Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

While offering NO evidence from the last 25 years, Melanie "Mad Mel" Phillips yesterday made the grotesque claim that "the root cause" of an increase in child abuse is "the willed disintegration of the traditional nuclear family", which she blames on "lifestyle choice".

Phillips claims that "Head teachers there (in Birkenhead) told me that children were highly sexualised at the ages of five or six, & that their reflexive instinct whenever thwarted was violence."

archive.md/PT1el#selectio…

She goes on to claim that "so systemic is this cultural meltdown that there are vanishingly few young people in social work or anywhere else who have a clue that there’s anything wrong with the “lifestyle choice” they assume is a given of western society."

She preposterously claims: "the dislocation of biology from parenthood has been an exponential catastrophe for untold numbers of children & women. It is the greatest cause of social inequalities, through educational underachievement, crime & juvenile psychological disorders."

Rupert Murdoch pays unhinged reactionary shit-stirring cranks to spout this diabolical unevidenced reactionary bullshit: the likes of Phillips completely disregard the devastating effects of poverty, declining public services, lack of mental health support & grotesque inequality.

She's said her dad was "gentle, kind & innocent", an "overgrown child", & that "as my other parent he just wasn’t there", which taught her "how the absence of proper fathering could screw up a child for life": she appears to blame her kind & gentle dad for the monster she became.

Her views on almost everything are utterly abhorrent.

In 2010, The Spectator & Phillips apologised & agreed to pay substantial compensation & legal costs to a prominent British Muslim they falsely accused of antisemitism.

theguardian.com/media/2010/nov…

In 2012, Phillips resigned from The Spectator after it apologised & paid compensation for another of her pieces which it said contained an allegation that was "completely false".

Then Conservative party chair, Sayeeda Warsi said of Phillips: "I call her Mad Mel."

Phillips was heavily criticised for an article she wrote in The Jewish Chronicle which suggested that "the taunt of Islamophobia is used to silence any criticism of the Islamic world, including Islamic extremism" & "facilitates" antisemitism.

The newspaper's editor acknowledged that the article had been divisive & apologised to readers who had been angered or upset by the piece.

Simon Kuper, writing in the Financial Times, described her in 2011 as an advocate for the Eurabia conspiracy theory.

Phillips's criticisms of liberal Jews who disagree with her views on Israel have been condemned by Alan Dershowitz, Rabbi David Goldberg, & Jonathan Freedland, who criticised Phillips's labelling of Independent Jewish Voices, a group of liberal Jews, as "Jews For Genocide".

Phillips accused Barack Obama of "adopting the agenda of the Islamist" & of being "firmly in the Islamists' camp", describing him as "a sulky narcissist with an unbroken history of involvement in thuggish, corrupt, far-left, black power, Jew-bashing, west-hating politics".

In 2013, Phillips argued that "there is no evidence for global warming... the seas are not rising any more than is in any way out of the ordinary, the ice is not decreasing, it is increasing, the polar bears are increasing in number, & the temperature is going down, not up".

Phillips supported Andrew Wakefield, whose fraudulent work led to concerns about MMR & him being struck off. In articles in the Mail & Spectator, she championed Wakefield's claims while casting doubt on their rebuttal by scientists, doctors, & politicians. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

Her attacks on MMR attracted criticism from scientists & science writers, but Phillips continued to support Wakefield even after his research methods & motives began to attract serious scrutiny & criticism.

Claims of a link between the MMR vaccine & autism are dangerous & false.

"While Mr Wakefield is being subjected to a witch-hunt, & while the parents of the affected children are scandalously denied legal aid to pursue the court case... those powerful people in the medical establishment are continuing to misrepresent the evidence."

A load of old crap.

In 2010, Andrew Wakefield was struck off the Medical Register & barred from practising medicine in the UK.

Phillips's support of Wakefield's "findings" & her campaign against the MMR vaccine has been credited for significantly undermining public trust in vaccines.

For Phillips, Scottish nationalism & Irish republicanism are cultural phenomena "rooted in romanticism & myth", while Englishness "came to stand proxy for all the communities of the British Isles".

She denounced "attempts at secession by tribes" in Northern Ireland.

The Irish Times said that her piece had met with objections from both unionists & republicans. The Irish ambassador to the UK rejected her claim & said on Twitter the country's sovereignty is "based on strong sense of identity, distinctive culture & shared values & interests".

She is even ambivalent about the Northern Ireland peace process, stating that while it has strengthened the Union with Great Britain & saved lives, it has rewarded terrorism, "undermined the rule of law", & exchanged bombs for "paramilitary, mafia-style control of some areas".

Phillips argued that the Tory Party lost its way after the retirement of Margaret Thatcher. She also stated that the UK Independence Party is prepared to embody "truly conservative attitudes" & has attracted a sizeable protest vote, despite its "unsustainable spending policies".

Sounding like an unhinged Victorian Barbara Castle, Phillips became a "scathing critic of modern Britain" which she regards as "a debauched & disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children & violence, squalor & vulgarity on the streets".

In 2008, Ruth Runciman, UK Drugs Policy Commission Chair, & former Chair of the UK Mental Health Act Commission, called "allegations" Phillips made that the commission was "intent on bringing about the legalisation of drugs" "an absolute travesty & a wilful misrepresentation".

A particularly frothing Phillips wrote in 2011 that there is no "war on drugs" in Britain, rather a "refusal to enforce the law against drug use in a coherent, consistent, & effective manner".

She sees the result as a lax attitude to drug use that helps perpetuate drug use.

In 2007 she wrote "the traditional family.. has been relentlessly attacked by an alliance of feminists, gay rights activists, divorce lawyers & 'cultural Marxists' who grasped that this was the surest way to destroy Western society."

web.archive.org/web/2011060906…

She opposed the introduction of civil partnerships for gay couples; said giving IVF fertility treatment to lesbians would "help destroy our understanding of human identity"; & said the UK Govt was brainwashing children by including references to gay people in lessons in schools.

She's been paid to puke out the same old predictable, divisive & provocative culture war bullshit for 25 years.

Not only is it tiresome regressive crap, but it's also tragic: Phillips was brought up in the exact nuclear family she champions, but which produced a damaged monster.