Toilet paper

There’s something smelly about this Star front page:

It looks smelly. And by heck it is smelly. The claim that Rochdale Council has wasted YOUR money on toilets that can only be used by Muslims (how will they know?) is bollocks for two reasons:

• No Council has done anything
• The toilets aren’t just for Muslims

You can see the problem.

This story originally appeared, as far as I can tell, in yesterday’s Manchester Evening News. It notes:

Managers at the Rochdale Exchange are introducing the squat toilets, also known as Iranian toilets, following demand by shoppers in the diverse town.

That would be the, er, Rochdale Exchange shopping centre, would it? The one that raises money by leasing out private shop space, and therefore whose spending has fuck all to do with the Council? Yes, that’d be it.

The Star actually does include the fact that it’s the shopping centre that’s installing these toilets. In fact, the only mention of the Council is here:

The pans were installed after centre management attended a “cultural” training course with community activist Ghulam Rasul Shahzad.

Shahzad, an ex-Rochdale Council training officer, runs courses on “cultural understanding and community cohesion”.

He took shopping centre manager Lorenzo O’Reilly on a tour around the town’s Central Mosque, even showing him the loos. And Mr O’Reilly decided to provide one squat hole in the ladies’ and one in the gents’ for “cultural reasons”.

See that prefix? Ex-? That means he is no longer. Somehow, the Star has transformed a former Council employee offering advice that is then taken up by a private company into

Council wastes YOUR money on hole-in-the-ground toilets

The Press Association even reports a spokesperson for the centre as saying it was a business decision to meet the needs of the community. I know it’s late, but this makes my face hurt.

Okay, so I think we’ve established that Rochdale Council hasn’t had anything to do with this, unless you make it accountable for former employees’ future actions. And you don’t, so it didn’t. What about the second point, that the toilets are ‘Muslim-only’?

What with it being ten to two in the morning, I can’t contact the Exchange Centre, and I’m away without internet from 7am today until sometime on Friday. But I can say with some certainty that this is just as wrong as the Council rubbish. Why? Because nowhere else has reported it.

Normally that wouldn’t be a guarantee, I grant you. But this is the Star. It’s not Woodward and Bernstein. And in the absence of any corroborating quote from anyone, even some desperate rent-a-cunt who can barely open the hole in his face, I’ve no hesitation in calling this out as the nasty lie it surely is.

Ah, I hear you say, eager to defend the Star. Could it not be that ‘Muslim-only’ does not refer to the future users of these toilets, but the traditional users? After all, the Star does say that

[t]he Middle Eastern-style squat holes, just a hole in the ground, are common in Asia.

That would be shaky, very shaky, but possibly just about technically defensible. Thankfully, the Manchester Evening News is back to set us straight:

The toilets, which are common in Pakistan and India, are preferred by some Asian families for cultural reasons.

…

Squatting toilets are the norm in many countries throughout the world – including China, Japan, Argentina and Turkey.

So no, it could not be that.

When even the Mail and the Sun can cover a story about Muslims with just a bit of bickering about diversity but you can’t, something’s gone wrong. This is an irresponsible, inaccurate, disgraceful piece of writing.

(In the next couple of days I will be writing a complaint to the PCC about this piece under article 1.i of the Editors’ Code of Conduct. All correspondence will also be posted to this blog in a dedicated post.)

UPDATE: The PCC complaint is here. And thanks to Howard Hockin for flagging up the Council’s response.

UPDATE: In fact there is a statement suggesting that the toilets are for anyone, from Ghulam Rasul Shahzad himself:

“The toilets are open to anyone, it’s not exclusive and anyone can use them.”