Besides the physical appearance of people in Central London briefly alluded to by one of the Pope’s aides, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the obsessive preoccupation with the doings and agonising of its homosexual population also marks out London from the country of which it is supposed to be capital.

Of course all capital cities are different from the countries they subsist in – Washington, Canberra, Ottawa are often the butt of jokes and scorn, partly because of the massive presence of groups lobbying for taxpayer handouts – but London is like Washington, Los Angeles and New York combined in that the UK media is almost entirely located in London.  So what preoccupies the London media becomes the preoccupation of most of the country with Scotland and Northern Ireland being partial and honourable exceptions to this generalisation.

What preoccupies London media people above all are themselves.  This week, starting Saturday in the Times, appears to be Lesbian week, kicking off with a 3,000 word article by Jeanette Winterson, the writer and long-standing advocate of the need for society to accept homosexual practice as normal.  The article is built round the lives of half-a-dozen assorted well-off good-looking female celebrities who have declared themselves homosexual. This emboldens Winterson to ask rhetorically if “gay is the new normal” in a distant echo of Trevor Howard’s famous film line, “In my youth we horse-whipped homosexuals; now we have to tolerate them, soon it will be compulsory”.  But for all the attention they receive in the London media, homosexuals are a very tiny minority in the country at large.  While various government departments “guess at 5-6% of the population”, detailed confidential surveys show much smaller numbers.

The only remotely scientific survey on the matter in recent times was published in 1994 by Blackwell Scientific Publications Ltd under the title “Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles”, an entirely confidential survey of nearly 19,000 adults no less, selected randomly from across the whole country, ensuring that all occupations and age groups over 18 were properly represented.

This survey showed that that the proportion of male homosexuals is about 1.3% of the adult male population and the proportion of female homosexuals about 0.6%  – around 0.5 million individuals in total.  These are not of course evenly spread round the country.  As with any distinctive self-conscious group, like attracts like, and it is clear that disproportionately many homosexuals congregate in the media and arts professions, most of which are centred in London.  This wouldn’t matter to the rest of us at all except as we noted at the beginning of this post, London through its media thus gives an exaggerated view of homosexual numbers, not only to British people, but also to foreign visitors.  This exaggeration has had a hugely distorting effect in public administration, notably in recruitment to certain police forces, who have felt themselves obliged to obey the Home Office’s London-based targets for homosexual recruitment, among other so-called diversity targets.

Possibly it is a coincidence on the eve of the Pope’s visit, but the Times on Tuesday, September 14^th, ran another long article about Lesbian agonising.  This certainly lends support to Cardinal Walter Kasper’s other remarks about “aggressive secularism” in Britain for which he had to cancel his visit at the Pope’s side.

Every week the four ‘quality’ newspapers distribute about 30,000 tonnes of newsprint between them or 1.5 million tonnes in a full year of which a great deal is focussed on ‘celebs’ of one sort or another. 

A week’s reading of one of the ‘qualities’ is about 800,000 words or about 8-10 novels per week, say 400 per year.  Can anyone, except the writers and their subjects, possibly keep up with even a tenth of this output, for which some millions of trees are cut down and processed each year?  In the face of this can anyone take the broadsheets seriously when they publish yet another article on the London metrosexual’s second most earnest preoccupation after themselves – sustainable green policies?

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