Music Forums Brought Down a British Politician in About Two Days

Music forums on the early internet were… not entirely great places to say the least. Just ask Jared O'Mara, the Labour Member of Parliament for Sheffield Hallam – he unseated ex-Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg at the 2017 general election – who has now been suspended by the party because of new allegations of recent sexist behaviour, as well as the shit he used to post on various sites. Everyone's a hero on the Drowned in Sound message boards until you're being publicly dragged for making gross jokes about fingering 15 years later, right?

Over the last week or so, political blog Guido Fawkes (basically the burnbook, libertarian, roots-in-the-rightwing TMZ of Westminster) has been dredging up various blogs and forum posts from Jared's past. They don't make great reading, especially not from someone who was part of a Women and Equalities select committee. O'Mara frequented music forums in the 2000s, and wrote reviews for local sites, and they're peppered with slurs from the misogynistic to the homophobic, and also just downright cringe.

A review of an Arctic Monkeys live show – on a website named after a Reverend and the Makers song, which, no comment – used the phrase "sexy little slags" (probably a reference to the "Dancing Shoes" lyric "you sexy little swine" but still not brilliant). And a piece about the Sheffield band Shot Dead described them as "even better than receiving fellatio from the beautifully pert lips and wet mouth of Angelina Jolie" (OK seriously my dude work on your metaphors, this is literally just a chance to make a weird, masturbatory joke and says nothing about the music, smh). Unfortunately, because Shot Dead's music was uploaded to MySpace, it's lost in the ether, but we did find this interview with them:

One member responds to a "best album ever question" with Reel Big Fish's Big Noise. He is being serious.

On top of his apparently questionable music taste, things do not look particularly bright for O'Mara. As it stands, he is suspended from the Labour party pending investigation, following calls for the move from across the Commons and within the Labour party itself.

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