Thank you for your prejudiced, bigoted opinion on this mean nothing fluff piece.
I doubt the people of Boston, Lincolnshire, who have suffered from the influx of Eastern Europeans in their town (it has more of them on a per capita basis than any other town in Britain other than London) and were incensed when this Mary Beard, one of those Liberal Establishment figures whose main speciality is being patronising to people (and her ugly looks make her LOOK like a Liberal Establishment figure), told them in no uncertain terms on an episode of Question Time in the town that immigration is good for their town and they should stop whingeing.
And then, having had the audacity to tell the good people of Boston that they should shut up and put up with the high, unchecked influx of immigrants into their town she then, like all Liberal members of the Twitterati (including the likes of Stephen Fry) then took to Twitter to announce that lots of nasty people are after her making "misogynystic" comments about her (the likes of Beard and Fry seem to think they can say what they like about other people but get rather sensitive when abuse is thrown back at them).
And it's alright for people like you to cry racism when you live in the eighth-emptiest country on the planet and do not suffer from evermore overcrowding and the resulting strain on public services like Britain is.
The trouble with Establishment, metropolitan liberals like you, your mates on this forum and Mary Beard is that you are so completely ignorant of normal, everyday life and the life of the ordinary working man in the street.
It’s not misogyny, Professor Beard. It’s you
Rod Liddle
26 January 2013
The Spectator
Patronising, arrogant and out-of-touch liberal: Historian Mary Beard on BBC's Question Time in Boston, Lincolnshire, telling the disgruntled townsfolk, who are concerned about the influx of immigrants into their town, that immigration is "good" for Boston
Why is Mary Beard asked on by TV producers? Because they think she looks like a loony. She has to realise this.
Oh, this age! How tasteless and ill-bred it is.’
— Gaius Valerius Catullus
‘I do not know whom Mary Beard is but wyth a name lyke that she surely has a third teat and a hairy clopper.’
— Internet posting following Professor Mary Beard’s appearance on Question Time
So Catullus, mate — things have not got much better over the last two thousand years. People, it seems, are still ill-bred and tasteless, as that second quote up there would suggest. It was not the most tasteless comment on the internet over the last week or so, or even the most tasteless to be directed at Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. There are others, most so vulgar even I wouldn’t repeat them, from quite the most ghastly ill-bred people. I suppose it is shocking that someone of Professor Beard’s standing and breeding is forced to suffer its hideous manifestations.
What happened was this. Professor Beard was invited to take part on the BBC’s
Question Time programme, where she made what can be politely described as an utter fool of herself. I run a small, light-hearted competition every year on my blog for people to vote for the most stupid woman to have appeared on
Question Time in the past 12 months. It is but the third week of January and Mary is already a shoo-in, I fear, unless they ask (Liberal Democrat) Lynne Featherstone — the Manchester United, nay the Barcelona, of this particular award — back on to the show.
Anyway, having performed with stumbling vapidity in her earlier answers, she turned to the question of immigration and the influx of Bulgarians and Romanians we are all looking forward to welcoming to our shores next January. Mary managed to appear smug, patrician and fabulously ill-informed in her answer, which was to the effect that a study in Lincolnshire had suggested that immigration had caused nary a problem at all but had added immeasurably to the rich diversity of the area — and so, she concluded, there would be no problems at all from this next wave.
Unfortunately, she was speaking in Lincolnshire at the time and the lowly born, perhaps ill-bred audience quickly disabused her of this ludicrous notion with multiple descriptions of what it was like to live in a place which has been swamped with eastern European workers; their lack of homes, the crime, the antisocial behaviour, the pressure on local resources and so on.
Beyond the confines of the programme, Beard’s remarks were greeted with frank hilarity and in some cases anger. She was very quickly made ‘Twat of the Week’ on a non-aligned website and the insults started flowing. Most of them were accurate refutations of her vacuous argument, or expressions of annoyance at her middle-class, metropolitan insouciance. But it is true that some ridiculed her appearance as well.
Outrageous, tweeted Beard! (Yes, the Prof tweets, and that tells you something.) ‘The misogyny here is truly gob-smacking,’ she whined: all those comments were ‘truly vile’. She triumphantly listed the most graphic comments on her blog and concluded that the abuse would ‘be quite enough to put many women off appearing in public’. If only that were true in Mary’s case, but I strongly suspect it isn’t. On the broader point, that the comments are vile — yes, indeed. I have made the case before that the internet has shown us as we really are, which is not terribly nice, all things considered. But misogyny? First, the majority of abuse was about what she said — not how she looked. But does she really believe that men do not get the same level of abuse when they have angered people on TV, or in print, or on the internet? Does she think that in the case of men, the comments are restricted to a coolly delivered and logical series of counter-arguments which eschew any and all personal denigration? Is she really that thick?
I have lost count of the times my own p enis — a harmless enough creature, really — has been invoked, most usually by women, during an attempted refutation of some point I have made in an article. It is, I have been assured, minuscule, or inoperative, or unwashed, or diseased, or nonexistent. Sometimes all of these things at once. And as with Mary, the remainder of my physical being is not left unremarked: fat, hideous, stinking, vile, ugly… oh, lordy, we could be here for weeks. It is nothing to do with misogyny; it is just what people reach for when they, perhaps temporarily, hate someone. I remember a short while ago a complaint that Muslims in the public eye were subjected to the most horrid nastiness — the journalist Mehdi Hasan was one of the loudest complainants. Again, no, Mehdi; it’s not your religion, or the colour of your skin — it’s you. It’s just you.
But there’s one other thing in the case of Mary Beard. How many professors of classics have you seen on BBC
Question Time, other than Beardie? None. How many other professors of classics have been invited to take part in
Jamie’s Dream School, or been invited to present a series on BBC2? None other. Just Beard. Why is this? Is it because she is so absolutely brilliant at the classics that they think she ought to be on a cooking show? Nope: it’s because of the way she looks. They think she looks like a loony. And the TV companies, the producers, love that. If they can’t get a hunk or a fox, they like an eccentric. It generates a reaction, not always entirely pleasant. And if Mary doesn’t grasp that her appearance is precisely
why she — along with Grayson Perry — gets to be on TV, then she had best not look at what the genuine loonies have to say on Twitter.
http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/8830261/its-not-misogyny-professor-beard-its-you/
Professor Mary Beard should visit Boston, Lincs, as I did
Peter Hitchens
19 January 2013
Daily Mail
I see the distinguished Cambridge Classics scholar Mary Beard has been involved in an argument, on BBC Question Time, about the effect of mass immigration on the Lincolnshire town of Boston. She seems to have been persuaded by an official report that all is well there. A member of the audience took her up on this pretty volubly. I strongly recommend that she visits and sees for herself, as I did in 2011. My account is here
Boston Lincolngrad: The strange transformation of a sleepy English town | Mail Online
For reasons that still escape me, the Boston council took umbrage at what is a simple, factual description of an undoubted problem. What is it about the liberal middle class that makes them so uninterested in the problems of the British working class, as it used to be known? Why do they nervously imagine that it is ‘bigoted’ to draw attention to the huge and lasting effects of mass immigration?
Boston is a beautiful place set amid spectacular big skies, and everyone who can should try to visit its lovely church and its soaring tower, one of the glories of England and in my view one of the sights of the world (and I’ve seen a few). It’s a fairly short journey from Cambridge, and still on the railway network. If Professor Beard wants to go, I can put her in touch with a comfortable and convenient Bed and Breakfast establishment close to a rather good pub serving excellent food, and she will find many local people happy to guide her round the district and talk to her. She’s obviously an intelligent and thoughtful person, despite her standard-issue flat-pack leftist views which probably aren't really her fault. It would be gratifying if she could revise her opinions in the light of the facts, as we are supposed to do.
Ban the booze: Locals in Boston have started a campaign to stop people drinking on the streets of the town as rowdy street-drinking (and public urination) are two of the local complaints against migrants
Professor Mary Beard should visit Boston, Lincs, as I did - Mail Online - Peter Hitchens blog
