Rod Liddle

Here’s the headline from the Daily Mail: Family of 12 from Luton - including a baby and two grandparents who are suffering from diabetes and cancer - feared to have joined ISIS  It undoubtedly says something about me that my first reaction upon reading the story was: yay – result! That’s saved us all quite a few bob, no? Carry on like this and we might clear the national debt. I have no sympathy for, or empathy with, these people. Except a slight suspicion that by joining Islamic State, they are probably doing the right thing. By their own lights. Would that more might follow. These people have looked at Britain and thought – nah, don’t want that. So off they go to ally themselves with people more of their own frame of mind. Why is this not a good thing?

Tesco is in trouble for religious insensitivity. A store in east London had a special Ramadan promotion. Prominently positioned within its offers were Smokey Bacon Flavour Pringles © - and of course, hackles have consequently been raised. It matters not a jot that the re-constituted and hydrogenised potato snack contain no pork products whatsoever – the Smokey Bacon Flavour © is a consequence of some chemical by-product of depleted uranium or deep freezing the underwear of various local tramps, whatever. It’s enough to arouse fury, even if Muslims are prohibited only from eating pig itself, not stuff that might pass itself off as pig. Good. You kowtow to this religion with a 'Ramadan Mubarak' promotion, you deserve all you get.

Where would you rather live, Dewsbury or Bradford? I ask because it seems that there are probably some good property deals to be had in this particular corner of West Yorkshire right now, as a consequence of half the population decamping to Syria in order to blow themselves up. I mean, property was pretty cheap already — in Savile Town, Dewsbury, right in the heart of the Muslim ghetto, you can buy a nice grey stone cottage for not much more than fifty grand. Two beds, back yard, only a stone’s throw from the local sharia court and that vast mosque run by those jovial extremists Tablighi Jamaat. But it’ll be even cheaper now, I would guess.

If you ever doubted it was the case, here’s the final proof that in the UK, Health and Safety legislation trumps everything. Tamanna Begum, a Sunni Muslim nursery school 'teacher' in Essex, has just lost an employment appeal tribunal. She wanted to wear a full head to toe Darth Vader style jilbab to work. Her employer preferred that she would not. The tribunal decided that the employer was within his rights as the jilbab was 'reasonably regarded as a tripping hazard.' Not that it was scary for the kids, or embodied sexism, or was alien to our way of life – simply that the stupid woman might trip over it. The only thing that matters.

I have spent the last few days posing with a tampon as part of an international campaign to demystify the important issue of menstruation. I do not usually menstruate myself, although out of a wish to show solidarity with those who do I set aside five or six days each month to behave in a grotesquely irrational and bad-tempered manner, snapping at people for no reason and moaning a lot. As a man this seems to be the very least that I can do, an attempt at empathy which still recognises my privileged position as a male. The campaign which I mentioned — and I would urge you all to take part in it — is called JustATampon.

There is a genuine madness in our current operation to ferry as many asylum seekers as possible from North Africa to, eventually, the UK. As I mentioned at the time we dispatched the Royal Navy to the southern Med, we will only encourage more and more people to set sail in upturned bath-tubs and patched-up lilos. Among them will be maniacal jihadis and assorted criminals, all expecting to be rescued by the countries which, in some cases, they wish to destroy. For the ordinary non-jihadi citizens it means a jumping of the queue over those who attempt to gain access to the imperialist west legally. For a fuller exposition of this problem I would direct you to Max Hastings’s article in the Daily Mail. Max also deals with the effect upon our depleted armed services.

My favourite moment in the crisis engulfing football’s governing body, Fifa, came with the intervention of a man called Manuel Nascimento Lopes. Manuel is the Fifa delegate from Guinea-Bissau, an African country which occupies 130th place in the Fifa world rankings but which, far more importantly in this context, punches well above its weight when it comes to institutionalised corruption. Thirteenth in the world, according to the organisation Transparency International — not a bad showing for a smallish sub-Saharan rathole which has been almost permanently engulfed in civil war since the Portuguese got the hell out.

Yet another exciting discovery from the world of Islamic science. As you are probably aware, Islamic culture has always paid a high regard to science and Muslims will tell you proudly that they invented absolutely nothing. That is, they have provided the world with the mathematical representation of absolutely nothing, what we now know as zero. Where would we be without nothing? In the tenth century the scholar Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Khwarizmi decided that it would be useful to draw a little circle to signify zero if you were doing some complex calculation. He called it sifr.

Still inside that bubble, David Aaronovitch informs us that, regardless of the election result, we are all of a metrosexual mindset, whatever that is. Like it or not, the country as a whole is becoming 'more like' London. This was written in response to the slings and arrows flung at Labour for neglecting its northern, English, working-class base – something I’ve been banging on about for at least fifteen years (and perhaps until now to no avail whatsoever). I think David ought to shift his fat arse and get out a bit more. There has always been a deep resistance to and suspicion of the identity politics and race-obsession of the white London middle class.