Non-tweeting teens? No fear!

by Greg McDonald

City investors are tweeting and texting in shocked horror today at the revelation – in a research note written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley intern and splashed across the front of the Financial Times – that teenagers don’t use Twitter!

Those of us old enough to throw up a bottle of super-strength cider without first sourcing a fake ID on Bebo can breathe a sigh of relief: today’s kids, who hate adverts and paying for stuff and like concerts and freebies, are just like us after all.

So if you signed up for Twitter, spent a weekend being updated on which of your work colleagues had recently made cups of tea, painted their garage doors or – most vitally – decided they might watch the EastEnders repeat, and promptly given up on being hip, it turns you’re more down with the kids than you thought.

As the old world of record companies and teen magazines goes up in smoke, you can forgive the money men for looking to an Actual Teenage Boy for what makes this generation tick.

But we should remember that as the crusade for the teenage pound sees City investors throwing mouth-watering sums at internet projects they little understand, advertisers bombarding insecure kids with endless airbrushed images of unobtainable perfection, and the press scaring parents with horror stories of skunk-addled hoodies roaming the streets, we risk alienating today’s teenagers as never before.

The truth, to put it in a tweet, is that today’s kids are no different from us when we were that age – all that’s changed is the world they face.

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

by James Amar

Michael Jackson has died, aged 50, after a suspected heart attack. The singer was rushed to hospital in Los Angeles where doctors tried, unsuccessfully, to resuscitate him. He leaves behind him three children – and a world in shock.

His first wife Lisa Marie Presley expressed a “massive loss on so many levels”, while Madonna said "his music will live on forever”.

Jackson's glittering career was launched when he joined his brothers on stage as the youngest member of The Jackson Five, enjoying enormous success with hits such as ABC and I Want You Back.

His work as a solo artist proved even more fruitful, with the trail-blazing Off The Wall setting the tone before, unforgettably, Thriller became the best-selling album of all time.

His death comes just weeks before Jackson was due to start his much-hyped This Is It comeback tour, with no fewer than 50 dates in London. As fans across the world struggle to come to terms with his sudden death, read the tributes for the King of Pop left by Orange.co.uk users.

RIP MJ.

Black and blue

by Alan Tyers in New York

For the last couple of days, the papers in New York have all led on the unfortunate story of an off-duty police officer who was shot and killed in a case of mistaken identity… by a fellow cop.

Omar J Edwards was coming off shift in Harlem when he saw a man breaking into his car. He tried to apprehend the thief; another police officer, Andrew Dunton, saw the pursuit, ordered both runners to stop, opened fire – and hit his colleague.

The fact that Dunton was white and Edwards was black has escaped nobody: black community leaders allege it is just the latest example of the “institutionalised racism” that plagues public life in the city in general, and black relations with the police in particular. Black off-duty cops have been shot by white colleagues before.

“Institutionalised racism” – the same phrase used by the 1999 Macpherson Report into the Met following the death of Stephen Lawrence. Do we face the same problems in the UK? How does policing differ in New York and London?

People in New York, by and large, are proud of their police, whom they regard as part of their communities and defenders of the citizenry. In Britain, we are more innately mistrustful of authority in general. Perhaps it’s because the populace in Britain – as in other old world nations – have had to battle The Man for 1,000 years to get rights; in America, they got together to create a nation for and by the people from a single point, more or less.

Still, it didn’t do Omar J Edwards much good.

Britain's got talons

by Greg McDonald

So Susan Boyle’s in hospital? Congratulations Simon Cowell, and the screen-addled nation in whose name you wheel out vulnerable victims for sneering ridicule, for proving that when it comes to preying on the weak like vultures, Britain’s got talons.

On this blog six weeks ago, following her TV debut, we hoped for Susan Boyle’s own sake that she would go no further in the contest and be spared the life-destroying fame she evidently wasn’t cut out to handle. We failed to anticipate that the national claws would be out for blood within a month.

Yet Boyle’s humiliation pales into insignificance compared to the exploitation of children on these shows.

The eagerness to please on their cherubic faces, the hint of frightened tears in their little eyes – it’s enough to make a child abuser reach for the record button. The parents who expose their kids to judgment by the likes of Piers Morgan aren’t worthy of raising them.

In a just country, a guy like Simon Cowell – whose next teeth-whitening job will be paid for by the breakdown of a shy spinster – would one day know such suffering himself. Instead in Britain we laud him, according to a poll last week, as a potential prime minister!

As the paparazzi vultures flock to Boyle’s bedside this morning, Britain’s talons have cut deep enough. Let’s get Cowell and co’s circus of cruelty off our TVs, and do the one decent thing we can for Susan Boyle – leave the poor woman alone.

Why nasty Nick should shun the Queen

by Greg McDonald

The media storm over nasty BNP leader Nick Griffin being invited to tea with little old Elizabeth II shows our corrupt political elite up for the self-serving hypocrites they are.

If anything, Griffin, a man standing for democratic election, should shun the Queen as a totalitarian whose family represents a thousand years of brutal violence, religious oppression and white supremacy.

Now before anyone thinks I’m advocating hanging swastikas in Trafalgar Square, let’s be clear: the BNP's policies (more hitting of defenseless children, less of those awful darkies who give us Olympic glory and our national diet) are an embarrassment to anyone who understands what it means to be British.

Yet should Griffin and co gain seats in June, much of the blame will lie with the self-serving greed of a corrupt mainstream political elite guilty of upholding the undeserving at the expense of the unrepresented many.

As Fred Goodwin enjoys his pension pot, Lord Michael Martin arises, and the rest of us suffer on their financial and political watch, what’s required is genuine representative democracy. That means proportional representation, four-yearly elections, the abolition of unelected Lords and heads of state, and representative governance.

We must not let the corrupt mainstream use the threat of the BNP to distract from the rot at the heart of our system – and there couldn’t be a better symbol of that rot than a woman who’s never had a job throwing a knees-up at the Palace.

Same Old Tories…

by Alan Tyers

David Cameron is giving it the “Daddy’s home and there’s going to be trouble” over Tory MP expenses… The Opposition leader began by vowing to bang heads together in his party as The Daily Telegraph’s brilliantly enjoyable exposé of MPs’ bread-dipping rolled on.

Some of the best claims have included: £2,000 for cleaning the moat of Douglas Hogg’s Lincolnshire castle; and five grand for gardening costs including “a helipad” at Sir Michael Spicer’s place (this was explained by Sir Michael, the Tories’ most senior backbencher, as “a family joke”. But not such a funny one that he thought his family should pay for it.)

James Arbuthnot thought it only right that the taxpayer clean his swimming pool (about £1,400 a year) and David Heathcoat-Amory really, really needed 380 quid of our money for a sack of s***. How very appropriate, you might say.

David Cameron has done his level best to convince people that this is a new, different Conservative party – not just a party for the rich, not just the privileged continuing to feather their already massive nests at the expense of the punters.

Well, David, it doesn’t look good.

On this blog yesterday, Greg McDonald wrote that at least this is a democracy and we can vote out the ones we don’t like. And he's right. The only problem is that the Opposition waiting in the wings are, on this evidence, every bit as craven and greedy as the current Government.

Can’t say I fancy voting for any of them, myself.

R u a noob?

by Greg McDonald

As the English language approaches the addition of its millionth word, the likely new entrant from the outmost intellectual frontier of dictionarial nascence couldn’t be more apt.

It’s “noob”.

If you’re encountering the term for the first time, a noob is someone rather like you – a newcomer who doesn’t quite understand what’s going on.

And you might want to keep your noob status hush or risk falling victim to word number one million and one, and finding yourself “defriended” - probly by yr m8s on Twitter.

While the expansion of our language should be cause for celebration, with the average English native’s vocabulary shrinking to just 14,000 words, if you thought English was ceasing to be spoken in England, you’d be right.

The internet and text speak – sorry, txt spk – have spawned such a revolution that today a teacher with 40 years’ classroom experience probably can’t decipher a note passed between six-year-olds.

Yet magnificent as our language may be, the truth is that all beautiful things end up as stuffy museum pieces, and the fate of the English you’re reading right now will be no different to the now indecipherable lines Chaucer wrote in the 14th century.

A few hundred years hence and teachers marking the “21st Century” module of the class of 2209’s English GCSEs will award a triple A-stars for grammar as they read: “Da English spk of da 2100s wz v dif frm 2day & can do in da hedz ov noobz”.

Potentially speaking

by Alan Tyers

Should we be panicking? Nobody seems quite sure. But the papers are doing their best…

Pity the poor couple on the front page of The Sun today: newlyweds, no less, which always makes being sick so much worse in the world of the newspaper. Nice for the couple that we can all share in their illness.

But after the big shock horror headline – and The Sun is by no means alone in this sort of news bait-and-switch – what do readers actually discover? The disease is “potentially deadly”… There are more “suspected cases in the UK”…  The “deadly virus could infect up to 40 per cent of the UK population”.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda… Later in the story, it turns out that the couple who have the “potentially deadly” disease are, in fact, “recovering well”. Oh right. So not so much “potentially deadly” in their case. Or “deadly”. Just “not deadly”.

Over at the supersoaraway Guardian, you can follow the progress of swine flu via a live newsfeed. The first entry at time of writing was: “Stephen Fry has called for calm about swine flu on Twitter.”

Thank God. Stephen is alright and still able to Twitter. Even in these terrifying days of falling newspaper circulations – sorry, “deadly diseases” – life must go on, eh?

Do condoms belong next to crisps?

by Greg McDonald

Religious commentators who claim new TV adverts for the morning after pill offer a green light for teenage promiscuity, and that contraception shouldn’t be advertised “alongside a packet of crisps”, can’t see the wood for the rubber trees.

Our national problem is not consenting adults sharing a healthy human experience – it’s our unwanted pregnancy rate. And if TV ads are effective in lowering that rate, then more power to them.

Yet social conservatives like Catholic Bishop Vincent Nicholls and Ann Widdecombe continue to put the many-wheeled cart of sex education before the virile stallion of sex.

Widdecombe claims young people seeing morning after pill ads “will think there are no consequences to having sex”, while the Bishop opposes TV condom advertising too. Such ads fail to show our youngsters “what human sexuality is about”, claims the lifelong celibate in the dress.

Today’s kids don’t live in Narnia, but a world where the school run is past the local pole-dancing lair and boob-job ads fund the railways. If anything is going to send these sex-saturated teens into a pagan orgy of promiscuity, it’s not a timely reminder of the availability of contraceptives.

“Alongside a packet of crisps” is exactly where contraception should be advertised – as a responsible part of a healthy life free of superstitious guilt and social taboos.

Sick child Of Europe

by Alan Tyers

Britain’s kids are among the unhappiest in the continent. Across a bundle of factors including health, ability to talk to parents and low chances of being in education or training, the UK came 24th out of 29 in a new survey.

Only the unappealing prospects of a young life in Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Lithuania were worse, as was Malta, which always seems quite a nice place, but there you have it.

What does this all mean? Is it linked to our triumphant position in the binge-drinking, drug-taking and teenage pregnancy tables, where Britain is enjoying a period of continental dominance that would put our three Champions League semi-finalists to shame? Is it our pandering schools system, where teachers dare not discipline a child for fear of reprisal? Is it our celebration of yobbishness and ignorance? Is it family breakdown? Is it the PS3? Is it knives? Is it Blu WKD?

One person who most certainly does not know is Children’s Minister Beverley Hughes.

“The fact that we created a new Government department to focus solely on children, schools and families shows the increased importance being given to children in this country,” says the Minister.

If you want an example of why this Government is spending so much and achieving so little, look no further. She’s saying: “Don’t worry that the evidence suggests we are failing badly, we’ve set up a department.” The solution to any problem? More talking, more public money, more initiatives, no change.

“Our Children’s Plan is our long-term vision and it puts children and families at the centre of everything Government does,” says Hughes.

This is just an empty… I was going to say “soundbite”, but that implies some sort of rhetorical punch. It is literally meaningless. Are children and families at the forefront of policy in Afghanistan? Or pensions? Really? Hopeless.

Looks like our kids will have to sort it out for themselves.