Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Pikey

I am, at the very least, one-eighth gypsy, thanks to my dear departed grandmother. This gives me no particularly special insights into that culture, nor does it mean I can talk with any great authority on matters relating to what people refer to as the 'travelling community'. However, what it does do is make me feel slightly uncomfortable when words like 'pikey' and 'gyppo' are sprayed around by people who should know better. After all, it's part of my heritage; it's part of what makes me who I am. I don't like hearing all that dismissed in a single word of hatred, a word of contempt, a word that's become a label for all things cheap, nasty, thieving and low-life.

Along with redheaded folk, gypsies are perhaps the last bastion of racism, the last thing you can get away with. Who winces when you call someone a ginger twat? Who tut-tuts when you call someone a pikey for being lazy, or dirty, or cheap? Who gets hauled out of a football crowd for calling a player a dirty ginger bastard? (Or calling Freddy Eastwood a dirty pikey bastard?) It's everyone's last chance to be prejudiced, nasty and unthinking.

Which brings me to Basil Brush. As a redhead himself, the silly fox should have known better, or at least had some thought about crude stereotyping. Do all gypsies go round selling lucky heather and pegs? Really? What if Basil Brush encountered a comedy Asian character running a corner shop and bobbing his head around, would that be OK? Would that be something to chortle about? It would be, thankfully, unthinkable in these rather more enlightened times - we've come a long way since Curry and Chips or Mind Your Language; at least, I rather hoped we had.

Of course, should you try and complain about racist stereotyping of any kind, you encounter a tsunami of bile from angry Mailish types who say it's all just a bit of harmless banter, what's wrong with golliwogs and Little Black Sambo, it was all right in the 1950s so why isn't it wrong now? And when you try to say anything about gypsies that isn't inflammatorily negative, you get an avalanche of anger from people who'll tell you their car was broken into, it must have been them, I didn't see them do it but their caravans are only 75 miles away, it must have been them.

Personally, Basil Brush doesn't seem spectacularly offensive - just lazy and dumb, the kind of bullshit stereotyping that went out with Black Forest Gateau and Berni Inns. It's just not relevant any more; it's tired, hackneyed, pathetic and tediously unimaginative.

Speaking of which, Richard Littlecock has popped up on this very subject. Wonder what he'd think if Basil Brush met a comedy Jew, oy-vaying and oh-my-lifeing? That'd be chucklesome as well, Dick? Or is it just other races you think it's funny to stereotype?

The Golliwog Squad has claimed another scalp. Basil Brush is being investigated by police for racism.
You couldn't make it up.

Unlike stories about immigrants in the Mail. Do you get repeat fees for YCMIU, by the way?

He's been put in the frame by someone called Joseph Jones, who styles himself vice-chairman of the Southern England Romany Gipsy and Irish Traveller Network.
Jojo has taken extreme offence at the "racist and offensive" nature of an episode broadcast on the children's digital channel CBBC.
In it, Basil's friend Mr Stephen falls under a gipsy's spell which makes him attractive to women - no mean feat, by all accounts, if the rumours about most of the other male presenters of children's TV programmes are anything to go by

Because they're GAY!!!!11111!!! lol rofl lmao. £700,000 a year for this shit.

How did Jojo come to hear about this shocking smear against sensitive, law-abiding members of the diddicoy community?

Not just diddicoys, Dick, but... oh who gives a fuck. Why am I bothering trying to argue rationally? You're just a nasty, dirty, shitty little man with hopeless writing skills who panders to racists and bigots. You work for the world's worst newspaper. And hopefully you will endure a long and lingering unpleasant death, alone and unloved behind the gates of your Florida mansion, forgotten about and despised. It's something I do hope for, anyway.

So it's Basil Brush, so what? This isn't PC gone mad, it's PC gone right. Time to end these last homes for racists and prejudiced idiots. Time that stupid stereotypes were smashed to pieces. Time to start growing up.

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