TV contestant's racist views leave parents on a tide of bad PR
FERGUS SHEPPARD MEDIA CORRESPONDENT (fsheppard@scotsman.com)
IT WAS simultaneously a nightmare for any parent and a demonstration of the extraordinary power of reality TV in modern Britain.
A middle-class Edinburgh couple yesterday found themselves forced into the unfamiliar world of public-relations spin control as a row over their daughter's racist remarks on television came to the doorstep of their Georgian home.
David Buchanan, father of 18-year-old Lucy Buchanan, enlisted Edinburgh PR firm Profile Plus to issue a statement which amounted to a "wholehearted" apology for their daughter's conduct.
Lucy, a former pupil of the £19,662-a-year St Peter's School in York, won a place on a Channel 4 reality show in a gap year before going to Bristol University.
[...]
Lucy - who lists her hobbies as lacrosse and shooting - gave her fellow contestants camped on the South Pacific islands of Motoraku and Rapota a crash course on her views on society.
She said Britain was home to "way too many cultures", adding: "Britain is a complete mess. I just don't appreciate people coming into our country and taking over our culture." In another aside, the teenager declared: "I'm for the British Empire and things. I'm for slavery, but that's never going to come back."
The Buchanans were forced into defending their daughter as journalists descended on the family home. Mr Buchanan is understood to be an IT executive while his wife, Nicola, is a former model.
In his statement, Mr Buchanan said: "Lucy has been brought up in a loving and caring home, she has been privately schooled, as is already known.
"By definition, she has had advantages in life, which mean that she has been cosseted in a way that for most children is simply not available to them. It is our firm belief that Lucy, as a naïve teenager, made these silly and very unfortunate remarks on the back of her excitement at being on Shipwrecked."
The statement claimed Lucy had been "challenged" by teammates on the show, a process which had altered her views over five months of filming.
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Mr Buchanan added: "We hope that on Lucy's return she will be afforded the opportunity to use this life experience in a positive way to demonstrate that she can act as an ambassador for change and moderation."
Lucy's trenchant views have extended to more than race. She has also described fat people as "disgusting", calling for them to get their stomachs stitched, and branded lesbians "sinister".
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The Commission for Racial Equality said it was monitoring Shipwrecked.
Campaign group Anti-Slavery International actually backed Channel 4's decision to screen Buchanan's remarks, arguing they illustrated how little slavery was understood.
Group spokeswoman Beth Herzfeld said: "These sorts of comments and the cavalier attitude to slavery clearly show a lack of recognition that slavery does continue to exist, as well as an understanding of what the transatlantic slave trade involved."
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We are living in a culture of envy. If Lucy'd attended, say, the local comprehensive, nobody would have given a damn. The fact that the article revels oh-so-subtly in the details of her privileges ("Lucy - who lists her hobbies as lacrosse and shooting...") makes it a perfectly vile bit of journalism.The parents are spineless morons,
1) because they apologised for their daughter's opinions,
2) because they let their daughter, whose education they obviously intended to be elitist, prostitute herself at such a crappy TV show,
3) because they are using politically correct lower-middleclass-isms like "caring" and "privately schooled", which, so I suspect, are anathema at the school for which they forked out all that money.
So The
Did it ever occur to those moronic parents that their "cosseted" daughter who, according to her father "made these silly and very unfortunate remarks on the back of her excitement at being on Shipwrecked" that she made these remarks not out of "excitement" but PRECISELY BECAUSE SHE WAS FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HER LIFE EXPOSED TO THE REALITY OF YOB-LIFE?
I have been at the receiving end of quite some aggro for similar views to those Lucy espressed on fat people.
That is, I can understand that it is vile and unfair to discriminate against people who can't do anything about their condition, be it colour, handicap or whatever. Fat people CAN. At least the vast majority of them. Why are they still mollycoddled and protected as "victims" by the politically correct brigade? To quote myself: After holocaust survivors, cancer survivors, rape survivors, abuse of various sorts survivors, we now have - obesity survivors! The terminology reveals the agenda: "Something bad has happened to me; it must be someone else’s, preferably the men's, doing".Thank you for your acclaim. I think that was rather good, too.
By standing up for fat women, feminism [incidentally another ideology of envy] creates a perverted system of female solidarity. Fat women get encouragement, support and even acclaim for an unhealthy lifestyle. Feminists WANT women fat. They want to proselytize women who feel that they are ugly or potentially rejected by men. These are the first and easiest prey for an ideology that fosters men-hating.
It's not men who force their views on women; it's a women-shaped society that forces its views on women and it is not beyond feminists to fish even at the very bottom of that self-made foodchain.
And lesbians... who would care what they are doing if it were behind closed doors. I wouldn't and, so I presume, Lucy wouldn't either. Hell, I don't even WANT to know what sort of activities people prefer behind closed doors. It's the fact that so many of them are aggressively flaunting their sexuality, which makes them (and homosexuals) so unpalatable. They are cramming their sexuality down our throats, and we, who don't share such proclivities, are supposed to like it -- and AGAIN in the name of the new tin god political correctness.
Not to mention the disgusting hypocrisy of all those who are now appalled that a yobbo-programme, designed to be sensationalist, turned out to be just that and are targeting the young woman instead of the makers of that cynical bit of taste- and soul-corrupting dirt.
All that said, the article, in all its political correct righteous outrage, misses entirely the probably most crucial point, namely that Whites were rather gifted amateurs when it came to enslaving people and the professionals were (and, worse still ARE) people of various Middle Eastern and North African extraction who enslaved Whites as well.
But to say all that is, of course, racist. And it might, mind you, hurt the overdeveloped sensitivities of the followers of the "Religion of Peace".
The politically correct perception of who makes victim fodder and who doesn't is pretty selective.
A list of titles at amazon.com for further education:
Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (Early Modern History) by Robert C. Davis
White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam's One Million White Slaves by Giles Milton
They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America by Michael A. Hoffman
White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives by Paul Baepler
Race and Slavery in the Middle East: A Historical Enquiry by Bernard Lewis
