In a brilliant piece of political strategy, famous leftwing blogger ‘Penny Red’ last night improved the life chances of hundreds of thousands of people living in deprived socio-economic circumstances.
In a quite breathtaking move, she removed from the glare of public opprobrium many teenage mothers, through the disarmingly simple tactic of writing a mildly controversial piece of slightly tongue-in-cheek literary criticism for a well-known blog.
As it now transpires she fully intended, famous blogger Tom Harris MP immediately took the bait, and turned all his mighty moral outrage upon the young blogger, who is known to be a woman, and, shockingly, to have a mind of her own, questioning many of the discursively construced power relations which hold sway in our society.
In selflessly setting herself up as a target for the outrage of the whole of the internet-based troll community, which is led by the MP and his shadowy sidekick ‘I. Dale’, teenage parents have been, at one fell swoop, freed from the Harris-based glare of negative publicity. It is hoped many will go on to lead normal lives, though it is too early to judge the effects of being remorselessly battered by the rightwing press in this way.
One teenage mother, who refused to be identifed for fear of having her benefits slashed before she even got down to the post office, said:
‘Laurie Penny has shown real courage. It takes a brave woman to stand up to a whole gang of trolls whose core belief is that people should not think for themselves at all, but should simply beleive what Tom Harris and the Daily Mail tell them.’
Harris himself, who had been heavily tipped to become Minister for Moral Reform and Workhouses in any new Government of National Reactionary Bitterness, has been silent on the matter since the early hours when the story broke, not least, it is thought, because this bit is made up.
In another made up part, it appears that another key though unexpected beneficiary of Ms PennyRed’s bravery is notable Conservative candidate Louise Bagshawe, who had been a target for Mr Harris MP’s outrage just a few days ago for doing something really quite unpleasant and nasty; it now appears to have been let off the hook as a result of this subsequent attack on people deciding to use long words while actually knowing what they mean.
Bagshawe, whose latest novel ‘Glitz’ has been desribed as ’sooo predictable…. one of the worst books I’ve read’ by the one reviewer we could be bothered to look up on Google, was thought to be very relieved, and looking forward to making a complete fool of herself on the radio again.
We did contact Laurie Pennie herself for comment, but the language she uses is not thought to be suitable for this blog, which has strict family values.
We can confirm, however (had this not been totally made up as well) that she may possibly have alluded, with a suitable level of post-modern irony, to the tendency of many her critics towards an almost Lacanian ego/id dialectical process between self-repressive morality and an auto-erotic impulse. Or something.
