Rod Liddle

I think we need a new source of ultimate evil for people taking part in political discussions, because Godwin’s Law has been outreached of late. Mike Godwin, a US attorney, correctly identified that every political debate online will, eventually, end up with someone being likened to Adolf Hitler. ‘Eventually’ was the key word — but that was in 1990. Nowadays the arguably controversial Austrian politician is invoked at the outset of discussions, and after that there’s nowhere left for people to go to display their contempt for whoever it is they’re speaking to, or about. Both Brexiteers and Remainers are like Hitler. Leftists and Tories. We’re all like Hitler, immediately, these days.

I’m meant to be peering into a tunnel hacked out by Hamas a few hundred metres from Gaza City into Israeli territory but my attention has wandered. The air around us, above this parched, scrubby wasteland, is fecund with life. A pair of black kites are circling and below them a steppe buzzard is lumbering amidst the thermals. And is that a lappet-faced vulture? Do you know, even without my specs, I think it is. The IDF guy in charge of this facility wanders up. ‘You are interested in the birds, my frent? They too are political. The Palestinians put all their filth, their garbage, right up against the fence, as close to us as possible. As a result, many vermin and many hawks, some endangered elsewhere. There is always an upside to misery. Now, let us go below, please.

Should we make it illegal to study the social sciences? Imagine the amount of tendentious rubbish we could erase from the world if we did. The economists who pretend on Newsnight that they know what’s going on, when they haven’t a clue. The sociologists fabricating evidence to support their inane and inevitably woke theses. The lies masquerading as fact and able to gull the public because of the spurious claim that they are ‘scientific’. There is no science in economics or sociology, interesting though those disciplines might be once they have been shorn of their pretensions. Let me give you a recent example.

Overheard on the eastbound Jubilee Line train today at about 1620. Two blokes, sitting next to each other, apparently friends. One of them takes out an apple and starts eating it. The other one looks at him and says: ‘What are you doing?’ His friend continues eating the apple. ‘Are you having a crafty apple? Are you?’ The man continues to eat the apple. ‘You are! Oooooh. A crafty apple. Nice.

Every year during Easter Week I draw up a chart of my least favourite countries and distribute the list to close friends and relatives. I’ve been doing this for thirty years now and I’m sure it has proved helpful to those close to me. So sure, in fact, that I intend, from now on, to post the same chart here. I hope in time my hate list will come to be seen as a familiar herald of summer, like letters to the Times about the first cuckoo or Christian names given to children. I never explain my reasoning: in most cases there is no need. And where there is need it is a case of pure, blind, prejudice. When I say “country” I dislike, sometimes I mean merely the government of that country, sometimes I mean the awful people who live in it and most usually I mean both.

It is a great disappointment to me that my phrases don’t get picked up by other writers and then society in general before ending up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chuck Palahniuk is credited with the use of ‘snowflake’ as a pejorative term, for example, and James Bartholomew claims (despite some evidence to the contrary) to have made up ‘virtue-signalling’. Both are now very familiar and even overused — but mine all get ignored.