Rod Liddle

Does it matter that white Britons are now a minority in three towns or cities in this country? The latest census figures suggest that whitey is outnumbered in Leicester, Luton and Slough. I assume the reason for this is that lots of Asians have colonised these places and as a consequence many of the whites have got the hell out. They have always been fairly awful places, mind, in any case - Luton in particular. Those who welcome more and more immigration usually wave their hands and say listen, change happens, and we should welcome it – for the white people in those towns it is a chance to meet new neighbours from a vibrant culture, an uplifting experience for them. But of course this is not always how it feels if you actually live there...

If you haven’t seen it yet, this video of Piers Morgan interviewing a lunatic is good value for a few minutes: He is the butt of many jokes, Morgan, and I suspect the Americans like his rather bumptious public school schtick more than we do. He is, however, a very good interviewer indeed, both in print and on screen; genuinely one of the best, much as it grieves me to say so. He didn’t have to do much here, mind, apart from keep a straight face. The gun lobby must curse Alex Jones every time he appears on screen to support their cause.

I was in bed by one o clock on New Year’s Day. We did the countdown thing, for the kids, and then hung around for a while looking tired; it was only later, when my wife and I were upstairs in bed, that the real fun began. A long and corrosive argument about the mice, probably the 15th we’ve had on this subject since we moved in back in August. We could both hear the mice downstairs, whooping it up, holding some sort of shindig of their own; the relentless skittering across the stone floor tiles or the parquet wood blocks in the living room. I was tempted, at one point, just to shout downstairs: ‘Keep it down a bit will you, we’re trying to get some sleep up here.

A merry Christmas to all of you; the sane and the troubled, the humorous and the witless, the rural and the urban, the autodidacts and the monomaniacal, the easy-going and the psychotic, the borderline fascists and the Stalinist libtard bien pensants. And all the others, the many I’ve missed. I wish you all a lovely Christmas and a new year which brings forth things which make you sort of, you know, happy. And so this morning, d’you know what? I really did this. Thing is, it’s all there was available that hadn’t been earmarked for family lunches or suppers or snacks for the bloody kids. So I did it. I breakfasted on coffee and apples. It comes to all of us, in the end. Happy Christmas.

These shootings. I think we need J G Ballard back. Looking back through previous such apparently random events, we might observe that: • The perpetrators are almost always white. • They are almost always lower middle class or middle class. • The areas in which the shootings take place are almost always comfortable, although not luxurious, suburbs, a good distance from the local metropolis. In demographic terms they tend to have a rather lower racial mix than is average for the state. • The median income is always bang on average for the state. They tend to be places with otherwise low crime figures. I don’t really know what this tells us.

Does Santa Claus really exist? I have to say I have become very sceptical in recent years. There is something about this character which simply does not ring true, not to mention his rather sinister retinue of airborne reindeer. I am not saying that he definitely does not exist, simply that we should not be too credulous, too ready to believe what the authorities tell us. A junior school teacher in Dorset is in trouble for having allowed into the minds of his eight- and nine-year-old charges a similar element of doubt.

In a dawn raid today police swooped on children’s legend This Old Man for alleged sexual assault against countless toddlers and took him to a police station. “We have several thousand allegations that Mr This Old Man repeatedly abused children under the guise of a sort of sinister numbers game.  We can only praise those who have had the bravery to come forward to report these crimes. These are people who have been traumatised, in their infancy, by a trusted entertainer who proceeded to touch them inappropriately – or ‘playing nick-nack’, as the depraved old paedo put it.” The leader of an anti-child abuse charity, Ms Jan Cosworth-Harridan, said: “Let us be clear.

I am in southern Italy and there has been thunder and lightning pretty much continuously since Tuesday. I am quite scared of lightning. I need to buy some comestibles; especially wine and cigarettes. But the tiny apartment I have rented is connected to the outside world only by 72 metal steps affixed to the side of the mountain by metal scaffolding. The lightning is all about. Should I risk it? Would it help if I wore rubber-soled shoes for my dash to the shop? Or will I be forever fused to the rockface, like a sort of crap gargoyle? I turn to you for help, and succour.

Given that David Cameron, rightly, seems to believe Lord Leveson’s recommendations are a crock of shit, what was the point of the inquiry in the first place? To show that something was being done? To give people like the hilarious Coogan a day in the sun, and that smug prolix lawyer who thought he was James Mason in The Verdict? We have to stop handing things over to lawyers and judges. Journalists are bad enough, but these people are even more thieving, grasping, self-righteous and utterly out of touch with public opinion. Too much time is given over to what they have to pronounce, too much weight given to their usually fatuous perorations. For all their flaws, I prefer the MPs – at least you can get rid of them.

Remarkable story in today’s Daily Telegraph. A couple from Rotherham who fostered children have had the kids taken away from them by social workers - because they were members of UKIP. The adults, not the kids. Having been previously considered ‘exemplary’ carers, the couple – who do not wish to be named – were allegedly confronted by a social worker who told them that the council had received “tip-off” that the pair were UKIP supporters. This made them unsuitable as carers because UKIP had “racist” policies, according to the imbecilic social worker. And the kids were re-allocated. Aside from those Owen Jones trolls who arrived here yesterday like demented sheep, can anyone suggest a justification for this?