Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.
From our UK edition
I used to volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary, counting sheep and goats on an agreeable patch of chalk downland in Kent. On hot days the goats would hide in the dense, cool woodland and it could take a long time to find them. Occasionally they broke out of the reserve because our gates were of
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As a snapshot of our country, you’ll be pressed to find anything quite so resonant as the one which depicts a leading member of our Skankerati sitting in an inflatable off the southern coast of the UK with tattoo and vape in attendance. There has been much debate of late about the very large numbers
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I don’t quite see the point of flying Union flags in Tower Hamlets, or complaining about it when the council takes them down. This squalid little fiefdom run by the deeply corrupt Lutfur Rahman is not part of the UK: it is a suburb of Sylhet, with all that such a location might entail. This
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A familiar cliché, which in history has been disproved time and again, is that a police force cannot operate without the consent of the people. Tell that to the residents of what was once East Berlin. But that old canard raises a different problem. Which people are giving the consent? The ones who abide by
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I needed to speak, briefly, to my car insurer regarding breakdown cover. After undergoing the usual roster of DNA testing, fingerprinting, recitation of ‘familiar names’, the woman on the other end of the phone said this to me: ‘I need to ask this as well. Are you vulnerable?’ It is now six hours later and
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You can gauge the fragility of an ideology by the blind fury with which it reacts to questioning. So it is with neo-liberalism. Teacher Simon Pearson, for example, was sacked for suggesting that the jailing of Lucy Connolly – who said very nasty things about asylum seekers – was an example of two-tier justice and
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If any other country in the Middle East had behaved as monstrously as Israel has in recent weeks, the jets would be lined up on our runways ready to do a bit of performative bombing. Never mind BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) and diplomatic pressure. I mention this because those of us who support Israel,
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The grotesque halfwit who tried to have me prosecuted for ‘incitement’ was on Newsnight on Wednesday night, spouting the usual gibberish. This is Labour’s Bella Sankey, who runs Brighton council, although her presence on the BBC was more a consequence of her past directorship of Detention Action, an organisation that appears to campaign against everything
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Grade: B+ There’s quite a lot to dislike about Wet Leg, even aside from their stupid name. The entirety of their lyrical canon, for starters – vapid and petulant millennial inanities, 50 per cent performative braggadocio, 50 per cent adolescent carping. Or there’s the commodification of their sexualities: they’ve traded up to being bi, just
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If I had been given the vote at the age of 16, I would have put my cross beside the name of the Communist party candidate, assuming that he was not a tankie. If he was, I would have had to think long and hard; a left-wing Labour candidate might well have been preferable. I
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I suppose this magazine is probably not the best forum to launch a movement to sweep away the British middle class, much along the lines of Pol Pot’s adventure in Kampuchea in the late 1970s, but one can only play with the cards one has been dealt. The more one reads the newspapers, the more
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Chauve souris de la lune There is an intense and consuming stupidity within almost everything George Monbiot writes, the lumpen prose devoid of both doubt and humour. Doubt and humour are blood brothers, of course – and enemies of the kind of bovine certitude which Monbiot peddles, a cacophony of privately educated green tinged nepo leftism
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Did you take part in any of the mysterious commemorations last weekend? The newspapers were full of it – something called 7/7, apparently. I read a long report on the BBC’s website about this tragedy but remained entirely unclear as to who killed the people on those trains and bus. The report said ‘bombs were
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A small yield nuclear weapon, such as the American W89, dropped on Glastonbury in late June would immediately remove from our country almost everybody who is hugely annoying. You would see a marked reduction in the keffiyeh klan, for a start, and all those middle-class Extinction Rebellion protestors would find, in a nanosecond, that their
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I think I have just located Peak Guardian. It can be found on page 57 of the newspaper’s latest Saturday magazine, ‘Saturday’. And it rests under the headline: ‘Should we give babies the right to vote?’ In the piece, a woman called Laura Spinney advances the case for ‘ageless voting’. She accepts that a common
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It is heartening to see the lefties out marching in defence of mullahs and their enlightened rule of Iran. The Stop the War Coalition has been organising protests the length and breadth of the country, demanding ‘Hands off Iran’. It is harder for the marchers to identify specifically with their cause than it is when
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It’s surely time we dropped our cynicism and got behind the government’s National Abortion Drive, another noble attempt to kickstart our floundering economy. The United Kingdom has made great strides of late in this area, recently overtaking France in the number of abortions performed annually, the figures showing the largest increase since this sort of
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I don’t monitor this stuff all the time. It would be soul destroying. All that happens is that I tune in, often by accident, and there is something which once again betrays the long term, institutional, anti-Israel bias of the BBC. So, Friday night’s television news and the Middle East Correspondent Lucy Williamson. Reporting on
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I recently did an online quiz to name the 100 biggest selling pop and rock acts in the USA. The Beatles came top – the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen and so on, along with the homegrown stuff: Elvis, the Eagles and Chicago. Noticeable by their complete absence were the Beach Boys. In the late
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In the autumn of 1940, British cities were being bombed every night by large aeroplanes whose provenance was apparently of some considerable doubt. While the public almost unanimously believed the conflagrations to have been caused by the Luftwaffe, the authorities – right up to the government – refused to speculate. Indeed, when certain members of