Obituary: Jade Goody | Media | guardian.co.uk.
Jade Goody's life says much about Britain. She was a mouthy, fun-loving working-class English girl. The sort of person Guardian readers pretend to care about. After all, their ideology proclaims such people as a vanguard class; a class so important that it deserves to exercise dictatorship. I have observed, in my own life, that when such middle class socialists actually meet the working class, they don't like us very much.
I grew up with girls like Jade. She shocked me, but not because (like hypocritical Guardian Socialists) I am a snob. I found it shocking that the state education system had left her not merely uneducated, but (until close to the end) unaware of it. The "shamelessness" the Guardian opines about is typical, but not surprising. After all, her teachers would have told her that her views were just as "valid" as anyone else's (regardless of whether they were grounded in study or experience). If they drilled anything into her, it was certainly not a love of literature or history. Rather it was the fear of being called certain dangerous names, such as "racist." How like a whipped pup she was, for all her exuberance, when she was called that taboo name.
She was not bright, but I have known many older people from similar backgrounds who read books and poems for pleasure and who could write a well-constructed and properly-spelled letter. She was betrayed by her country, which has sacrificed education on the altar of a bastardised Marxism. She was betrayed by our media too. They exploited her ignorance, set her up to fall, and then twisted trivial remarks to denounce her - ludicrously - as "Public Enemy No. 1". They whipped up other uneducated, ignorant people to shout "bitch" and "witch" at her, just as their ancestors might have done centuries before public education was invented. And now they have made a saint of her. Just as self-servingly.
Jade Goody was an ordinary woman, in extraordinary circumstances. In the end, I would like to think she made a fool of her tormentors. Albeit at the cost of some pain to everyone else suffering from cancer at present, with the help of the odious Max Clifford she turned their firepower on them. She made a fortune which (if her repellent husband doesn't get his crim mitts on it) will help to raise her children. Best of all, in her final weeks, she made the only intelligent comment of her short life. She said she realised she was uneducated (pace Archbishop Cranmer, that was her first glimmering of wisdom) and that she wanted to make the money to provide private education for her children. I hope they get it. If Mr Clifford put her in touch with a lawyer to establish a trust which will defend her wealth against her husband, mother and hangers-on, then I will be prepared to think my first good thought about him.
Jade Goody was a celebrity. She could have been so much more. Unlike the middle-class educationalists who dumb down our system because children like Jade (and me, in my time) "can't cope" or "have a short attention span", I know that the ordinary boys and girls of Britain have potential which is being squandered by the shedload. While the media sentimentalises an unfortunate drop of the ball on the roulette wheel of nature, spare a thought for all the Jades and Sharons and Toms who will never know the wonders of their culture. They will never live their lives to the full - whether cancer gets them or not - because of the evil Guardian readers (and writers) in Britain's educational establishment. Jade Goody's life was less pointless than that of such people. They waste the education they were lucky enough to receive by denying education to others. All on the basis of a crazed ideology that relentlessly demonises and destroys human potential.
Rest in peace, Jade. God rot you, Polly Toynbee and all your ilk.
