How we'd snigger at the Very Proper Gander!

We would. Snigger that is. After all we're so much more sophisticated than in times past.

Not so very long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up and down in his yard and singing remarked, “There is a very proper gander.”

An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost.

“They said something about propaganda,” she said.

“I have always suspected that," said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander’s clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. “They were up to no good,“ she said.

A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. “He said to hell with the flag, too,“ said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb.

Finally everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander’s house. He was strutting in
his front yard, singing to his children and his wife. “There he is!“ everybody cried. “Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flaghater! Bomb-thrower!“ So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.

Yesterday, a twitter fury erupted because the on-line, human equivalent of that old hen misread or misheard the word "snigger" turning it into a terrible racist slur. And I guess that the only thing is for us to take the 'moral' from Thurber's modern fable to heart - having told the Very Proper Gander's tale, our James concludes:

Moral: Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

Or off twitter!

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Understanding Bradford...a few tips for London-based journalists

Goit Stock Falls, Cullingworth

I read a great deal about Bradford in the national papers since 29th March (I gather something happened). And I've seen a load of nonsense spouted by assorted clever people of right and left who, if they've ever been to Bradford, haven't got past Manningham's terraces in that visit.

By way of illustration (and to be fair this one is rather better written than many others) here's David Goodhart in Prospect Magazine. I believe Mr Goodhart is something important in some grand think tank or something like that - which of course makes his opinion of my City so much more significant than mine:

Even more than George Galloway, a young man called Naweed Hussain is the key to the Bradford West by-election upset. I spent a couple of hours with him last summer when I went to Bradford to write a piece “ten years on” from the 2001 riots. He was an angry and thwarted man; angry not so much about joblessness or discrimination (though he did complain about a “brown ceiling” at the council and university) but about the control of minority representation in the Labour party by people from the Jats and Bains clans from the Mirpur region of Kashmir, from where so many of Britain’s 1.2m Pakistanis originate.

Now let me explain something - it really is crucial to understanding Bradford. The Pakistani muslim population is a minority in all but seven of the City's wards. There are five more where that population are a significant minority - more than a third of the electorate.  Every other ward has a white (sort of christian I guess) majority.

To understand Bradford, look at the picture above and ask yourself what kind of place has a wonderful waterfall like that? Not urban for sure - two thirds of Bradford is rural (you never hear that on the BBC do you) and the District contains such iconic symbols of Yorkshire as Ilkey Moor, Top Withens and Saltaire.

Yet each year journalists troop up to the City (or more often make a couple of phone calls while staying safely in their well-appointed home near Hampstead Heath or some other trendy part of London). And talk the most complete tosh about the place based on their stupid belief that it's all terraced, Victorian housing and tatty council blocks. A sort of Liverpool built from stone.

I lose count of the times I've said this to journalists. It's not that the BBC, Channel 4 and so forth haven't had the briefing. It's just that the City has to conform to their London prejudice - poor, Northern, Asian and riot-strewn.

None of this is true - for sure, the City has problems. Too few jobs, too many poor schools, what Anne Cryer called the importing of poverty from South Asia and a City Centre that simply isn't good enough. But talking about Pakistani clan politics as if it was the City's problem rather than the Labour Party's problem doesn't cut the mustard as far I as I'm concerned.

So please my friends in the press, next time you're up give me a call and I'll give you a tour - I'll take you to Goit Stock, to Manningham Park, to Thornton village and to Apperley Bridge. If you've time we can pop up to Baildon, visit Bingley market and eat pie and peas in Keighley. Maybe then you start to understand Bradford and to set aside your prejudice, your stereotype of our great City.

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