Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible. I’d like the art therapists to be next, if at all possible. I mean, next in line for the national outpouring of bile and contumely. My closest friend is an art therapist and his smugness is beginning to get my goat, especially coming
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Tony Little, the headmaster of Eton, recently told me that he thought teacher training colleges tended to make people worse teachers rather than better. As the head of an independent school, Mr Little is allowed to appoint who he wants to his teaching staff, and regularly appoints those who have not been through the vacuous
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Do you remember the vicious debates back in the middle of the 1990s about whether or not we should join the single European currency? We don’t have that argument much any more; even the Liberal Democrats keep their traps shut about it these days and try to change the subject when any one mentions it.
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I realise that in most cases, the following is not something which concerns you terribly. Further, the point I’m making has been made over and over again this last decade or so. But this year it’s a sort of parody of a parody itself. Consider; top of the bill the witless showbiz caterwauling of Beyonce,
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I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’. I am thinking of starting up a free internet site called ‘Cancer and House Prices’. Every day, a new piece of information, which I will make up, about tumours and property values and perhaps how these two phenomena are unexpectedly
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It is henceforth illegal for schools to ban certain haircuts because they believe them to be evidence of gang membership. A High Court Judge, Justice Collins, has deemed it to be a form of indirect racial discrimination. A school in Harrow had banned the braided “cornrow” hairstyle because they feared it was worn as a
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What do you suppose the chances are of this being the coldest June since records began, or maybe the dampest June since records began? My guess is that it will almost certainly be the most dramatic of some climatic variation since records began; paradoxically, every other month is. Every season is. Every year is. Every
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This post is primarily for the nigger-obsessed idiot Mike99, who kindly contributed to a previous thread and bandied the offensive word around like George Wallace on amphetamines. But hopefully others will join in the debate too. Dambusters, then, and Stephen Fry’s remake of the famous film in which Guy Gibson’s dog will be renamed “Digger”,
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The received wisdom seems to be that while the government is, as Charles Clarke put it, utterly incoherent and inept, devoid of strategy and consistency of policy, Cameron is getting away with it because he has held office for only a year, ie he is still “new”. However, the same magnanimity of received wisdom has
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The problem with AC Grayling’s new super university is that stigma will attach to it similar to that which has attached itself to, say, the University of Central Neasden. In that it is possessed of pretensions which its graduate body will not be able to match. Its clients will be drawn from the ranks of
From our UK edition
Our womenfolk are taking to the streets again in an attempt to convince us that they should be allowed to be called sluts without men thinking they might be ‘sluts’. Our womenfolk are taking to the streets again in an attempt to convince us that they should be allowed to be called sluts without men
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Do we agree with the overseas development minister, Andrew Mitchell, that we should take as much pride in our massive overseas aid budget as we do in the Queen and the Armed Forces? Mitchell has announced that he intends to make Britain a “world superpower” of development money. I’m not sure quite what this means.
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Should we be as worked up as the Mail on Sunday about a BBC Radio Four panellist implying the word “cunt” in a show broadcast at six thirty in the evening? The paper has got itself into a right old lather. Apparently, Sandi Toksvig made the typically hilarious “quip”, that “The Tories have put the
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I don’t know if any of you were watching that England game. Maybe like me you did so half reluctantly, disliking the players because they are in the main ignorant, overpaid, under-achieving and consumed with hubris. But if you did you will have felt that familiar despond; it was a game the Swiss deserved to
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It is a matter of great comfort to me, as a football fan, that all the allegations made against the various Fifa delegates have been shown to be utter fabrications. I had been a little worried. We know now, though, that they are utter fabrications because the boss of Fifa, Sepp Blatter, a man of
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I took the Caledonian sleeper train from London Euston to Glasgow on Sunday night. This is what the train did: it left Euston at 2330 and made its way to just south of Watford Junction, where it waited for twenty minutes. Then it went back south, on a different line, to just north of Kings
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At last we crusaders for truth can reveal exactly what happened when a famous footballer who is married met the former Big Brother contestant, Imogen Thomas. I suppose you could guess what happened, but it’s better to know for sure, isn’t it? Don’t worry, we’ll use phrases like ‘asked her to perform a sex act’
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I suppose it’s wrong to lock people up for crimes they didn’t commit. But nonetheless, if George Davis had served his full sentence for an armed robbery which he probably didn’t commit in 1975, then he wouldn’t have been able to take part in the armed robbery on the Bank of Cyprus two years later,
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Tired of the BBC’s bias over the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? So too is The Guardian, and a new book More Bad News from Israel by Greg Philo and Mike Berry. However, their weariness is with what they see as the BBC’s pro-Israeli bias. Berry and Philo, according to The Guardian, “find that the Israeli explanation of
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I think we’re all very relieved that Vicky Pryce, the estranged wife of the Cabinet minister Chris Huhne, is not motivated by revenge in writing a book about her ex-husband and dobbing him in to the police. I think we’re all very relieved that Vicky Pryce, the estranged wife of the Cabinet minister Chris Huhne,
