By popular demand, I'm moving the thread for Jeremy Clarkson's Sunday Times columns to this sub-forum.
Keep in mind that you can freely read Jeremy's Sunday Times Driving and Sun columns online for free, so they won't be appearing here.
On with the show:
Keep in mind that you can freely read Jeremy's Sunday Times Driving and Sun columns online for free, so they won't be appearing here.
On with the show:
Officer, arrest that man, he's all too easily offended by Fury's piffle (Dec. 13)
A friend was burgled last weekend. And stand by for a shock because by Wednesday a suspect had been arrested and was in a cell. I thought that sort of thing didn't happen any more. I thought the police no longer even investigated burglaries because they were far too busy interviewing people who'd said something that someone else thought was horrid.
We learnt recently that a boxing champion of some sort called Tyson Fury had said in an interview that the devil will come to the Earth and do what devils do just as soon as abortion, homosexuality and paedophilia are all legalised.
The thrust of his argument was that in the 1950s nobody would ever have believed that one day it'd be legal to do sex with someone of the same genital grouping. In the same way as now we cannot believe that kiddie-fiddling could one day be considered acceptable. But that maybe ... who knows? As a result, many people vowed to not buy Mr Fury's calendar this Christmas. Others went further and tried asking the BBC to make sure he was not shortlisted for a gong at the annual Sports Personality of the Year bash.
That's an absurd idea because all Fury has done is tell the world that he's a bit dim. And if the BBC were forced to shortlist only those with a reasonably high IQ the Sports Personality of the Year could be a held in a shed.
One person, however, decided that trying to get a dim man banned from appearing in the same room as lots of other dim men and women was nowhere near harsh enough. He reckoned that Mr Fury needed bringing down a peg or two so he reported him to the police who confirmed last week that the boxing and Jesus enthusiast will now be questioned.
Yup. A chap whose job is to beat other men to a pulp is going to be questioned by officers because officially one man one was upset by something he'd said. Whatever happened to sticks and stones? I've been in Mr Fury's shoes. A number years ago I said while appearing on Have I Got News For You that I run over foxes for fun and the next thing I knew two burly policemenists were sitting in my conservatory, drinking a half of pale ale and scratching their heads.
Someone had complained to the Met and the Met had asked the CNPD (Chipping Norton Police Department) to dispatch Starsky and Hutch to my house for a bit of a shakedown. They'd arrived in a bit of a fluster because they weren't quite sure what was going on.
Were they there to see if I really had said I'd run over a fox for fun, which we all agreed was a bit pointless because anyone could clearly have heard and seen me saying it on television. Or were they there to see if I actually had run over a fox for fun? If I hadn't, then is it a crime to say that I had? And if I had, is that a crime at all? We weren't sure. Certainly we all agreed that it would be jolly difficult in a court to prove that the fox-flattening incident was for fun or because the stupid thing was crossing the road without looking. In the end, we filled in lots of forms that were sent back to the Met in London and then ... nothing happened.
I can pretty much guarantee that this is what's going to happen with Mr Fury. Two policemen will arrive at his caravan. They will ask him if he really did suggest that homosexuals are the same as paedophiles and then after establishing that he did, or didn't, they'll fill in a load of paperwork, get his autograph and a couple of selfies and that will be the end of that.
We need to be clear on something here. There is a very big difference between an angry mob in Ku Klux Klan headdresses chanting and parading outside the house of a homosexual couple and a God-bothering sportsman tarring gays and paedophiles with the same brush.
Let's be frank. He wasn't urging gangs of young men to grab a selection of shovels and pickaxe handles and maraud around Soho looking for Julian Clary.
He wasn't suggesting that homosexuals should be castrated or put into a camp of some sort. He was simply saying that as a Christian he found the notion of legalised gay sex repellent.
You may not agree with that. I know I don't. But it is Mr Fury's right as a citizen of this country to express his views. And it is your right to stick your fingers in your ears and go "La-la-la-la-la-la-la" if you don't want to hear them.
It is also your right to telephone the police and make a formal complaint. And then it's their duty to send two constables round to see what's what. And that's the problem. Because Mr Fury plainly wasn't inciting any form of hatred. I've listened to the tape and all he was doing was spouting a load of religious gobbledegook. Go down to Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday morning and you'll hear far worse.
Plainly, then, something needs to be done, but what? We need a law that prevents so-called hate preachers from urging extremely impressionable young men to explode in a shopping centre. But that law cannot be used to stop Jimmy Carr telling jokes about rape. Or Mr Fury being anti-gay, or me saying I ran over a fox for fun.
Happily, I've come up with a plan. It's very simple. If, after questioning Mr Fury, no action is taken, the police should then go round to the house of the man who made the complaint and arrest him for wasting police time. And to help them out with that, his name is Ian Sawyer. He's 55. He's from Manchester. And he looks a bit like a potato.
This is the only way to make the professionally offended think twice before picking up the phone. They have to understand that if they make a complaint and they're wrong, they are going to get punished for being a cry baby.