The Raoul Moat affair has uncovered a seething pit of northern madness

pete johnson

I thought we were well past the dribbling North South prejudice which characterised the seventies.

Eff whay aye...

Moat wasn't from Northumberland. He was from Newcastle.

Facebook is, and always has been, driven by idiocy. Presumably that's why you read it.

You seem to claim that 18,000 people have signed up to the Facebook campaign? I just looked and it has 731 members. The moderator just posted an apology because he's too busy to delete all of the unsympathetic posts. However, there's a similarly named satirical site with 8,000 members. Perhaps that's the one you meant but you just didn't read any of the content?

I live in Newcastle and I've yet to meet one of the "thousands and thousands of supporters" you speak of. Everyone I've spoken to refers to him in terms which would just as adequately describe you.

Last years Home Office Crime stats set the rates for violent crime incidents in London at around 40,000 higher than the combined regions of North East and North West England. This area includes the cities of Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester and has a population of 9.25 million as compared to London at 7.2 million. The rates for both the North East and North West are falling. London reported no change. Last time I checked London was fairly and squarely within what is commonly perceived as South.

Tw*t

Oedipus Rex

Dead right about the surreal Di blubfest - it has launched an era of mass hysteria about just about anything, as if the nation was suffering from some kind of collective psychological illness.

The fact that, in this case, it is in reality a small minority doesn't change a thing - north or south.

Yam Yam

To paraphrase that immortal British gangster movie, 'Get Carter', "Some hard nuts operate up north, Rod. They won't take kindly to someone from London poking his bugle in."

Kevan

Though I agree that the north-south divide thing is a little beyond the pale, I couldn't agree more that our society contains a significant number of people who readily answer the description "...fabulously — almost inconceivably — stupid, illiterate, ill-educated but incredibly sure of their rights..." and that number, I fear is far greater than either we might imagine, need or should tolerate. Those illiterate half wits who do answer to this description need to have it impressed upon them that you have no rights what so ever, certainly not a right to respect unless you earn them/it. The only scum in this society are those under educated persons who believe they are the centre of the universe and act accordingly badly, without decorum, without manners and without intelligence.

Herbert Thornton

Of course Moat was nuts, but why point a finger at the North when the entire country is as mad as Rod's box of frogs, with the madness being especially concentrated in London? Mass hysteria and a desire to construct shrines are indeed endemic to the Establishment - evidenced by the degree to which it worships at the shrine of Political Correctness and by way it has encouraged so many millions of immigrants to settle in Britain, bringing with them their own special kinds of mass hysteria and building shrines all over the place.

There is a saying, centuries old, that "Those whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad."

From all the evidence, it seems that this time, the Gods are more determined than ever.