Rod Liddle

I’m not sure where I stand on the tax-breaks for married couples, announced with great hoo-ha by the government and derided by the opposition. On the one hand, as a god-fearing authoritarian bigot, I approve of people who choose to live as Jesus Christ himself wished us to. On the other hand, I do not think that marriage per se is the answer to the social problems occasioned by broken families (which are almost infinite). The problem is people having children too quickly, when they are either married or otherwise, and without thinking through the consequences. Or perhaps being too stupid to think through the consequences.

Freedom of speech is alive and well in Scotland, then. Pastor Josh Williamson took the Christian gospel to the streets of Perth last week, before he was arrested by the old bill for a ‘breach of the peace’. Asked why he was being arrested, Plod No 1 said because you’re too loud, pointing to the electrical device the clergyman was carrying. That’s an MP3 recorder, he replied, it’s not an amplifier. Then Plod No 2 claimed it was the content of his sermon, although he could not put his finger on what it was exactly. Hauled down the nick, refused the right of a lawyer, Williamson was eventually released with a verbal caution and the comment from another copper: ‘You seem like a reasonable man, why not just stop preaching?

Is it only the mentally ill who are allowed guns in the USA, or is it only the mentally ill ones that we hear about? Aaron Alexis, responsible for shooting dead 12 people within a military base in Washington DC, had a bunch of exciting guns with him, including an AR 15 semi-automatic rifle, which seems to be the weapon de jour for homicidal mentalists. Alexis also was in possession of voices in his head, apparently, and was paranoid and possibly schizophrenic to boot. Quite soon, in your newspapers, someone from a mental health charity will tell you that statistically speaking crossing the road is far more dangerous than a schizophrenic person and that they are normally charming, courteous and members of various pacifist and anti-poverty pressure groups. I’m sure that’s true.

Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants to this country are ‘just like’ British people who have second homes in France, according to the government’s Crime Prevention minister, Jeremy Browne. He is absolutely right, except for a small number of really quite insignificant differences. One being that the Romanians and Bulgarians don’t own homes here. The second being that Brits with second homes in France are rarely in receipt of that country’s welfare benefits. The third being that Brits in France are rarely a matter of concern for that country’s Crime Prevention minister.

The Syrian rebels who liberated the mountain village of Maaloula apparently immediately set about converting the predominantly Christian population to Islam, using the gently persuasive techniques we have come to associate with this dynamic and expanding religion. ‘Allahu Akbar! Either you will convert to Islam or you will be beheaded,’ rebels allegedly told some villagers. Other residents were simply shot dead without all the onerous conversion palaver. It is said that the accents of the rebel soldiers were many things — Chechen, Tunisian, Moroccan, etc — but certainly not Syrian.

It is a tragedy that some of us are born in the wrong times. According to that increasingly gobby conduit of right-on morality, the NSPCC, girls these days feel compelled to act like porn stars in order to ingratiate themselves with boys. I am not sure quite what, in day to day life, this involves. I only know that they made no similar attempts during my adolescence, or if they did I didn’t notice. I vaguely recall one young lady in my school class telling me, when I was 14, that she had engaged in sexual intercourse the previous night with a boy from a neighbouring town. ‘What was it like, Debs?’ I asked, wide-eyed. ‘Didn’t touch the fucking sides,’ Debs spat with all the contempt she could muster.

Apologies for the prolonged absence. This was due to a holiday in which I stayed away from all forms of communication for two and a half weeks. I cannot recommend this policy too highly. During my break, incidentally, I discovered another reason to physically assault the hawkers who festoon the central square in Marrakech, the Djema el Fna. There were plenty of reasons before – the leering, the groping, the monomaniacal persistence, the useless tat they are flogging, the lying, the cheating etc. But now you can add the fact that they all say ‘lovely jubbly’ as soon as they realise you are English. Sadly I never quite mastered the Arabic for ‘F*** off, you sexually repressed third world yob’.

Listen, this story is moving so quickly stuff will almost certainly have happened in between me writing it and you reading it. I hate the idea that you might be left behind the curve, but I just don’t know how to get around that. An outrage occurs and of course we try faithfully to report it, so that you can be outraged vicariously, but time moves on; the outrage spreads out, like a fast-moving conflagration, and begins to affects us all and we all of us feel unclean and traduced. Already, with the outrage I’m about to describe, the Guardian has decided it was not one outrage but two conjoined outrages, Siamese-twin outrages if you like. By the time you read this we could be in United Nations territory. We could.