You say tomato, and I say tomato

I like to see things in black and white. For there to be a right and a wrong answer to every question.

How frustrating, then, to find that so many issues in the news dissolve into more than 50 shades of grey.

These reflections were prompted by listening to Radio 4 on Monday morning, experiencing mounting irritation as some pundit droned on about internet trolls.

Only he insisted on pronouncing the word to rhyme with “dole” instead of “doll”.

Imagine how deflated I felt when I looked it up in search of vindication and found that either pronunciation is considered correct.

I shall have to confine myself to being annoyed with those who continue to mispronounce my surname, and the name of the village where I live, even after I have politely put them right.

So let us move on from pronunciation to consider the issue of trolling in general. Clearly writing disobliging things about other people is not a nice or kind thing to do, whether one does it on the internet or by painting abusive graffiti on their walls.

It is made even less appealing when judgements are passed on named individuals by those not in full possession of the facts, who almost always hide within the comfortable shadow of a pseudonym.

On the other hand (for this is not a black and white issue), how offended can anyone reasonably be by comments about them on Twitter, particularly if they do not actually use Twitter?

How far must freedom of speech be constrained to protect the right not to be offended of people who reflexively take umbrage on behalf of others?

Often on Twitter I read amongst the tsunami of outrage about some controversial post or other, a still small voice saying (in 140 characters or fewer) “actually I am gay / black / disabled / dyslexic / a war veteran / whatever and I thought that was quite a good joke”.

A recent TV documentary on motorways belatedly introduced me to the fact that there is officially no longer any such thing as a “road traffic accident”. We now have “road traffic collisions” because nothing happens by accident: “someone is always to blame”.

If your car crosses the central reservation because of a blow-out it’s your own fault for not checking the tyres or driving too fast; or the fault of the garage who fitted the tyre, or the company who manufactured it; or the farmer whose hedge clipping damaged it; or the Highways Agency for not filling the pothole you clipped.

At its most extreme this thinking ends up with people scouring a runway for the strip of metal that punctured the tyre of the Concorde that crashed in Paris, and taking to court the airline from whose plane it fell.

The blame culture also gives free rein to those who become fixated with the belief that the victims of well-publicised tragedies are the authors of their own misfortune.

I don’t suppose that parents who have lost a child need reminding that things might have turned out differently if they had not left their offspring unattended.

Any more than it is helpful to point out that those placing themselves at risk in war zones, whether as reporters or humanitarians, took a free choice to do so (and if they grievously underestimated the danger they would be in, that too was their own fault).

Islamic State like to see themselves as master propagandists, making full use of social media to attract the gullible to their cause. Small wonder that trolling is officially part of the US State Department’s fight back.

Let us hope that it proves more effective than air strikes in undermining morale.

We can surely all agree that death is a disproportionate response to trolling, whether for the victim or the perpetrator, in a world where even the most heinous war crimes will escape capital punishment.

But ultimately on the greyly murky issue of trolling I find I can get no further than two black and white yet wise sayings of my parents: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

And “If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out.”

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Sunderland has a lot to answer for

Well done, us! It takes real skill and judgement to manipulate a simple first-past-the-post electoral system to achieve a result that absolutely none of the political parties wanted. That will serve them right for fiddling their expenses.

The only snag is that, being British, we are still not satisfied. The weekend newspapers were full of vox pop moans about that weird Scotsman still hanging around in Downing Street, and asking what on earth nice Dave Clegg thought he was up to, talking to nasty Nick Cameron.

And, with another election probably looming fairly soon, no one in any party dared answer “Because you willed it, dimwits.”

My own election day went very satisfactorily until about 11pm. I dropped my postal vote off at my nearest polling station, impeded only by two nonagenarians attempting to dodder through the door simultaneously, and enjoyed a fine lunch with two fellow scribblers, both lifelong Labour supporters.

Funnily enough they had both suddenly discovered an urgent need to support the Lib Dems, cheerily noting that the party stood to the left of Labour on most issues. Vote Clegg, get Miliband seemed to be the calculation. How could Nick possibly do a deal with “oily Dave” the PR man?

Of course, they may yet prove to be right, but at least I have enjoyed a few days sporting a wry smile.

Having viewed the BBC exit poll, I should have headed straight for bed, but the wait for those promised Sunderland results seemed tantalisingly short. And then the massive Wearside swings of 8.4% and even 11.6% to the Tories made me think that a night of genuine excitement lay ahead.

After all, if Sunderland was prepared to swing so strongly towards “Dave” after his candid predictions about how the North East could look forward to many fewer comfortable public sector jobs not answering the phones in call centres, or casually losing computer discs full of sensitive information, just imagine how well he might do in regions to which he was not actually proposing to lay waste.

Which is how I came to be still up at 4.30am, completely knackered, my bottle of Champagne still unopened, before I finally grasped that the ultimate result was going to be bang in line with the exit poll I had seen six and a half hours earlier.

Now one of the few areas in which I am in complete agreement with our (probably soon) ex-Prime Minister is the operation of a strict blame culture. With him everything was Tony Blair’s fault for about 13 years, then poor old Sue stepped forward to take his place. Luckily for me I acquired a wife not too long after I stopped being able to afford a PA, and fortunately for her baby Charlie came along quite soon afterwards to share responsibility for everything that goes wrong in the Hann household.

Sadly we spent election night 200-odd miles apart, but even if we had been together it is quite clear that this particular debacle was all down to the Makems. Either they weren’t paying attention to “Dave”, or they were too dim to understand what he said, or in the rush to win the race for first declaration (which isn’t too much of a challenge, really, considering that they are the only entrant) …

No, they could not have miscounted, could they? The British electoral system is beyond reproach.

My only compensation for a needlessly sleepless night was going live to Montgomeryshire to see the look on the face of chief asteroid worrier and Cheeky Girl fancier Lembit Opik as he was turfed out on a scarcely believable swing. But it was not enough, really. Next time I’m off to bed at 10.05 sharp. And the right advice for Sunderland is surely this: start training for a marathon, not a sprint.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne