Caveat Coda: an inadvertent masterclass from Julie Burchill, of all people

I wasn't planning on writing about the situation which arose at the weekend again, but sometimes the universe drops something in your lap which is too good not to use. And so it was yesterday, with a demonstration of the correct way to respond to your publisher being exposed as a bigot coming from Julie Burchill of all people. 

Now let me begin by saying that I do not usually consider Julie Burchill a moral exemplar, and most of the time my rule in all things is to try and behave better than she would in any given situation. Burchill is a massive transphobe, and she was recently successfully sued for damages by Ash Sarkar after she tweeted Ash with the same kind of Islamophobic shit I've had screamed in my face when I've gone on demos against neo-Nazis. The fact that the book Burchill is shopping around publishers bears the thuddingly witless title Welcome to the Woke Trials on its own ought to be enough to establish that generally speaking, she's not someone to emulate. 

But having said that, when Tabitha Stirling, the sole director of Stirling Publishing (who had stepped in to publish Burchill's screed after Little, Brown dropped it as a result of Burchill's Islamophobia), was outed as a member of the fascist group Patriotic Alternative, Burchill withdrew her book from that publisher. 

 Now, I don't have any doubt that Burchill only did this because of the optics - she had previously described Tabitha as 'just like me', and Stirling's husband had ran for Edinburgh Council on behalf of the definitely-not-fascist-sounding For Britain party in 2018, so the clues were there - but the fact remains that, when informed of links between her publisher and a bigoted organisation, Burchill took material action even at the cost of inconvenience to herself. 

I never thought I would find myself saying nice things about Julie Burchill, even if only in comparison with someone else. Because remember the poet I mentioned back at the start of Saturday's article - the guy whose poem written on the back of the murdered body of Sarah Everard was so rubbish I felt forced to intervene? Well, I made him aware of what I discovered about Valiant Scribe after he posted so happily about them agreeing to publish said poem. And did he do what Burchill did when the fact he was being published by a bunch of bigots was brought to his attention?

Reader, he did not: 

I don't know about you, but I would like to think that, when it came time to make a choice (even, perhaps, a 'choice of life', though my being trans certainly wasn't something I chose), I'd behave with more integrity than Julie Burchill, but there you go. Poets, eh?