Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
Harriet Harman has been forced to apologise for having called Danny Alexander a “ginger rodent”. Her “quip” came as the highlight of a speech to the Scottish Labour Party Conference; we in Labour are conservationists, we love the red squirrel, but there’s one ginger rodent we never want to see in Scotland and that’s Danny
Should northerners, with their interminable pies and poverty, be allowed on to the BBC political discussion programme, Question Time? The corporation is being accused of “bias” because last week’s show came from Middlesbrough, a town with high unemployment and a large proportion of public sector jobs due for the axe. The Transport Minister, Philip Hammond,
The guitarist Keith Richards is perhaps most famous for having constructed a short and very simple rhythmic musical phrase, over the top of which his colleague Mick Jagger expressed an increasing irritation at being unable to acquire, in both general and specific terms, any kind of ‘satisfaction’ — despite, as he proceeded to explain, repeatedly
I just wondered if, henceforth, there should be a parental advisory label at the top of this blog, so that incredibly angry and maybe homicidal Welsh people whose names are almost devoid of vowels can follow it only if they have their parents with them to help. Or better, maybe, I could underscore stuff which
I hope you are as delighted as me at the fact that our financial commitment to overseas aid will increase by more than 30 percent over the next few years. I suspect they’re all leaping up and down with delight in Middlesbrough, Liverpool, Stoke, Cardiff and so on, too, as the dole queues grow longer.
I see that the BBC has been told there will be no increase in its license fee plus it must look after the World Service and S4C. Good. It should increase the funding to the World Service, which is one of the few things foreigners like about Britain and which pitches its journalism on a
Delingpole Redux. James has responded to my post in his blog to all those true and fervent non-believers at the Telegraph. The headline reads “Rod Liddle Knows Less About Climate Change Than I know About Millwall”. And there, just about, we have it – as I said, the political correctness of the right, mirroring the
What’s happened to James Delingpole’s sense of humour? He is one of the funniest writers in the country, acute and truthful and unworried by the constant spite and derision of the faux left libtard bien pensant arseholes who swarm around the internet like sea lice around a sewage outlet pipe. He is also, I ought
Amsterdam Be careful if you are planning to attack a Jew in Amsterdam. What you see is not always what you get. Throw a rock or spit at some bloke with long curly sidelocks and a yarmulke and before you know it you might end up handcuffed in the back of a police van. What
Just back from Amsterdam, via the train, or two trains at least. The list of stations speeding by sounded like a drunken Scotsman’s tirade: Sloten, Dordrecht, Mechelen, Duffel, ya Delft bastard. I was there for the magazine, to write a piece about an increase in anti-Semitism in the country and especially in Amsterdam itself. The
Has anyone else had enough of John McTernan, appearing on a political discussion programme near you at this very moment? McTernan was Tony Blair’s political organiser, a backroom monkey who, since May this year has decided we should all be able to benefit from his incalculable wisdom. Thin eyed and smug he has been wrong
My favourite headline for many a month is in this morning’s Guardian: “Black Britons at more risk of jail than black Americans.” This suggests jail is a debilitating communicable disease, perhaps something like scarlet fever, which visits itself upon people entirely regardless of their behaviour. The headline accompanies an article based upon the latest report
David Davis is the ghost at the coalition’s feast And then, somewhere behind the arras, there is David Davis. Every Conservative party conference has an arras, and this year’s arras is a very pretty one, embroidered in sky blue and a pale yellow the shade of stale egg yolks, hardly yellow at all, depicting a
I assume you are au fait with the latest research on solar activity and its effects upon climate change, the research for which was undertaken at Imperial College, London. This latest stuff suggests that contrary to what had been expected, when solar activity increases it has a counter-intuitively depressing effect on the climate of the
A remarkable lack of nerve shown by the Conservative Party over the cuts to Child Benefit, don’t you think? It occurred to me, when the announcement was made, that this would be an almost uniformly popular measure. Those on the left like would it because it smacks of progressiveness, those on the right wouldn’t mind
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching the left try to attack these changes to child benefit changes from the left. The truth is it is a far more “progressive” policy than Labour would have dared, or indeed did dare, throughout its thirteen years in power. I suppose it is easier for the Conservatives to get away with
I suppose the labour movement should be very happy that the Tolpuddle Martyrs were not led by BBC newsreaders. This week’s strike has been called off following the intervention of extremely high paid corporation stars such as Fiona Bruce and Huw Edwards urging their badly paid colleagues not to down tools. They were worried that
There is a view, prevalent among a sizeable minority of people in this country, and particularly within the angry, fat and drunk white underclass, that one day very soon the green flag of Islam will fly above Westminster and Britain will have become a Muslim country, by stealth. This is the snarled and yet resigned reaction
I am not sure why David Miliband is getting such an easy ride at the moment. Perhaps this is mean-spirited and insensitive of me, although I have nothing against the chap. But it does strike me that his likely decision not to stand for the shadow cabinet and instead to “leave front line politics”, perhaps
The difficult question for me is who were the 0.88 per cent of Labour MPs, and 2.5 per cent of Labour members, who thought that Diane Abbott was the best possible person to lead the Labour Party? Admittedly this is the sort of proportion of voters who at elections decide to select the candidate from
