Pete Cashmore: Twitter humble pie, exam disgust, team tag & new political power

If you gathered together all of the offence taken on Twitter on any given day and somehow managed to convert it into electricity – hey, I'm sure they must have the technology somewhere – then we'd never need fossil fuels again. We could all grow old, powering our televisions and charging up our hybrid vehicles from the power of people on Twitter getting upset about things that don't matter.

This week's chief offender is, believe it or not, a pie. But not just any pie. This is an M&S pie. And it's an M&S pie that has been called racist. Just take a moment to digest that (literally, if you happen to want a pie right now). A pie that somebody somewhere has called racist. What times we live in!

The pie in question is one of curried lamb with mango chutney and onion seed, which sounds pretty delicious to me, and it goes by the name of 'Empire Pie'. And herein lies the rub for the easily offended. To those who have slammed M&S for their grotesque racism, the word 'Empire' carries with it connotations of colonialism, of slavery, of the forced subjugation of nations and many, many deaths. Even so, one might argue that it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that a pie's name in any way suggests that these were good things.

It has been revealed that the Empire Pie was so called because it was first invented by an Indian chef during the days of the British Empire, and thus suggested that a more politically correct name for the pie might be the Commonwealth Pie.

Well, to M&S I say this: Do not change the name of your pie. Leave your delicious, moist (I'm basically hoping they're going to send me some free samples here) pie exactly as it is. If you are cowed into renaming your pie due to the online whinings of a minority of people who could find something to get offended about in an episode of the Teletubbies, then we will, as a people, have suffered a collective loss to said people. And I can no more stomach that than I can stomach a substandard pie, of the type sold at lesser high street retailers.

There are, of course, some things worth getting offended about, and I'm pretty sure this qualifies as one of them.

It is, in a nutshell, a homophobic maths exam. Now, you might well think that a maths exam can be homophobic in much the same way that a pie can be racist – that is to say, it can't and people are being silly.

But the exam in question, given to pupils at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, happened to contain this question:

"If in a town 70 per cent of the men are married to 90 per cent of the women (and each marriage is between one man and woman, as God intended when he made humans male and female) what percentage of the adult population are married?"

It's the words in brackets that seem to have got people all upset. The school explained that the questions in the exam were written voluntarily by a former teacher who had since retired, the inference perhaps being that it was composed by a dotty old buzzard with too much time on his hands. The school apologised for the question's inclusion amid no small amount of outrage. I myself am horrified by the question, mainly because I got an A in GCSE maths and I don't know the answer. I suspect that it's 80 per cent but the fact I don't know for sure suggests that I am slowly getting more stupid, and before you know it, will be the kind of person who gets offended by racist pies.

It's not all doom and gloom in this week's column.

In among all the moaning, there's always room for joy and fun and laughter, and so it gives me great pleasure to reveal that there is a group of men in the United States who have been playing a game of 'tag' for 23 years.

By this, I don't mean that they have been playing non-stop for 23 years, that would be exhausting. But every February, for one month, they play tag and the man who is 'it' attempts to tag another player on a global scale. One of the group, they claim, spends the whole month in Hawaii so as to make it more logistically difficult for him to become 'it'. Needless to say, I love this story and am going to suggest to the top brass at the E&S that we institute it immediately as a method of team-building. And then I'm off to Hawaii for a month to wait it out.

Writing as I do for the nation's leading local newspaper, I have become, via simple osmosis, something of an expert on the current political scene, which I would summon up thusly: they're generally a bunch of hapless berks and buffoons.

What our nation needs is no-nonsense politicians who will speak their mind and not care for social niceties and the general avoidance of offence. We need politicians like the Phillippines' president Rodrigo Duterte, who has a simple message for his political opponents: I am going to eat you.

Yes, President Duterte is not a man to take militant opposition lightly, and has therefore informed extremist militants in his homeland that he intends to quash their movement by eating them. "They will pay. When the time comes, I will eat you in front of people," he informed his opponents in a recent rally.

There's a lot of hyperbole spoken in the world of politics, but unless I miss my guess, I think the President is actually being serious here.

It's certainly an interesting way of dealing with political opposition, and begs the question: How much seasoning would you need before you'd consider eating Michael Gove?