Columns

Thursday

Rod Liddle

If you’re stupid enough to let all these people in, at least treat them decently

We were on our way to a party in south-east London when my friend, Rob, saw the graffiti. Sprayed with painful neatness on a wall: ‘Support Jeremy’. It suited the area so well — a small quadrant of our capital city that the inhabitants I dare say still think is ‘edgy’, even now after they’ve got rid of all the blacks and the white working class by pricing them out of the market. Artisan bread shops and ‘community’ pubs and vegetarian cafés. Whereas once the occupants of this enclave were engaged in actual work — plumbers, electricians, drug dealers etc. — now I would wager almost all of them get their wages from you via grants and the NHS and what have you.

James Delingpole

Time to put my money where my mouth is

'As oil crashes, is it time to short solar stocks?’ Gosh, I wish I’d read that headline a year ago. The solar stock it tipped for doom in January 2015 has since plummeted from $19 to $2.65. Yes, hindsight can be a wonderful thing. But what if there were an area of the markets which you knew to be grotesquely overvalued as a result of ignorance, dishonesty, and false sentiment? You’d be mad not to bet against it, wouldn’t you? It would hardly be gambling: more like plain common sense. This is how I’ve felt for quite some time about the climate change industry. Very often when I read the expert commentators writing on the subject in the City pages, I’m shocked by how much more I know than they do.

Thursday

James Forsyth

The centre-right is failing world-wide – so what’s the secret of Cameron’s success?

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsrise-racismattheoscarsandcameronscentre-rightsecret/media.mp3" title="James Forsyth and Isabel Hardman discuss the PM's centre-right secret" startat=628] Listen [/audioplayer]There are times when Westminster’s obsession with US politics is embarrassing for even the strongest believer in the Anglo-American relationship. Monday was one of those days: MPs debated banning Donald Trump, the reality TV star turned presidential hopeful, from entering Britain. Leaving aside the illiberal absurdity of this, Trump hadn’t even said he was planning a visit. It was a pathetic attempt by MPs to insert themselves into the US presidential race. But what cannot be denied is the extent to which Trump is shaking up US politics.

Rod Liddle

The Oscars have a disgracefully racist record

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/donaldtrumpsrise-racismattheoscarsandcameronscentre-rightsecret/media.mp3" title="Rod Liddle and Tim Robey discuss whether the Oscars are racist" startat=1039] Listen [/audioplayer]In 2017 it will be exactly 50 years since a dapper Sidney Poitier announced to Rod Steiger, in the excellent film In The Heat of the Night: ‘They call me Mr Tibbs!’ Rod Steiger, playing a somewhat right-of-centre sheriff of a small town in Mississippi had hitherto been disposed to refer to Poitier — a senior policeman on his way home to Philadelphia — as ‘boy’, if you recall. I say the film was excellent, but the plotting was flawed, convoluted and unconvincing.

Hugo Rifkind

Corbynglish as a second language: a political dictionary of terms

Corbynterpretation [n]: The inevitable process of debate, after Jeremy Corbyn is interviewed, over what he actually meant. Does the Labour leader believe the killing of Osama bin Laden was a tragedy, or not believe this? Would he like Britain to negotiate with Daesh or would he be opposed to that happening? Would he, or would he not, abandon the Falkland Islands? As in, ‘Well, that’s a matter of Corbynterpretation’ or, ‘No, no, those remarks have been totally misCorbynterpreted.’ In order to Corbynterpret [v] one must first consider 1. Whether the Labour leader brought up the disputed view himself (invariably not) 2. Whether the Labour leader clearly said ‘yes’ after somebody asked him whether he held this view (invariably not) and 3.

Matthew Parris

Rhodes’s statue should remain, on one condition

Lobengula was the second king of the Matabele people in what is now Zimbabwe. He was also the last. Cecil John Rhodes smashed his authority, and broke his tribe. The Matabele (a breakaway people from the Zulu kingdom to the south) had been making their way north, and by the time Rhodes arrived on the scene were in effective control of a vast area of southern Africa, stretching from the Limpopo river to the Zambezi. Matabeleland was rich in -minerals and the tribe were being pestered by white prospectors. Rhodes saw his opportunity. He made an ally of Lobengula, who had been king since 1869, and in 1888 persuaded him to grant Rhodes’s emissaries an exclusive deal known as the Rudd Concession.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Bowie once praised Adolf Hitler… but he was always changing his tune

[audioplayer src="http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/projectfear/media.mp3" title="Rod Liddle and Kaite Welsh discuss David Bowie's legacy" startat=678] Listen [/audioplayer]I was desperately worried that you hadn’t read or heard enough platitudinous drivel about David Bowie — and therefore felt compelled to weigh in with my own observations. In all honesty I haven’t heard so much repetitive, imbecilic guff since Mandela shuffled off this mortal coil. It was even worse than the confected sobfest that greeted the passing of the charming and likeable Lou Reed.

James Delingpole

Nature is red in tooth and claw. Get over it

Wild Lone is one of the most violent books I’ve ever read. It was published just before the last war and it doesn’t pull its punches: mothers are slaughtered with their babies; brothers and sisters are eaten alive; callous parents look on indifferently as their sick children die slowly beneath them; the few survivors almost invariably succumb to disease, cold or starvation. Every child should read it, for it tells you how the world really is. The natural world, I mean. It was written by one of the last century’s great amateur naturalists, Denys Watkins-Pitchford, under his nom-de-plume ‘BB’ and it purports to be the biography of a ‘Pytchley fox’ called Rufus. Rufus is simultaneously the book’s hero and villain.

Mary Wakefield

I, robot. You, unemployed

One evening last autumn, four experts in the field of artificial intelligence arrived in Westminster with an urgent message for our government. There’s a robot revolution on the way, they said, and unless we prepare for it we’re in trouble. The briefing was a quiet affair — I was one of only a few journalists invited, for fear of headlines like ‘The Terminator is coming’. However, by the time the last A.I. expert had said his piece, it was hard to imagine how a hack could over-hype the story. Computers really are set to take over, it turns out. We’re rolling unstoppably towards servitude to machines. The four experts spoke in turn, each about a different point in the future, like biblical prophets warning of the End Times.

Thursday

Matthew Parris

Our leaders’ suicidal urge to sex it up

It has been over a month since Parliament voted to bomb Isis in Syria, yet in that time there have been fewer raids than there are Lib Dem MPs. A flurry of three attacks took place immediately following the vote on 1 December, but since then there has been only one — by an unmanned Reaper drone on Christmas Day. And even that only ‘probably’ killed some Isis guards at a checkpoint. The three earlier manned missions had focused on an oil field that a US military spokesman later described as having previously suffered ‘long-term incapacitation’ at the hands of the US air force.

James Forsyth

Corbyn is untouchable now

There have been few more pathetic displays of political impotence than the tweets sent by shadow cabinet members paying tribute to Michael Dugher after his sacking by Jeremy Corbyn. Dugher, a classic northern Labour fixer, had taken on the role of shadow cabinet shop steward. He spoke out against Momentum, the Corbynite pressure group, warned against a ‘revenge reshuffle’ and criticised negative briefings against the shadow cabinet from the leader’s office. But rather than protesting at his sacking through a walkout, shadow cabinet members confined their solidarity to a 140-character gesture. Their tweets, rather than looking like brave defiance of the boss, actually showed just how cowed they are.

Rod Liddle

Why we have to stand by the foul, brutal Saudis

The Saudis have got the new year off to a busy start, haven’t they? The authorities executed 47 people, including a rather grim-looking Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr — leading Shia cleric and children’s party balloon sculptor (giraffes a speciality). OK, I made that last bit up. He was just a heavily bearded religious agitator and probably not much fun at parties. He’s dead now. In time I will overcome my grief and rebuild. As a consequence, Shia Iran has severed diplomatic links with the Sunni House of Saud and the usual furious and violent massed protests — which characterise both branches of the Religion of Peace™ — have taken place in Tehran. Screaming hordes waving placards saying stuff like ‘Down With Britain!

Hugo Rifkind

What a spankingly splendid scandal

Apparently, according to a variety of relatively reliable sources that include the man himself, the Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk, is in the habit of accepting money from a paparazzi agency in exchange for advising them how they might best snap pap pictures of the Labour MP for Rochdale, Simon Danczuk. Is this not one of the most amazing facts you have ever learned? Every bit of it — that tabloids want these photographs; that photo-graphers will pay for them; that an MP can earn a tidy sum by secretly facilitating them — simply boggles me. Are they all at it? Maybe that’s why we keep seeing those vile pictures of David Cameron fatly jogging, or Jeremy Corbyn dressed like Tony Soprano taking the bins out. You never know.

Thursday

James Delingpole

The best things in the world spring up by accident

Since no one has bothered to ask what my must-read book of last year was I’m going to tell you here: it’s Matt Ridley’s Evolution of Everything. I don’t think it has appeared on nearly so many recommended lists as his previous bestsellers Genome and The Rational Optimist, nor has it been so widely reviewed. And I have a strong inkling as to why: its message is so revolutionary as to alienate pretty much everyone across the spectrum, from Christians and Muslims to corporate bosses, historians, feminists, educationalists and conspiracy theorists, from Greens and socialists all the way across (if there’s a difference) to Conservatives like George Osborne and David Cameron.

Rod Liddle

The political wisdom of people who don’t even know what a circle is

Why are liberals morons? I’m sure that this question has rattled around your mind before, perhaps when watching one of those fair and balanced debates between three ill-dressed but very liberal women that Newsnight puts on every evening, hosted by Kirsty Wark. You hear them tiptoeing through the -nether regions of some important political issue, carefully sidestepping the nub of the matter, obfuscating, denying the patently obvious even when it is staring them right in their smug faces, jabbering ineffectually about nothing in essence. How can these silly mares be this way, you may have asked yourself. How can they navigate their way through life on such slender mental resources?

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Hug, hold hands . . . then stampede to the right

What a pleasure it was to see two socialist parties triumph in the most recent elections. First, Labour increased its share of the vote in Oldham — and then, last weekend, the Front National became France’s most popular party, securing almost 30 per cent in the first round of the country’s regional elections. Labour’s win was, I suspect, a bit of a false dawn. For a start, the party did an un-usual thing and fielded a sentient and likeable candidate, something which most of the time it successfully avoids doing. But even then, it was at least partly dependent upon Asian men hauling large sacks of votes from illiterate and non-English-speaking residents into the local post office.

James Forsyth

Exit strategy vs stay-in power

By this time next year Britain will, if the government has its way, have voted on whether or not this country should stay in the European Union. This referendum has the potential to reshape British politics. It will not only determine whether we remain in the EU, but it will also play a huge role in determining who will be the next Prime Minister. It will present David Cameron with the most difficult party-management challenge that he has faced in more than a decade as Tory leader. Downing Street has given up trying to secure a deal at the European Council later this month. The new target is early in the new year. The major stumbling block to any agreement is the British proposal for a four-year bar on EU migrants receiving either in- or out-of-work benefits here.

James Delingpole

Will you survive the Delingpole Era? See below…

  Things I am going to ban when, by popular acclaim, I am elected your Dictator For Life in 2016.   1. Onions where the brown skin doesn’t come off easily. You know the ones: where the papery outer layer clings so tightly that you have to pick it off laboriously with a sharp knife and it takes forever. I hate these onions so much. I’m pretty sure they’re all foreign, though I may be mistaken.   2. Slimline tonic water. (See also: Diet Coke; semi-skimmed milk) ‘Oh? Is it really? Sorry about that. I think it’s all we’ve got.’ ‘Aspartame? Oh, is that not good?’ ‘Not sure I can tell the difference, to be honest.’ ‘Don’t blame me. I don’t get any say in the shopping.

Hugo Rifkind

If you believe the internet, I was the Israeli army’s answer to Jason Bourne

One of the strangest and, in a weird way, best things to have happened to me in the past year was the emergence of a firm conviction among a quite large collection of internet weirdos that I spent my youth fighting for an elite unit of the Israeli army. It started after a boozy pre-Christmas lunch almost exactly a year ago, when a woman tweeted me. I vaguely recalled that she had tweeted me before, probably about Jews or bankers or Palestine or Dolphin Square or Jimmy Savile, all of which I get quite a lot and normally ignore. This time, though, she had a question. She wanted to know about my Twitter profile picture, and whether the olive-green shirt I’m wearing in it was my uniform from my time in the IDF. This amused me.

Mary Wakefield

Am I a brave cult survivor, too?

When I was 21, I lived with a cult for a year. It was a commune really, a tight-knit group of Christians, but I’ll call it a cult because it was in Texas and for special occasions we all wore white. There were other cult markers, too: we had a charismatic leader; the younger kids were home-schooled; and, to my great excitement, one (now ex) member wrote a book after she left: I Can’t Hear God Anymore: Life in a Dallas Cult. That I ended up there is a testament to the dangers of showing off. All those endless questions after finals, all those inquiring adults: ‘And what are you going to do now? What’s your plan?’ Well, I had no plan.