Here’s the final paragraph from an online Telegraph article on the tube strike:

Having trouble getting to work? Please share your tales of travel woe below. For readers who live outside London, this is your chance to gloat about your trouble-free commute.

Who said conservatives don’t have a sense of humour? Yes, vent your anti-union anger if you have a job to go to (as 800 Tube employees won’t, if the cuts go through), or, if you live outside the city, you can ‘gloat’ about your ability to get from one inferior location to another.

The reaction to the strike has been typical and quite boring. I think these headlines point out something quite disappointing in our political culture:

Tube strike: millions hit by travel chaos with 9 lines affected – The Telegraph

Tube strike forces Londoners on to buses and bikes – The Guardian

Autumn of discontent begins as Tube walkout brings misery for millions of commuters and tourists – Daily Mail

I don’t think it would be too degenerate to point out that public transport strikes can be annoying, but there’s very little outrage to be found over the planned 800 layoffs, which is surely the story here. The Guardian even has a blog post entitled ‘London tube strike – tell us your stories’. Here’s my story from this traumatic incident: Yesterday I decided to postpone a drink with a friend, and my mother had to get up earlier than usual; when she got home she was quite tired, and she shouted at me for not informing her that my wardrobe is a bit broken at the moment. Guess what – she still has a job. No surprises in guessing that most people have stories about as boring; they either took the bus, hopped on a bike, or worked from home (which some regard as a luxury, btw).

I find the sympathy for the poor tourists in the Mail headline quite amusing. How patriotic of them to suggest Londoners forgo their industrial disputes for the sake of Johnny Foreigner’s holiday. This has the added benefit of applying practically every day of the year in London.

Striking public sector workers are always deemed ‘selfish’ by popular grumbling; I think it’s clear who’s being selfish here.

The taboo on relationships between older women and younger men is one of the stranger and more persistent ones in modern Britain. No one seems to think much of Rod Stewart being married to a woman 26 years his junior, but the love lives of Sam Taylor-Wood and Iris Robinson are the focus of a kind of fascinated horror. In the latter case, there’s been a kind of depressing predictability about the way that the juicy details of Robinson’s affair with the then-19-year-old Kirk McCambley garnered far more attention than Robinson and her husband’s alleged financial misdeeds.

The weirdest example of this disgust at relationships where women are older – at least of the stuff I’ve read – has to be this Liz Jones column from today’s Mail on Sunday. The general gist of it seems to be that when men have relationships with younger women it’s perfectly acceptable because men are entirely motivated by sex, (and everyone knows that nubile twenty-somethings with huge tits are the only attractive women in the universe). Women, on the other hand, don’t really like sex, so if they enter into a relationship with young  (and presumably libidinous) men, they must have some other dark, underhand reason for doing so. More specifically:

A woman embarks on a relationship with someone much younger than her because she believes she can manipulate him, boss him, steal his sperm and then nurture him as she would a child or a pet.

In return for these (doubtful) benefits, Jones suggests, the woman in the partnership provides financial and career assistance to her young lover – a leading film role in the case of Aaron Johnson, Taylor-Wood’s boyfriend (he plays John Lennon in recent biopic Nowhere Boy), and a dubious £50,000 loan in the case of Robinson and McCambley. In arriving at these conclusions, Jones also claims to be drawing on her own (apparently somewhat disastrous) experience of being married to a man 15 years her junior.

Finally, by way of a parting shot, Jones insinuates that Robinson’s affair is a sign of something far worse than ‘a trendy, cougarish predilection for toy boys’, on the grounds that she was  willing to risk her marriage and political career over it, though she isn’t very specific as to what this might be. She mentions Humbert Humbert (the protagonist in Lolita), but that isn’t particularly helpful. It doesn’t seem very fair to equate having a romantic relationship with a 12-year-old (as in Lolita) and having one with a 19-year-old (as Robinson did). And even if it was, that still doesn’t really provide any sort of insight into what drove Robinson to put herself in such professional and personal jeopardy. Perhaps more bizarrely, Jones also seems to be suggesting that relationships between older women and younger men are almost totally devoid of sexual desire, since according to her younger men only pretend to find their older partners attractive, while the women simply don’t enjoy sex at all.

More than anything, this column makes me feel deeply sorry for Liz Jones. By her own admission, she’s basing her arguments on her own experiences, which rather strongly suggests that it’s Jones, not Robinson, Taylor-Wood or any other older woman, who hasn’t enjoyed sex since her ‘teenage crush period’, who sees younger men as willing suppliers of sperm who are easy to manipulate, and relationships with them as a kind of cold commercial transaction. I hope that isn’t true – it doesn’t sound like a very happy existence – but it looks fairly plausible.

I’m not denying that there are many reasons to dislike and criticise Iris Robinson (her homophobia, for starters), but tenuous armchair psychoanalysis based on your own experiences seems a pretty flimsy basis for that. I don’t know – any more than Jones does – what Robinson or Taylor-Wood’s precise motives were when they started their respective relationships. But I really can’t see what grounds we have to suppose that there was anything more Machiavellian going on than there is when older men have relationships with younger women. It’s almost as if the Mail has some sort of agenda against women who step outside its narrow Victorian vision of acceptable female behaviour, but I’m sure that’s just crazy talk.

“You’ll never guess who I had in the back of my cab the other day…”

It was revealed today in The Daily Mail that the claim that Saddam Hussein could unleash weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes came from an Iraqi cab driver. So now we know why they call it ‘the knowledge’…

The man had apparently overheard two senior Iraqi army officers discussing Saddam’s munitions capability (note: munitions, not weapons) in the back of his cab. He reported it to the British agent he was working for, who reported it to his runner at MI6, who reported it to someone else in MI6 who wrote a report, which was then looked at in detail by the Joint Intelligence Committee members and given to Downing Street (who took it at face value because it suited them to). If this sounds like a case of international Chinese whispers that’s because it was. The fact that this kind of third party hearsay formed the cornerstone of the September dossier, which informed the decision for this country to go to war with Iraq, is deeply troubling.

What is startling is that this cab driver – and we don’t know whether he was in fact a real cab driver turned informant or a ‘moonlighting’ spy – appears to have been not just the best evidence the intelligence services had, but one of the few lines of intelligence they had. In today’s Iraq Inquiry hearing, Sir John Scarlett, the man with ultimate responsibility for preparing the September dossier, admitted that intelligence from Iraq was limited and difficult to get hold of. I don’t doubt this. However, the danger of relying on only a handful of sources for intelligence is that if one of them is compromised, unreliable or a cab driver with dodgy hearing, a large proportion of your intelligence could be wrong.

I once rented a flat in a part of North East London (if this seems like a facetious and offensive comparison, that’s because it is). I went to view it on a nice sunny day when the neighbours were out and it seemed just perfect. A week after I moved in with my flatmate we discovered that the neighbourhood at night resembled the fall of Saigon, teenage prostitutes roamed the street, people liked to set fire to cars outside and I once came home to find two 13-year-old boys unlocking next door with a crow bar. In hindsight, I needed better intelligence and I certainly wouldn’t have made that move if I’d had it. However, my decision only had ramifications for myself and my flatmate, it didn’t lead to wanton destruction and considerable loss of life. I suppose if you extend the metaphor one could view the letting agency as defence contractors – making money from the misery of others – they certainly had better intelligence than we did.

There is always a question hanging over government intelligence when mistakes are made: was it malice or incompetence? One very interesting thing that came out of today’s Inquiry hearing was the definition given by Sir John Scarlett of the role of the intelligence agencies – he made the distinction that intelligence agencies present information but they don’t lay down how to interpret it. That is left to ministers (which is of course a wonderful excuse for the intelligence agencies). During the course of the hearing it transpired that there is and was no system of daily intelligence briefing for the PM, and not even any kind of induction process for ministers. So not only are they left to interpret intelligence, they are often left to interpret it with no training in interpreting intelligence (and sometimes with no intelligence of their own).

However, it turns out the government was not the only member of the Estates to have been left to their own devices. The Daily Mail also said in it’s article today that when the September dossier was published, “some British papers interpreted the dossier as meaning that British troops based in Cyprus would be vulnerable to an Iraqi attack. At the time the government did not do anything to correct this error.”

Sometimes I think I would almost prefer malice over incompetence in Westminster – if only for a change.

Earlier this month, Reuben wrote an article examining the media’s newfound war-weariness and how, owing to the fact that almost every major newspaper backed the invasion of Afghanistan, it can only express itself in impotent calls for better equipment.

Now of course, the Iraq war was much more divisive. Many journalists were critical of the plans to invade Iraq from day one and some left-leaning newspapers even actively threw themselves behind the anti-war movement. Needless to say, the Mail was not one of these papers. Pick any good cause, and you can guarantee it’ll be cheering for the other side. Which – six years on, zero weapons of mass destruction found, a million Iraqis dead and billions of pounds blown – puts the Mail and the other right-wing papers in a rather difficult position. How to criticise the war now without admitting to their own mistake in backing it?

The Chilcote Inquiry provides the perfect opportunity. As more and more evidence comes to light showing what the anti-war movement knew all along – the war was never about weapons of mass destruction or humanitarian intervention, it was about regime change and had been planned a year in advance – the hitherto pro-war media can plead ignorance. Not only this, but since the right-wing tabloids are swinging towards the Conservatives for the coming election, it provides them a handy (and wholly deserved) stick with which to beat a crippled Labour government.

Of all the papers, the Mail, more than any other, is going down the ‘we were lied to’ route. Today’s Mail on Sunday wrings its hands with glee at Lord Goldsmith’s secret letter revealing Blair’s deception.”The disclosures deal a massive blow to Mr Blair’s hopes of proving he acted in good faith when he and George Bush declared war on Iraq. And they are likely to fuel further calls for Mr Blair to be charged with war crimes,” writes political editor, Simon Walters.

They’re right, of course, we were lied to, and Blair should be charged with war crimes. But as Obi Wan Kenobi once said: ‘Who’s more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?’

Today’s Guardian headline reads: ‘BNP conference backs ballot on non-white members’. Naturally, the accompanying picture shows Nick Griffin breaking wind with a very long pole up his backside.

I found this very interesting. Not because it points to any grave injustice of media bias. All media is biased in one way or another and, frankly, if you’re the leader of Britain’s most successful racist organisation, I feel you probably deserve everything you get. But, for all the mainstream credibility the BNP have gained since their European election breakthrough and despite the flurry of media attention they have received, Nick Griffin continues to be shown in the worst light possible. Once the press largely ignored the BNP and when the party was mentioned it was only to condemn them and everything they stand for. Now the media have been forced to report on their activities as a matter of public interest. But, no matter what headline you read, no matter how bland and neutral and matter-of-fact the text, the accompanying picture will always show Nick Griffin looking a) stupid, b) ridiculous, c) evil or d) all of the above.

Here the Daily Mail quotes Nick Griffin as saying lots of Hindus, Sikhs and ethnic minorities support his views on immigration. Despite largely sharing his views on immigration themselves, the Mail then show Griffin preparing to gnaw through a log:

Here The Guardian reports that the BNP’s membership list has been leaked again, whilst Nick Griffin is shown looking like a satanic priest preparing to summon a demon:

And here is the demon he summoned:

And let’s not forget everyone’s favourite picture of Nazi Nick getting egged on by a less than receptive audience:

Now it may simply be that Nick Griffin is just as ugly as his politics. He’s certainly not likely to win first prize in any beauty contest. But a picture paints a thousand words and here they seem to say much more than the content of the articles themselves. The media has had to grudgingly accept that the BNP are part of mainstream discussion now and an item for public interest. They can no longer ignore them and they can no longer afford simply to denounce them without engaging with the public grievances that have made the party so frighteningly popular. The pictures are a neat, and not all that subtle, way to make the BNP look bad without ever having to spell it out. A picture might paint a thousand words, but they still need only two. Nazi scum.

Ah, Twitter. That bite-sized break from ennui, that stream of consciousness, that tool of social mobilisation… but mobilisation to what?

Twitter has played an important part in the democratisation of politics – witness the Tweets of solidarity from Iran and the recent downfall of the Carter Ruck’s Trafigura injunction against The Guardian (which was also in no small part caused by The Third Estate and others).

Twitter has been hugely effective as a mass campaigning tool for organisations such as Climate Camp, Avaaz and Greenpeace. It gets petitions signed and it publicises worthy causes more quickly than ever before. There’s no doubt it’s a great tool for quickly disseminating information.

I enjoy Twitter. As a journalist, I sometimes get leads from Twitter. It has been mostly beneficial to my life. It could also be my downfall. At the risk of sounding like a total Luddite, Twitter has great potential for evil…

The great thing about Twitter is that it’s so ‘in the moment’ – this makes it both hugely entertaining and refreshingly un-spun. However, who hasn’t said things ‘in the moment’ that they have later regretted? Twitter could prove to be the ultimate tool for large-scale Chinese whispers. For Crucible-style mass hysteria and mob rule.

Labour’s newly crowned “Twitter tsar”, MP Kerry McCarthy, has already warned MP’s that what they say in haste can come back to haunt them. David Cameron has warned against the dangers of spouting rubbish in his own inimitable way (and if anyone should know…). The difference between Twitter and journalism of the kind that you get in a blog like this one or in a broadsheet newspaper is that it is generally considered commentary.

The mobilisation of the forces of Liberal anger against the Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir is a warning sign. Personally, I believe Jan Moir’s article about the death of the Boyzone singer Stephen Gately was guilty of being both homophobic and incredibly insensitive. However, most of what the Daily Mail publishes is similarly offensive to me. So I don’t buy it and I don’t read it.

I did read Jan Moir’s article, I wonder how many of those who followed those links on Twitter direct to the PCC did the same? I wonder how many people read about the article on Twitter and made up their mind to complain without having seen what they were complaining about? It’s surprisingly easy to get worked up and carried away by being offended…

Seven years ago I had the pleasure of working in an extremely minor capacity on the early stages of Jerry Springer the Opera. The hate campaign that was swiftly mobilised against the production when it was later aired on the BBC was staggering. Nothing has the ability to offend people quite like comedy. What was interesting about the orchestrated mass complaints was that a very small minority of those complaining had actually seen the show. They had only heard about it. The information was disseminated with amazing effectiveness by the Christian Voice organisation (the scourge of comedians) and, thus ‘informed’ their members complained.

It’s insulting to say that because the average demographic of Twitter is young, urban and well educated this could not happen. You yourself are likely to fit all of these categories (or, like me, at least the ‘urban’ one) – how often have you allowed yourself to get all worked up about something without knowing all the facts? Now be honest. With Twitter, as in life, sometimes we should stop, count to ten and think before we pass things on.

(For the benefit of any new readers, FJM is explained here. But to be honest, it’s not very complicated. You’ll probably get the idea pretty quickly.)

It’s been a good week, both for the liberal left and for Twitter. First there was the whole Trafigura thing, which finally came to a decisive end yesterday evening, when the injunction on the Minton Report into the toxic waste dumping was lifted. This followed the lifting earlier in the week of the injunction against reporting a Parliamentary question mentioning it, which was what sparked off the whole thing. But before that came to an end, a whole new storm of outrage was brewing over Jan Moir’s egregiously offensive piece in Friday’s Mail, which, thanks once again to a campaign on Twitter, attracted a huge number of complaints and not a few derisory reactions from the rest of Fleet Street and the blogosphere. So a few hours later she decided to try and explain herself, in a manner wholly deserving of being FJM’d:

Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately. This was never my intention. Stephen, as I pointed out in the article was a charming and sweet man who entertained millions.

Um, I really don’t think most people were upset because they thought you saw Gately as charmless or sour. But I suppose you can never be sure about these things.

However, the point of my column-which, I wonder how many of the people complaining have fully read –

Hang on, you’re a columnist for the Daily Mail, and you’re claiming that the criticism you’re on the end of is nothing but an uninformed kneejerk reaction? This is truly special.

…was to suggest that, in my honest opinion, his death raises many unanswered questions. That was all. Yes, anyone can die at anytime of anything. However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death – out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger – did not have a bearing on his death. At the very least, it could have exacerbated an underlying medical condition.

O…kay. First, you didn’t say that there were ‘unanswered questions’ about Gately’s death, you categorically stated that ‘Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one.’ So now you’re just lying, very clumsily. Second, you’ve already been taken apart by any number of people (see links above) for implying you magically know the circumstances of Gately’s death better than the qualified coroner who examined his body. Doing the same thing again really isn’t helping you.

The entire matter of his sudden death seemed to have been handled with undue haste when lessons could have been learned.

Ooh, what lessons might these be? Please enlighten us.

On this subject, one very important point.  When I wrote that ‘he would want to set an example to any impressionable young men who may want to emulate what they might see as his glamorous routine’, I was referring to the drugs and the casual invitation extended  to a stranger. Not to the fact of his homosexuality.

Got that, kids? Drugs and casual sex might not have had anything to do with Gately’s death, but they’re still bad, mmmkay? I hear he didn’t always get his five fruit and veg a day either. Maybe his death could teach us a lesson about the importance of eating our greens?

In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships – the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting – have proved just to be as problematic as marriages.

Fair point. Of course, it would help if you could cite a single case of someone arguing that civil partnerships wouldn’t have the same problems that marriages do, since without that all you’ve got there is a pathetic straw man argument, but I suppose I’m quibbling over details here.

In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones.

So…your grand finale is to insinuate that the protests about this article are some kind of gigantic conspiracy rather than the result of people actually being genuinely offended? Sterling job there. If for some reason you find yourself looking for work in the near future, maybe Carter Ruck’s PR department could hire you?

Guest post by Oli

Baroness Scotland

The government’s chief legal adviser, Attourney General Patricia Scotland, was fined £5000 today and forced to make a public apology for employing an illegal immigrant as her housekeeper. Sad to say, I first discovered this story via the front page of the Daily Mail.

That a positive case for immigration is rarely put across, is one of the major failures of Labour. Instead of taking the Daily Mail to task for its scaremongering moral panic headlines, the government has trashed its own sentiments on immigration and the positive impact it has on Britain by trying to match the hard-faced reactionary stance of the right-wing press.

Some border controls and rules for employment are important, and it is obvious why high profile government employees should not employ illegal immigrants and why Baroness Scotland should be culpable for this, but it is plain wrong to see immigrants used as ammunition for a braying media and their readers – perpetually shouting ringside about the decline of Britain.

This is the Daily Mail at its apex –  inventing statistics and selectively editing reports to attack some of the most vulnerable people in Britain. Instead of highlighting how immigration has benefited Britain wholesale, the Daily Mail tirelessly drones about public sector pressures, asylum seekers spreading diseases and illegal immigrants plaguing the streets. Its biased reporting has become so dangerous that the Association of Chief Police Officers published a report about how ill-informed media coverage is a significant risk to public disorder. That the paper has such a powerful sway over middle Britain, makes its lies about immigration a crime of epic proportions. It quite literally has blood on its hands.

Where it really sticks the boot in, is on illigal immigrants, not least becauce the majority of them make life decisions that you and I will never have to. Many are supporting families in their home countries and, rather than being lecherous, criminal, swarthy types as painted by the tabloid press, they are brave human beings used to inhumane work conditions, often fleeing a life of extreme poverty and war. Instead of demonising them, we should raise a glass to those who make it through the reactionary border controls, make their money and send it home, rather than looking to the Daily Mail to bludgeon the truth and fuel potential race wars.

It is a shame that as soon as somebody is branded an illegal immigrant, all else about their personality is erased, and they become a criminal statistic. I just hope their families back home have their fingers crossed, because global warming and tough immigration policy in the West is not a good combination for men and woman struggling to make the best of life, unfortunate enough to be born into one of a depressing list of circumstances – corrupt political systems, geographic oddities cut off from the blood supply of the city, superstition, war, misogyny or cruel religious oppression – that in the scheme of a world no different from Russian roulette may be their curse.

Strict immigration controls mean people being channelled through irregular migration networks. So instead of our fruit being picked by migrants working for a fair wage and with legal rights, illegal immigrants are smuggled to work on the black market under the jurisdiction of a gang master – or to clean the house of Baroness Scotland.

A grown up debate is needed about illegal immigrants because hysterical newspaper headlines are not the answer if we care about human rights and tackling the profit-hungry invisible labour market that puts clothes on our backs and food on our tables.

And now for something completely indifferent…

There’s an American blog I read from time to time that goes by the name of Gin and Tacos. It has an irregular feature entitled FJM, in which the author takes egregiously stupid comment articles and systematically destroys them for the edification of his readers. (FJM stands for Fire Joe Morgan, a now-defunct baseball blog whose sole purpose was this kind of analysis.) Since I quite like this concept, I’ve decided to shamelessly plagiarise draw inspiration from it as a means to demonstrate the shocking revelation that Amanda Platell is full of shit. Platell’s original brainfarts are in bold; my commentary’s in normal text:

Soaring immigration – and a migrant baby boom – has sent Britain’s population rocketing over the 61 million mark.

Really? So the Office for National Statistics are lying when they say that the rate of net immigration into the UK has dropped by 20% in the past four years? Or does ‘soaring’ mean ‘decreasing’ on your planet?

We are now the second most densely populated country in the world, something that will be all too apparent on the roads and trains this bank holiday weekend.

Sadly, though, it is not the indigenous middle-class, hard-working, tax-paying population that’s exploding.

Because the only people in this country who have jobs and pay taxes are the ones who live in detached mock-Tudor villas in Surrey and can trace their ancestry back to Alfred the Great. True fact.

According to statistics, our latest baby boom is partly down to high birth rates among immigrants, and partly due to rising numbers of younger mothers.

The Office for National Statistics thinks this latter trend is explained by young women putting babies before careers. Well, none of the young women I know is.

And you’re personally acquainted with a representative, statistically significant sample of young women in this country? The ONS might as well just abolish itself when we’ve got sages like you around.

So who are these younger mothers? It stands to reason that many of them must be teenagers.

And teenagers having children is evil. Nearly as evil as older women having children, probably. In fact, women should really only give birth between the ages of 25 and 28. Anything else is wrong and against nature.

How many of them are married or even have their children’s father around? How many have jobs or are supported by someone who does? How many live off benefits?

I don’t know. I’m sure you’re about to provide accurate figures, though – you’ve been so good at that so far.

No, what these figures really show is that our benevolent welfare system is actively encouraging girls to have babies young and alone.

Labour has, disgracefully, made single-motherhood a legitimate occupation.

Oh. Unsupported sweeping generalisations. Well, those are…nearly as good as actual informed opinions, right? It’s almost like you’re going to conclude by descending into a babble of non sequiturs, clichés and frothing-at-the-mouth rightwing alarmism that’s totally unjustified by any of the rest of what you’ve written, but surely you’re not that predictable…

My other worry is this: how many immigrant mums have contributed anything to this country before landing us with another child to educate in our already struggling schools?

Across Britain, one in four babies is born to a mother from overseas. The figure is 55 per cent in London, and in some places it’s as high as 75 per cent.

Small wonder, then, that many teachers find themselves struggling against the language barrier to raise educational standards.

At a time when the very core of Britishness is threatened, shouldn’t we be concerned about this?

In fact, as other figures showed this week, more than five million Brits have never worked under Labour, which suggests that far from importing workers, we need to get our own population into jobs.

The cost of unemployment in the UK is now £346 billion – with £100 billion of that paid in housing benefits alone.

The sad truth of the matter is that it’s not so much a baby boom we’re experiencing as a benefits boom. Middle Britain, stand ready to empty your wallets.

…never mind.

Imagine a 27-year-old woman with a non-hereditary medical condition who’s been told by doctors that she should only expect to live to 45. Despite this, she chooses to have a child, knowing she’ll probably die around the time the child turns 18. Is this wrong? According to the Daily Mail, apparently yes. The death this week of Carmela Bousada, who in 2007 gave birth to twins through IVF, making her the world’s oldest new mother, at 66, prompted a great deal of familiar hand-wringing debate, principally centred around whether Bousada was “selfish” to have children at so advanced an age, this particularly unpleasant opinion piece in the Daily Heil opting pretty unequivocally for “yes”.

But I find it hard to see what the problem is. Life expectancy for women in Spain at present is about 84, so assuming Bousada was healthy when she gave birth, she could assume she had a reasonable chance of living until her kids made it to at least their late teens, and it seems she had a large extended family who will look after the twins now she’s gone. She couldn’t have known she’d get cancer – it was pure bad luck. (Yes, I know that opinion piece I just linked to says her cancer was “accelerated” by her IVF treatment, but it’s important to bear two things in mind: 1) Bousada almost certainly wasn’t aware that IVF would have that effect, and 2) never, ever trust a fucking word in the Daily Mail about science, particularly if it’s related to cancer.) It’s hard to see why older first-time mothers are the only parents eligible to be labelled selfish. We don’t tend to assess the selfishness of new mothers in relation to their income, say, (the Daily Mail probably would for mothers on benefits, but that’s a different issue), so what’s so special about age? Even the argument that having children later in life endangers the health of the foetus (which, from what little I know about the subject, may at least have a small quantity of evidence behind it) is irrelevant here – Bousada’s twins came from donor eggs and sperm.

The condemnation of Bousada and other older women who undergo IVF is also in stark contrast to the general acceptance of IVF for couples and single women who are the “right” age (in the Daily Mail’s eyes). It’s even offered on the NHS, and has been for some time. We live in a world with a population rapidly approaching seven billion, experiencing shortages of food, water, and other vital resources that are only going to get more serious. Bringing into the world a child that’s going to use far more than its share of those resources (as a child born in the UK inevitably will) could in itself be considered pretty self-serving. That thousands of people in this country use scarce public money to do so seems a hell of a lot more selfish than just having a child a bit later in life than average.