Michael Gove was on BBC Question Time the other night, fielding questions about such contentious subjects as education, immigration and benefits. But when he browsed the internet afterwards to see what, if anything, was exercising the web about his performance, he was surprised to discover that his greatest crime had been an innocuous turn of phrase in response to a jibe from David Dimbleby.
Dimbleby had idly wondered why Gove was so disliked by the teaching profession, to which Gove replied that this was a loaded question on the lines of ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ This elicited a huge outpouring of internet hatred from the usual online victim groups to the effect that it was outrageous that a government minister should make light of the very serious problem of domestic abuse.
No, I wouldn’t have believed this either if I hadn’t myself experienced such immense obtuseness from BBC audiences on two occasions recently. One was Free Speech — a youth debate programme redolent of that old Not The Nine O’Clock News sketch where Griff Rhys Jones tries unsuccessfully to get down with the kids on a show called Hey, Wow! — in which I made the H.M. Batemanesque mistake of pointing out that, thanks to the failed experiment of multiculturalism, there were now parts of inner-city Britain which were effectively Muslim ghettos.
Rather than dispute the premise — not an easy task, given the widespread evidence from Birmingham and Bradford to Luton — the young audience and most of my fellow panellists decided to attack me for my choice of terminology. ‘Ghetto’ was a racist word, they told me. Islamophobic too. The more they hissed and jeered and showed their disapproval of my vile bigotry, you could tell, the more warm and gooey they felt inside.
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