All Jeremy Clarkson said, when asked, was that he thought the strikers should be taken out and shot. It's exactly the same sort of thing that is said by thousands of all sorts of people about all sorts of other people every single day of the year. It doesn't even actually matter whether or not he meant it. I'd rather prefer that he did; better, I think, to have an opinion instead of worrying about what opinion one should have, don't you think?
What the ensuing farrago of opinion revealed, however, was truly ugly. It even ended up being discussed on BBC's Question Time last night and what a measly, niggardly, cowardly country it revealed we've become.
As Dave Gorman said so eloquently in his blog, you have no right not to be offended. But if you've decided you are going to be offended for goodness' sake try to be offended in a worthwhile cause. JC is an entertainer. He was entertaining. That's what he does. Because, in case you didn't get that last bit, he's an entertainer. And he made me laugh, because unlike so many po-faced respondents I have a sense of proportion. What happened to the Great British sense of humour? What happened to tolerance and our ability to rub along together?
Maybe you have become more European than surveys reveal; forever looking to somebody else to tell you what to think , to feel, to get worked up about? Me? I find left wing politics - that is to say ALL British and European politics - offensive. But I don't write to the fucking newspapers to ask them to stop offending me. Those newspapers you all complained to, you know, the ones on which you showered such opprobrium for the phone hacking? Make up your feeble minds, why don't you?
Hurrah, well said.
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