The Times - UK (2022-05-27)

26 Friday May 27 2022 | the times

Comment

are doing as everyone is too focused

on their own business.

I was a victim of a random crime

that I’d never heard of but is

apparently common. Catalytic

converters of older cars especially

are worth money because they

contain platinum. Nothing to do with

the Queen’s jubilee, by the way,

though you do wonder.

Royal blessing

A

s it happens I saw the

Queen this week. She

visited the Chelsea Flower

Show on Monday, riding along in

a golf cart-type vehicle that

was immediately dubbed the

Maj-mobile. Her route

took her down the

main avenue with all

the big show

gardens. She

stopped — truly a

vision in pink —

and chatted to

Joe Swift about

his bee garden

(buzz buzz).

She then

rode

slowly

by my

Wild Kitchen Garden,

chatting away to the

RHS president, Keith

Weed, (his real name) about

container gardening. I swear I heard

her say the word “pretty” about mine

before stopping to have a chat with

the balcony gardener Jason Williams,

known as the Cloud Gardener, who

usually tends his wonderfully

colourful array of plants on the 18th

floor of a Manchester tower block. It

was all rather thrilling.

Podium finish

I

won’t pretend that I

wasn’t nervous on

Tuesday when the

medals were given

out. You have to be

prepared for

anything but I am

pleased to report

that the Wild

Kitchen Garden

received a “silver

gilt”, which is just

one down from

gold. I did emit a

shriek of happiness

(American behaviour).

Thank you also to all the

many readers who stopped

by for a chat about wild

edibles. Clearly many of

you love, as I do, getting

your hands dirty.

Turtle rain

T

he weather

has been

shocking.

On Tuesday raindrops the size of

T

he “build” for my container

garden at Chelsea felt

almost like an extreme

sport and my daily step

count (in steel-toecapped

boots) was way over 10,000. At the

end of the day, I must admit to a

certain weariness. This was exactly

the case when I slumped thankfully

into my car at 8pm one night last

week at Woodside Park Tube station

to head back to my flat.

“VROOM!! VROOM!!” I jumped

out of my skin. My VW Beetle

suddenly sounded like a Ferrari in a

Formula One race. What was going

on? Had the exhaust fallen off? Had

I hit a pothole?

The answer came at Kwik Fit the

next day at 8.30am. “Your catalytic

converter has been stolen,” said the

mechanic, showing me the gap

underneath the car. My what?

Apparently thieves have to jack up

the car to steal it but, in a car park,

no one stops to ask them what they

Comedy is our weapon against woke absurdity

Despite the predictable outrage of trans activists, Ricky Gervais’s tirade is funny because it’s true

ideology can hardly be described as

“punching down”.

Why should comedy have rules

anyway? Increasingly, comedians are

expected to sign waivers promising

not to offend. But if explaining a

punchline kills a joke then political

purity tests are the firing squad

before a comedian ever makes it on

stage. Somewhere along the line we

have lost our sense of humour.

Gervais opens SuperNature with a

caveat that many of his remarks will

be ironic. He explains: “That’s when I

say something I don’t really mean,

for comic effect, and you, as an

audience, you laugh at the wrong

thing because you know what the

right thing is. It’s a way of satirising

attitudes.” He also reminds the

audience that comedians act in

character on stage and it is the

character, not the comedian, that

says outrageous things. These things

should not need explaining. But the

response to Jimmy Carr’s joke about

Gypsies earlier this year suggests

explanations are indeed required.

The fact is, both offence and humour

are subjective. If you don’t find

something funny, the best advice is

not to watch.

Fortunately for the rest of us,

Gervais is still free to say what he

likes on Netflix. As he frequently

reminds us, he’s an incredibly

wealthy man and this makes him

uncancellable. But the freedom to

ridicule woke orthodoxies should not

be the sole preserve of the rich.

Joanna Williams is the founder of the

think tank Cieo

Emma Duncan is away

have been nothing remotely funny

about saying only a man has a penis.

It was a straightforward biological

fact. It is only when it is prohibited to

say such things that they have the

power to shock. In puncturing

pomposity, Gervais is part of a great

comedic tradition.

But rather than roll their eyes at

Gervais, activists have taken the bait.

A spokesperson for the National

Center for Transgender Equality in

the US said Gervais perpetuated

“dehumanising myths about

transgender people”, which could

“give people permission to

discriminate, harass and even

commit violence”. This suggests that

new orthodoxies about gender

should be afforded special protection

and marked as off-limits to

comedians. This would spell the end

of free speech in comedy.

One rule has it that comedians

must only “punch up” and Gervais

transgressed by poking fun at a

minority group. But it wasn’t

transgender people Gervais was

making the target of his jokes but

transgender ideology — new beliefs

about gender fluidity and the

importance of declaring our

pronouns at every available

opportunity. As I explore in my book

How Woke Won, this ideology has

been adopted wholesale by the

police, the civil service, the education

sector and even the NHS.

Challenging it can mean you end up

in court, like Allison Bailey or Maya

Forstater; or are visited by the police,

like Harry Miller; or, like JK

Rowling, receive enough death

threats to paper your house. In this

context, having a pop at transgender

I

n SuperNature, his new Netflix

comedy special, Ricky Gervais

pokes fun at doctors, Hitler and

pets. But it’s not the cat gags that

have sparked online outrage. In

an opening monologue skewering

the absurdities of cancel culture,

Gervais jokes about women.

Struggling to name women

comedians, he eventually lands on

Dame Edna Everage and Eddie

Izzard.

“Women!” he complains. “Not all

women, I mean the old-fashioned

ones. The old-fashioned women, the

ones with wombs. Those f***ing

dinosaurs. I love the new women.

They’re great, aren’t they? The new

ones we’ve been seeing lately. The

ones with beards and cocks. And

now the old-fashioned ones say, ‘Oh,

they want to use our toilets.’ ‘Why

shouldn’t they use your toilets?’ ‘For

ladies!’ ‘They are ladies — look at

their pronouns! What about this

person isn’t a lady?’ ‘Well, his penis.’

‘Her penis, you f***ing bigot!’ ‘What

if he rapes me?’ ‘What if she rapes

you, you f***ing Terf ?’”

To the obvious delight of the

audience, it takes Gervais precisely

one minute to expose the lie of the

woke incantation: “Trans women are

women.” He gets to the heart of a

debate that other people — the

women whose rights are being

compromised — worry about

discussing out loud in case they end

up on the receiving end of abuse.

Yet the spontaneous shrieks of

laughter from those watching live

stand in stark contrast to the online

outrage that has ensued. Predictably,

Gervais has been condemned for

“anti-trans rants masquerading as

jokes”. Glaad, a US-based LGBTQ

campaign group, called the Netflix

special “dangerous”.

I know explaining a joke is not the

done thing, but as someone who

hooted loudly (and may have even

punched the air in jubilation) I feel

obliged to share my insights. Gervais’s

60-second tirade is funny because it

is true. Despite the total moral

certainty of transgender activists, we

all know that someone with a penis

is not a woman. His comments are

also funny because they are so

shocking. Gervais says something

considered utterly taboo in polite

society. As one of the old-fashioned

dinosaurs with a womb, it is a relief

to hear said aloud just how warped it

is to make a female victim of sexual

assault stand up in court and describe

her male attacker as a woman.

The furore around SuperNature

shows how a censorious woke

culture, where people are so quick to

perform outrage and signal their

own moral superiority, provides a

climate for a comedian like Gervais

to thrive. Ten years ago there would

Somewhere along the

line we have lost

our sense of humour

small turtles hurtled down, followed

by hail, then sun, then drizzle, etc.

There was a brief summer interlude

where my friend and I sat in the sun

but, moments later, it was torrential

rain again and we found ourselves

sheltering under a large yew in the

House Plant Studio area. Crazy.

Dispensing advice

T

he wet weather triggered yet

another announcement on the

Tube about how we have to be

careful of slippery steps. (How did we

survive before?) Victoria station

seems to be particularly addicted to

telling us stuff. The one I hate the

most is where we are asked to use

the station’s sanitising hand gel

dispensers and told: “The little things

we do help protect the little things

we love.” I mean, really? Hand gel?

Get a grip.

Attack of the vapours

W

ord of the week, spotted in

our Weather Eye column, is

“fuliginous” and means

“sooty” or “dusky” as in this

comment about London from the

pioneer environmentalist John

Evelyn in 1661: “Inhabitants breathe

nothing but an impure and thick Mist

accompanied with a fuliginous and

filthy vapour”. We need to revive it.

Ann Treneman Notebook

Platinum’s

so popular it

was stolen

from my car

@anntreneman

We can’t give in to

this blackmail by

civil service unions

Jawad Iqbal

B

ritain’s increasingly militant

public sector union bosses

are delusional if they think

there is a great wave of

public sympathy for their

bellicose threats of industrial action.

The latest self-serving union

leader to wave a stick at the public is

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of

the Public and Commercial Services

(PCS) union, representing 182,000

public sector workers, including civil

servants. He doesn’t mince his words:

“What people would see is that job

centres would close, there would be

nobody there overseeing collection

of taxes, overseeing the minimum

wage; the justice system would come

to a halt.”

Why? All because of a proposed

2 per cent pay rise for his members

and the threat of job cuts. This is an

insult, he claims, because it is civil

servants who have “kept the country

running” during the pandemic. Try

telling that to the thousands of

people whose holidays are under

threat because of delays at the

Passport Office: 500,000 applications

are waiting to be processed.

The belligerence of the union

chiefs is all too reminiscent of a

bygone era of industrial relations

based on class conflict. The cheap

rhetoric of hard-pressed workers

against fat-cat bosses is especially

ludicrous coming from union leaders

on bumper pay packages. Serwotka

takes home about £125,000 a year;

Dave Penman, general secretary of

the FDA, a union for senior civil

servants, who accused the

government of “a reckless

slash-and-burn to public services”, is

paid about £152,000 a year.

It’s the same story elsewhere in the

public sector: rail unions have just

voted to strike in a dispute over jobs,

pay and conditions. At the same time

it has emerged that rail union chiefs

took home nearly £500,000 in pay

and perks during the first year of the

pandemic: Mick Cash, the former

general secretary of the Rail,

Maritime and Transport (RMT)

union, earned £163,468 in 2020.

Union blackmail is increasingly

the order of the day in the vital

arena of public services and it’s

depressing to see civil servants using

similar threats to the rail unions.

Meanwhile it’s the public that is

suffering the most, let down by

politicians running scared of the

unions. Is anyone surprised at the

deafening silence from the Labour

Party, still heavily reliant on its union

paymasters? It still won’t say whether

it supports the strikes or not.

The government is guilty of

dithering, too. It must push ahead

with plans to impose minimum

service levels in the public sector,

preventing staff from all walking out

at once on essential services. The last

thing the country needs right now is

a crippling wave of strikes.

Jawad Iqbal is a freelance writer

Joanna

Williams

@jowilliams293