Rod Liddle

The evangelical preacher Stephen Green has had his conviction upheld – for standing quite near an abortion clinic in Ealing with a Bible verse in his hands in protest last February. Remarkably, this act is illegal in the UK today. Green argued that he was not protesting about the women entering the clinic, but against the law which prevents him from doing that. The judge noted, however, that the verse Green was holding was Psalm 139/13: ‘For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.’ Green is a devout man and that devotion, you might argue, is split equally towards God and self-publicity. But still.

I mentioned a couple of days ago being underwhelmed by Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel. But I am a glutton for punishment, and continuing to ignore my long-held practice of never reading Booker winners, I bought last year’s victor – Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. As I mentioned, this is about a nasty right-wing government taking over in Ireland and being horrid to union officials. It didn’t sound quite up my street, but I thought I’d give it a go. And then I read the second sentence in the book: How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. I mean, hello? You’re trying too hard, mate. I know you’re meant to try, when you’re writing a serious novel. But the trick surely is not to let the trying show.

I think we can all be delighted that, at last, the University of Leicester has taken action to end one of the real problems associated with swimming pools – the presence there of awful white people, swimming about all over the place. Odious, arrogant, pasty-faced white people with their mewling, stupid white children. White people doing the breast stroke and the crawl. White people climbing out of the pool looking horribly white. White people deliberately infecting the global swimming majority with their filthy white verrucas. The university, alongside the Unity Swimming organisation, is running segregated swimming sessions for black and ethnic minority people.

There was a time we all looked forward to on the BBC Today programme, back in the early years of Tony Blair’s first term as Prime Minister. Late July, early August. Blair had scooted off to San Gimignano, Mandelson was probably on a yacht with an oligarch, even Campbell was away battling his weird inner demons somewhere. And for about three or four weeks the country was run by John Prescott, as deputy PM.  As you are aware, there is a dearth of political stories in the dog days of summer. But with John in charge, all you had to do was ring up and suggest that a Labour Spad had said something nonsensical and bingo!

I switched the radio on in my car today and it went straight to the BBC World at One on Radio Four. I thought I’d tuned it to Radio Three but instead of a mellifluous tune I got Sarah Montague. I was on the bit of the A66 in Middlesbrough where it merges with the northbound A19 and it is a tricky interchange, with narrow lanes and huge growling lorries. I am mentioning all this as a means of explaining why I didn’t change channels straight away. I wanted to make sure I was on the Tees Viaduct and not headed to Teesport, you see. I needed to concentrate. That’s not really balance, is it? What I heard was an interview with a Palestinian bloke (described as a ‘playwright’) who lives in London but has family in Gaza.

It would be consoling to think that the BBC, alone among our supposedly unpartisan TV news providers, is guilty of hopelessly biased coverage of the US presidential election. This would conform to the increasingly popular notion that Auntie is in a place beyond redemption, unique in its iniquities. That notion may be true, but it is not true of its US election coverage. All of the news providers have been biased and the BBC is probably one of the least egregious of offenders. It would seem to me that all the broadcasters broadly concur that a second Trump presidency would be a disaster for the US, for democracy and for the world and that therefore the normal rules of balance are not applicable. They demonstrate this bias in the following four ways: Story selection.