We have more important things to worry about than whether Phil and Holly are getting along
Whenever it’s a “slow news” day for the tabloid media, they like to make up stories that is either not in the public interest, or sensationalist fluff designed to hype up the public, or both. So much so that the Sun newspaper published a front page saying “ITV stars’ rift — Holly & Phil barely speaking. She’d do This Morning without Phil.” This front page is about — you guessed it — the programme’s presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, and this “rift” that they’re apparently having.
Such impressive journalism! Letting people know that what’s going on inside celebrities’ private lives is in the public interest, quite literally — WHO ASKED FOR THIS?! I didn’t want to know whether Schofield and Willoughby are ordering food from a McDonalds, unless they were doing it for TV. The Sun and journalism coming together is like Scooby-Doo and Frankenstein making friends out of each other, although you’d read it in your nightmares. Sorry!
The Sun’s “exclusive bombshell” was spread through to outlets like the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror. Yet despite what was being reported over the weekend, ITV confirmed that Schofield and Willoughby would still present This Morning. They did *actually* appear and they looked through the news with Gyles Brandreth and Camilla Tominey, barely mentioning anything that’s been reported about them. So basically, it’s been some sort of a normal news day in the ITV house.
I’m talking about this because the tabloid media is interested in making private celebrity moments “national interest stories” and getting the nation to talk about them. I’d rather talk about the more important things going on in the news. For example, the UK is making a leap forward into fascism, we could be losing *a hell of a lot of* money thanks to the excessive cost of living, not to mention that we have a former US president found guilty of sexual abuse. All the things that should be in the agenda, not about whether Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby are still friends off screen.
Speaking of a leap forward into fascism, the Tories rushed through the Public Order Act and made it into law, and as we have seen, it led to the arrests of several people, including republicans, who dared to protest the coronation of King Prince Charles. The Metropolitan police, which made these arrests and even handcuffed the Night Safety team for possession of rape alarms, released 46 out of 64 people and “regretted” their actions afterwards.
The Met’s recent actions have raised questions about whether we still have the right to protest. The truth is, we barely do now thanks to a government which is happy to crack down on democratic freedoms that they don’t like. And a police force which operates on a racist, homophobic, misogynistic and corrupt scale.
All of this is embedded in fascism, in which examples can include disdain for human rights and obsession for national security. Something which may be familar with the home secretary Suella Braverman. This week, she was speaking at the National Conservatism conference when she and Jacob Rees-Mogg were separately interrupted by Extinction Rebellion activists. Basically, it’s fascism being encountered by anti-fascism, which should be the case if we were to live in a country where fascism is stood up to once and for all.
Also speaking at the National Conservatism conference was Danny Kruger, the Tory MP son of Bake Off judge Prue Leith. This week, he said this: “The normative family, the mother and father sticking together for the sake of the children, is the only basis for a safe and functioning society.” In a normally political climate, nobody would even feel the need, or want, to say it all out loud, like an “importance” (it isn’t).
I’m the child of two divorced parents, and what Kruger’s saying is not only offensive to divorced families and children of divorced parents, but also to LGBTQ+ families, children of dead parents and domestic abuse victims. Not to even mention that he also worked with the twice-divorced Boris Johnson. Oh, and he said that women “don’t deserve the absolute right” to bodily autonomy.
In other news, writer and commentator Douglas Murray said “the Germans mucked up twice in a century” in defence of British nationalism. Very nice to see the Holocaust treated as a “mucked-up moment” rather than a genocidal piece of history which resulted in the slaughters of millions of Jews and segregation of the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community. Funnily, Murray writes for the Spectator, which is no stranger to publishing pro-fascist content.
Oh, and what about Jacob Rees-Mogg? In the NC conference, he boasted about using the idea of Voter ID to “gerrymander” future elections for the Tories. He even described it as a “clever scheme” to attempt to swing voters back to the party. When you have the Conservatives admitting that they were trying to rig elections, you know they exposed themselves as the complete fucking frauds that they are and have been.
In fact, it’s not even Phil and Holly that you need to be worried about, unless you read the Sun and barely know how to keep up with the real world. It’s that the Conservatives and their supine media cheerleaders are cheering on fascism and they’re not even hiding it. Either we fight back or we get sucked in to some Handmaid’s Tale-like horror story that who knows will come out of it.
