Comment: The Baby Borrowers backlash isn’t just foolish – it’s offensive.

Weeks into 2007 and we’re already mourning the first Parliamentary casualty – our old friend proportionality. Speechmakers have deserted rigour and reason, putting their faith instead in the random and the ridiculous. Take Gordon Brown for example, and his claim that Iraq policy is ‘in a rut’. 655,000 have died and the Chancellor describes it as ‘in a rut?! 655,000 ≠ a rut. It seems the master of numbers has fumbled his figures.

The ludicrous exaggeration is in fashion as well. And nowhere more so than amongst the cavalcade of Norfolk MPs who expressed their disproportionate disdain over BBC’s The Baby Borrowers, a reality television programme which teaches a pack of preening teenage prima donnas that a baby needs more attention than the average Tamagotchi. According to Norman Lamb the programme amounted to an ‘abuse of children’, while Beccles backbencher Richard Bacon branded the show a ‘grotesque display of human misery’.

Viewed on its own, this upheaval seems foolish, but place it in a wider context and it’s plain offensive. The trials and tribulations of parenthood are a daily reality for many teenagers – many of whom face a bitter battle with poverty. If anything The Baby Borrowers should have made us despair at the cruel expectations we placed on teenage parents, and how little the state helps them.

Over at Channel 4 a similarly impotent moral debate churns on. “You’re treating them like slaves” yelps Jade Goody. Her adversary, Ken Russell, indifferently reiterates the facts – “That’s what they are, my girl”. “But they’re real people – they’re human beings” cries Jade with desperate sincerity.

Again, Miss Goody’s emotional convictions seem rather foolish, but one cannot dispute the genuine anger behind them. So aren’t her passionate protests a little wasted in this virtual vacuum of reality television? Couldn’t Jade’s “they’re real people” battlecry be put to better use outside of this lewd laboratory of swelling egos and hidden cameras? In the real world – a world blighted with injustices like Guantanamo Bay and sweatshop labour.

Or are we so engrossed by television that we’ve forgotten that world (It was of course Orwell’s biggest error – Big Brother isn’t watching everyone; everyone is watching Big Brother). Or was this a deliberate choice? Have we forsaken reality? Have we adopted reality television as our celebrity-littered snow-globe world? Has the rule of the red button and the text-vote referendum satisfied our yearning G-d complexes?

From Big Brother to beyond, the decisions are ours – who stays? Who goes? What’s right? What’s wrong? Reality television has made everyone a judge. But it’s time to think outside of the (idiot) box. Let’s look not to Big Brother, but to the bigger picture. Let’s lament not for babies borrowed, but for perspective lost.