Pity the Paralympics are being used by The Enlightened to hector the rest of us

Smug Liberal

Just after the Olympics proper ended, Channel 4 News dragged on a Post Office spokesman and loftily demanded to know why they the organisation wouldn't be issuing a separate stamp to celebrate every British Paralympic gold medalist as they had for able-bodied competitors. The spokesman spluttered unconvincingly as odious presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy faked moral outrage. As an example of arrogant left-liberal bullying, it took the biscuit.

Inevitably, it worked. The PO rapidly announced a change of policy - soon, there'll be enough Paralympic stamps flying around to furnish a decent-sized ticker-tape parade, and I'm expecting that demands for every disabled person in Britain to be honoured with their own stamp and gold-coloured post box.

I have absolutely no intention of watching a single second of the Paralympics. I’m happy that they exist, I’m delighted for all the competitors, and I wish them all well. I think the Paralympics are A GOOD THING in huge capital letters that can be seen from outer space. The courage and determination on display are truly cosmic and enormously heartening – they demonstrate how bloody brilliant human beings can be in the face of adversity, and they remind us able-bodied folk that our petty problems mostly don’t amount to a hill of beans. But that's not the point - they aren't about able-bodied people like me.

One reason for my reluctance to treat the Paralympics as a natural extension of the real thing is that I’m only averagely interested in sport, don’t watch that much of it (apart from tennis), and – when I do – I want to see the very best practitioners. For instance, I’ll watch Champions League football – but nothing would induce me to watch a game from the Championship. Similarly, I would have to be manacled to the sofa before I’d pay any attention to an under-21 soccer international.

You could, of course, take the view that Paralympic sports are, because of the competitors’ various disabilities, different events from the ones at the senior event, where, after all, no one sits in a wheelchair or, with one notable (and, in my view, rather dodgy) exception, wears prosthetic limbs. But, if they are indeed different events, I’ve little interest in them. But then, I’m not really interested in most Olympic events anyway.

The other reason I’m giving the Paralympics a miss is that I suspect that watching it is supposed to make me feel good about myself. I feel as if I’m supposed to pat myself on the back for being decent, compassionate, caring and ever so open-minded - and I just don’t think other people’s misfortune should be seen as an opportunity to increase one’s self-esteem. (I suspect the addiction to self-congratulation accounts for the grotesque sentimentality of most of our politicians.)

Alarm bells started clanging when I saw that Channel 4 had chosen arch-liberal smugster Jon Snow - Guru-Murthy's partner-in-crime on Channel 4 News - to host a series of programmes leading up to the games. I suspected that this noble event would be hi-jacked by the liberal media, the organisers and some of those associated with the differently-abled community for a bout of full-on, in-your-face, holier-than-thou moral bullying. And so it has proved. The games are being used to tell the rest of us that our attitudes to the disabled are just plain wrong – and we jolly well need to rewire our brains and mend our reactionary ways. In other words, it’s the disabled’s turn to be used as a stick with which the Enlightened can belabour the Unenlightened.

The point of the Paralympics is not to change the way those of us fortunate enough to be able-bodied view the disabled, nor, indeed, to reinforce liberal-leftists’ already humungous sense of their own moral superiority. The disabled should be furious at the attempt to reduce them to the status of just another one of the left's pet victim groups.

(Apropos of nothing very much, I was watching a news item about the Paralympics the other night featuring a brain-damaged footballer. It was – as much of the less preachy coverage surrounding the games has been – enormously touching. The chap said he hoped that one day mentally-impaired footballers would play in the Premier League. I couldn’t help reflecting that Wayne Rooney is surely living proof that his wish has already been granted.)