Williams deserved to be killed for making some particularly dismal album. Though I said it in the mildest way and it was quite obvious that my fatwa was really not an incitement for Radio 4’s listeners to rise up, hunt down Williams mercilessly and appear outside Broadcasting House with his head on a spike, the presenter nevertheless blanched and felt compelled to offer an instant on-air apology stressing that I hadn’t meant what I said.
Well, duh.
What the BBC and its brain-dead apparatchiks clearly fail to understand at moments like this is that they are actually endorsing and cultivating our culture of abject stupidity. If Lord Reith were still around, he really would want the entire BBC staff – management especially but also grinning half-wit presenters like The One Show’s Matt Baker and Alex Jones – taken out and shot for what they have done to a once-fine institution.
In a sensible, rational universe, the natural response of those presenters to remarks like Clarkson’s would be a knowing chuckle – as if to say: “Ah there goes old Jezza again. What a card he is. But of course, that’s why we had him on the programme in the first place: to say the kind of things that Jeremy Clarkson would say on television.” Thus, they would be signalling to those viewers idiotic enough to seek to take umbrage at Clarkson’s remarks that there was no point in doing so since the comments were obviously flippant.
Instead by looking shocked, the presenters indicated to viewers that they were perfectly within their rights to take offence at what Clarkson had said. This signal was then amplified by the official apology issued by the BBC immediately afterwards. Thus it is that our state broadcaster, whose propaganda we are forced to finance with a compulsory levy, sends out a signal to the world that the English language is no longer a complex, beautiful, nuanced thing in which meaning depends on tone and context but something we should treat with extreme caution and use in its most literal sense lest someone, somewhere take offence.
The damage the BBC is wreaking on our culture in ways both large and small is all but incalculable. The Clarkson affair is at the smaller end. At the larger end, I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to giving you the gory details of the BBC’s complicity in the Climate Change scam – as revealed both in the Climategate 2.0 emails and in Christopher Booker’s magisterial new report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. And I’m quite sure Roger Harrabin is too.
Related posts:
- Green jobs? Wot green jobs? (pt 242)
- The real cost of ‘global warming’
- How the TUC’s day of innocent family fun was destroyed by evil, fascist media
- ‘We must live more sustainably’ says Jeremy ‘Seven Homes’ Irons
13 thoughts on “Jeremy Clarkson’s critics should be taken out and shot”
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Remeber the days when ‘Telly’ people, all had personalities?
If you have ever done a day`s work, instead of living off your mother and father, you would understand the depth of feeling towards those that expect the working class to pay for the mistakes of your ilk.
I am also from Doncaster, birthplace of Jeremy, Up His Own Arse, Clarkson. I expect he will not be revisiting Doncaster in a while, nor would he be welcome to.
Comments like his are not said in jest by people like him. There is many a true word spoken under the guise of humour. He meant every word, and he should be sacked and jailed for it.
Far right cretins, like you and your ilk, have no understanding of the real world that the rest of us live in. You are so out of touch with reality that you may as well be living on a different planet.
I would love to meet the likes of you and Clarkson around a quiet, dark corner one time.
You are the scum of society, and deserve to be looked upon as such!
The thing about the pension pots is that medicine is making the average age of the population increase, so a small increase in contributions are needed from the public sector, unless you the taxpayer to effectively pay extra the public pensions, which are generous already.
By the way, the threats and intimidation from union stewards is all hot air; the only thing private sector unions do in the long-term is bankrupt your employers by pushing up your own wage packets and making the company fall foul of cheap foreign competition. If you want to stop cheap imports, you need to get behind Delingpoles anti-EUSSR campaign, and vote UKIP, not Labour. All these disasters for everybody are the fault of socialist strike and dissent, the same stuff that caused the USSR to go under.
If you want to meet these people “around a dark corner”, you’re in a pipe dream. Look what happened to Arthur Scargill, who has to be protected by an office like Fort Knox, only accessible by an underground car park with full time security. You end up making the workers unemployed by driving industry to China where wages are lower and unions are prohibited. Also John Prescott, with his working class credentials, two Jags, and a long so-called “eating disorder” consisting of going to top restaurants repeatedly each day to gorge, empty and re-gorge, in the Roman banquet manner.
Yeah, I’ve heard all this hard man union talk all my life, but you guys need to cut down on the beer bellies and try running instead of darts before you’re anything like a challenge to anyone.
The garbage strike in Southampton is dragging on because the council can’t fire the b*stards, even though hundreds of unemployed people have volunteered to take their place.
And people wonder why Britain is going down the toilet.