Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle

Rod Liddle is associate editor of The Spectator.

Friday

Rod Liddle

At last, a speedy police response

The founder of the English Defence League, Tommy Robinson, turned up in Leeds on Thursday to film people going into a grooming trial. He did not speak, chant, accost anyone or do anything other than point his mobile phone at attendees, from a distance. Nor was he with a crowd. Still, seven coppers turned up and bundled him into a paddy-wagon accusing him of a breach of the peace. I’m not remotely a fan of Robinson. But I do not like the idea that simply being Robinson is enough to get you arrested. Or that writing something in defence of Robinson puts you somehow beyond the pale.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Our Obama moment? Let’s hope not

Here’s something to bear in mind over the next few years. Be wary of taking advice on social justice from someone whose wedding dress cost 200,000 quid. Marks & Spencer does one for £69, off the peg. Meghan could have donated the remaining £199,931 to Generating Genius, the charity set up by the brilliant educationalist Tony Sewell which tries, with huge success, to get inner-city black kids into our top universities by instilling in them a respect for academic excellence, hard work and discipline. Instead of encouraging them to languish in a state of victimhood, which is the white liberal approach. For sure, Meghan looked lovely and the wedding undoubtedly made a lot of people very happy, and one wishes her and Prince Harry nothing but the best for the future.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Arctic Monkeys: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Grade: B+ Oh, terrific — a concept album about a 1970s hotel somewhere in space, plus an attack on our over-technologised world. Just what I wanted. There is no restraint on self-indulgence if you have a sufficiently remunerative back catalogue. This is also a Bowie tribute album, which fits in nicely with all that outer-space business. I have never heard any performer clamber so comprehensively into the skin of a dead rock star as Alex Turner does with Bowie here, in the writing and even more so in the mannered singing with its characteristic falsetto swoops. This is pure Bowie from the era between The Spiders of Mars and David Live, and especially Aladdin Sane.

Rod Liddle

Why this deluded affection for the Palestinians?

The worst entry for this year’s Euro-vision song contest was that vast cater-wauling aboriginal. I can’t remember her name, only that her performance convinced me still further that Australia might not, technically, be a part of Europe. But then I was a little worried by the winner too. The song ‘Toy’, sung by Israel’s Netta Barzilai, was easily the most musically imaginative in the contest and so probably deserved its victory. But the lyrics were the usual deluded, self-aggrandising victimhood rot. ‘I am a beautiful creature,’ she sang, despite fairly compelling evidence to the contrary, right there in front of our eyes.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

We’re deluding ourselves about gang violence

Hey, Londoners — been stabbed or shot yet this week? Just thought I’d check as the place seems to resemble, in its violence, downtown Mogadishu right now — and indeed is graced with many of the same kinds of people. That’s probably why you haven’t been stabbed or shot yet: the murdering has been committed exclusively, so far as I can tell, within the minority ethnic communities by young men who are either immigrants or the children of immigrants. So you’re safe for a while, until they’ve all been used up and the stabby shooty young men get around to you.

Rod Liddle

Belly: Dove

Grade: B+ One of my favourite songs from the 1990s was about a Chinese adulteress forced to walk around town with a decomposing dead dog on her back. ‘Slow Dog’, from Belly’s debut album Star, was mental and frenetic and possessed the kind of berserk and glorious chorus most bands would kill for. The rest of the album wasn’t bad either — the sincerely odd ‘Gepetto’ and the lowering, nagging almost-hit ‘Feed The Tree’ the best of a very good bunch. How would you define Tanya Donelly’s oeuvre, other than as delightfully idiosyncratic? Alt-rock, obvs. Maybe neo-psychedelic post-grunge shoegazey power pop. Either way, it was too good to last.

Monday

Rod Liddle

Let’s keep electric cars quiet — even if they hit a few pedestrians

I have never much liked cars. I am aware that they serve a purpose, much as do security measures at international airports – but then I don’t like them very much either. Cars are horribly noisy, arrogant, dangerous, foul-smelling and claustrophobic and bring out the worst in us. The noisy thing bothers me most – and so I was delighted by the advent of electric cars, which are almost silent and also smell less bad than normal cars. Now I read that there are plans to fit them with some kind of noise-making device because too many pedestrians are being killed by their sudden, silent, approach. Here’s my suggestion: scrap the noise-making device idea and let the pedestrians die. I am one of them and am fully prepared to take that risk. Let them die.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

A warm welcome to the UN’s envoy for idiocy

Another new word, this time from the deranged far-right: incel. This means a chap who is involuntarily celibate because women won’t sleep with him. Instead, these besoms prefer to have sex with attractive men. There are links with the Toronto murderer Alek Minassian, who drove a van into a bunch of pedestrians because he couldn’t get a shag. Incels applauded his actions online, demanding death to the ‘Stacys’ and the ‘Chads’. And also the ‘Beckys’. Ah, yes, three more new words. Stacys are attractive ‘unattainable’ women. Chads are the good-looking young men who get to shag them.

Monday

Rod Liddle

What’s wrong with deporting illegal immigrants?

Can anyone explain to me why it is wrong for the Home Office to have a target for the removal of illegal immigrants? And would not the ideal target be 100 per cent? Rudd is inept, I think. She probably should have gone – although as ever, the thing which pushed her over the edge was nonsensical. Failing to keep count of how many are coming in and failing to stop them is, of course, the much bigger crime. As is presiding over a magnificent London stabfest between young immigrants and the children of immigrants and doing nothing about it.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The roots of Labour’s bigotry

Another word which has gained a new meaning in the present decade, along with ‘vulnerable’ and ‘diverse’: survivor. Once it meant a person who had been transported to Auschwitz but somehow came out alive. Or a person who had been involved in a terrible car crash but had escaped with only a broken neck. Today it means someone whose nipple was perhaps gently tweaked by a light entertainment star 40 years ago. Or someone who was mildly and almost certainly justifiably bullied at school. I’m also getting a little weary of the elephant in the room. It has become for me, when talking about transformative grammar, the elephant in the room. I heard a woman on Radio 4 say: ‘Well, the thing is, Sarah, there are so many elephants in the room.

Rod Liddle

Kylie Minogue: Golden

Grade: D– Kylie has a place in my heart for having made the second-best single to feature the chorus ‘na na na na na na na na’. The best was Cozy Powell’s ‘Na Na Na’ (all the better for being capitalised), but Kylie’s magnificently vacant synth pop disco lament ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’, written by the ubiquitous Cathy Dennis, ran it close. Everything else the pouting Aussie sockpuppet chanteuse has done has been utterly excremental, so credit to the lass for maintaining a certain consistency with her latest album Golden. It has received half-decent reviews in some quarters, but only, I suspect, from people who have either had their frontal lobes removed with a soupspoon or areso jaded they have forgotten up from down.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Joking about vowels is a hate crime now

It took four days to actually see the pine marten in the flesh. We caught it on a trail cam on night two of our holiday as it scampered in an agreeably gamine manner for the food we’d left out. It ate better than us that week. By night three it had a choice of eggs (its favourite), peanut butter sandwiches and chopped-up frankfurters. All it needed was a nicely chilled Chablis. We sat in the dark for hours, waiting, until my wife said: ‘Fuck the malodorous little bastard, let’s watch TV.’ She is not much of one for wildlife really. And then it appeared, up on its hind legs crunching its way through the shell of an egg, tipping the yolk down its throat. Pale golden chest, long bushy tail, perky, impish face — we’d got our man.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

The DPP was never much cop

An interesting development for our police force, then. In future they do not have to believe everything someone tells them, in the manner of a particularly credulous village idiot. They may be allowed, possibly encouraged, to exhibit a degree of curiosity in their line of work — have a bit of a think about things, maybe even ask questions. I do hope they are able to cope. They have been institutionally cretinised for a long while now — ever since Alison Saunders was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions in 2013. She is stepping down when her contract comes to an end in October and is anxious to take up her new career opportunity as under-manager of a whelk stall in Cleethorpes (I think I’ve got that right).

Wednesday

Rod Liddle

Labour, lizards and anti-Semitism

There’s a very funny moment in Jon Ronson’s book Them: Adventures with Extremists, part of which follows the New Age mental case David Icke on a tour of Canada. All the way across the great plains, Icke has been promulgating his thesis that we are the unwitting subjects of shape-shifting reptilian alien overlords. Aside from Ronson, a protestor has been following Icke, too — demonstrating outside each venue —convinced that when Icke says ‘shape-shifting reptilian overlords’ he really means ‘Jews’. Eventually, having heard Icke speak on perhaps a dozen occasions, Ronson asks the protestor, ‘Do you still think that when Icke says lizards, he means Jews?’ And the protester replies, a little crestfallen: ‘No.

Rod Liddle

Judas Priest: Firepower

They’re still alive, then. Chuggedy-chug, grawk, screech screech, chuggedy-chug. First mention of demons — line one, song two. Song one is about blowing people to bits with firepower, cos they’re really EVIL. There are spurts of lead guitar that sound like knives slashing at an empty plate and those strange, pompous, strangulated vocals — operatic diva meets Freddy Krueger — common to most UK heavy metal. Anything to hide the Brummie accent, I suppose. Thank you, the West Midlands, for foisting on the world the blind alley of HM, blues with the rhythm, wit and soul replaced by volume and bellowing and posturing and almost continual references to the poor fucking devil (who clearly didn’t get all the best songs).

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Our response to the nerve gas attack has been an act of self harm

There was a growling Russian maniac on the BBC’s Today programme last week, an MP from the United Russia party called Vitaly Milonov. Breathing rather heavily, as if he were pleasuring himself, Mr Milonov likened our country to Hitler’s Germany for having accused Russia over the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. At this point he was cut off by the presenter — rather a shame, I thought, at the time. I would have liked to hear Vitaly expand upon some of his other beliefs, such as homosexuals being responsible for the Ebola virus and Jews being Satanists. He also hates cyclists, so not all bad, then. If you wanted to conjure up a post-commie reactionary Russian pantomime villain, Vitaly is what you would end up with.

Rod Liddle

Vince Staples

Grade: B+ Another ex-Long Beach crip replanted in pleasant Orange County via the conduit of very large amounts of record company money and thus now able to draw on his time as a gangsta, while telling us all it was a very naughty thing to have done. The difference between Staples and much of the similarly uprooted West Coast hip-hop crew is twofold. First, off-stage the man is thoughtful, articulate and refuses to hunker down beneath the comfort blanket of black victimhood. Further, he eschews all drugs and alcohol and loathes the glorification of gang culture — something he calls coonery — and is a Christian. (Although it is hard to imagine Jesus Christ cheerfully singing along with this little number.) And second, he has words.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

A black and white issue

Last time I was in South Africa I spent two weeks deep in the Karoo, that desiccated wasteland in the Northern Cape which is home only to a handful of jackals, the occasional springbok and supporters of the Afrikaaner Resistance Movement. I had been visiting Orania, a smallish town in which no black people are allowed. Set up by the son-in-law of Hendrik Verwoerd, its existence now is very grudgingly protected by the South African government under regulations which preserve minority cultures — ah, the irony. I was doing a documentary, the gist being: ghastly, ghastly, racist white people. I have to admit that I, as a white supremacist bigot, was a little more equivocal about the issue than the rest of the crew, which is perhaps why the programme never got on TV.

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Nils Frahm: All Melody

Grade: A Here we are in that twilit zone where post-techno and post-ambient meets modern classical, a terrain that has its fair share of tuneless charlatans and chancers. Frahm is not one of those. There are of course the repetitive synthesiser arpeggios familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to sit in some achingly hip Dalston café: slightly too many for my liking on ‘#2’, which Frahm may consider the centrepiece of this album. But the German is obsessively attuned to nuance. Beneath those Glass-like riffs there is plenty going on: descant melodies, counterpoints burbling up out of the ether.

Rod Liddle

The populist revolution has only just begun

Why aren’t children called Roger any more? I wondered this when reading about the sad death of Sir Roger Bannister. Coincidentally, the evening before, my young daughter had been watching The Great Escape and most of the Englishmen in it seemed to be called Roger. The only time you hear the name is in early episodes of Midsomer Murders, the ones produced before they were forced to have black people being killed in a ludicrous fashion alongside the whites, to demonstrate our commitment to equality. It does have an awkward connotation with sex — but then it always did, Roger having been a slang word for penis right back to the 17th century. I suppose it has simply drifted out of fashion, along with common decency, emotional continence and heterosexual marriage.