PCC fine with 'snide' reference to Dale sexuality

Influential conservative blogger, Iain Dale, recently made a formal complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about a Daily Mail column that chose to describe Dale as "overtly gay" (Dale is openly gay) and said of his promotion in a Pink News interview of his bid to be a Parliamentary candidate that it was "charming how homosexuals rally like-minded chaps to their cause."

Dale blogged today that the PCC has not upheld his complaint. The full text of the adjudication is in his blog post. The Commission described the columnist's language as "mischievous" (echoes of Jan Moir here already), as well as "fusty" and "uncharitable", and said that the references were an attempt at humour that "may have been lost on some readers". However, the Commission felt that the language stopped short of being "pejorative and gratuitous" or "spiteful to the point of homophobia" or "an arbitrary attack on [Dale] on the basis of his sexuality."

Just as the homophobia and bigotry were in plain sight in Jan Moir's column on Stephen Gately, so the pejorative language and spiteful, abitrary homophobia are apparent to me in this Mail column. The PCC claims to have considered carefully the context of the column (its reputation for mischief at the expense of public figures) but it hasn't put the language of the column into any kind of real-world context. The only reason for referring to Dale's sexuality at all in this way is to be pejorative and spiteful, knowing that the column's readers will appreciate it. 'Overt' may, on its own, be a neutral adjective, but it is not used to mean the same as 'open' - it is used in this context to mean conspicuous, and distastefully so in the view of the columnist. It is clearly meant to be pejorative. Suggesting that gay people are "like-minded" reflects a vile prejudice about homosexuality that it is merely a state of mind, and it also insults gay people by suggesting that they are only capable of thinking alike. It is condescending, demeaning, belittling. The sole purpose of the piece is, in fact, an arbitrary attack on Dale on the basis of his sexuality.

Regulators can sometimes show a tendency to take homophobia less seriously than other forms of prejudice, such as racism (see, for example, the BBC Governors, as they then were, content for Chris Moyles to use the word 'gay' as synonymous with 'crap'). This is wrong - and a good exercise to determine if someone's language has crossed the line into homophobia is to replace it with similarly 'non-pejorative' racial terms and decide how comfortable you now are. Imagine if the Daily Mail described an African-Caribbean person not as black but as "conspicuously black"; if they had said of a black Tory blogger who had promoted their political candidacy in The Voice that it was "charming how blacks rally like-minded chaps to their cause." Would the PCC be so sanguine then? None of the individual words used is pejorative on its own, but put into the context of the wider piece and the pejorative sentiment is very clear.

The PCC adjudication has been written with great care. It clearly anticipates a hostile reaction because the reasoning for the adjudication is spelled out methodically and precisely. This is as it should be. It's a shame the reasoning is so flawed.