What comes to mind when you think of the word “spectator”?
The dictionary definition is “a person who watches at a game, a show or other event”.
A spectator is a fly on the wall. An onlooker. And while they may feel heavily invested in the outcome of whatever has captured their fleeting attention, spectators rarely put their own necks on the line.
Hold that description of the spectator in mind as we turn to the conservative political magazine of the same name.
England star and anti-poverty campaigner Marcus Rashford this week revealed on social media that The Spectator would imminently publish a hit piece, in which it would attempt to cast doubt over his charitable work.
The crux of the aspersion being that Rashford’s tireless activism (which has resulted in government U-turns over free-school meals) is somehow tainted by the fact that he is a highly paid sports personality and businessman.
At time of writing, this hit-piece has yet to surface.
Hopefully, they’ll keep it that way. After all, it appears there are more pressing matters for the influential publication to aggressively pursue than a working class black man who spends most of his free time feeding malnourished children.
There’s GB News, wheeling out racist Thunderbird puppet Nigel Farage to bolster flatlined television ratings. Or thin-skinned Times Radio presenter and soiled human wet-wipe Giles Coren, who gloated about the sudden death of journalist Dawn Foster – because she spent some of her tragically short but principled life pointing out what a contemptible, jumped-up wee dobber he is.
And then we had the main event, as mouth-breather Dominic Cummings laid on a slab, once again, just how corrupt, talentless, and sociopathic this current crop of Tory reprobates really is.
Surely this might occupy the tumble-weeded mind of a perma-jaundiced Rod Liddle. The famous Spectator scribe who hates people casting up his 11-year-old articles because it reminds him of Toby Young’s mental age.
It is utterly dumbfounding that a publication, once respected across the political spectrum (now in danger of descending into an audience-captured culture war farce) would train its editorial sights on a figure so clearly well intentioned and useful as Marcus Rashford.
A young working class man who embodies Britain’s better nature. Who makes his values visible by uniting communities – not tearing them apart for the sport of chicken-hearted subscribers.
He has proven so effective in this enterprise that his work around poverty has in many ways eclipsed his prodigious sporting achievements.
It’s all well and good being a commentator.
You dip your head into the real world once every few days, you phone in your hot take, and the money’s in your account in a few weeks.
But for people like Rashford, who put more than simply their opinions on the line, the country and its people are not to be observed passively, nor sneered at from a safe distance.
Nobody filing from British media’s Debenture Box possesses the heart or the street credibility to go 10 rounds with Rashford – or the millions stood behind him and everything he does.
It says something of the low proximity some commentators have to social reality that they would even ponder such a heinous course of action. Good then that they appear to have thought better of it.
Society is not a spectator sport.
No wonder A&E admissions are rising
Emergency department admissions this year are almost 40 per cent higher than pre-pandemic levels, figures show this week.
Many speculate as to the reasons behind it.
While I’m no expert, I’m willing to take a punt that it might be something to do with the immense rigmarole now involved in getting a GP appointment. It now makes more sense for people to wait until their doctor’s surgery closes, and instead contact NHS 24, where a phone consultation often results in being sent to casualty.
There, they may expect to wait up to five hours to be examined and while that is no fun, it’s a damn sight better than waiting as long as three weeks to see a doctor.
Then we have the people who give up trying to get an appointment, who self-medicate with over-the-counter drugs, unaware their symptoms are the early stages of something more serious.
Eventually, they’ll keel over, or their pain will become too great, that they end up in the emergency room.
We need action to alleviate this backlog and soon before we have another crisis on our hands.
The end of the pandemic is in sight, I’m sure we’d all like to be alive to enjoy it.
Plague of little house guests
I'm loving the weather right now. But given my Scottish heritage, it is only right that I find something to complain about.
For me, it’s not the high temperatures that are the problem – it’s all the creatures that want to come into your house.
I’ve only just stuck a collar on the cat to stop her bringing birds and mice into the house at night, only to find that every open window, or door ajar, brings with it a small plague of horse-, house-, and fruit-flies, as well as ants, daddy-long-legs and field spiders.
And given we have not yet smashed the patriarchy, somehow it always falls to me to either kill or remove these insects and rodents – even though I’m as freaked out by them as everybody else.
