They say that a week is a long time in politics and a month is even longer. And for Julie Edge and the DESC it’s been a little over a month now since the initial rumours of out of control sex education classes featuring drag queens purportedly giving tips on a variety of extreme sexual practices, and revealing a veritable cornucopia of allegedly different genders, to confused or chastised children at QEII school started circulating. From the start it felt like the usual blinkered hyperbole you get in small communities where the jungle drums tend to beat incredibly fast - but in reality from outset the rumours spread like absolute wildfire metastasising like some weird media cancer and in no time at all the story jumped from just Energy FM and Manx Radio to the BBC, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph and then GB News, LBC and from there even across the Atlantic to the worlds leading fake news agency - Fox News. And each time the story seemed to get a bit more embellished and evolved just a tiny bit more until it was clearly impossible for anyone in the IOM (or anywhere else) to establish what was true or untrue anymore. The genie was firmly out of the bottle and there was nothing that could be done to put the cork back in again as the media perpetuated a rapidly snowballing narrative of its own.
To properly ramp it all up at the start we also had the mandatory angry online petition which has now been signed by over 1,000 people (although significantly less people than signed a petition about Douglas bins to be fair):
To illustrate how the story rapidly evolved let’s quickly link to some of the external coverage the IOM has had in the last month which makes our sleepy Island look rather like Royston-Vasey-On-Sea in the eyes of the wider world from such reliable sources as - the Daily Mail:
The Times:
The BBC:
The Telegraph:
As well as some amusing live interviews by outraged parents given on rolling tabloid news channels such as LBC:
And a rather special piece where the petition initiator, Mr Matthew Cheetham, debated the subject with no less than that bastion of UK liberalism Nigel Farage on right-wing hate channel GB News:
Our very favourite clip though is getting harder to track down online already where forty something Marown Commissioner, Eliza Cox, a self identifying mother of two really can’t help smirking more than just a little bit when discussing fisting and anal sex with a regional TV interviewer. In fact we can now only find one copy embedded in a Tweet - but for us this is the perfect example of the rampant hysteria we move on to cover next:
Of course with the genie having got completely out of the bottle for a week or two we then had a claimed independent investigation by the DESC and a sudden about turn in the messaging with a redacted summary of Part One of the DESC investigation being published.
No drag queen at QEII says the DESC:
The redacted summary of the initial report can be found here:
In conclusion Julie Edge MHK, Minister for Education, Sport & Culture, confirmed:
I am satisfied that the initial facts have now been established and further work will commence to ascertain the age appropriateness of all input into this area, following the completion of the first part of this investigation.
Royston-Vasey-On-Sea and PaedoGeddon
As we watched this all unfold over the last few weeks it’s clear that we haven’t seen outrage and irrational media stoked fear and misinformation like this since Chris Morris’ fabulous 2001 Brass Eye fake news report - PaedoGeddon.
We reproduce the full programme here for readers who have ten minutes or more to spare as a refresher:
Readers might recall that PaedoGeddon originally aired in the summer of 2001 - a year after the tragic murder of Sarah Payne which became the catalyst that sparked national hysteria over the country’s sex-offender registry. At the time The Sun led a high profile campaign to publish the names and locations of all 110,000 convicted sex offenders and vigilante mobs were patrolling some streets having been heavily stoked by the media - eventually prompting a riot in which an angry mob actually ransacked the home of an ex-convict. Therefore it’s no surprise that at the end of Morris’ PaedoGeddon a mob promptly sets a man named Peter Phile on fire in his car. And as the fake news bulletin draws to a close the parody news anchor dismisses Phile's death as necessary collateral damage - saying to camera there’s an astonishing sense of community here .. a sense of a job well done, a shared sigh of relief, very much like the bizarre euphoria at the end of an hour’s vomiting.
And having re-watched this in all its uncomfortable glory we ask are we really any different twenty two odd years later with IOM school teachers rumoured to be getting death threats from the stoked up media fuelled baying mob?
From the Guardian:
PaedoGeddon is not a comfortable watch and at the time it sparked the most public complaints in the history of British television with thousands calling in to register their disgust and several UK MP's decrying the broadcast (well at least the ones that hadn’t been clamouring to be interviewed by the Brass Eye producers in the first place). But have we really learned much in the intervening twenty odd years when it comes to media fuelled public hysteria? Or have we just been lucky that nobody in the drag community or the teaching staff at QEII has been treated in a similar way to Morris’ poor Peter Phile?
These news reports will certainly stand the test of time. They’ll still be up online in twenty or thirty years time too to reflect the mood of the time and so in closing we ask will they ultimately look as awful and incongruous as this clip of Edgar Quine from the 1991 General Election campaign that still haunts Google?
We’ve come a long way in thirty odd years. Allegedly anyway.
Chris Morris explaining the impact of the imaginary drug cake which makes as much sense as some of the last months QEII claims.
