By Ben Pensant.

As a proud progressive I have little time for mainstream culture. I stopped listening to Pearl Jelly the second their debut single Never Mind went to number one, I never read another Irvine Walsh novel after Hollywood butchered The Wasp Factory, and as I explained in A Play For Yesterday, I gave up on A Game Of Tits And Dragons during episode one when I realised it was available to stupid people on Rupert Maxwell’s Skynet channel.

So I’m as likely to watch Celebrity Big Jungle as I am to get out of bed before lunchtime. Or so I thought. Because like the glorious day when Linda Nolan and Janet Street-Preacher ambushed disgraced Olympian Victor Louis-Smith on Loose Fannies and demanded he apologise for forcing peaceful Muslims to send him death threats, wokeness is often revealed in the most un-woke places.

Which is why I found myself in the unlikely position of having my mind blown by reality show designed for working-class cretins with feet for hands. For as the Roseanne Pallett story played out I realised what I was witnessing: the #MeToo movement writ large on national television. Finally!

The campaign has recently taken a bump of course, after the accusation that hot Spanish actress Asia Argentina sexually assaulted a 17-year-old boy then bought his silence. Predictably alt-right trolls accused the #MeToo club secretary of hypocrisy for effectively doing the same thing as Harvey Wankstain. Which is utter bollocks for several reasons.

First of all Asia, unlike Wankstain, didn’t admit her guilt by coughing up a six-figure sum to shut up her accuser: she got her rich boyfriend to pay instead.

Secondly, this young man is clearly not suffering the same level of trauma as Asia (left). If he was he would’ve carried on dating his assaulter and laughing in photographs with her like she did.

Thirdly, the only pieces of evidence that they had sex are: his word; her admission; the texts she sent admitting they’d had sex. For all we know the Russians made him say that, just like during the World Series they forced soccer pundit Alan Shola to spout pro-Putin propaganda such as ‘Moscow is a really nice city’.

And finally, her accuser is a MAN. A WHITE MAN. Last I heard the command was ‘believe women’ not ‘believe men too even though they’re liars and if someone assaulted one it was probably his own fault for being a man’

It seems Asia’s one mistake was to seduce the only straight teenage boy on the planet who thinks getting sucked off by her is a bad thing. But this didn’t stop misogynist trolls crawling out of their basements to claim she’d discredited #MeToo, disgracefully suggesting that instead of flatly believing every allegation we should perhaps wait for evidence before calling for penthouses to be torched.

Luckily, the right-wingers ate their words when ‘Corrie favourite Roseanne singlehandedly resurrected the three cornerstones of #MeToo: principles burnt on my brain since Roland Farrow shocked Hollywood last October with the incendiary article that wasn’t remotely a cynical attempt to re-publicise the wafer-thin accusations against his pretend father. They are:

• Guilty until proven innocent
• If someone feels they were assaulted, they were.
• A hand on the lap is like a knee to the fanny.

All of which characterised Roseanne’s claim that she was beaten up in the Big Jungle kitchen by brutish Hollyoaks beefcake Ryan Thompson (right), who covered his tracks like so many abusers by making sure he didn’t actually touch her when punching her repeatedly in the ribs. Gaslighting at its most insidious.

But even Ryan’s alligator tears, the footage proving he never touched her, and Ms Pallett’s swift exit from CBJ after hearing hundreds of socially retarded psychopaths screaming ‘ROSEANNE OUT!’ weren’t enough to ruin her moment. Because she exemplified the way #MeToo has empowered all manner of struggling actresses with long histories of lying and cheating. The only regret is that Roxanne didn’t accuse Ryan of clobbering her off-camera so she could have really fucked him over.

Predictably, Roxanne was forced to tour the TV studios admitting she was ‘mistaken’ and repeating the same carefully worded apology ad nauseum. Her transparent attempt to destroy a fellow soapstar was never acknowledged, Roseanne wisely sticking to ‘I genuinely felt he’d battered me six times despite the fact he barely touched me once!’. And it worked brilliantly, with hip trans-chick Paris Jackson and loud-mouthed scab Shirley Fogherty defending her on the grounds that it’s not our place to tell Roseanne how she feels. Even though we watched her take twenty minutes to notice the air-jabs which slightly brushed her body apparently made her ‘feel’ like she’d gone twelve rounds with Frank Tyson.

Still, though I loved their re-casting of Roseanne as the victim – and she’d never have accused Ryan in the first place if he hadn’t intimidated her with those sexually suggestive swimming trunks – I’d have loved to see her stick to her original story and ruining the innocent bastard. Because it’s time #MeToo got some bloody respect. Progressives rightly bang on about incitement when condemning right-wing pundits but where is the celebration of good incitement? If we can blame Katie Hopkirk for racist violence then why not give props to the feminist bruisers who’ve convinced women that a wolf whistle is as bad as a gang-rape?

Without their influence I doubt Roseanne would’ve found the courage to fabricate her assault accusation. Or double-down on it by claiming she felt she’d been assaulted even though she hadn’t. Because we all know if someone feels hurt then they are hurt, and anyone who disagrees should check their privilege, stay in their lane, and quit talking over people who think shadow-boxing is the same as getting pummelled.

Of course, maybe Roseanne couldn’t care less about #MeToo and is simply a horrible person who lied and cheated because, well, that’s what she does. But sod that. Entertain such dangerous ideas and soon you’ll be saying that rapists rape regardless of how many issue of Loaded they’ve read, or jihadists kill infidels because their holy book tells them to and will do with or without Western foreign policy. So let’s not.

Fortunately, in the CBJ house Roseanne had the support of that rarest of beasts: the progressive man who knows when to shut his pie-hole and listen to lying women. And amazingly she found two: Rugby star-turned-serial drink-driver Jermain Defoe and Ben Gardiner (left), the property tycoon who found fame by marrying someone he’d never met on television then being surprised when she binned him three months later after realising he’s a bit of a plank.

These two titans put Ryan to shame by fulfilling the requirements demanded by the modern misandrist: respect for boundaries; a desire to Do Better; the willingness to believe anything that comes out of a woman’s mouth if it increases the chances of getting her bra off. It also helps that one is a person of colour and the other wears eyeliner. And please, before anyone accuses me of playing identity politics, you’ll notice I didn’t apply the same logic to the other POC in the house: Highlands Hindu Hardeep King-Cola, whose suspicion of Roseanne from day one forfeited his place in my Oppression Mini-League.

From his crowd-pleasing Scottish accent to his cosy friendship with fat-cat fraudster Nick Neeson, Hardeep may as well be white: he sure as hell ain’t no Muslim, bruv. Listen up, Uncle Jock. You may think mentioning your religion and ethnicity every five minutes will endear you to leftists but I’ve got news for you – that pillowcase on your head is fooling no-one. Perhaps it’s time you remembered what happened to the last brown-skinned Glaswegian who sold out his faith by sucking up to his white Christian slave-masters…

And as for Ryan Thompson’s pathetic boast that he is ‘a quarter Indian’. Yeah, right, and I’m Malcolm Luther King’s great-great grandson. As the violent ordeal he subjected Roseanne to demonstrated, his Asian blood was diluted long ago: he’s all white now.

Sadly, upon leaving the house Ben and Jermaine were forced to recant their support for Ms Pallett, due to a combination of cowardice, right-wing pressure, and the dawning realisation that they’d both been played like fiddles and had more chance of fucking Santa Claus. Just two more in a long line of minorities whose voices were erased to preserve the twin evils of white power and toxic masculinity.

Luckily, the impact of Roseanne’s bravery more than made up for their betrayal. And I can’t have been the only one reminded of that other teary-eyed young lady who recently made the headlines after demanding the removal of a criminal. So I was delighted to learn of the new twists taken in the heart-warming story of Swedish airplane hero Ellen Eriksson (below).

If you’re anything like me you’ll have marvelled at courageous Ellen’s refusal to sit down on a plane until an Afghan asylum seeker facing deportation was removed. And you were probably also horrified by the alt-right bigots who immediately piped up with Islamophobic questions like ‘what was he being deported for?’, ‘how do you know he’ll be killed in Afghanistan?’, and ‘are you aware that Sweden has extremely liberal immigration laws and don’t deport people for just anything?’. Thankfully such attempts to discredit Ellen were roundly dismissed as bigotry, and she received support across the political spectrum from Diane Abbott to Caroline Lucas.

But amazingly, this tale is even more joyous than we thought. Because the truth has finally been revealed about the poor, misunderstood Afghan on the plane. And contrary to what the racist rumour-mongers speculated, he wasn’t a rapist or a terrorist: he’d been released from jail for beating his wife and children with an electrical cord. Indeed, when found by police he was in the process of smashing her head off the kitchen floor: a far more humane way of assaulting your partner than the barbaric British method of braining her with a tin of pineapple chunks.

All in all, I can’t recall a better example of a brave Muslim defending his culture in defiance of western prejudice. And whatever path his life takes, he’s earned his place in regressive hearts forever, along with the marginalised men who ‘assaulted’ those prick-teases in Cologne and the oppressed grooming gangs who introduced northern England to the quaint mediaeval custom of abusing children in chip shops.

Trolls suggested this proved why Ellen was wrong to stage her protest without knowing the full story. Horse-shit. The fact that she was willing to go to bat for a man who tried to murder his wife just emphasises her compassion. So what if she knew bugger all about why he was being deported: she felt he shouldn’t be which is all that matters. And how was she to know he’d been in jail? She’s a student for god’s sake: where would she find the time to learn about her own country’s immigration laws or come to the obvious conclusion that he’d probably done something quite bad and maybe trying to stop him being deported without the facts wasn’t the wisest move? We’ll leave such agenda-driven muckraking to the Islamophobes, thanks. Because ignorance is a virtue on the modern left: what you don’t know is waaay more powerful than what you do. 

Of course, nobody wants to see him return home and have another crack at killing his wife and kids. For starters it would be terrible PR. But who knows, perhaps they’d benefit from being encouraged to resist immoral European positions such as ‘not being totally on board with getting strangled by daddy’. Either way, if he does it would be entirely on the authorities and nothing whatsoever to do with Ellen’s protest effectively granting him the freedom to commit murder. Young left-wing ladies don’t even have the power to earn the same as men never mind force them to slaughter their families.

Similarly, if he’d returned to Afghanistan and been shot dead the second he got off the plane that would be entirely on the authorities too, and nothing whatsoever to do with the gunman or the oppressed bloke who got himself thrown out of a liberal democracy for gracing it with the very worst aspects of the society he left.

Lest we forget it was us who corrupted that society in the first place, destabilising the Islamic world so thoroughly that its marginalised citizens were left with no choice but to brutalise their own people. And any idiot knows the Taliban were only invented because the FBI and Jim Rambo trained those well-meaning Mujahideenies to act as cannon fodder against the Russians. Make no mistake, the country he would’ve been forced to return to because the authorities couldn’t keep their noses out of a private family dispute is a hell on earth NO human being should have to endure. Just don’t call it a shit-hole, you racist.

All of which reinforces how right Ms Erikkson was. And while rumours persist that the poor Afghan gent will still be deported, let’s hope in the meantime he’s allowed to practice the traditional Islamic custom of beating the shit out of your loved ones without the fascist state sticking their bigoted beaks in.

But we should also praise the celebs and politicians who were applauded her protest a month ago: the same ones who said fuck all when it was revealed that the bigots who cautioned that in all likelihood the man was a violent criminal were 100% right. And god bless Ellen and Roseanne for proving that two women can make a difference. Whether accusing an innocent man of being a wife-beater or accusing a wife-beater of being an innocent man, these ballsy ladies demonstrate the way feelings continue to shape the conversations EVERYONE is having.

Emily Parkhurst would be soooo proud.

@ben_pensant