5 Feet of Fury

Julie Burchill and the Dire Straits ruling: what makes a hate crime?

Julie Burchill writes:

…the only thing that ever seemed remarkable about Dire Straits was that they looked the only act where the roadies had locked the band in the dressing room and gone onstage in their place.

Then has a go at Vanessa Redgrave:

I find it fascinating that, as a woman who had a gay dad and a gay husband, Redgrave persists in backing cultures which find homosexuality an abomination – the Chechen nationalists, the Palestinian goons, those in favour of Irish unification and now the Travellers. Is this some unconscious hostility she is working out?