Chris Grayling - "Hopelessly Full of Shit"

I'm several days late on this, as I've been busy, but I just can't let such rubbish pass without comment. On Tuesday, the Conservative Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling, gave a speech comparing parts of "Broken Britain" to Baltimore, as seen in The Wire. Basically, crime is rife and our society's going to hell in a handcart. The remedy for this, as ever, is to hang 'em and flog 'em (more prisons, tougher sentences, the same old Tory bollocks).

The politics of it irritates me, of course, but what really gets my goat is Grayling's deployment of my favourite show as an argumentative prop. Some enterprising Beeb journalist asked him how much of the show he'd actually seen and was rewarded by Grayling's admission that he'd seen "most" of the first season. There are five, by the way. Had Mr Grayling bothered to delve a little further into his own source material, he would have found that the show's writer, David Simon, has little or no time for the kind of "remedies" Grayling espouses. That's the point of the show.

Here's Simon on Graylingesque tough guy politics:

"It is possible that a few thinking viewers, after experiencing a season or two of The Wire, might be inclined, the next time they hear some politician declaring that with more prison cells, more cops, more lawyers, and more mandatory sentences that the war on drugs is winnable, to say, aloud: "You are hopelessly full of shit."

Grayling likely wasn't aware of the show's message, as, by his own admission, he hasn't seen it. It takes a certain kind of arrogance to use the work of someone completely opposed to everything you stand for to buttress your own "argument", though. That's the Tories, though, I'm afraid.