I have tried now several times this week to muster the energy to write something about Gregg Wallace, the UK TV impresario who finds himself in the midst of trial by media over allegedly lewd comments made to female co-workers. The story is on the front page of every UK newspaper, has bled over into the Irish papers, and is consuming acres of social media outrage.
And yet, I find I don’t care. In fact, I find the whole thing broadly disgusting.
Disgusting, because it is so disproportionate. And so predictable. Because the villain is the kind of villain we’re all supposed to be comfortable with: A working class, mouthy, white British lad who by the sounds of him talks behind closed doors like a parody of Sid James in Carry on up the Khyber, expecting the subjects of his jokes to titter excitedly and exclaim “ooh matron!”.
His victims, too, are the perfect kind of victims for the media: Middle class, well-coiffured and educated women who work in the media, who had the absolute horror to encounter the kind of fellow who sounds like he talks to women while his eyes fixated entirely on their bosoms and not their faces. Given the way he is being depicted, he might as well have walked off the screen of a low-budget UK porn flick dressed in a handyman’s outfit.
Those aren’t the kinds of villains that young working-class women in the UK encounter, most often. And when they do encounter them, coverage is scant. Consider, by way of contrast, how much or how little the average person has heard about the UK’s grooming gangs scandal.
Over the past decade or so, evidence has emerged in the UK of the systematic rape, grooming, and abuse of over 1,300 working class young women in towns and villages across the country. These girls did not suffer degrading jokes about their looks: They suffered mass rape, sexually transmitted illnesses, life-changing abuse, and the absolute apathy of the British establishment. Some of them suffered cigarette burns. Others were ritually urinated on. All were raped and sexually exploited. And in almost all cases, the UK authorities turned a blind eye to it for years.
Consider the case of Bannaras Hussein, convicted in 2016:
Opening the case against Bannaras Hussain, who pleaded guilty to 10 offences including multiple rapes and indecent assault against seven girls, the prosecution recounted how he was able to carry out his criminal activities in plain view of the police.
Colborne said Bannaras, known locally as Bono, had taken the girl, who was 12 or 13, to a car park near Rotherham police station. He made the girl perform a sexual act on him in the front of the car while her sister sat in the back.
“When shortly afterwards, a police car pulled up alongside them and asked what they were doing, Bannaras shouted: ‘She’s just sucking my cock, mate.’ The police car drove off,” Colborne said.
Or consider the abuse suffered by the victims of a similar gang in Oxford:
Police and social services made “many errors” and failed to stop the sexual abuse of young girls in Oxfordshire, a serious case review has found, external.
Up to 370 girls may have been the victims of child sexual exploitation (CSE) across the county over the past 15 years.
It comes after a gang of men were jailed in 2013 for abusing six girls in Oxford between 2004 and 2012.
These cases might go back ten years, but the scandal of grooming gangs in the UK is still ongoing. Just last week, for example, Zaheer Iqbal (45) and Wajid Adalat (47) of Halifax were revealed to have been sentenced at Bradford Crown Court for the systemic sexual abuse of a young girl from the Calderdale area of that city which began when she was at the age of 13.
Their crimes included oral, vaginal, and anal rape, which is significantly more serious than the alleged dirty jokes and lewd comments that flowed from the mouth of Wallace. They are the latest of 20 men, mainly though not exclusively of Asian backgrounds, who have now been sent to prison for the systemic rape and sexual abuse of young girls from mainly working-class white communities in the Bradford area alone.
So why on earth are we hearing so much about Gregg Bloody Wallace? Who, for all his alleged offences against workplace sensibilities, certainly does not stand accused of rape?
The answer, I would have thought, is easy enough: He’s a working-class white bloke who committed his indiscretions against middle class white women. It’s the kind of thing that happens to the people who write and produce the news. Quite literally, in this case. This is a media story about this guy who said unspeakable things to my friends.
Spare us this nonsense: If Wallace is guilty of inappropriate workplace commentary, sack him and have done with it, instead of subjecting him to tiresome and endless trial by media.
We are hearing about Wallace because he fits into a story that the media wants to tell anyway: It is a story of white, working class men as dangerous sex pests whose desires and behaviours must be constantly controlled, monitored, and regulated. It is a story that underpins the case for consent classes in schools, tougher HR practices in white collar workplaces, and more womens studies departments in Universities.
We are not hearing as much about the grooming gang scandal because it undermines a story that the media wants to tell regardless: About how multiculturalism is a cost-free, happy-clappy story about rainbows and integration, and has no discernable costs.
One story gets wall to wall coverage, the other is systematically buried for years, and then covered grudgingly with immense emphasis on how the perpetrators do not, of course, represent all Muslims.
It’s gross and pathetic, is what it is. And it says an awful lot about the media. Much more about them, in fact, than it says about Gregg f*cking Wallace.