Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
A couple of weeks back I wrote a piece for the magazine about the debate over the Schonrocks, a family living in south London who allowed their two children – aged five and eight years – to cycle to school unaccompanied. The school had told them to desist from this practice because it was dangerous.
Must admit I’m thoroughly enjoying the government’s fury that decent, white, Christian, blind people keep getting chucked off buses because Muslims object to them. Apparently there is something in the Koran warning that if you brush up against a blind person, or get his saliva on your hand, it is haram – which means no
Some new public conveniences at a shopping centre in Rochdale will include two hole-in-the-ground squat toilets in order to make the area’s Asian population feel more at home. These innovations are apparently known as “Nile pans”, although I must say I have never heard them called this. I’ve heard them called “holes in the ground”,
This link was sent to me by my friend Belette. I am not sure if it makes it more or even less appropriate that one of the dancers is a survivor of Auschwitz. More, I suppose. Though I’ll bet it wasn’t his idea. Anyway, apologies if it causes offence; my own view is that it
What on earth is the government going to do about all these deranged northerners running amok shooting people? The more callous among you might well argue that it doesn’t really matter, as these madmen are only shooting other northerners, and so it is therefore none of our business. Perhaps. But there is no guarantee that
Just a quick one: who do you think is the more truly fucking stupid, the legions of thick Geordies who have signed the Facebook campaign claiming that Raoul Moat was a “legend”, or the outgoing chair of Ofsted Zenna Atkins, who said that it was good for schools to have incompetent or useless teachers because
I was largely behind Charles Moore’s rebellion against the BBC license fee. Partly for aesthetic reasons – I don’t like Jonathan Ross, and the truth is I wouldn’t like him much better if he were paid only £6 per year, rather than £6m. Partly too for a reason of which I expect Charles himself would
I’d hate to come across as a snob, but is the seaside town of Blackpool really worthy of UNESCO world heritage status, as is currently being suggested? Does it, you know, punch its weight alongside the Great Wall of China and the Acropolis? I thought it was just somewhere for Glaswegians to vomit. I’ve been
Louise Bagshaw, one of the new intake of Conservative MPs perhaps unkindly called Tory Totty because they are not, actually, terrifyingly ugly, has put her head above the parapet on the subject of rape. She is opposing plans to give men charged with rape anonymity in court. Women who accuse a man of rape are
It’s odd, says Rod Liddle, that we mollycoddle our children while insisting that they can decide what’s right or wrong When I was six years old and on holiday at my grandparents’ house I would spend every day, with a lunch box of egg and cress sandwiches, up at Darlington railway station, watching the trains.
I read Dan Hannan’s blog about the recent Spectator debate in which we argued about whether or not Britain was so completely knackered that we all ought to leave the place right now. I thought we should, Dan thought we should hang around for a bit longer. Anyway, on his blog Dan made reference to
I bumped into Alan Yentob at The Spectator party last week. A good man who has both produced and presented some of the BBC’s best programmes over the last few decades. If there wasn’t a BBC, we wouldn’t have those programmes, or anything like them; the BBC exists through a sort of moral cross-subsidisation –
I asked my local greengrocer for a couple of blood oranges last weekend. They were to go with an orange cake I’d baked for some left-wing friends who were coming over — a nice left-wing cake, I thought. No flour or butter in it (both right-wing ingredients, historically), just ground almonds, eggs, sugar and oranges.
An interesting piece in The Guardian which suggests that people in warmer, hotter, more southerly countries (they mean Africa but dare not say it) might have lower IQs than people in the north, on account of some mysterious process by which the body devotes too much energy and resources to fighting infectious diseases and not
The Telegraph ran a piece which virtually repeated my blog about young black men and crime figures in London. Here it is. I’ll be writing more about this later in the week, when I’ve tied down a few more details about the original complaint, supposedly from a “private individual” to the PCC about my blog.
The general public seems split in two over who to blame for England’s latest abject failure at the world cup and our consequent exit. People who support one of the big six or seven teams in the Premier League blame the England manager, Fabio Capello. The rest of us blame the players. The division reinforces
Years ago I used to spend one evening a month in some dank and frowzy local authority hall attempting to prevent crazed and scary lesbians from becoming my local MP or councillor. This was during my time as a Labour party activist in south London — and attendance at the staggeringly dull ward meetings was
I’m not quite sure where I stand on the subject of Chris Huhne and his new weird-looking quasi-lesbo missus, Carina Trimingham. I don’t entirely understand why Huhne has copped so much flak for having left his wife, divorce – as I know – being a sort of occupational hazard of the modern middle classes. Huhne
“Comrades of the North Korean Democratic Republic – extraordinary news! Against all the odds your heroic socialist representatives at the western junket known as The World Cup have vanquished one of the most filthy running dog imperial powers, Portugal. With the Great Leader as their inspiration, and Juche in their hearts, they set about the
How quickly they’ve all turned, the supposed football experts who, three months ago, were proclaiming Fabio Capello as the greatest manager since Sir Alf. Praising the discipline he imposed upon his team, praising his “flexible” 4-4-2 formation. Two adverse results against crap teams is all it took. Now he was wrong to have been strict